Zendesk Hacked After Employees Fall for Phishing Attack

zendesk-hacked-after-employees-fall-for-phishing-attack

Customer service solutions provider Zendesk has suffered a data breach that resulted from employee account credentials getting phished by hackers.

Cryptocurrency trading and portfolio management company Coinigy revealed last week that it had been informed by Zendesk about a cybersecurity incident. 

According to the email received by Coinigy, Zendesk learned on October 25, 2022, that several employees were targeted in a “sophisticated SMS phishing campaign”. Some employees took the bait and handed over their account credentials to the attackers, allowing them to access unstructured data from a logging platform between September 25 and October 26, 2022.

Zendesk told Coinigy that, as part of its ongoing review, discovered on January 12, 2023, that service data belonging to the company’s account may have been in the logging platform data. Zendesk said there was no indication that Coinigy’s Zendesk instance had been accessed, but its investigation is still ongoing. 

Zendesk does not appear to have published any statement or notice related to this incident on its website and the company has not responded to SecurityWeek’s inquiry.

However, based on the available information, it’s possible that the attack on Zendesk is related to a campaign named 0ktapus, in which a threat actor that appears to be financially motivated targeted more than 130 organizations between March and August 2022, including major companies such as Twilio and Cloudflare. 

The 0ktapus attackers used SMS-based phishing messages to obtain employee credentials and victims included cryptocurrency companies. 

Twilio and Cloudflare discovered breaches in August, but there was no indication that the campaign was not ongoing, so it’s possible that the same hackers targeted Zendesk a few months later. 

While Coinigy appears to have been notified by Zendesk about the data breach only in January 2023, other victims appear to have been informed much sooner. 

The US-based cryptocurrency exchange Kraken informed customers about a Zendesk breach that involved phishing and unauthorized access to the Zendesk logging system back in November. Kraken said at the time that while accounts and funds were not at risk, the attackers did view the content of support tickets, which contained information such as name, email address, date of birth and phone number.

This is not the first data breach disclosed by Zendesk. In 2019, the company revealed that it had become aware of a security incident that hit roughly 10,000 accounts. 

Related: Zendesk Vulnerability Could Have Given Hackers Access to Customer Data

Related: Recently Disclosed Vulnerability Exploited to Hack Hundreds of SugarCRM Servers

The post Zendesk Hacked After Employees Fall for Phishing Attack appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Companies Impacted by Recent Mailchimp Breach Start Notifying Customers

companies-impacted-by-recent-mailchimp-breach-start-notifying-customers

Companies affected by the recent Mailchimp data breach have started notifying customers. The list includes WooCommerce, FanDuel, Yuga Labs and the Solana Foundation.

Marketing automation platform Mailchimp revealed recently that its security team discovered unauthorized access to one of its tools on January 11. The tool is used by the company’s customer-facing teams for support and account administration.

According to Mailchimp, the hacker targeted employees and contractors in a social engineering attack and used compromised employee credentials to gain access to some Mailchimp accounts.

“Based on our investigation to date, this targeted incident has been limited to 133 Mailchimp accounts. There is no evidence that this compromise affected Intuit systems or customer data beyond these Mailchimp accounts,” the company said in a notice published on its website.

In response to the breach, Mailchimp suspended access for the targeted accounts and notified impacted customers.

Some of those customers have started informing their own customers about the incident. One of the first to do so was WooCommerce, the WordPress ecommerce plugin made by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com.

WooCommerce uses Mailchimp to send emails to customers and its account was one of the 133 that were impacted by the breach.

WooCommerce told customers that some of the information they shared may have been exposed, including name, URL, address, and email address. Passwords, payment data or other sensitive information was not exposed, nor was any store using WooCommerce.

Online gambling service FanDuel has also informed customers that their name and email address may have been compromised. The FanDuel notification says the incident involved a third-party technology vendor and does not name Mailchimp.

The Solana Foundation, the nonprofit behind the Solana blockchain and cryptocurrency network, was also impacted and it did name Mailchimp in its notification to customers.

In the case of Solana, exposed information included names, email addresses and Telegram usernames.

Yuga Labs, a blockchain technology company that develops NFTs and digital collectibles, best known for the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, also confirmed being hit by the Mailchimp breach. Yuga Labs said it only used the service for limited purposes and there was no evidence that data from its Mailchimp account was exported.

Mailchimp claims to have 13 million active customers around the world. This is not the first time the company has announced suffering a breach in recent months. In August 2022, it suspended some accounts following a cyberattack targeting some of its cryptocurrency-related customers.

A few hundred Mailchimp customers were hit at the time, including DigitalOcean, which was not happy with the way the email marketing company handled the incident.

Mailchimp also discovered a security incident in March 2022.

Related: Breached American Airlines Email Accounts Abused for Phishing

Related: Email Hack Hits 15,000 Business Customers of Australian Telecoms Firm TPG

The post Companies Impacted by Recent Mailchimp Breach Start Notifying Customers appeared first on SecurityWeek.