Critical Android Flaw Leads to 'Permanent DoS’

Google has released an update stomping out three critical-severity vulnerabilities in its Android operating system — one of which could result in “permanent denial of service” on affected mobile devices if exploited. The vulnerabilities are part of Google’s December 2019 Android Security Bulletin...

Cisco Releases Flood of Patches for IOS XE, But Leaves Some Routers Open to Attack

UDPATE Cisco Systems issued 24 patches Wednesday tied to vulnerabilities in its IOS XE operating system and warned customers that two small business routers RV320 and RV325 are vulnerable to attack and that no patches are available for either. A total of 19 of the bugs were rated high severity by...

Phishing Campaign Delivers Nasty Ransomware, Credential-Theft Two-Punch

An array of phishing emails harboring Word attachments with embedded macros have been infecting systems with a deadly malware and ransomware duo. The campaign, spotted by researchers at Carbon Black, has hit infected systems with a lethal attack combination that harvests credentials, gathers syst...

Pandemic-Bored Attackers Pummeled Gaming Industry

Attacks on the gaming industry skyrocketed during the year of the pandemic, with attacks on web applications shooting up 340 percent in 2020. According to Akamai Technologies’ latest State of the Internet and Security report, Gaming in a Pandemic PDF, cyberattack traffic targeting the video game...

Deepfake Attacks Are About to Surge, Experts Warn

Artificial intelligence and the rise of deepfake technology is something cybersecurity researchers have cautioned about for years and now it’s officially arrived. Cybercriminals are increasingly sharing, developing and deploying deepfake technologies to bypass biometric security protections, and ...

National Surveillance Camera Rollout Roils Privacy Activists

While controversy over the potential overreach of neighborhood and law-enforcement video surveillance has focused mainly on Ring, an Atlanta-based startup has quietly rolled out its own network of smart surveillance cameras across the country that is again raising questions of privacy and the ire...

Hackers Sell Data from 26 Million LiveJournal Users on Dark Web

A database containing credentials from more than 26 million LiveJournal accounts has been leaked online and is being sold on the Dark Web and hacker forums. The data contained in the files appears to be from a 2014 incident in which 33 million accounts were hacked, according to a published report...

A Brisk Private Trade in Zero-Days Widens Their Use

There were more zero-days exploited in 2019 than any of the previous three years, according to telemetry from FireEye Mandiant. The firm said that’s likely due to more zero-days coming up for sale by cyber-weapons dealers like NSO Group; a growing commercial market has made such tools much more...

‘StrandHogg’ Vulnerability Allows Malware to Pose as Legitimate Android Apps

Researchers have discovered a new Android vulnerability that could allow malware to pose as popular apps and ask for various permissions, potentially allowing hackers to listen in on users, take photos, read and send SMS messages, and basically take over various functions as if they are the...

Apache Struts 2 Flaw Uncovered: ‘More Critical Than Equifax Bug’

A critical remote code-execution vulnerability in Apache Struts 2, the popular open-source framework for developing web applications in the Java programming language, is threatening a wide range of applications, even when no additional plugins have been enabled. Successful exploitation could lead...

Researchers Crack Furtim, SFG Malware Connection

New research is challenging what security researchers know about Furtim, a new malware strain that has been compared to Stuxnet because of its believed targeting of industrial controls in energy companies. According to security experts at Damballa, Furtim and the recently discovered SFG malware a...

Microsoft to Investigate Alleged Xbox Credit Card Hack

Microsoft is looking into a potential security issue affecting its Xbox 360 video game console this week after a group of college students claimed they were able to extract the credit card information of a console’s previous owner from the machine. Ashley Podhradsky, Rob D’Ovidio, and Cindy Casey...

Free HermeticRansom Ransomware Decryptor Released

A free decryptor is out to unlock a ransomware found piggybacking on the HermeticWiper data wiper malware that ESET and Broadcom’s Symantec discovered targeting machines at financial, defense, aviation and IT services outfits in Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia last week. The fact that there was...

6 Cyber-Defense Steps to Take Now to Protect Your Company

The headlines feel like Groundhog Day, if each of Bill Murray’s repeated days grew increasingly threatening: Ransomware attacks rise again. Ransomware attacks up over last quarter. Ransomware attacks tower over previous year. You get the idea. And yet again, a new report from Ivanti sends a clear...

Geek Squad Vishing Attack Bypasses Email Security to Hit 25K Mailboxes

A pair of billing and tech support “vishing” attacks using Geek Squad and Norton Antivirus as cover managed to hit 25,000 mailboxes recently, questing after victims’ credit-card details. Vishing a contraction of “voice phishing” generally involves stealing personal information from victims over t...

CISA: Nation-State Attackers Likely to Take Aim at Palo Alto Networks Bug

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA is warning that foreign hackers are likely to exploit a newly disclosed, critical vulnerability in a raft of Palo Alto Networks firewalls and enterprise VPN appliances, which allows for device takeover without authentication. The...

Lenovo, HP, Dell Peripherals Face Unpatched Firmware Bugs

Fresh firmware vulnerabilities in Wi-Fi adapters, USB hubs, trackpads and cameras are putting millions of peripheral devices in danger of a range of cyberattacks, according to research from Eclypsium. TouchPad and TrackPoint firmware in Lenovo Laptops, HP Wide Vision FHD camera firmware in HP...

Cisco Aironet Access Points Plagued By Critical, High-Severity Flaws

Cisco Systems has released a security update stomping out critical and high-severity flaws impacting its Aironet access points, which are entry-level wireless access points APs used by mid-size enterprises in their offices or small warehouses. It also issued a slew of additional patches addressin...

Nation-State Actors Go All-In on Mobile Malware

APTs, including a range of nation-state groups operating in China, North Korea, Pakistan and Russia, are shifting their malware development focus to target mobile users for intelligence gathering, financial gain and disruption of national rivals. That’s according to CrowdStrike’s Mobile Threat...

Audit of GitHub SSH Keys Finds Many Still Vulnerable to Old Debian Bug

An audit of the SSH keys associated with more than a million GitHub accounts shows that some users have weak, easily factorable keys and many more are using keys that are still vulnerable to the Debian OpenSSL bug disclosed seven years ago. The public SSH keys that users associate with their GitH...

Tool Scans for RTF Files Spreading Malware in Targeted Attacks

Exploits embedded inside Microsoft Office documents such as Word, PDFs and Excel spreadsheets have been at the core of many targeted attacks during the past 24 months. Detection of these attack methods is improving and nimble hackers are recognizing the need for new avenues into enterprise...

Cyberattacks Launch Against Vietnamese Human-Rights Activists

Human-rights activists are being targeted by cyberattacks as part of a wider effort by the Vietnamese state to censor anyone speaking out against the government, Amnesty International’s Security Lab alleges. Ocean Lotus, a well-known threat actor dating back to 2013, is behind the spyware campaig...

Critical Flash Player Flaw Opens Adobe Users to RCE

Adobe is warning of a critical vulnerability in its Flash Player application for users on Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS operating systems. The vulnerability is the only flaw released this month as part of Adobe’s regularly scheduled patches markedly less than the 18 flaws addressed during it...

Why This New Cybergang is Heralding a New Age For BEC

A newly-uncovered business email compromise BEC cybergang, dubbed Silent Starling, has found success using a tricky technique to swindle funds from more than 500 organizations worldwide. The West African cybergang has been using a method that researchers with Agari – who discovered them in late...

Evernote Critical Flaw Opened Personal Data of Millions to Attack

UPDATE A critical flaw in the popular note-taking Evernote extension could have allowed attackers to steal personal data – including emails and financial transactions – of millions. Specifically impacted was the Evernote Web Clipper extension for the Chrome browser, which lets users capture...

‘CatalanGate’ Spyware Infections Tied to NSO Group

An unknown zero-click exploit in Apple’s iMessage was used by Israeli-based NSO Group to plant either Pegasus or Candiru malware on iPhones owned by politicians, journalists and activists. Citizen Lab, in collaboration with Catalan-based researchers, released the finding in a report on Monday tha...

Oil & Gas Targeted in Year-Long Espionage Campaign

A sophisticated campaign targeting large international companies in the oil and gas sector has been underway for more than a year, researchers said, spreading common remote access trojans RATs for cyber-espionage purposes. According to Intezer analysis, spear-phishing emails with malicious...

Sprawling Cyberattack Breaches Several Airlines

A communications and IT vendor for 90 percent of the world’s airlines, SITA, has been breached, compromising passenger data stored on the company’s U.S. servers in what the company is calling a “highly sophisticated attack.” The affected servers are in Atlanta, and belong to the SITA Passenger...

The APT Name Game: How Grim Threat Actors Get Goofy Monikers

What’s in a name? When it comes to advanced persistent threat groups, it is often quite a bit. While their monikers’ may seem whimsical – Fancy Bear, Nomadic Octopus, Ocean Lotus and Darkhotel – the reality is these are not arbitrary names. In fact, many are similar to schoolyard nicknames or a...

It's The Stupidity, Stupid: How Absurd Pitches Help Online Scammers Find Their Marks

Do you find e-mail pleas for help from the widow of Democratic Republic of the Congo strongman Mobutu Sese Seko unconvincing or downright silly? That may be the point, according to Microsoft researcher Cormac Herley. The outlandish claims of Nigerian Letter – or “419” – scams serve a critical...

CVS Health Records for 1.1 Billion Customers Exposed

More than 1 billion records for CVS Health customers were left in the database of a third-party, unnamed vendor – exposed, unprotected, online. Researchers said the data points revealed could be strung together to create an extremely personal snapshot of someones’s medical situation. The glitch i...

U.S. Weapons Programs Lack 'Key' Cybersecurity Measures

Weapons programs from the U.S. Department of Defense DoD are falling short when it comes to incorporating cybersecurity requirements, according to a new watchdog report. While the DoD has developed a range of policies aimed at hardening the security for its weapon systems, the guidance leaves out...

Microsoft Tackles Election Security with Bug Bounties

As the 2020 presidential election draws closer and primary season looms around the corner, Microsoft has launched a bug-bounty program specifically aimed at its ElectionGuard product, which the software giant has positioned as performing “end-to-end verification of elections.” ElectionGuard is a...

Google Chrome Bug Actively Exploited as Zero-Day

Google has updated its Stable channel for the desktop version of Chrome, to address a zero-day security vulnerability that’s being actively exploited in the wild. The bug, tracked as CVE-2022-1096, is a type-confusion issue in the V8 JavaScript engine, which is an open-source engine used by Chrom...

APT ‘Aquatic Panda’ Targets Universities with Log4Shell Exploit Tools

Cyber criminals, under the moniker Aquatic Panda, are the latest advanced persistent threat group APT to exploit the Log4Shell vulnerability. Researchers from CrowdStrike Falcon OverWatch recently disrupted the threat actors using Log4Shell exploit tools on a vulnerable VMware installation during...

Apache Guacamole Opens Door for Total Control of Remote Footprint

Apache Guacamole, a popular infrastructure for enabling remote working, is vulnerable to a slew of security bugs related to the Remote Desktop Protocol RDP, researchers have warned. Admins should update their systems to avoid attacks bent on stealing information or remote code-execution. “Once in...

Oracle Ties Previous All-Time Patch High with January Updates

Oracle has patched 334 vulnerabilities across all of its product families in its January 2020 quarterly Critical Patch Update CPU. Out of these, 43 are critical/severe flaws carrying CVSS scores of 9.1 and above. The CPU ties for Oracle’s previous all-time high for number of patches issued, in Ju...

Solar, Wind Power Utility Disrupted in Rare Cyberattack

A cyberattack on the U.S. energy grid has just come to light, so to speak, which disrupted plant visibility at Utah-based sPower back in March. sPower, a Utah-based wind and solar provider, began experiencing a series of lost connections between its main control center and remote power-generation...

Can Nanotech Secure IoT Devices From the Inside-Out?

Another day, another incident of internet-of-things IoT gadgets falling flat on their faces and spilling users’ privacy, if not getting hooked into a botnet, used for cryptomining or opening a network backdoor that allows intruders to move laterally through a network. It’s only Wednesday, but...

ThreatList: DMARC Adoption Nonexistent at 80% of Orgs

About 80 percent of company web domains don’t have standard email authentication protections in place. That’s according to 250ok’s Global DMARC Adoption 2019 report, which analyzed 25,700 domains in the education, e-commerce, legal, financial services, SaaS and nonprofit sectors, as well as the...

Buggy Phishing Kits Allow Criminals to Cannibalize Their Own

They say it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, but in cybercrime terms, perhaps it should be called a “phish-eat-phish” situation. Researchers recently discovered that several widely used phishing kits harbor vulnerabilities that can be exploited by other criminals to hijack operations – and...

Google Patches Critical Remote Code-Execution Flaws in Android

Google patched four remote code-execution RCE flaws as part of its May Android Security Bulletin. Three of the critical bugs are tied to the System portion of the Android platform architecture, responsible for core apps such as the dialer, email and camera. A fourth critical RCE bug opens the doo...

Ryuk Ransomware Attack Sprung by Frugal Student

A European biomolecular research institute involved in COVID-19 research lost a week’s worth of research data, all thanks to a Ryuk ransomware attack traced back to a student trying to save money by buying unlicensed software. Security researchers at Sophos described the attack in a report...

Exchange Cyberattacks Escalate as Microsoft Rolls One-Click Fix

As dangerous attacks accelerate against Microsoft Exchange Servers in the wake of the disclosure around the ProxyLogon group of security bugs, a public proof-of-concept PoC whirlwind has started up. It’s all leading to a feeding frenzy of cyber-activity. The good news, however, is that Microsoft...

Masslogger Swipes Outlook, Chrome Credentials

Cybercriminals are targeting Windows users with a new variant of the Masslogger trojan, which is spyware designed to swipe victims’ credentials from Microsoft Outlook, Google Chrome and various instant-messenger accounts. Researchers uncovered the campaign targeting users in Italy, Latvia and...

Facebook Removed Tens of Thousands of Apps Post-Cambridge Analytica

Facebook said it has suspended tens of thousands of apps as part of its ongoing investigation into how third-party apps on its platform collect, handle and utilize users’ personal data. The results of the investigation, launched in March 2018 in response to Facebook’s infamous Cambridge Analytica...

Faulty Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Patch Pulled Back

Microsoft announced Wednesday afternoon that it has pulled MS13-061, one of the patches issued yesterday for vulnerabilities in Exchange Server 2013. Microsoft said the patch is causing issues with the content index for mailbox databases. Organizations would still be able to send and receive emai...

Microsoft Submits Tracking Protection Proposal to W3C

Microsoft has submitted its proposal for web tracking protection to the W3C for consideration as a standard, hoping to get the organization’s stamp of approval for its browser privacy technology. The proposal is in the earliest stages of the process and has not been approved, a process that can...

Log4JShell Used to Swarm VMware Servers with Miners, Backdoors

What researchers are calling a “horde” of miner bots and backdoors are using the Log4Shell bug to take over vulnerable VMware Horizon servers, with threat actors still actively waging some attacks. On Tuesday, Sophos reported that the remote code execution RCE Log4j vulnerability in the ubiquitou...

Critical Steam Flaws Could Let Gamers Crash Opponents’ Computers

Game developer Valve has fixed critical four bugs in its popular Steam online game platform. If exploited, the flaws could allow a remote attacker to crash an opponent’s game client, take over the computer – and hijack all computers connected to a third-party game server. Steam is utilized by mor...