Criminals exploited weak checks and old tech to pull off vast COVID benefit fraud

In life, when you encounter something momentuous—a sudden job loss, a routine check-up that revealed an illness you cant afford the medical bills for—you can be assured that the federal or state government has benefits you can apply for it. And where there are benefits, you can also be assured th...

Unpatched Remote Hacking Flaw Disclosed in Fortinet's FortiWeb WAF

Details have emerged about a new unpatched security vulnerability in Fortinet's web application firewall WAF appliances that could be abused by a remote, authenticated attacker to execute malicious commands on the system. "An OS command injection vulnerability in FortiWeb's management interface...

Why Is There A Surge In Ransomware Attacks?

The U.S. is presently combating two pandemics--coronavirus and ransomware attacks. Both have partially shut down parts of the economy. However, in the case of cybersecurity, lax security measures allow hackers to have an easy way to rake in millions. It's pretty simple for hackers to gain...

Chaos Malware: Ransomware and Wiper

An under-construction malware called Chaos has been spotted, which is being advertised on an underground forum as being available for testing. While it calls itself ransomware, an analysis revealed that it’s actually more of a wiper. According to Trend Micro researcher Monte de Jesus, Chaos has...

Black Hat: New CISA Head Woos Crowd With Public-Private Task Force

LAS VEGAS – Just weeks after the U.S. Senate confirmed Jen Easterly to lead the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA, the new director spoke at Black Hat USA 2021 on Thursday, albeit virtually, announcing a major public-private partnership to fight cybercrime. Called the Joint...

A week in security (July 26 – August 1)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: OSX.XLoader hides little except its main purpose: What we learned in the installation process. The Clubhouse database “breach” is likely a non-breach. Here’s why. Kaseya Unitrends has unpatched vulnerabilities that could help attackers expand a breach. UDP Technolo...

UC San Diego Health Breach Tied to Phishing Attack

Authorities at the University of California San Diego Health reported a phishing attack led to a major breach of its network, which allowed an adversary to gain access to sensitive patient, student and employee data. A Wednesday notice from UCSD Health explains the attack occurred between Dec. 2,...

Top Routinely Exploited Vulnerabilities

CISA, the Australian Cyber Security Centre ACSC, the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre NCSC, and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI have released the Joint Cybersecurity Advisory Top Routinely Exploited Vulnerabilities, which details the top vulnerabilities routinely...

CNA legal filings lift the curtain on a Phoenix CryptoLocker ransomware attack

Two months after fully restoring its systems, CNA Financial, the leading US insurance company that was attacked by a group using Phoenix CryptoLocker ransomware, issued a legal notice of an information security incident to the Consumer Protection Bureau in New Hampshire. You may recall that Phoen...

FBI: Cybercriminals Eyeing Broadcast Disruption at Tokyo Olympics

The Tokyo Olympics, set to open Friday night, are already being targeted by threat actors — however, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Cyber Division has issued a chilling warning the Games’ TV broadcast is likely to be plagued by attacks, since it will be the only way to view events now that...

Indictments, Attribution Unlikely to Deter Chinese Hacking

The federal government is fighting back against what it says are China-based cyberattacks against U.S. universities and companies with indictments and a “naming-and-shaming” approach — but researchers aren’t convinced the efforts will come to much in terms of deterring future activity. On Monday,...

Law Firm to the Fortune 500 Breached with Ransomware

Campbell Conroy & O’Neil, P.C. – U.S. law firm to a dazzling array of huge companies – told its star-studded clientele that an intruder may have groped their data. It was hit with ransomware in February and is now suffering the data-breach fallout. That client list spans a slew of industries and...

Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures of Indicted APT40 Actors Associated with China’s MSS Hainan State Security Department

Summary This Joint Cybersecurity Advisory was written by the Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA to provide information on a Chinese Advanced Persistent Threat APT group known in open-source reporting as APT40. This advisory provides...

Significant Historical Cyber-Intrusion Campaigns Targeting ICS

Protecting our Nation’s critical infrastructure is the responsibility of federal and state, local, tribal, and territorial SLTT governments and owners and operators of that infrastructure. The cybersecurity threats posed to the industrial control systems ICS that control and operate critical...

U.S. Government Releases Indictment and Several Advisories Detailing Chinese Cyber Threat Activity

CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI, and the National Security Agency NSA have observed increasingly sophisticated Chinese state-sponsored activity targeting U.S. political, economic, military, educational, and critical infrastructure personnel and organizations. In response: The White...

New StopRansomware.gov website – The U.S. Government’s One-Stop Location to Stop Ransomware

The U.S. Government launched a new website to help public and private organizations defend against the rise in ransomware cases. StopRansomware.gov is a whole-of-government approach that gives one central location for ransomware resources and alerts. We encourage organizations to use this new...

Analysis of the FBI’s Anom Phone

Motherboard got its hands on one of those Anom phones that were really FBI honeypots. The details are interesting...

Kaseya Patches Zero-Days Used in REvil Attacks

Kaseya made good on its promise to issue patches by July 11. On Saturday, the company behind the Virtual System/Server Administrator VSA platform that got walloped by the REvil ransomware-as-a-service RaaS gang in a massive supply-chain attack released urgent updates to address critical zero-day...

The Latest Pro-Trump Twitter Clone Leaks User Data on Day 1

Plus: A failed takedown in Russia, details on an FBI-sting encrypted phone, and more of the week's top security news...

Kaseya Attack Fallout: CISA, FBI Offer Guidance

The REvil cybergang is taking credit for Friday’s massive ransomware attack against managed service provider Kaseya Ltd. The criminals behind the attack claim it infected 1 million systems tied to Kaseya services and are demanding $70 million in bitcoin in exchange for a decryption key. Federal...