High-Severity Cisco DoS Flaw Can Immobilize ASR Routers

A high-severity flaw in Cisco’s IOS XR software could allow unauthenticated, remote attackers to cripple Cisco Aggregation Services Routers ASR. The flaw stems from Cisco IOS XR, a train of Cisco Systems’ widely deployed Internetworking Operating System IOS. The OS powers the Cisco ASR 9000 serie...

Single Malicious GIF Opened Microsoft Teams to Nasty Attack

Microsoft has fixed a subdomain takeover vulnerability in its collaboration platform Microsoft Teams that could have allowed an inside attacker to weaponize a single GIF image and use it to pilfer data from targeted systems and take over all of an organization’s Teams accounts. The attack simply...

DroidSheep Android App Hijacks Sessions in One Click, Developer Meant Well

Following the success of the Firesheep application, a new Android application called DroidSheep allows users to hijack Web sessions of popular online services over insecure Wifi connections. DroidSheep enables Android-based man in the middle attacks against a wide range of Web sites, including...

Microsoft: Lapsus$ Used Employee Account to Steal Source Code

In a new blog post published last night, Microsoft confirmed that the Lapsus$ extortion group hacked one of its employee’s accounts to get “limited access” to project source code repositories. “No customer code or data was involved in the observed activities. Our investigation has found a single...

IKEA Hit by Email Reply-Chain Cyberattack

As of Friday – as in, shopping-on-steroids Black Friday – retail titan IKEA was wrestling with a then-ongoing reply-chain email phishing attack in which attackers were malspamming replies to stolen email threads. BleepingComputer got a look at internal emails – one of which is replicated below –...

APT Charming Kitten Pounces on Medical Researchers

Security researchers have linked a late-2020 phishing campaign aimed at stealing credentials from 25 senior professionals at medical research organizations in the United States and Israel to an advanced persistent threat group with links to Iran called Charming Kitten. The campaign—dubbed BadBloo...

Ring Adds End-to-End Encryption to Quell Security Uproar

Smart doorbell maker Ring is giving cybersecurity critics less to gripe about with the introduction of end-to-end encryption to many of its models. Ring products, which have been a juggernaut success with consumers, have faced a litany of harsh criticism from cybersecurity experts for what they s...

Second Try at LSASS Patch Addresses Vulnerability

Microsoft’s second try at patching a vulnerability in a critical Windows process apparently is more successful than its first attempt. Yesterday, as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday release of security bulletins, Microsoft sent out an update that fixed a denial-of-service vulnerability in the...

From PowerShell to Payload: An Analysis of Weaponized Malware

UPDATE Click, and boom, your network is compromised. All a hacker needs is one successful exploit and you could have a very bad day. Recently we uncovered one artifact that we would like to break down and showcase. We will get “into the weeds” here and really deep-dive on the technical details, s...

'Cable Haunt' Bug Plagues Millions of Home Modems

UPDATED Multiple cable modems used by ISPs to provide broadband into homes have a critical vulnerability in their underlying reference architecture that would allow an attacker full remote control of the device. The footprint for the affected devices numbers in the hundreds of millions worldwide...

VMWare Urges Users to Patch Critical Authentication Bypass Bug

VMware and experts alike are urging users to patch multiple products affected by a critical authentication bypass vulnerability that can allow an attacker to gain administrative access to a system as well as exploit other flaws. The bug—tracked as CVE-2022-31656—earned a rating of 9.8 on the CVSS...

Black Hat: Novel DNS Hack Spills Confidential Corp Data

LAS VEGAS – Amazon and Google patched a domain name service DNS bug that allowed attackers to snoop on the confidential networking settings of companies – revealing computer and employee names along with office locations and exposed web resources. The vulnerability, outlined in a Black Hat USA 20...

High-Severity Cisco Flaw Found in CMX Software For Retailers

A high-severity flaw in Cisco’s smart Wi-Fi solution for retailers could allow a remote attacker to alter the password of any account user on affected systems. The vulnerability is part of a number of patches issued by Cisco addressing 67 high-severity CVEs on Wednesday. This included flaws found...

Inside the Hoaxcalls Botnet: Both Success and Failure

The Hoaxcalls botnet, built to carry out large-scale distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks, has been actively in development since the beginning of the year. One of its hallmarks is that it uses different vulnerability exploits for initial compromise. Researchers, however, have discovered th...

Shades of BlueKeep: Wormable Remote Desktop Bugs Top August Patch Tuesday List

Microsoft’s August Patch Tuesday release contains updates for 93 CVEs, including 29 that are rated critical in severity. The highest priority of these include four critical remote code-execution RCE vulnerabilities in Remote Desktop Services RDS and a critical RCE flaw in Microsoft Word. Also, tw...

TrickBot Ravages Customers of Amazon, PayPal and Other Top Brands

Cyberattackers are targeting 60 different high-profile companies with the TrickBot malware, researchers have warned, with many of those in the U.S. The goal is to attack those companies’ customers, according to Check Point Research CPR, which are being cherry-picked for victimization. According t...

Chrome Zero-Day Under Active Attack: Patch ASAP

Google on Monday issued 11 security fixes for its Chrome browser, including a high-severity zero-day bug that’s actively being jumped on by attackers in the wild. In a brief update, Google described the weakness, tracked as CVE-2022-0609, as a use-after-free vulnerability in Chrome’s Animation...

Actively Exploited Microsoft Zero-Day Allows App Spoofing, Malware Delivery

Microsoft has addressed a zero-day vulnerability that was exploited in the wild to deliver Emotet, Trickbot and more in the form of fake applications. The patch came as part of the computing giant’s December Patch Tuesday update, which included a total of 67 fixes for security vulnerabilities. Th...

Zero-Day Used to Wipe My Book Live Devices

Western Digital will start providing free data-recovery services in July for people whose data was wiped off their network-attached storage NAS devices last week, the company said in an update on Tuesday. The company is also planning to offer a trade-in program to get customers onto the cloud –...

Chase Bank Phish Swims Past Exchange Email Protections

Threat actors are impersonating Chase Bank in two phishing attacks that can slip past Microsoft Exchange security protections in an aim to steal credentials from victims — by spoofing real-life customer scenarios. Researchers from Armorblox recently discovered the attacks, one of which claims to...

US Military Ties Prolific MuddyWater Cyberespionage APT to Iran

U.S. Cyber Command has confirmed that MuddyWater – an advanced persistent threat APT cyberespionage actor aka Mercury, Static Kitten, TEMP.Zagros or Seedworm that’s historically targeted government victims in the Middle East – is an Iranian intelligence outfit. The link has been suspected, and no...

WordPress Plugin WP Statistics Patches XSS Flaw

WordPress plugin WP Statistics has patched a cross-site scripting XSS vulnerability that could allow for full website takeover, if the website is operating under certain non-default settings. WP Statistics gives website owners a tool to analyze site statistics, such as the number of visitors on t...

Microsoft Pushes Azure Users to Patch Linux Systems

Microsoft is warning customers that some Azure installations are vulnerable to a recently-disclosed critical Linux Exim mail server flaw that is under active attack. The warning comes after a widespread worm campaign was disclosed on Friday, targeting a flaw in the Exim mail transport agent MTA,...

Zero-Day No More: Windows Bug Gets a Fix

The local privilege-escalation LPE zero-day bug in Microsoft Task Scheduler, disclosed by SandboxEscaper on Twitter in late May by way of making public a fully functioning exploit, now has a micropatch. The interim fix, from 0patch, was issued Tuesday to address the vulnerability. The bug would...

Firefox and Edge Fall to Hackers on Day Two of Pwn2Own

Hackers took down the Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge browsers on Thursday at Pwn2Own, the annual hacking conference held in tandem with CanSecWest, as the competition continued for a second day. The dynamic hacking duo of Amat Cama and Richard Zhu, which make up team Fluoroacetate, had anothe...

Phishing Campaign Targeted Those Aiding Ukraine Refugees

Cyberattackers used a compromised Ukrainian military email address to phish EU government employees who’ve been involved in managing the logistics of refugees fleeing Ukraine, according to a new report. Ukraine has been at the center of an unprecedented wave of cyberattacks in recent weeks and...

Virus Bulletin 2019: Japanese Attacks Highlight Savvy APT Strategy

LONDON — Three separate, multi-year APT campaigns targeting region-specific software showcase a savvy technique of leveraging zero-day vulnerabilities in niche software in order to infect victims with malware. According to researchers at JPCERT in Japan, speaking at Virus Bulletin 2019, both the...

NTP Amplification Blamed for 400 Gbps DDoS Attack

For those of you who thought the infamous Spamhaus distributed denial-of-service attack set an ugly bar for the volume of spurious traffic sent at a target, gird yourself for worse. A massive DDoS attack, reaching at its peak 400 Gbps of bad traffic, was detected late yesterday against a number o...

Microsoft Settles With Kelihos Botnet Defendant, Says He Didn't Run the Network

Microsoft on Friday said it has reached a settlement with a Russian programmer it named as a defendant in a lawsuit related to the operation of the notorious Kelihos botnet. The company said that it no longer believes Andrey N. Sabelnikov was the operator of the botnet, but was instead responsibl...

Inside Patch Tuesday at the Microsoft Security Response Center

In this video, Dustin Childs of the Microsoft Security Response Center gives an inside look at what it’s like in Redmond on Patch Tuesday and what goes into the efforts that Microsoft makes to get fixes out every month. View the video at Microsoft’s Security TechCenter...

REvil Hits US Nuclear Weapons Contractor: Report

Sol Oriens, a subcontractor for the U.S. Department of Energy DOE that works on nuclear weapons with the National Nuclear Security Administration NNSA, last month was hit by a cyberattack that experts say came from the relentless REvil ransomware-as-a-service RaaS gang. The Albuquerque, N.M...

Annoyingly Believable Tax Refund Scam Targets Mobile

A text message-based tax scam is making the rounds in the U.K., in a probable harbinger of things to come as the U.S. tax season gets underway in earnest. SMS messages are going out to unsuspecting U.K. citizens claiming to be from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs HMRC, the country’s...

5M WordPress Sites Running 'Contact Form 7' Plugin Open to Attack

A patch for the popular WordPress plugin called Contact Form 7 was released Thursday. It fixes a critical bug that allows an unauthenticated adversary to takeover a website running the plugin or possibly hijack the entire server hosting the site. The patch comes in the form of a 5.3.2 version...

Intel ZombieLoad Side-Channel Attack: 10 Takeaways

Intel on Tuesday revealed a new class of speculative execution vulnerabilities, dubbed Microarchitectural Data Sampling MDS, which impact all its modern CPUs. The flaws all ultimately depend on different ways of executing side channel attacks to siphon data from impacted systems – and result in...

Yandex Data Breach Exposes 4K+ Email Accounts

Yandex – one of Europe’s largest internet companies – is warning of a data breach that compromised 4,887 email accounts. The breach stems from an insider threat. Yandex is the most-used search engine in Russia – and the fifth most-popular search engine worldwide. Beyond its search engine, Yandex’...

FritzFrog Botnet Attacks Millions of SSH Servers

A peer-to-peer P2 botnet called FritzFrog has hopped onto the scene, and researchers said it has been actively breaching SSH servers since January. SSH servers are pieces of software found in routers and IoT devices, among other machines, and they use the secure shell protocol to accept connectio...

China's APT3 Pilfers Cyberweapons from the NSA

The advanced persistent threat APT group known as APT3, which researchers across the board link to the Chinese government, has built a full in-house battery of exploits and cybertools collectively dubbed “UPSynergy.” An analysis of the toolkit has uncovered a geopolitical cat-and-mouse spy game: ...

Infosecurity Europe: Cryptojacking is Making a Comeback

LONDON, UK – With cryptocurrency prices skyrocketing, the threat of cryptomining malware, used to mine various types of cryptocurrencies, is continuing to worry the security industry. Case in point: Recently researchers uncovered the Nansh0u campaign, a cryptojacking campaign that mines an...

Linux Kernel Flaw Allows Remote Code-Execution

Millions of Linux systems could be vulnerable to a high-impact race condition flaw in the Linux kernel. Kernel versions prior to 5.0.8 are affected by the vulnerability CVE-2019-11815, which exists in the rdstcpkillsock in net/rds/tcp.c. “There is a race condition leading to a use-after-free UAF,...

80% of Net Neutrality Comments to FCC Were Fudged

Broadband providers and a 19-year-old college student were among those who successfully hijacked public comments during a crucial decision-making process in 2017 to overturn net neutrality by flooding the Federal Communications Commission FCC with fraudulent comments indicating their position on...

Security Camera Firm Arlo Zaps High-Severity Bugs

Two high-severity vulnerabilities in Arlo Technologies’ wireless home security camera gear have been patched. The flaws, which indirectly impact Arlo’s popular fleet of wireless home security cameras, are limited to adversaries with local network and physical access to Arlo Base Stations. Both...

Hacked Hair Straighteners Can Threaten Homes

Researchers have found a way to successfully hack connected hair straighteners to turn them on and increase the heating element up to its maximum temperature—causing a serious fire hazard for unsuspecting owners. Pen Test Partners decided to put the Glamoriser hair straightener through its securi...

Former Researcher Iceman Sentenced to 13 Years

A former security researcher turned criminal hacker has been sentenced to 13 years in federal prison for hacking into financial institutions and stealing credit card account numbers. Max Ray Butler, who used the hacker pseudonym Iceman, was sentenced Friday morning in U.S. District Court in...

Lapsus$ Data Kidnappers Claim Snatches From Microsoft, Okta

Both Microsoft and Okta are investigating claims by the new, precocious data extortion group Lapsus$ that the gang has breached their systems. Lapsus$ claimed to have gotten itself “superuser/admin” access to internal systems at authentication firm Okta. It also posted 40GB worth of files to its...

‘Privateer’ Threat Actors Emerge from Cybercrime Swamp

A new type of cybercriminal is emerging in a cyber-threat landscape that’s historically been dominated by either state-sponsored threat actors or financially-motivated criminals that are hunted and prosecuted by law enforcement. Dubbed “privateers” by researchers at Cisco Talos Intelligence, thes...

DoppelPaymer Gang Leaks Files from Illinois AG After Ransom Negotiations Break Down

The ransomware gang identified as DoppelPaymer has leaked a substantial collection of files from the Illinois Office of the Attorney General OAG on a server controlled by the cybercriminal group. The move came after ransom negotiations between the two parties broke down following a ransomware...

Hackers Exploit Critical Flaw in Ghost Platform with Cryptojacking Attack

Hackers targeted the publishing platform Ghost over the weekend, launching a cryptojacking attack against its servers that led to widespread outages. The attack stemmed from the exploit of critical vulnerabilities in SaltStack, used in Ghost’s server management infrastructure. Ghost is a free,...

DarkHotel APT Targets Wynn, Macao Hotels to Rip Off Guest Data

An advanced persistent threat APT group has been targeting luxury hotels in Macao, China with a spear-phishing campaign aimed at breaching their networks and stealing the sensitive data of high-profile guests staying at resorts, including the Grand Coloane Resort and Wynn Palace. A threat researc...

Critical Security Bug Can Knock Smart Meters Offline

Critical security vulnerabilities in Schneider Electric smart meters could allow an attacker a path to remote code execution RCE, or to reboot the meter causing a denial-of-service DoS condition on the device. Schneider Electric’s PowerLogic ION/PM smart meter product line, like other smart meter...

Fake Jason Statham Bilks a Fan Out of Serious Money

English actor Jason Statham – a.k.a. “the Transporter” – is cozying up to people who like his Facebook page – or at least, someone purporting to be him is. A fraudster managed to bilk a vulnerable and unsuspecting Statham fan out of a “significant amount” of money after approaching her while she...