GoDaddy Shutters 15,000 Subdomains Tied to 'Snake Oil' Scams

Researchers at the security firm Palo Alto Networks worked with domain registrar and web hosting firm GoDaddy to shut down 15,000 subdomains pitching ‘snake oil’ products and other scams. The takedowns are linked to affiliate marketing campaigns peddling everything from weight-loss solutions and...

Fallout EK Retools for a Fresh New 2019 Look

A new version of the Fallout exploit kit EK has emerged, featuring new exploits and fresh payloads, including the GandCrab ransomware. The development shows that EKs have a lot of life yet left in them, researchers say. The Fallout EK generally finds its victims by way of malvertising campaigns,...

Zusy Malware Installs Via Mouseover – No Clicking Required

Researchers are warning of several recent spam campaigns delivering PowerPoint files that when opened contain a mouseover link that installs a variant of the Zusy malware. The malware is novel because it does not rely on macros, JavaScript or VBA macros to be enabled for the dropper file to...

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...

Microsoft Issues Windows 10 Workaround Fix for ‘SeriousSAM’ Bug

A privilege escalation bug, affecting versions of Windows 10, received a workaround fix by Microsoft Wednesday to prevent attackers from accessing data and creating new accounts on compromised systems. The bug, dubbed SeriousSAM, affects the Security Accounts Manager SAM database in all versions ...

Fleeceware Apps Bank $400M in Revenue

About 204 different “fleeceware” applications with a combined billion+ downloads have raked in more than $400 million in revenue so far, via the Apple App Store and Google Play, analysis has revealed. Fleeceware apps generally offer users a free trial to “test” the app, before commencing automati...

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...

Fishwrap Campaign Sways Social Media Users with Old News

An influence operation that recycles old news about terror incidents and re-publishes them as if they were new is making the rounds on social media, according to Recorded Future analysis. The technique, which the researchers have dubbed Fishwrap since it repurposes old news, is also using a speci...

‘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...

Misconfigured Baby Cams Allow Unauthorized Viewing

A vulnerability affecting multiple baby monitors could allow someone to drop in and view a camera’s video stream, according to researchers. Potentially hundreds of thousands of live devices are impacted, they said. The issue exists in the manufacturers’ implementation of the Real-Time Streaming...

News Wrap: Nintendo Account Hacks, Apple Zero Days, NFL Security

For the week ended April 24, Threatpost editors discuss the hottest cybersecurity news stories, including: Apple zero days disclosed in the iPhone iOS that researchers say have been exploited for years. Meanwhile, Apple has pushed back and said there’s no evidence to support such activity. Ninten...

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...

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...

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...

Microsoft’s May Patch Tuesday Updates Cause Windows AD Authentication Errors

Microsoft is alerting customers that its May Patch Tuesday update is causing authentications errors and failures tied to Windows Active Directory Domain Services. In a Friday update, Microsoft said it was investigating the issue. The warning comes amid shared reports of multiple services and...

Cyberattackers Target UPS Back-Up Power Devices in Mission-Critical Environments

Cyberattackers are targeting uninterruptible power supply UPS devices, which provide battery backup power during power surges and outages. UPS devices are usually used in mission-critical environments, safeguarding critical infrastructure installations and important computer systems and IT...

NSA: 5 Security Bugs Under Active Nation-State Cyberattack

The Feds are warning that nation-state actors are once again after U.S. assets, this time in a spate of cyberattacks that exploit five vulnerabilities that affect VPN solutions, collaboration-suite software and virtualization technologies. According to the U.S. National Security Agency NSA, which...

COVID-19 Vaccine Spear-Phishing Attacks Jump 26 Percent

As Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson roll out COVID-19 vaccines cybercriminals are preying on the those hungry to get in line for immunization. Between October and January the average number of COVID-19 vaccine-related spear-phishing attacks grew 26 percent, said Barracuda Networks researcher...

Twitter Hack Update: What We Know (and What We Don't)

UPDATED 7/18 at 12:50 p.m. ET Earlier this week, Twitter locked down thousands of verified accounts, including the accounts of Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Apple, Uber and others, after it became clear that hackers had been able to compromise them. The tip-off? Suddenly these high-profile...

Troy Hunt: 'Messy' Password Problem Isn't Getting Better

LONDON, UK – The security world is facing a major issue that has led to widespread breaches, data exposure, and more – and it all stems from millions of insecure passwords used for everything from enterprise PCs to internet of things IoT devices. Poor password hygiene – including reusing password...

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...

Critical RCE Vulnerability in ForgeRock OpenAM Under Active Attack

Attackers are actively exploiting a critical, pre-authorization remote-code execution RCE vulnerability in the popular Access Management platform from digital identity management firm ForgeRock. Access Management, a commercial access-management platform, is based on the OpenAM open-source...

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...

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...

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...

TikTok Riddled With Security Flaws

Researchers say they have discovered several major vulnerabilities in the short form video app TikTok. The reported vulnerabilities come as scrutiny around the Chinese-owned platform increases. Researchers say the most serious vulnerability in the platform could allow attackers to remotely take...

Microsoft Management Console Bugs Allow Windows Takeover

A Windows interface that allows system administrators to configure and monitor systems from an admin level has several vulnerabilities that would allow an attacker to install malicious payloads and even take over a target, privileged machine. The bugs are grouped under one umbrella CVE-2019-0948...

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...

Microsoft Breaks Silence on Barrage of ProxyShell Attacks

Microsoft has broken its silence on the recent barrage of attacks on several ProxyShell vulnerabilities in that were highlighted by a researcher at Black Hat earlier this month. The company released an advisory late Wednesday letting customers know that threat actors may use unpatched Exchange...

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...

Cisco Patches 13 High-Severity Router and Switch Bugs

Cisco Systems released patches for 29 bugs Wednesday that addressed flaws in a wide range of its products including routers and switches running the IOS XE networking software. Thirteen of the vulnerabilities revealed are rated high severity. The bulk of the high-severity vulnerabilities are tied...

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...

Gaming Giant Capcom Hit By Ragnar Locker Ransomware: Report

Video game giant Capcom has reportedly been hit by a ransomware attack that affected access to certain systems – including email and file servers – and encrypted 1 terabyte TB of sensitive data. The Japanese video game developer and publisher has developed a number of multi-million selling game...

DeadBolt Ransomware Resurfaces to Hit QNAP Again

DeadBolt ransomware has resurfaced in a new wave of attacks on QNAP that begin in mid-March and signals a new targeting of the Taiwan-based network-attached storage NAS devices by the fledgling threat, researchers said. Researchers from Censys, which provides attack-surface management solutions,...

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...

Molson Coors Cracks Open a Cyberattack Investigation

Another high-profile company has been hit with a cyber attack that’s causing a major disruption to its business. Brewing company Molson Coors acknowledged on Thursday that it has “experienced a systems outage that was caused by a cybersecurity incident,” according to a Form 8-K filed with the SEC...

DNSpooq Flaws Allow DNS Hijacking of Millions of Devices

Researchers have uncovered a set of flaws in dnsmasq, popular open-source software used for caching Domain Name System DNS responses for home and commercial routers and servers. The set of seven flaws are comprised of buffer overflow issues and flaws allowing for DNS cache-poisoning attacks also...

WordPress, Apache Struts Attract the Most Bug Exploits

WordPress and Apache Struts vulnerabilities were the most-targeted by cybercriminals in web and application frameworks in 2019 – while input-validation bugs edged out cross-site scripting XSS as the most-weaponized weakness type. That’s according to the RiskSense Spotlight Report, which analyzed...

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...

Critical Adobe Flash, ColdFusion Vulnerabilities Patched

Adobe has issued fixes for critical flaws in Adobe Flash and ColdFusion that could lead to arbitrary code execution if exploited. Overall, Adobe patched 11 vulnerabilities across Adobe Flash, Adobe ColdFusion and Adobe Campaign – including five critical flaws – during its regularly-scheduled...

ScarCruft APT Adds Bluetooth Harvester to its Malware Bag of Tricks

The ScarCruft Korean-speaking APT is changing up its espionage tactics to include an unusual piece of malware devoted to harvesting Bluetooth information – while also showing some overlap with the DarkHotel APT. An analysis of ScarCruft’s binary infection procedure by Kaspersky Lab shows that in ...

No-Joke Borat RAT Propagates Ransomware, DDoS

Attackers are using a newly released remote access trojan RAT to spread ransomware and distributed denial of service DDoS — in addition to the traditional RAT function of backdooring victims’ systems. Researchers at Cyble Research Labs discovered the RAT, which they dubbed Borat RAT because it us...

WordPress File Management Plugin Riddled with Critical Bugs

A critical cross-site scripting XSS bug impacts WordPress sites running the Frontend File Manager plugin and allows remote unauthenticated users to inject JavaScript code into vulnerable websites to create admin user accounts. The bug is one of six critical flaws impacting the WordPress plugin...

5 Tips to Prevent and Mitigate Ransomware Attacks

Ransomware attacks cost companies over $100 billion a year. Making matters worse, the overwhelming majority of ransomware attacks now include a threat to leak stolen data if the ransom isn’t paid, a technique called “double extortion.” Cybercriminals like ransomware because the entry barrier is...

Lawsuit Claims Flawed Facial Recognition Led to Man’s Wrongful Arrest

Racial bias against non-white skin in facial recognition landed Nijeer Parks ten days in jail in 2019 after the technology falsely identified him as a shoplifting suspect, a new lawsuit says. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t been to the location of the crime, a Hampton Inn hotel in Woodbridge, New...

Cisco Webex Bug Allows Remote Code Execution

Cisco Systems has fixed two high-severity vulnerabilities in its products, including one in its popular Webex video conferencing platform that could enable a remote attacker to execute commands. The high-severity Webex flaw exists in the web-based management interface of Cisco Webex Video Mesh, a...

Microsoft Internet Explorer Zero-Day Flaw Addressed in Out-of-Band Security Update

Microsoft has released out-of-band security updates addressing two vulnerabilities – including an Internet Explorer zero-day vulnerability being actively exploited in the wild. The Internet Explorer zero-day vulnerability CVE-2019-1367 is a remote code execution flaw that could enable an attacker...

MS12-020 RDP Exploit Found, Researchers Say Code May Have Leaked From Security Vendor

There is a confirmed legitimate working exploit for the MS12-020 RDP vulnerability in Windows circulating already and researchers say it is capable of either crashing or causing a denial-of-service condition on vulnerable machines. Microsoft has warned customers about the possibility of the explo...

Roaming Mantis Expands Android Backdoor to Europe

The Roaming Mantis Android malware campaign has buzzed into Europe, quickly infesting France in particular, where there have been 66,789 downloads of the group’s specific remote access trojan RAT as of January. The campaign pushes the Android RAT known as Wroba aka Moqhao or XLoader onto victim...

CISA Orders Fed Agencies to Patch Exchange Servers

Hot on the heels of Microsoft’s announcement about active cyber-espionage campaigns that are exploiting four serious security vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server, the U.S. government is mandating patching for the issues. The news comes as security firms report escalating numbers of relat...