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Everyone with a Roku TV or streaming device will eventually be forced to enable two-factor authentication after the company disclosed two separate incidents in which roughly 600,000 customers had their accounts accessed through credential stuffing.

Credential stuffing is an attack in which usernames and passwords exposed in one leak are tried out against other accounts, typically using automated scripts. When people reuse usernames and passwords across services or make small, easily intuited changes between them, actors can gain access to accounts with even more identifying information and access.

In the case of the Roku attacks, that meant access to stored payment methods, which could then be used to buy streaming subscriptions and Roku hardware. Roku wrote on its blog , and in a mandated data breach report , that purchases occurred in "less than 400 cases" and that full credit card numbers and other "sensitive information" was not revealed.

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Password-manager LastPass users were recently targeted by a convincing phishing campaign that used a combination of email, SMS, and voice calls to trick targets into divulging their master passwords, company officials said.

The attackers used an advanced phishing-as-a-service kit discovered in February by researchers from mobile security firm Lookout. Dubbed CryptoChameleon for its focus on cryptocurrency accounts, the kit provides all the resources needed to trick even relatively savvy people into believing the communications are legitimate. Elements include high-quality URLs, a counterfeit single sign-on page for the service the target is using, and everything needed to make voice calls or send emails or texts in real time as targets are visiting a fake site. The end-to-end service can also bypass multi-factor authentication in the event a target is using the protection.

LastPass in the crosshairs

Lookout said that LastPass was one of dozens of sensitive services or sites CryptoChameleon was configured to spoof. Others targeted included the Federal Communications Commission, Coinbase and other cryptocurrency exchanges, and email, password management, and single sign-on services including Okta, iCloud, and Outlook. When Lookout researchers accessed a database one CryptoChameleon subscriber used, they found that a high percentage of the contents collected in the scams appeared to be legitimate email addresses, passwords, one-time-password tokens, password reset URLs, and photos of driver’s licenses. Typically, such databases are filled with junk entries.

Enlarge / Technicians inside United Launch Alliance's Vertical Integration Facility connect Boeing's Starliner spacecraft to the top of its Atlas V rocket Tuesday. (credit: United Launch Alliance )

Ground teams on Florida's Space Coast hoisted Boeing's Starliner spacecraft atop its United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket this week, putting all the pieces in place for liftoff next month with two veteran NASA astronauts on a test flight to the International Space Station.

This will be the first time astronauts fly on Boeing's Starliner crew capsule, following two test flights without crew members in 2019 and 2022. The Starliner Crew Flight Test (CFT) next month will wrap up a decade and a half of development and, if all goes well, will pave the way for operational Starliner missions to ferry crews to and from the space station.

Starliner is running years behind schedule and over budget. SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft has flown all of NASA's crew rotation missions to the station since its first astronaut flight in 2020. But NASA wants to get Boeing's spacecraft up and running to have a backup to SpaceX. It would then alternate between Starliner and Crew Dragon for six-month expeditions to the station beginning next year.

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Kremlin-backed actors have stepped up efforts to interfere with the US presidential election by planting disinformation and false narratives on social media and fake news sites, analysts with Microsoft reported Wednesday.

The analysts have identified several unique influence-peddling groups affiliated with the Russian government seeking to influence the election outcome, with the objective in large part to reduce US support of Ukraine and sow domestic infighting. These groups have so far been less active during the current election cycle than they were during previous ones, likely because of a less contested primary season.

Stoking divisions

Over the past 45 days, the groups have seeded a growing number of social media posts and fake news articles that attempt to foment opposition to US support of Ukraine and stoke divisions over hot-button issues such as election fraud. The influence campaigns also promote questions about President Biden’s mental health and corrupt judges. In all, Microsoft has tracked scores of such operations in recent weeks.

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It's easy to get the impression that Discord chat messages are ephemeral, especially across different public servers, where lines fly upward at a near-unreadable pace. But someone claims to be catching and compiling that data and is offering packages that can track more than 600 million users across more than 14,000 servers.

Joseph Cox at 404 Media confirmed that Spy Pet, a service that sells access to a database of purportedly 3 billion Discord messages, offers data "credits" to customers who pay in Bitcoin, Ethereum, or other cryptocurrency. Searching individual users will reveal the servers that Spy Pet can track them across, a raw and exportable table of their messages, and connected accounts, such as GitHub. Ominously, Spy Pet lists more than 86,000 other servers in which it has "no bots," but "we know it exists."

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  An example of Spy Pet's service from its website. Shown are a user's nicknames, connected accounts, banner image, server memberships, and messages across those servers tracked by Spy Pet. [credit: Spy Pet ]

As Cox notes, Discord doesn't make messages inside server channels, like blog posts or unlocked social media feeds, easy to publicly access and search. But many Discord users many not expect their messages, server memberships, bans, or other data to be grabbed by a bot, compiled, and sold to anybody wishing to pin them all on a particular user. 404 Media confirmed the service's function with multiple user examples. Private messages are not mentioned by Spy Pet and are presumably still secure.