Cerberus Enters the Android Malware Rental Scene

A never-before-seen Android banking trojan, dubbed Cerberus, is being rented out on underground forums by a threat group that likes to engage with the defense community publicly via Twitter. According to a Tuesday posting from ThreatFabric, Cerberus isn’t based on the leaked Anubis source code th...

New Loader Variant Behind Widespread Malware Attacks

Behind a recent wave of cyberattacks, pelting PCs with FormBook, LokiBot, SmokeLoader malware, is an updated version of a malware-loading technique called TxHollower. It is described as a new “significant threat”, according to researchers, who added, attacks using TxHollower have “spread like...

Cisco Service Provider, WebEx Bugs Offer Up Remote Code Execution

Cisco is warning of critical remote code-execution RCE vulnerabilities in the Cisco Prime Infrastructure PI and Evolved Programmable Network EPN Manager, which is used by telcos, mobile carriers, cable companies and ISPs to manage their hardware infrastructure. The vendor also issued estimated...

IoT Scale Flaws Enable Denial of Service, Privacy Issues

Here is an internet of things flaw that can tip the scales to a hacker’s advantage. Researchers have discovered a bevy of flaws in a consumer smart scale that could allow hackers to launch a variety of attacks, from man-in-the-middle to denial of service attacks. Checkmarx researchers reported th...

Year-Old Critical Vulnerabilities Patched in ISP Broadband Gear

Patches for three critical vulnerabilities impacting broadband gateways made by Advanced Digital Broadcast ADB have been released to the public, nearly two years after the bugs were first found. Issues range from a privilege escalation flaw, an authorization bypass vulnerability and a local...

Microsoft Silverlight Zero Day Vulnerability Patched

Microsoft Silverlight vulnerabilities certainly don’t have the same hacker cred as bugs in Adobe Flash, for example, but nonetheless, that does not diminish their value, nor does that mean they should be ignored. Microsoft patched a critical flaw in the application framework on Tuesday, and...

Authorities Fully Behead Hydra Dark Marketplace

German authorities have taken down the Hydra marketplace – a popular destination on the Dark Web for trading in illicit goods and services, including cyberattack tools and stolen data. This week, they were able to commandeer and take offline underpinning infrastructure such as servers, plus insta...

Russia May Use Ransomware Payouts to Avoid Sanctions

Russia may ramp up ransomware attacks against the United States as a way to ease the financial hurt it’s under due to sanctions, U.S. federal authorities are warning. Those sanctions have been levied against the nation and Vladimir Putin’s government due to its invasion of Ukraine. The Financial...

Zero-Click Flaws in Widely Used UPS Devices Threaten Critical Infratructure

Three critical security vulnerabilities in widely used smart uninterruptible power supply UPS devices could allow for remote takeover, meaning that malicious actors could cause business disruptions, data loss and even physical harm to critical infrastructure, researchers have found. Researchers a...

How to Get into the Bug-Bounty Biz: The Good, Bad and Ugly

Zero-day disclosures, those known bugs without a fix, can have potentially catastrophic results. One of the best ways to combat them is by discovering them before the bad guys do. Some of the biggest tech brands on the planet have been pummeled by a rash of high-profile zero-day exploits. In the...

Hundreds of Millions of Dell Users at Risk from Kernel-Privilege Bugs

Five high-severity security flaws in Dell’s firmware update driver are impacting potentially hundreds of millions of Dell desktops, laptops, notebooks and tablets, researchers said. The bugs have gone undisclosed for 12 years, and could allow the ability to bypass security products, execute code...

Mozilla Bug Bounty Program Doubles Payouts, Adds Firefox Monitor

Mozilla is bumping up its bug bounty payouts and has added new websites and services – including the recently deployed Firefox Monitor– to its bug bounty program in hopes of attracting more researchers to sniff out vulnerabilities. The browser-maker is doubling bug bounty payouts for most of its...

Magecart Groups Attack Simultaneous Sites in Card-Theft Frenzy

In an interesting development on the financial cybercrime scene, different Magecart groups have been spotting stepping over each other and attacking the same sites. Magecart is an umbrella term encompassing several different threat groups who all use the same modus operandi: They compromise...

Virus Bulletin 2019: VoIP Espionage Campaign Hits U.S. Utilities Supplier

LONDON — A recent attack aimed at a U.S.-based oil, gas and chemical supplier leverages the company’s use of the enterprise-class Asterisk open-source PBX software, used for VoIP services. According to research from Check Point, presented here at Virus Bulletin 2019 on Friday, the attack was firs...

1B Mobile Users Vulnerable to Ongoing ‘SimJacker’ Surveillance Attack

A vulnerability discovered in mobile SIM cards is being actively exploited to track phone owners’ locations, intercept calls and more – all merely by sending an SMS message to victims, researchers say. Researchers on Thursday disclosed what they said is a widespread, ongoing exploit of a SIM...

DEF CON 2019: New Class of SQLite Exploits Open Door to iPhone Hack

LAS VEGAS – Researchers at Check Point have identified a new class of vulnerabilities targeting SQLite, outside the context of a browser for the first time. The new attack techniques exploit memory-corruption issues in the SQLite engine itself — leading to a host of new hacks, including code...

Telegram CEO Fingers China State Actors for DDoS Attack

The chief executive of secure messaging app Telegram is pointing the finger squarely at China as the culprit responsible for the distributed denial of service DDoS attack that it suffered on Wednesday. The company announced the attack on Twitter, warning that users may be experiencing connection...

440 Million Android Users Plagued By Extremely Obnoxious Pop-Ups

Over 440 million Android phones have been exposed to an obnoxious advertising plugin hidden within hundreds of popular applications available via Google Play, which ultimately can render phones almost unusable. Lookout Research discovered the plugin being bundled with 238 unique applications that...

Calibration Attack Drills Down on iPhone, Pixel Users

A proof-of-concept for a new type of privacy attack, dubbed “calibration fingerprinting,” uses data from Apple iPhone sensors to construct a globally unique fingerprint for any given mobile user. Researchers said that this provides an unusually effective means to track people as they browse acros...

Cisco Warns of Critical Nexus 9000 Data Center Flaw

A critical vulnerability in Cisco’s software-defined networking SDN software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to connect to a vulnerable data-center switch and take it over, with the privileges of the root user. The bug CVE-2019-1804, which has a CVSS severity rating of 9.8 out of...

Trickbot Malware Goes After Remote Desktop Credentials

The banking trojan known as Trickbot has resurfaced, with an updated info-stealing module that allows it to harvest remote desktop application credentials. According to Trend Micro’s Noel Anthony Llimos and Carl Maverick Pascual, a new variant has recently come on the scene, and is being spread v...

YouTuber PewDiePie Promoted Via 50K Hacked Printers

A hacker claims to have commandeered 50,000 printers globally in order to print pamphlets promoting YouTube star “PewDiePie.” The alleged widespread hack sheds light on just how insecure printers are, and how precarious printer vulnerabilities could be when they offer an easy route into the...

Osiris Banking Trojan Displays Modern Malware Innovation

After staying dormant for few years, the Kronos banking trojan resurfaced in July in a form dubbed Osiris. A wider analysis of how the banking trojan is evolving shows innovative development on the part of its authors, with an eye to broader malware trends. Osiris first appeared in July in three...

Microsoft Patches Three Vulnerabilities Under Attack

Microsoft today patched a zero-day Word vulnerability that has been publicly attacked along with deploying fixes for Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge and Windows 10. In all, nine Microsoft products received updates totaling 45 unique CVEs. Three of the vulnerabilities among Tuesday’s updates,...

Reporting Mandates to Clear Up Feds’ Hazy Look into Threat Landscape – Podcast

You know that hazy window that’s been obscuring the cyber threat landscape, leaving the feds squinting to try to see what’s really going on? The government has recently pulled out some squeegees. Case in point: the government spending deal that President Biden signed into law on Friday. The bill...

Magecart Goes Server-Side in Latest Tactics Changeup

Magecart Group 12, known for skimming payment information from online shoppers, was fingered for last September’s gonzo attack on more than 2,000 e-Commerce sites, and now researchers have issued a report explaining how they did it, detailing a new technical approach. The skimmers are still “very...

Millions of Unpatched IoT, OT Devices Threaten Critical Infrastructure

Thousands of organizations remain at risk from the URGENT/11 and CDPwn collections of vulnerabilities, which affect operational technology OT gear and internet of things IoT, respectively. Unfortunately, there has been a rampant lack of patching, researchers said. According to researchers at Armi...

Magento Sites Vulnerable to RCE Stemming From Magmi Plugin Flaws

Researchers have disclosed two flaws that could enable remote code execution attacks on the Magento Mass Import Magmi plugin, an open source database client that imports data into Magento. Magmi is a Magento database client written in PHP, which is used to perform raw bulk operations on the model...

Thousands of PCs Affected by Nodersok/Divergent Malware

New malware identified by Microsoft and Cisco Talos has affected thousands of PCs in the United States and Europe and turns systems into proxies for performing malicious activity, the companies said. The fileless threat—called Nodersok by Microsoft and Divergent by Cisco Talos—has many of its own...

New SWAPGS Side-Channel Attack Bypasses Spectre and Meltdown Defenses

Millions of newer Intel microprocessors manufactured after 2012 are vulnerable to a new type of side-channel attack dubbed SWAPGS. SWAPGS is similar to existing side-channel attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown and similarly could allow a hacker to gain access to sensitive data such as passwords...

Apple Fixes Pesky FaceTime Bug in iOS 12.1.4 Update

Apple has patched a major flaw in its Group FaceTime feature that allowed callers to eavesdrop on people they called even if they never picked up. It also said it would pay a reward to the teen that identified the bug. The update comes along with a slew of other fixes in its release of iOS 12.1.4...

Fortune Favors the Bold? Man Steals Microsoft Founder's Identity, Credit Card

When one Pennsylvanian man couldn’t foot his bills, he opted to steal the identity of someone that could – one of the world’s richest men, Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Paul Allen. An AWOL solider from Pittsburgh swiped Allen’s Citibank credit card account information earlier this year to...

MS10-015 Restart Issues Are the Result of Rootkit Infection

Microsoft on Thursday confirmed that the blue screen of death issues that affected a slew of users after the latest batch of Patch Tuesday updates is the result of an existing infection by the Alureon rootkit. There was widespread speculation after the patch release that simply installing the...

9.3M+ Androids Running ‘Malicious’ Games from Huawei AppGallery

Why would a game about a cat’s “cute diary” need permission to make phone calls or suss out your location? It doesn’t: “Cat cute diary” is one of 190 trojanized games that Doctor Web malware analysts have found on AppGallery, the official app store for Huawei Android. They’re littering the Androi...

Kaseya Patches Imminent After Zero-Day Exploits

UPDATE 3 The worldwide July 2 attacks on the Kaseya Virtual System/Server Administrator VSA platform by the REvil ransomware gang turn out to be the result of exploits for at least one zero-day security vulnerability, and the company is swinging into full mitigation mode, with patches for the...

Security Bug Allows Attackers to Brick Kubernetes Clusters

A vulnerability in one of the Go libraries that Kubernetes is based on could lead to denial of service DoS for the CRI-O and Podman container engines. The bug CVE-2021-20291 affects the Go library called “containers/storage.” According to Aviv Sasson, the security researcher at Palo Alto’s Unit 4...

Google Research Pinpoints Security Soft Spot in Multiple Chat Platforms

Google Project Zero researcher Natalie Silvanovich outlined what she believes is a common theme when it comes to serious vulnerabilities impacting leading chat platforms. The research, published Tuesday, identifies a common denominator within chat platforms, called “calling state machine”, which...

Clever Phishing Attack Bypasses MFA to Nab Microsoft Office 365 Credentials

A new phishing campaign can bypass multi-factor authentication MFA on Office 365 to access victims’ data stored on the cloud and use it to extort a Bitcoin ransom or even find new victims to target, security researchers have found. Researchers at Cofense Phishing Defense Center discovered the...

Critical Adobe Flaw Fixed in Out-of-Band Security Update

Adobe has released an out-of-band patch for a critical vulnerability in its Creative Cloud Desktop Application for Windows. The flaw can be exploited by an attacker to delete specific arbitrary files on the victim’s system. Creative Cloud acts as a central console for desktop users to quickly...

Hackers Turn to OpenDocument Format to Avoid AV Detection

Attackers have a new obfuscation technique that uses the OpenDocument file format for sneaking payloads past antivirus software. Past macro-based attacks have relied on malware hitching a ride with .docx, .zip, .jar and many other file formats. But researchers at Cisco Talos said that because the...

Police Use of Facial Recognition is Just Fine, Say Most Americans

Despite the appetite for dystopian surveillance dramas on TV and in film, most Americans actually do trust law enforcement to not abuse facial recognition technology, according to a new survey. According to the Pew Research Center, a full 56 percent said that they trust police and officials to us...

HTTP Bugs Open Websites to DoS Attacks

Eight bugs in the implementation of HTTP/2, the most recent version of the HTTP protocol, can be exploited to launch denial of service attacks. The flaws were found in vendor server configurations ranging from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apache. Bugs are similar in nature and can be exploited b...

Critical OkCupid Flaw Exposed Daters to App Takeovers

A critical flaw in the OkCupid app has been found that could allow a bad actor to steal credentials, launch man-in-the-middle attacks or completely compromise the victim’s application. This is separate from the OKCupid account-takeover incident reported earlier in the week, but it does fit the...

Icefog Targeted APT Attacks Hit South Korea, Japan

An espionage campaign featuring precise targeting of victims and malware that allows the attackers one-on-one interaction with compromised systems has been uncovered. Government agencies, manufacturers, high tech companies and media organizations in South Korea and Japan have been the primary...

Microsoft Patches Critical Bug in Windows TCP/IP Stack

Microsoft has patched a serious vulnerability in the Windows TCP/IP stack that, under some conditions, could enable an attacker to run code on remote machines. The flaw lies in the way that the stack handles large amounts of specially formatted packets sent to a vulnerable machine. Microsoft...

Microsoft Plans Record-Breaking Patch Tuesday

This month’s batch of security patches from Microsoft will be a record-breaking one: 16 bulletins addressing a whopping 49 security vulnerabilities. According to the company’s advance notice, four of the 16 bulletins will be rated “critical,” Microsoft’s highest severity rating. Microsoft rates a...

Amazon Kindle Vulnerable to Malicious EBooks

A security flaw in Amazon’s Kindle e-reader made it vulnerable to malicious eBooks, opening the door to turning the devices into bots, compromising personal information and more. That’s according to Check Point researcher Slava Makkaeveev, who released the findings Friday. Check Point disclosed t...

Dexphot Malware Hijacks 80K+ Devices to Mine Cryptocurrency

Microsoft is warning of malware, Dexphot, that has infected more than 80,000 machines, sucking up their CPU power in order to mine cryptocurrency. Researchers first discovered Dexphot in October 2018 and saw its activity peak during July. They said that the malware has a complex attack chain and...

iPhone Zero-Days Anchored Watering-Hole Attacks

A total of 14 iPhone vulnerabilities – including two that were zero-days when discovered — have been targeted by five exploit chains in a watering hole attack that has lasted years. The watering holes deliver a spyware implant that can steal private data like iMessages, photos and GPS location in...

Apple iOS 12.2 Patches 51 Serious Flaws

Apple patched 51 vulnerabilities rated serious with its iOS 12.2 update. One of the most serious bugs could allow apps to secretly listen to end users. Apple’s iOS security updates, announced Monday during its March product announcement event, are for the iPhone 5s and later, iPad Air and later a...