This Week in Security News: BEC Attacks and Botnet Malware

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about the prevalence and impact of BEC attacks. Also, find out how botnet malware can perform remote code execution, DDoS attacks and...

CVE-2019-3719

creationtimestamp| type| source ---|---|--- 2019-05-02 04:00:00+00:00| seen| https://www.govcert.gov.hk/en/alertsdetail.php?id=386 2019-05-02 12:53:11+00:00| seen| https://t.me/SecLabNews/4847 2019-05-04 11:00:09+00:00| seen| https://t.me/sysodmins/5098 2019-05-06 08:52:34+00:00|...

DHS Shortens Deadline For Gov Agencies to Fix Critical Flaws

A Department of Homeland Security DHS order now requires agencies to remediate critical vulnerabilities discovered on their systems in 15 days – cutting in half the previous deadline of 30 days. That’s according to a Tuesday binding directive, which is a compulsory order for federal, executive...

MuddyWater APT Hones an Arsenal of Custom Tools

An array of customized attack tools are helping the MuddyWater advanced persistent threat APT group to successfully exfiltrate data from its governmental and telco targets in the Middle East; an analysis of this toolset reveals a moderately sophisticated threat actor at work – with the potential ...

I know what you did last summer, MuddyWater blending in the crowd

Introduction MuddyWater is an APT with a focus on governmental and telco targets in the Middle East Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon and also a few other countries in nearby regions Azerbaijan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. MuddyWater first surfaced in 2017 and has been active...

Vulnerability in French Government Tchap Chat App

A researcher found a vulnerability in the French government WhatsApp replacement app: Tchap. The vulnerability allows anyone to surreptitiously join any conversation. Of course the developers will fix this vulnerability. But it is amusing to point out that this is exactly the backdoor that GCHQ i...

Consumers have few legal options for protecting privacy

There are no promises in the words, “We care about user privacy.” Yet, these words appear on privacy policy after privacy policy, serving as disingenuous banners to hide potentially invasive corporate practices, including clandestine data collection, sharing, and selling. This is no accident. It ...

Evil TeamViewer Attacks Under the Guise of the U.S. State Department

UPDATE A targeted, email-borne attack against embassy officials and government finance authorities globally is making use of a malicious attachment disguised as a top-secret U.S. document. It weaponizes TeamViewer, the popular remote-access and desktop-sharing software, to gain full control of th...

Hacker Breaks Into French Government's New Secure Messaging App

A white-hat hacker found a way to get into the French government's newly launched, secure encrypted messaging app that otherwise can only be accessed by officials and politicians with email accounts associated with the government identities. Dubbed "Tchap," the end-to-end encrypted, open source...

Hacker Breaks Into French Government's New Secure Messaging App

A white-hat hacker found a way to get into the French government's newly launched, secure encrypted messaging app that otherwise can only be accessed by officials and politicians with email accounts associated with the government identities. Dubbed "Tchap ," the end-to-end encrypted, open source...

ThreatList: Bad Bots Account for a Fifth of All Web Traffic, FinServ Hit the Worst

About a fifth of all web traffic 20.4 percent comes from bad bots, which continue to attack daily in automated offensives on websites, mobile apps and APIs. That’s worse for some verticals, like the banking and finance sector, which was hit the hardest last year. That’s according to the Distil...

Spear Phishing Campaign Targets Ukraine Government and Military; Infrastructure Reveals Potential Link to So-Called Luhansk People's Republic

In early 2019, FireEye Threat Intelligence identified a spear phishing email targeting government entities in Ukraine. The spear phishing email included a malicious LNK file with PowerShell script to download the second-stage payload from the command and control C&C server. The email was received...

Gaza Cybergang Group1, operation SneakyPastes

Gaza Cybergangs is a politically motivated Arabic-language cyberthreat actor, actively targeting the MENA Middle East North Africa region, especially the Palestinian Territories. The confusion surrounding Gaza Cybergang's activities, separation of roles and campaigns has been prevalent in the cyb...

Compromising vital infrastructure: water management

It’s probably unnecessary to explain why water management is considered part of our vital infrastructure, but it's a wider field than you might expect—and almost every one of its components can be integral to our survival. We all need clean water to drink. As much as I like my coffee, I can't mak...

NSA-Inspired Vulnerability Found in Huawei Laptops

This is an interesting story of a serious vulnerability in a Huawei driver that Microsoft found. The vulnerability is similar in style to the NSA's DOUBLEPULSAR that was leaked by the Shadow Brokers -- believed to be the Russian government -- and it's obvious that this attack copied that techniqu...

CVE-2019-7609

Kibana versions before 5.6.15 and 6.6.1 contain an arbitrary code execution flaw in the Timelion visualizer. An attacker with access to the Timelion application could send a request that will attempt to execute javascript code. This could possibly lead to an attacker executing arbitrary commands...

Years-Long Phishing Campaign Targets Saudi Gov Agencies

An ongoing three-year-old phishing campaign has been targeting the credentials of Saudi Arabian government agencies — with a financially motivated actor the likely culprit. The campaign, code-named “Bad Tidings,” has siphoned victims’ credentials by pretending to be the Kingdom’s Ministry of...

Observations from RSA Conference, 2019

Last week, the 2019 RSA Conference was held with typical energy and exuberance in San Francisco. One of the largest cybersecurity industry conferences, it had over 700 exhibiting vendors not including another 50 in their Early Stage Expo area and over 500 sessions covering a wide range of current...

Pakistani Govt’s passport application tracking site hacked with Scanbox framework

By Waqas Hackers are after anyone seeking Pakistani passport while there is no response from the website's administrator. Researchers at information security firm Trustwave have made a startling new discovery about data breach on a Pakistani government website involving the Scanbox Framework. It ...

Thoughts on Cloud Security

Recently I've been reading about cloud security and security with respect to DevOps. I'll say more about the excellent book I'm reading, but I had a moment of déjà vu during one section. The book described how cloud security is a big change from enterprise security because it relies less on...