Two Websites Belonging to San Francisco (SFO) Airport Hacked
The San Francisco International Airport (SFO) reported that a pair of its websites had been hacked and the data contained within stolen. That data extracted was the user’s login credentials for the device used to access the websites and appears to have been extracted in March. If you’ve visited SFOConnect.com or SFOConstruction.com you should change the credentials for any devices used to access those sites, and any devices or accounts you have that use the same credentials. Often an attack on one website leads to a compromise on another as the attacker is able to leverage a set of credentials into more information.
Remember, malicious actors, are exposing themselves to risk whenever they strike so there’s (almost) always a reason behind an attack. Perhaps these two websites were hacked because a high-value individual is believed to frequent them, and by gaining access to the credentials on these two relatively low-value sites, that individual has been exposed to greater risk. Maybe this was a test of the SF International Airport’s response time to a hack, which will provide the attackers with an idea of their window of opportunity should they be able to breach a site with higher volume.
As the US federal government beings the process of sending out stimulus checks to its eligible citizens in response to the Covid-19 outbreak, it’s been faced with an interesting challenge: how do you provide a direct deposit stimulus payment to individuals who don’t file tax returns? The IRS’s answer was to create a website designed to collect the necessary information and then provide the payout, presumably linked to an individual’s Social Security Number. Unfortunately, Social Security Numbers are 1.) available online and 2.) not entirely random, which makes it possible for someone to impersonate another individual and take their stimulus check. Having a website also allows for scammers to create their own website designed solely to steal the credentials of any user, and then go use those to file the payments. Unfortunately, there’s probably not a better way to get payments to US citizens in need.
