In the days following revelations last September that big-three consumer credit bureau Equifax had been hacked and relieved of personal data on nearly 150 million people, many Americans no doubt felt resigned and powerless to control their information. But not Jessamyn West. The 49-year-old librarian from a tiny town in Vermont took Equifax to court. And now she’s celebrating a small but symbolic victory after a small claims court awarded her $600 in damages stemming from the 2017 breach.

Just days after Equifax disclosed the breach, West filed a claim with the local Orange County, Vt. courthouse asking a judge to award her almost $5,000. She told the court that her mother had just died in July, and that it added to the work of sorting out her mom’s finances while trying to respond to having the entire family’s credit files potentially exposed to hackers and identity thieves.

The judge ultimately agreed, but awarded West just $690 ($90 to cover court fees and the rest intended to cover the cost of up to two years of payments to online identity theft protection services).

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, West said she’s feeling victorious even though the amount awarded is a drop in the bucket for Equifax, which reported more than $3.4 billion in revenue last year.

“The small claims case was a lot more about raising awareness,” said West, a librarian at the Randolph Technical Career Center who specializes in technology training and frequently conducts talks on privacy and security.

“I just wanted to change the conversation I was having with all my neighbors who were like, ‘Ugh, computers are hard, what can you do?’ to ‘Hey, here are some things you can do’,” she said. “A lot of people don’t feel they have agency around privacy and technology in general. This case was about having your own agency when companies don’t behave how they’re supposed to with our private information.”

West said she’s surprised more people aren’t following her example. After all, if just a tiny fraction of the 147 million Americans who had their Social Security number, date of birth, address and other personal data stolen in last year’s breach filed a claim and prevailed as West did, it could easily cost Equifax tens of millions of dollars in damages and legal fees.

“The paperwork to file the claim was a little irritating, but it only cost $90,” she said. “Then again, I could see how many people probably would see this as a lark, where there’s a pretty good chance you’re not going to see that money again, and for a lot of people that probably doesn’t really make things better.”

Equifax is currently the target of several class action lawsuits related to the 2017 breach disclosure, but there have been a few other minor victories in state small claims courts.

In January, data privacy enthusiast Christian Haigh wrote about winning an $8,000 judgment in small claims court against Equifax for its 2017 breach (the amount was reduced to $5,500 after Equifax appealed).

Haigh is co-founder of litigation finance startup Legalist. According to Inc.com, Haigh’s company has started funding other people’s small claims suits against Equifax, too. (Legalist pays lawyers in plaintiff’s suits on an hourly basis, and takes a contingency fee if the case is successful.)

Days after the Equifax breach news broke, a 20-year-old Stanford University student published a free online bot that helps users sue the company in small claims court.

It’s not clear if the Web site tool is still functioning, but West said it was media coverage of this very same lawsuit bot that prompted her to file.

“I thought if some stupid online bot can do this, I could probably figure it out,” she recalled.

If you’re a DYI type person, by all means file a claim in your local small claims court. And then write and publish about your experience, just like West did in a post at Medium.com.

West said she plans to donate the money from her small claims win to the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and that she hopes her case inspires others.

“Even if all this does is get people to use better passwords, or go to the library, or to tell a company, ‘No, that’s not not good enough, you need to do better,’ that would be a good thing,” West said. “I wanted to show that there are constructive ways to seek redress of grievances about lots of different things, which makes me happy. I was willing to do the work and go to court. I look at this like an opportunity to educate and inform yourself, and realize there is a step you can take beyond just rending of garments and gnashing of teeth.”

Microsoft today pushed out a bevy of software updates to fix more than four dozen security holes in Windows and related software. Almost a quarter of the vulnerabilities addressed in this month’s patch batch earned Microsoft’s “critical” rating, meaning malware or miscreants can exploit the flaws to break into vulnerable systems without any help from users.

Most of the critical fixes are in Microsoft browsers or browser components. One of the flaws, CVE-2018-8267, was publicly disclosed prior to today’s patch release, meaning attackers may have had a head start figuring out how to exploit the bug to attack Internet Explorer users.

According to Recorded Future, the most important patched vulnerability is a remote code execution vulnerability in the Windows Domain Name System (DNS), which is present in all versions of supported versions of Windows from Windows 7 to Windows 10 as well as all versions of Windows Server from 2008 to 2016.

“The vulnerability allows an attacker to send a maliciously crafted DNS packet to the victim machine from a DNS server, or even send spoofed DNS responses from attack box,” wrote Allan Liska, a threat intelligence analyst at Recorded Future. “Successful exploitation of this vulnerability could allow an attacker to take control of the target machine.”

Security vendor Qualys says mobile workstations that may connect to untrusted Wi-Fi networks are at high risk and this DNS patch should be a priority for them. Qualys also notes that Microsoft this month is shipping updates to mitigate another variant of the Spectre vulnerability in Intel machines.

And of course there are updates available to address the Adobe Flash Player vulnerability that is already being exploited in active attacks. Read more on that here.

It’s a good idea to get in the habit of backing up your computer before applying monthly updates from Microsoft. Windows has some built-in tools that can help recover from bad patches, but restoring the system to a backup image taken just before installing the updates is often much less hassle and an added piece of mind when you’re sitting there praying for the machine to reboot after patching.

This assumes you can get around to backing up before Microsoft decides to patch Windows on your behalf. Microsoft says by default, Windows 10 receives updates automatically, “and for customers running previous versions, we recommend they turn on automatic updates as a best practice.” Microsoft doesn’t make it easy for Windows 10 users to change this setting, but it is possible.

For all other Windows OS users, if you’d rather be alerted to new updates when they’re available so you can choose when to install them, there’s a setting for that in Windows Update.

As always, if you experience any problems installing any of these updates, please leave a note about your issues in the comments below.

Additional reading:

Cisco Talos Intelligence blog take

The Zero Day Initiative’s Security Update Review

SANS Internet Storm Center

Microsoft Security Update Guide

Web site names ending in new top-level domains (TLDs) like .men, .work and .click are some of the riskiest and spammy-est on the Internet, according to experts who track such concentrations of badness online. Not that there still aren’t a whole mess of nasty .com, .net and .biz domains out there, but relative to their size (i.e. overall number of domains) these newer TLDs are far dicier to visit than most online destinations.

There are many sources for measuring domain reputation online, but one of the newest is The 10 Most Abused Top Level Domains list, run by Spamhaus.org. Currently at the #1 spot on the list (the worst) is .men: Spamhaus says of the 65,570 domains it has seen registered in the .men TLD, more than half (55 percent) were “bad.”

According to Spamhaus, a TLD may be “bad” because it is tied to spam or malware dissemination (or both). More specifically, the “badness” of a given TLD may be assigned in two ways:

“The ratio of bad to good domains may be higher than average, indicating that the registry could do a better job of enforcing policies and shunning abusers. Or, some TLDs with a high fraction of bad domains may be quite small, and their total number of bad domains could be relatively limited with respect to other, bigger TLDs. Their total “badness” to the Internet is limited by their small total size.”

More than 1,500 TLDs exist today, but hundreds of them were introduced in just the past few years. The nonprofit organization that runs the domain name space — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) — enabled the new TLDs in response to requests from advertisers and domain speculators — even though security experts warned that an onslaught of new, far cheaper TLDs would be a boon mainly to spammers and scammers.

And what a boon it has been. The newer TLDs are popular among spammers and scammers alike because domains in many of these TLDs can be had for pennies apiece. But not all of the TLDs on Spamhaus’ list are prized for being cheaper than generic TLDs (like .com, .net, etc.). The cheapest domains at half of Spamhaus’ top ten “baddest” TLDs go for prices between $6 and $14.50 per domain.

Still, domains in the remaining five Top Bad TLDs can be had for between 48 cents and a dollar each.

Security firm Symantec in March 2018 published its own Top 20 list of Shady TLDs:

Spamhaus says TLD registries that allow registrars to sell high volumes of domains to professional spammers and malware operators in essence aid and abet the plague of abuse on the Internet.

“Some registrars and resellers knowingly sell high volumes of domains to these actors for profit, and many registries do not do enough to stop or limit this endless supply of domains,” Spamhaus’ World’s Most Abused TLDs page explains.

Namecheap, a Phoenix, Ariz. based domain name registrar that in Oct. 2017 was the fourth-largest registrar, currently offers by a wide margin the lowest registration prices for three out of 10 of Spamhaus’ baddest TLDs, selling most for less than 50 cents each.

Namecheap also is by far the cheapest registrar for 11 of Symantec’s Top 20 Shady New TLDs: Namecheap is easily the least expensive registrar to secure a domain in 11 of the Top 20, including .date, .trade, .review, .party, .loan, .kim, .bid, .win, .racing, .download and .stream.

I should preface the following analysis by saying the prices that domain registrars charge for various TLD name registrations vary frequently, as do the rankings in these Top Bad TLD lists. But I was curious if there was any useful data about new TLD abuse at tld-list.com — a comparison shopping page for domain registrars.

What I found is that although domains in almost all of the above-mentioned TLDs are sold by dozens of registrars, most of these registrars have priced themselves out of the market for the TLDs that are currently so-favored by spammers and scammers.

Not so with Namecheap. True to its name, when it is the cheapest Namecheap consistently offers the lowest price by approximately 98 percent off the average price that other registrars selling the same TLD charge per domain. The company appears to have specifically targeted these TLDs with price promotions that far undercut competitors.

Here’s a look at the per-domain prices charged by the registrars for the TLDs named in Spamhaus’s top 10:

This a price comparison for Symantec’s Top 20 list:

I asked Namecheap’s CEO why the company’s name comes up so frequently in these lists, and if there was any strategy behind cornering the market for so many of the “bad” and “shady” TLDs.

“Our business model, as our name implies is to offer choice and value to everyone in the same way companies like Amazon or Walmart do,” Namecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall told KrebsOnSecurity. “Saying that because we offer low prices to all customers we somehow condone nefarious activity is an irresponsible assumption on your part. Our commitment to our millions of customers across the world is to continue to bring them the best value and choice whenever and wherever we can.”

Kirkendall said expecting retail registrars that compete on pricing to stop doing that is not realistic and would be the last place he would go to for change.

“On the other hand, if you do manage to secure higher pricing you will also in effect tax everyone for the bad actions of a few,” Kirkendall said. “Is this really the way to solve the problem? While a few dollars may not matter to you, there are plenty of less fortunate people out there where it does matter. They say the internet is the great equalizer, by making things cost more simply for the sake of creating barriers truly and indiscriminately creates barriers for everyone, not just for those you target.”

Incidentally, should you ever wish to block all domains from any given TLD, there are a number of tools available to do that. One of the easiest to use is Cisco‘s OpenDNS, which includes up to 30 filters for managing traffic, content and Web sites on your computer and home network — including the ability to block entire TLDs if that’s something you want to do.

I’m often asked if blocking sites from loading when they’re served from specific TLDs or countries (like .ru) would be an effective way to block malware and phishing attacks. It’s important to note here that it’s not practical to assume you can block all traffic from given countries (that somehow blacklisting .ru is going to block all traffic from Russia). It also seems likely that the .com TLD space and US-based ISPs are bigger sources of the problem overall.

But that’s not to say blocking entire TLDs a horrible idea for individual users and home network owners. I’d wager there are whole a host of TLDs (including all of the above “bad” and “shady” TLDs) that most users could block across the board without forgoing anything they might otherwise want to have seen or visited. I mean seriously: When was the last time you intentionally visited a site registered in the TLD for Gabon (.ga)?

And while many people might never click on a .party or .men domain in a malicious or spammy email, these domains are often loaded only after the user clicks on a malicious or booby-trapped link that may not look so phishy — such as a .com or .org link.

Update: 11:46 a.m. ET: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the name of the company that owns OpenDNS.

Adobe has released an emergency update to address a critical security hole in its Flash Player browser plugin that is being actively exploited to deploy malicious software. If you’ve got Flash installed — and if you’re using Google Chrome or a recent version of Microsoft Windows you do — it’s time once again to make sure your copy of Flash is either patched, hobbled or removed.

In an advisory published today, Adobe said it is aware of a report that an exploit for the previously unknown Flash flaw — CVE-2018-5002 — exists in the wild, and “is being used in limited, targeted attacks against Windows users. These attacks leverage Microsoft Office documents with embedded malicious Flash Player content distributed via email.”

The vulnerable versions of Flash include v. 29.0.0.171 and earlier. The version of Flash released today brings the program to v. 30.0.0.113 for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS. Check out this link to detect the presence of Flash in your browser and the version number installed.

Both Internet Explorer/Edge on Windows 10 and Chrome should automatically prompt users to update Flash when newer versions are available. At the moment, however, I can’t see any signs yet that either Microsoft or Google has pushed out new updates to address the Flash flaw. I’ll update this post if that changes.

Adobe credits Chinese security firm Qihoo 360 with reporting the zero-day Flash flaw. Qihoo said in a blog post that the exploit was seen being used to target individuals and companies in Doha, Qatar, and is believed to be related to a nation-state backed cyber-espionage campaign that uses booby-trapped Office documents to deploy malware.

In February 2018, Adobe patched another zero-day Flash flaw that was tied to cyber espionage attacks launched by North Korean hackers.

Hopefully, most readers here have taken my longstanding advice to disable or at least hobble Flash, a buggy and insecure component that nonetheless ships by default with Google Chrome and Internet Explorer. More on that approach (as well as slightly less radical solutions) can be found in A Month Without Adobe Flash Player. The short version is that you can probably get by without Flash installed and not miss it at all.

For readers still unwilling to cut the Flash cord, there are half-measures that work almost as well. Fortunately, disabling Flash in Chrome is simple enough. Paste “chrome://settings/content” into a Chrome browser bar and then select “Flash” from the list of items. By default it should be set to “Ask first” before running Flash, although users also can disable Flash entirely here or whitelist/blacklist specific sites.

By default, Mozilla Firefox on Windows computers with Flash installed runs Flash in a “protected mode,” which prompts the user to decide if they want to enable the plugin before Flash content runs on a Web site.

Another, perhaps less elegant, alternative to wholesale kicking Flash to the curb is to keeping it installed in a browser that you don’t normally use, and then only using that browser on sites that require Flash.

Administrators have the ability to change Flash Player’s behavior when running on Internet Explorer on Windows 7 and below by prompting the user before playing Flash content. A guide on how to do that is here (PDF). Administrators may also consider implementing Protected View for Office. Protected View opens a file marked as potentially unsafe in Read-only mode.

Last month’s story about organizations exposing passwords and other sensitive data via collaborative online spaces at Trello.com only scratched the surface of the problem. A deeper dive suggests a large number of government agencies, marketing firms, healthcare organizations and IT support companies are publishing credentials via public Trello boards that quickly get indexed by the major search engines.

By default, Trello boards for both enterprise and personal use are set to either private (requires a password to view the content) or team-visible only (approved members of the collaboration team can view).

But individual users may be able to manually share personal boards that include personal or proprietary employer data, information that gets cataloged by Internet search engines and available to anyone with a Web browser.

David Shear is an analyst at Flashpoint, a New York City based threat intelligence company. Shear spent several weeks last month exploring the depths of sensitive data exposed on Trello. Amid his digging, Shear documented hundreds of public Trello boards that were exposing passwords and other sensitive information. KrebsOnSecurity worked with Shear to document and report these boards to Trello.

Shear said he’s amazed at the number of companies selling IT support services that are using Trello not only to store their own passwords, but even credentials to manage customer assets online.

“There’s a bunch of different IT shops using it to troubleshoot client requests, and to do updates to infrastructure,” Shear said. “We also found a Web development team that’s done a lot of work for various dental offices. You could see who all their clients were and see credentials for clients to log into their own sites. These are IT companies doing this. And they tracked it all via [public] Trello pages.”

One particularly jarring misstep came from someone working for Seceon, a Westford, Mass. cybersecurity firm that touts the ability to detect and stop data breaches in real time. But until a few weeks ago the Trello page for Seceon featured multiple usernames and passwords, including credentials to log in to the company’s WordPress blog and iPage domain hosting.

Shear also found that a senior software engineer working for Red Hat Linux in October 2017 posted administrative credentials to two different servers apparently used to test new builds.

The Maricopa County Department of Public Health (MCDPH) in Arizona used public Trello boards to document a host of internal resources that are typically found behind corporate intranets, such as this board that aggregated information for new hires (including information about how to navigate the MCDPH’s payroll system):

Even federal health regulators have made privacy missteps with Trello. Shear’s sleuthing uncovered a public Trello page maintained by HealthIT.gov — the official Web site of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) — that was leaking credentials.

There appear to be a great many marketers and realtors who are using public Trello boards as their personal password notepads. One of my favorites is a Trello page maintained by a “virtual assistant” who specializes in helping realtors find new clients and sales leads. Apparently, this person re-used her Trello account password somewhere else (and/or perhaps re-used it from a list of passwords available on her Trello page), and as a result someone added a “You hacked” card to the assistant’s Trello board, urging her to change the password.

One realtor from Austin, Texas who posted numerous passwords to her public Trello board apparently had her Twitter profile hijacked and defaced with a photo featuring a giant Nazi flag and assorted Nazi memorabilia. It’s not clear how the hijacker obtained her password, but it appears to have been on Trello for some time.

Other entities that inadvertently shared passwords for private resources via public Trello boards included a Chinese aviation authority; the International AIDS Society; and the global technology consulting and research firm Analysis Mason, which also exposed its Twitter account credentials on Trello until very recently.

Trello responded to this report by making private many of the boards referenced above; other reported boards appear to remain public, minus the sensitive information. Trello said it was working with Google and other search engine providers to have any cached copies of the exposed boards removed.

“We have put many safeguards in place to make sure that public boards are being created intentionally and have clear language around each privacy setting, as well as persistent visibility settings at the top of each board,” a Trello spokesperson told KrebsOnSecurity in response to this research. “With regard to the search-engine indexing, we are currently sending the correct HTTP response code to Google after a board is made private. This is an automated, immediate action that happens upon users making the change. But we are trying to see if we can speed up the time it takes Google to realize that some of the URLs are no longer available.”

Flashpoint’s Shear said Trello should be making a more concerted effort to proactively find sensitive data exposed by its users. For example, Shear said Trello’s platform could perform some type of automated analysis that looks for specific keywords (like “password”) and if the page is public display a reminder to the board’s author about how to make the page private.

“They could easily do input validation on things like passwords if they’re not going to proactively search their own network for this stuff,” Shear said.

Trello co-founder Michael Pryor said the company was grateful for the suggestion and would consider it.

“We are looking at other cloud apps of our size and how they balance the vast majority of useful sharing of public info with helping people not make a mistake,” Pryor said. “We’ll continue to explore the topic and potential solutions, and appreciate the work you put into the list you shared with us.”

Shear said he doubts his finds even come close to revealing the true extent of the sensitive data organizations are exposing via misconfigured Trello boards. He added that even in cases where public Trello boards don’t expose passwords or financial data, the information that countless organizations publish to these boards can provide plenty of ammunition for phishers and cybercriminals looking to target specific entities.

“I don’t think we’ve even uncovered the real depth of what’s probably there,” he said. “I’d be surprised if someone isn’t at least trying to collect a bunch of user passwords and configuration files off lots of Trello accounts for bad guy operations.”

Update, 11:56 p.m. ET: Corrected location of MCDPH.