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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), one of the core entities for Internet governance and operations, announced that it had been compromied in late November via a "Spear-Phishing" attack.
They state that the compromised credentials were used to access more sensitive systems. Specifically, they mention:
The attacker obtained administrative access to all files in the CZDS [Centralized Zone Data System]. This included copies of the zone files in the system, as well as information entered by users such as name, postal address, email address, fax and telephone numbers, username, and password. Although the passwords were stored as salted cryptographic hashes, we have deactivated all CZDS passwords as a precaution. Users may request a new password at czds.icann.org. We suggest that CZDS users take appropriate steps to protect any other online accounts for which they might have used the same username and/or password. ICANN is providing notices to the CZDS users whose personal information may have been compromised.
They also identified unauthorized access to (ostensibly innocuous parts of) the ICANN GAC [Governmental Advisory Committee] Wiki as well as user-level accounts on the ICANN Blog and the ICANN WHOIS information portal.
While they're not terribly specific about how the attack happened aside from mentioning that the "email credentials of several ICANN staff members" were compromised, it doesn't take much imagination to figure out where it probably went from there. The impact seems rather minimal, but given the level of control that ICANN has over DNS, it does make one wonder how close we came to a major incident.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 19 2014, @10:25AM
...A 1% in the USA loses $1 million+ THEN they will take action because a 'big fish' got hurt BIG TIME by a scammer. They might do this if as little as $100K is lost. Any less than that and they probably won't lift a finger as the loss is not large enough to try to recover and if successful, blast it all over 'lamestream media'.
Otherwise, just delete the email without 'touching' it otherwise you have to waste time saving your data, and wiping and re-installing Windows, and putting it back.
You MIGHT avoid all this by checking your email inside a virtual PC session but why take the chance. :P
I wrote my own email client to avoid the 'bells and whistles' of Outlook that can extract file attachments to 'text files' so they load in Notepad if they are clicked on (accidentally). The attachments can be safely scanned for malware and deleted, quarantined, or forwarded to online antivirus services for analysis to update their antivirus scanners.