Two Critical Android Bugs Open Door to RCE

Google has addressed two critical flaws in its latest monthly Android update that enable remote code execution RCE on Android mobile devices. The critical bugs CVE-2020-0117 and CVE-2020-8597 exist in the Android System area, and would allow a remote attacker using a specially crafted transmissio...

Mozilla and Google Browsers Get Security, Anti-Tracking Boosts

Browsers Firefox and Chrome received updates this week, both adding security and privacy tools that help with password management and help block sites that track users. Mozilla’s Firefox browser introduced an “Enhanced Tracking Protection” feature that blocks over 1,000 third-party companies that...

Microsoft Releases New Regex Fuzzer

Microsoft has released a new fuzzing tool designed specifically to find mistakes in regular expressions in application code that could be vulnerable to attack. The SDL Regex Fuzzer identifies problematic lines that might cause an application to be susceptible to attacks that consume huge amounts ...

On the Hunt for Conficker

There are several ongoing investigations attempting to find the authors of the Conficker botnet, one of the fastest spreading worms in history, but those responsible for the worm have proven elusive. Read the full article. TechTarget...

NVIDIA’s Stolen Code-Signing Certs Used to Sign Malware

Two of NVIDIA’s code-signing certificates were part of the Feb. 23 Lapsus$ Group ransomware attack the company suffered – certificates that are now being used to sign malware so malicious programs can slide past security safeguards on Windows machines. The Feb. 23 attack saw 1TB of data bleed fro...

Cybercriminals Batter Automakers With Ransomware, IP Theft Cyberattacks

Cybercriminals are recognizing that the data that automotive companies have to offer – from customer and employee personal identifiable information PII to financial data – is invaluable. Recently, one attacker installed a keystroke logger on the workstation of a car dealership’s finance specialis...

Male Chastity Device Comes with Massive Security Flaws

Researchers at Pen Test Partners recently uncovered concerning security issues with a connected male chastity device and are calling on the entire connected sex toy industry — known as “teledildonics” — to make security a priority. The Qiui Cellmate chastity cage has a Bluetooth lock that could...

Critical Adobe Photoshop Flaws Patched in Emergency Update

Adobe released a slew of patches for critical vulnerabilities Tuesday that were part of an out-of-band security update. Several of the critical flaws are tied to Adobe’s popular Photoshop photo-editing software and allow adversaries to execute arbitrary code on targeted Windows devices. Overall,...

Experts Denounce Racial Bias of Crime-Predictive Facial-Recognition AI

More than 1,000 technology experts and academics from organizations such as MIT, Microsoft, Harvard and Google have signed an open letter denouncing a forthcoming paper describing artificial intelligence AI algorithms that can predict crime based only on a person’s face, calling it out for...

Targeted Espionage-as-a-Service Takes Hold on the Dark Web

The cybercrime underground has become a service-driven, on-demand economy, including making available targeted corporate espionage services. According to an analysis, about 40 percent of Dark Web merchants offer spearphishing-as-a-service and targeted hacking services, aimed at infiltrating Fortu...

AMCA Healthcare Hack Widens Again, Reaching 20.1M Victims

The hack of the American Medical Collection Agency AMCA, a third-party bill collection vendor, continues to expand, now impacting 20.1 million patients across three laboratory services providers. In the wake of revelations that the personal data of 12 million patients from Quest Diagnostics had...

Video: HackerOne CEO on the Evolving Bug Bounty Landscape

The bug bounty landscape continues to change along with the concept and rules around vulnerability disclosure. Meanwhile, companies such as GitHub, Microsoft and others continue to keep pace, launching or expanding bounty programs. Even the European Commission is getting in on the action. On...

Intel Squashes High-Severity Graphics Driver Flaws

Intel has issued fixes for five high-severity vulnerabilities in its graphics drivers. Attackers can exploit these flaws to launch an array of malicious attacks – such as escalating their privileges, stealing sensitive data or launching denial-of-service attacks. The graphics driver is software...

Australia Proposes Facial Recognition to Watch Porn

The Australian government has proposed using facial recognition to verify the age of people wanting to access pornography online. Unlike in the U.S., Australian law actually doesn’t prohibit minors from visiting adult sites, so the facial-recognition measure would be part of changing this policy...

ThreatList: Human Error is Behind One Quarter of Data Breaches

One quarter of all data breaches last year were caused by human error. The average cost of all breach in the same time period was $3.92 million, a 1.5 percent increase from the year before. Click to enlarge. That’s according to the 14th annual Cost of a Data Breach report from the Ponemon Institu...

Researcher Exploits Microsoft's Notepad to 'Pop a Shell'

A memory corruption bug in the Microsoft’s Windows Notepad application can be used to open remote shell access – typically a first step for attackers infiltrating a system. The bug was found by Tavis Ormandy, a bug hunter with Google’s Project Zero team. In a tweet he indicated that the bug was...

Google Patches Critical .PNG Image Bug

Google has patched a critical vulnerability in its current and legacy versions of its Android operating system, which allow an attacker to send a specially crafted Portable Network Graphics .PNG image file to a targeted device and execute arbitrary code. In its February Android Security Bulletin,...

How Web Apps Can Turn Browser Extensions Into Backdoors

Researchers have added another reason to be suspicious of web browser extensions. According to a recently published academic report, various Chrome, Firefox and Opera browser extensions can be compromised by an adversary that can steal sensitive browser data and plant arbitrary files on targeted...

Grand Theft Auto Panda APT Espionage Attack Platform

Researchers have discovered a mature attack platform that’s enjoyed great success eluding detection and made good use of an exploit present in a number of espionage campaigns. The attacks have concentrated largely on the automotive industry, hitting large companies primarily in Asia and only afte...

The Log4j Vulnerability Puts Pressure on the Security World

It’s not my intention to be alarmist about the Log4j vulnerability CVE-2021-44228, known as Log4Shell, but this one is pretty bad. First of all, Log4j is a ubiquitous logging library that is very widely used by millions of computers. Second, the director of the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure...

Apache’s Fix for Log4Shell Can Lead to DoS Attacks

As if finding one easily exploited and extremely dangerous flaw in the ubiquitous Java logging library Apache Log4j hadn’t already turned the Internet security community on its ear, researchers now have found a new vulnerability in Apache’s patch issued to mitigate it. Last Thursday security...

Parallels Offers ‘Inconvenient’ Fix for High-Severity Bug

The makers of Parallels Desktop has released a workaround fix for a high-severity privilege escalation bug that impacts its Parallels Desktop 16 for Mac software and all older versions. Mitigation advice comes five months after researchers first identified the bug in April. Parallels Desktop, now...

High-Severity Chrome Bugs Allow Browser Hacks

Google has updated its Chrome web browser, fixing four bugs with a severity rating of “high” and eight overall. Three are use-after-free flaws, which could allow an adversary to generate an error in the browser’s memory, opening the door to a browser hack and host computer compromise. On Friday,...

Apple Security Updates Tackle iOS Device Tracking, RCE Flaws

Apple’s latest security fixes, released Tuesday, tackle a wide range of bugs, including several patches for high-risk flaws that could allow for remote code execution RCE. Of particular interest to privacy-minded iPhone 11 users is an iOS 13.3.1 update that allows users to turn off U1...

Hotmail Limits Passwords to 16 Characters

Passwords, unfortunately, still are the main authentication mechanism on most Web sites, including all of the popular webmail services, such as Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail. Many sites encourage users to pick complex and long passwords, so it’s surprising to see that Microsoft now has limited...

Microsoft, Financial Groups Execute Takedown of Zeus Botnet Servers

Microsoft has gone after another botnet, this time targeting some of the command-and-control infrastructure behind the Zeus network with a takedown effort that included seizing two IP addresses used for C&C servers and filing suit against 39 unnamed defendants. The action against Zeus is the late...

SquirrelWaffle Adds a Twist of Fraud to Exchange Server Malspamming

SquirrelWaffle – the newish malware loader that first showed up in September – once again got its scrabbly little claws into an unpatched Microsoft Exchange server to spread malspam with its tried-and-true trick of hijacking email threads. That’s the same-old, same-old, as in, a SquirrelWaffle...

FIN7 Backdoor Masquerades as Ethical Hacking Tool

The notorious FIN7 cybercrime gang, a financially motivated group, is spreading a backdoor called Lizar under the guise of being a Windows pen-testing tool for ethical hackers. According to the BI.ZONE Cyber Threats Research Team, FIN7 is pretending to be a legitimate organization that hawks a...

Apple Plugs Severe WebKit Remote Code-Execution Hole

Apple is rolling out fixes for a high-severity vulnerability in its WebKit browser engine that, if exploited, could allow remote attackers to completely compromise affected systems. The mobile giant released security updates on Monday for the flaw, for its Safari browser, as well as devices runni...

Windows Exploit Released For Microsoft ‘Zerologon’ Flaw

Proof-of-concept PoC exploit code has been released for a Windows flaw, which could allow attackers to infiltrate enterprises by gaining administrative privileges, giving them access to companies’ Active Directory domain controllers DCs. The vulnerability, dubbed “Zerologon,” is a...

Temporary Patch Released For Adobe Reader Zero-Day

A temporary patch has been released to address a zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Reader that could enable bad actors to steal victims’ hashed password values, known as “NTLM hashes.” 0patch on Monday released a micropatch for the flaw, found in Adobe Reader DC. The vulnerability, which has no...

First 'Clipper' Malware Discovered on Google Play

A malicious app designed to steal cryptocurrency from victims by replacing a wallet address in the phone’s clipboard has been discovered harboring the first “clipper” malware discovered on Google Play, the official Android app store. Usually cryptocurrency-stealers are found on unsanctioned Andro...

New Ninth-Gen Intel CPUs Shield Against Some Spectre, Meltdown Variants

Intel’s new ninth-generation CPUs come packed with hardware-based protections against two variants of the infamous Meltdown and Spectre speculative execution attacks. The ninth-generation desktop Core processors are dubbed Coffee Lake, and became available for preorder on Tuesday. they’re built t...

Modern Defenders Share, Visualize and Succeed

TENERIFE, Spain – Network defenders who rely solely on lists of assets to protect are running a fool’s errand. Instead, it’s crucial to think in graphs to not only visualize threats, but also to understand network edges, and dependencies between assets and accounts in order to be able to capture...

Microsoft to Eliminate Weak MD5 Crypto Algorithm

The clock is running on Windows administrators to sweep out MD5 implementations before a February 2014 patch from Microsoft slams the door shut on the broken, aged crypto algorithm. Microsoft released a pair of advisories yesterday in addition to its regular Patch Tuesday security updates alertin...

NetTraveler Espionage Malware Campaign Ties to Gh0st RAT

A new cyberespionage malware campaign with ties to China going back to the Titan Rain and Gh0stNet attacks has been targeting diplomats, military contractors and government agencies in 40 countries. Researchers at Kaspersky Lab today unveiled details on NetTraveler, a data exfiltration tool, whic...

A Blockchain Primer and Bored Ape Headscratcher – Podcast

Why in the world would a collection of nonfungible token NFT gorilla avatars called the Bored Ape Yacht Club BAYC, run by 30-somethings using aliases like “Emperor Tomato Ketchup” and “No Sass” and adored by celebrities, spiral on up to a multibillion-dollar valuation …and, by the way, how can yo...

Microsoft Azure Developers Awash in PII-Stealing npm Packages

Researchers have found hundreds of malicious packages in the npm repository of open-source JavaScript code, designed to steal personally identifiable information PII in a large-scale typosquatting attack against Microsoft Azure cloud users. That’s according to the JFrog Security Research team,...

Campari Site Suffers Ransomware Hangover

Italian spirits brand Campari has restored its company website following a recent ransomware attack. According to the ransom note, the group behind the breach used Ragnar Locker to encrypt most of Campari’s servers and was holding the data hostage for $15 million in Bitcoin. Campari Group is behi...

Android Users Hit with 'Undeletable' Adware

UPDATE A healthy percentage of Android users targeted by mobile malware or mobile adware last year suffered a system partition infection, making the malicious files virtually undeletable. That’s according to research from Kaspersky, which found that 14.8 percent of its users who suffered such...

Connected Home Hubs Open Houses to Full Remote Takeover

Three different connected home hubs – Fibaro Home Center Lite, Homematic Central Control Unit CCU2 and Elko’s eLAN-RF-003 – are vulnerable in their older versions to serious bugs that would allow information disclosure, man-in-the-middle MiTM attacks and unauthenticated remote code execution RCE,...

Apache Tomcat Exploit Poised to Pounce, Stealing Files

A vulnerability in the popular Apache Tomcat web server is ripe for active attack, thanks to a proof-of-concept PoC exploit making an appearance on GitHub. The now-patched bug affects Tomcat versions 7.0, 8.5 and 9.0. According to Flashpoint analysts Cheng Lu and Steven Ouellette, an exploit for...

Astaroth Spy Trojan Uses Facebook, YouTube Profiles to Cover Tracks

Facebook and YouTube profiles are at the heart of an ongoing phishing campaign spreading the Astaroth trojan, bent on the eventual exfiltration of sensitive information. The attack is sophisticated in that it uses normally trusted sources as cover for malicious activities – thus evading usually...

GandCrab Ransomware Shutters Its Operations

The GandCrab ransomware group is shutting down, according to posts on the Dark Web. Researchers David Montenegro and Damian spotted the announcements over the weekend. Start of GandCrab Ransomware : 28-1-2018 .. 🦀🦀🦀 Close of GandCrab Ransomware : 1-6-2019 .. ☠️☠️☠️@RajSamani @ValthekOn @JohnFokker...

Dridex Banking Trojan Spreading Via Macros in XML Files

Not long ago, criminals pushing the Dridex banking Trojan were using Microsoft Excel documents spiked with a malicious macro as a phishing lure to entice victims to load the malware onto their machines. Even though macros are disabled by default inside most organizations, the persistent hackers a...

Microsoft Interflow Information-Sharing Platform Preview Open

Much like the Year of PKI that has never come to be, information sharing has been one of security’s more infamous non-starters. While successful in heavily siloed environments such as financial services, enterprises industry-wide are hesitant to share threat and security data for fear of losing a...

Microsoft plugs gaping holes in IE, Excel, Windows

Microsoft today released its April batch of security patches: 8 bulletins with patches for at least 20 documented holes in popular software products. The most serious of the flaws could lead to remote code execution attacks that give a malicious hacker complete ownership of a vulnerable machine...

Google Patches Chrome’s Fifth Zero-Day of the Year

Google has patched the fifth actively exploited zero-day vulnerability discovered in Chrome this year as one in a series of fixes included in a stable channel update released Wednesday. The bug, tracked as CVE-2022-2856 and rated as high on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System CVSS, is...

Email Campaign Spreads StrRAT Fake-Ransomware RAT

An email campaign is delivering a Java-based remote access trojan RAT that can not only steal credentials and take control of systems, but also presents as fake ransomware, Microsoft researchers have discovered. The Microsoft Security Intelligence MSI team has outlined details of a “massive email...

Google Patches Actively-Exploited Zero-Day Bug in Chrome Browser

Google released an update to its Chrome browser that patches a zero-day vulnerability in the software’s FreeType font rendering library that was actively being exploited in the wild. Security researcher Sergei Glazunov of Google Project Zero discovered the bug which is classified as a type of...