LifeLock Learns Lesson from Leaky Links

The combination of poor programming practices and poor control over business partners can be dangerous for a company's customers. Just ask LifeLock.

According to a post on KrebsonSecurity, a researcher named Nathan Reese discovered a vulnerability on a website that could provide the email address of every LifeLock subscriber. While Reese demonstrated the potential with a proof-of-concept script, there is no evidence that the data was accessed by any other unauthorized person.

The vulnerability was a bit of logic in a website allowing someone to enter a specific URL containing a subscriber key (unique identifying number) and receive a page displaying that user's email address. Since the subscriber keys are sequential, writing the script to harvest the email addresses was trivial.

While the impact of this type of breach would not be the same as for a breach involving credit card or Social Security numbers, it could still provide source material for compelling and unusually effective spear-phishing campaigns. In a statement provided to Dark Reading, Mounir Hahad, head of threat research at Juniper Networks, said, "The trouble begins when these email addresses and subscriber IDs are cross-referenced with the billions of previously leaked online accounts from other incidents, such as the Yahoo leak in 2013. From there, phishing campaigns can be very persuasive and may lead to people unknowingly handing out their passwords to scammers." 

According to Symantec, which owns LifeLock, the issue was on a third-party managed marketing page and has been fixed.

Read here for more.

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