Information Technology Security

By Lawrence Abrams, Bleeping Computer LastPass says its almost 12-hour outage yesterday was caused by a bad update to its Google Chrome extension. Starting at around 1 PM ET yesterday, LastPass users were suddenly unable to access their password vaults or log into their accounts, instead seeing "404 Not Found" errors, which typically indicate a page does not exist. The impact did not go unnoticed, with LastPass customers venting their frustration on Reddit and Twitter about the outage and their inability to retrieve their saved credentials and log in to sites.

By Sergiu Gatlan,  Bleeping Computer LastPass revealed this week that threat actors targeted one of its employees in a voice phishing attack, using deepfake audio to impersonate Karim Toubba, the company's Chief Executive Officer. However, while 25% of people have been on the receiving end of an AI voice impersonation scam or know someone who has, according to a recent global study, the LastPass employee didn't fall for it because the attacker used WhatsApp, which is a very uncommon business channel. "In our case, an employee received a series of calls, texts, and at least one voicemail featuring an audio deepfake from a threat actor impersonating our CEO via WhatsApp," LastPass intelligence analyst Mike Kosak said. Deepfake audio LastPass CEO impersonation "As the attempted communication was outside of normal business communication channels and due to the employee’s suspicion regarding the presence of many of the hallmarks of a social engineering attempt (such a...

By Chris Smith, BGR The first Thursday of May each year is World Password Day, which explains all the password-related announcements we saw this week. First, 1Password 8 for Mac launched with a few big new features. Then, Google started rolling out its Google Assistant password-changing feature. More importantly, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have announced plans to support passwordless sign-in . That last one is a massive cross-platform initiative that will bring us closer to killing passwords. In turn, this could significantly boost the security of online accounts, making them a lot harder to hack. It’ll take some time for websites and apps to support passwordless sign-in. But Google already gave us an idea of how it’ll all work. Proper password practices can help prevent hacks right now. You don’t need passwordless sign-in options if you’re already using unique, long passwords in connection with a password manager like 1Password or LastPass. These passwords are much harder to hack, e...