BlueKeep Flaw Plagues Outdated Connected Medical Devices

While Microsoft issued patches for the infamous BlueKeep vulnerability almost a year ago, researchers warn that almost half of connected medical devices in hospitals run on outdated Windows versions that are still vulnerable to the remote desktop protocol RDP flaw. Researchers said they found tha...

Lazarus APT Collaborates with Trickbot's Anchor Project

Researchers have found evidence of a link between global crimeware organization Trickbot and North Korean APT group Lazarus, observing direct collaboration via an all-in-one attack framework developed by Trickbot called Anchor Project. The move appears to be the first time an APT group has aligne...

Nvidia Fixes High-Severity Flaws in GeForce Experience for Gamers

Nvidia, which makes gaming-friendly graphics processing units GPUs, has patched two high-severity flaws in its GeForce Experience software, which could allow denial of service, information disclosure and privilege escalation on impacted systems. GeForce Experience is software for gamers utilizing...

ThreatList: Phishing Attacks Doubled in 2018

Phishing attempts more than doubled in 2018, as bad actors sought to trick victims into handing over their credentials. They used both old tricks – such as scams tied to current events – as well as other stealthy, fresher tactics. Researchers with Kaspersky Lab said in a Tuesday report that durin...

APT Threat Targets Tibetans, Journalists and Human Rights Workers

Tibetans, journalists and human rights workers in Hong Kong and Taiwan have been targeted in an APT campaign that makes use of Microsoft Rich Text File RTF documents to compromise computers. Researchers say it’s a new strategy by attackers in an ongoing advanced persistent threat that dates back ...

Details Surface on Stuxnet Patch Bypass

It took 10 hours to find what had eluded others for close to five years. German computer science student Michael Heerklotz spent the Christmas holiday reading Countdown to Zero Day, a narrative on the discovery and impact of Stuxnet, the computer worm considered one of the first cyberweapons, and...

Issues Arise With MS14-066 Schannel Patch

Some users who have installed the MS14-066 patch that fixes a vulnerability in the Schannel technology in Windows are having issues with the fix causing TLS negotiations to fail in some circumstances. The problem arises when users have TLS 1.2 enabled in certain configurations and it will sometim...

DOJ Indicts Russian Gov’t Employees Over Targeting Power Sector

The U.S. Department of Justice DOJ has indicted four Russian government employees in connection to plots to cyber-fry critical infrastructure in the United States and beyond, including at least one nuclear power plant. The campaigns involved one of the most dangerous malwares ever encountered in...

15 Cybersecurity Pitfalls and Fixes for SMBs

Small- to medium-sized businesses SMBs, those with 100 employees or less, are more vulnerable than ever to catastrophic cybersecurity breaches and attacks. The good news is that there are many things they can do, with extraordinarily little added investment, that will help IT managers lock down...

Mac Users Targeted by Spyware Spreading via Xcode Projects

A campaign aimed at Mac users is spreading the XCSSET suite of malware, which has the capability to hijack the Safari web browser and inject various JavaScript payloads that can steal passwords, financial data and personal information, deploy ransomware and more. Infections are propagating via...

Meetup Critical Flaws Allow 'Group' Takeover, Payment Theft

A popular online social service, Meetup, has fixed several critical flaws in its website. If exploited, the flaws could have enabled attackers to hijack any Meetup “group,” access the group’s member details and even redirect Meetup payments to an attacker-owned PayPal account. Meetup is a service...

Lenovo Warns of ThinkPad Bugs, One Unpatched

Dozens of Lenovo’s flagship ThinkPad models are vulnerable to bugs ranging in severity from low to high. Two of the flaws are tied to industry-wide security bulletins, while a medium-severity flaw affects only Lenovo laptops but remains unpatched. The most severe of the three bugs is a...

Malspam Emails Blanket LokiBot, NanoCore Malware With ISO Files

An ongoing spam campaign has been spotted using ISO disk image file attachments to disguise various information-stealing trojans, including LokiBot and NanoCore. Researchers said that they first spotted the malware-laced spam emails being distributed in April 2019. Spam sent to victims claim to b...

WordPress WP Live Chat Support Plugin Fixes XSS Flaw

For the second time this month a patch has been issued for the WordPress add-on called WP Live Chat Support Plugin. This time around it’s a cross-site scripting XSS vulnerability. The WP Live Chat Support is a popular WordPress plugin that allows users to install a pop-up “chat” plugin to their...

Drones are Quickly Becoming a Cybersecurity Nightmare

Drones are a growing threat for law enforcement and business security officers. In the run-up to Christmas 2018, rogue drones grounded planes at London Gatwick, the UK’s second-busiest airport. But, increasingly it’s not just the air traffic controllers sounding the alarms over drones, it’s also...

Microsoft Withdraws Outlook Update After Gmail Conflicts

Microsoft says a recent patch for Outlook 2007 after it caused slow performance and problems with third party e-mail services. Microsoft withdrew a software update released last week after reports that the update, to its Outlook 2007 e-mail product, was causing problems for customers connecting t...

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...

Ransomware Attacks Hit Major Utilities

Two state-owned utility companies in Brazil suffered separate ransomware attacks in the past week, forcing them to shut down some operations and services temporarily, In one case, sensitive data was stolen and dumped online, including network access logins and engineering plans. Centrais Eletrica...

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...

Vancouver Metro Disrupted by Egregor Ransomware

The threat actors behind the Egregor ransomware are showing a prolificacy in their early months of activity. On the heels of targeting struggling U.S. retailer Kmart, the Egregor gang also disrupted the Vancouver metro system with a ransomware attack. Translink, the Canadian city’s public...

Manchester United: IT Systems Disrupted in Cyberattack

The Manchester United football club in the U.K. has confirmed that the team fell victim to a cyberattack on its systems. Man U., one of the most popular soccer teams in the world, said that it was suffering ongoing IT disruptions. “The club has taken swift actions to contain the attack and is...

Ransomware Group Makes Splashy $20K Donation to Charities

The Darkside ransomware group has distinguished itself from its cybercriminal counterparts not by technical innovation, but by slapping a shiny corporate veneer on its attacks. The latest evolution in Darkside’s ransomware-as-a-corporation gimmick is a hefty $20,000 donation that the group made...

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday Packed with Critical RCE Bugs

Microsoft has released patches for 129 security bugs in its September Patch Tuesday update. These include 23 critical flaws, 105 that are important in severity and one moderate bug. Fortunately, none are publicly known or under active exploitation, Microsoft said. The most severe issue in the bun...

Google Fixes Critical Android RCE Flaw

Google kicked off its first Android Security Bulletin of 2020 patching a critical flaw in its Android operating system, which if exploited could allow a remote attacker to execute code. Compared to last year’s monthly tally, the number of CVEs patched this month were relatively few. The...

OpenBSD Hit with Authentication, LPE Bugs

An authentication bypass and three local privilege-escalation LPE bugs have been uncovered in OpenBSD, the Unix-like open-source operating system known for its security protections. The most severe of the vulnerabilities is the bypass CVE-2019-19521, which is remotely exploitable. OpenBSD uses BS...

ZuoRAT Can Take Over Widely Used SOHO Routers

A novel multistage remote access trojan RAT that’s been active since April 2020 is exploiting known vulnerabilities to target popular SOHO routers from Cisco Systems, Netgear, Asus and others. The malware, dubbed ZuoRAT, can access the local LAN, capture packets being transmitted on the device an...

‘An0m’ Encrypted-Chat Sting Leads to Arrest of 800

Law enforcement agencies have been selling encrypted phones to organized crime gangs for years, monitoring their conversations in what’s being called the biggest law enforcement sting ever. Since 2018, agencies have been overseeing the distribution of hardened, encrypted devices that have enabled...

Identity Theft Spikes Due to COVID-19 Relief

Cases of identity theft in the United States doubled in 2020, mainly due to cybercriminals taking advantage of people affected economically by COVID-19 who filed to receive government benefits. This is according to the Federal Trade Commission FTC, which received about 1.4 million reports of...

Microsoft Zerologon Flaw Under Attack By Iranian Nation-State Actors

Microsoft is warning that an Iranian nation-state actor is now actively exploiting the Zerologon vulnerability CVE-2020-1472, adding fuel to the fire as the severe flaw continues to plague businesses. The advanced persistent threat APT actor, which Microsoft calls MERCURY also known as MuddyWater...

Iran-linked Hackers Target Trump 2020 Campaign, Microsoft says

A group of hackers tied to Iran has been attempting to break into accounts associated with the 2020 reelection campaign of President Trump, researchers have discovered. Researchers from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center said they first observed activity from a group called Phosphorus in...

Intel CPUs Vulnerable to Sensitive Data Leakage in NetCAT Attack

Researchers have identified a new side-channel attack impacting all modern Intel server processors made since 2012. The vulnerability could allow bad actors to sniff out encrypted passwords as they are being typed into a secure shell session SSH; but, luckily, such an attack would be difficult to...

Norman Cryptominer Employs Sophisticated Obfuscation Tactics

A never-before-seen cryptomining variant, dubbed “Norman” after one of its executable files, has been spotted in the wild using various techniques to hide and avoid discovery. The levels of obfuscation are notable for their sheer depth, according to an analysis. Varonis uncovered an initial sampl...

Reddit Gold: Alice and Bob, Caught in a Web of Lies

Alice and Bob, the beloved or not-so-beloved, depending placeholder characters often used in cryptography examples, have been spotted in the middle of a web of deceit and intrigue by eagle-eyed Redditers. Think lies. Broken hearts. Even…murder. Yep, you heard that right. It all starts with the...

ThreatList: Latest DDoS Trends by the Numbers

Fresh statistics reveal a mix bag of good news and bad when it comes to distributed denial-of-service attacks in Q4 2018. According to the latest numbers available, the sheer number of attacks are down, but the length of time those attacks last have reached record lengths. The numbers come from...

Picking Up Where Neutrino Left Off: RIG Pushing CrypMIC Ransomware

When an exploit kit fades away, it usually doesn’t take long for another to take its place in the limelight, especially when the kit is an integral part of the ransomware ecosystem. That’s exactly what’s happened over the past few weeks as researchers say they’ve seen an uptick in RIG Exploit Kit...

Actively Exploited Zero-Day Bug Patched by Microsoft

Microsoft has revealed 73 new patches for May’s monthly update of security fixes, including a patch for one flaw–a zero-day Windows LSA Spoofing Vulnerability rated as “important”—that is currently being exploited with man-in-the-middle attacks. The software giant’s monthly update of patches that...

Sharp SIM-Swapping Spike Causes $68M in Losses

SIM-swapping – the practice of duping mobile carriers into switching a target’s phone services to an attacker-controlled phone – is on the rise, the Feds are warning – leading to millions in losses for consumers who found their bank accounts drained and other accounts taken over. Subscriber...

Windows Zero-Day Still Circulating After Faulty Fix

A high-severity Windows zero-day that could lead to complete desktop takeover remains dangerous after a “fix” from Microsoft failed to adequately patch it. The local privilege-escalation bug in Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 CVE-2020-0986 exists in the Print Spooler API. It could allow a local attack...

Magecart Gang Attacks Olympic Ticket Reseller and Survival Food Sites

UPDATE A faction of the Magecart threat group, Magecart group 12, has been linked to a recent digital card skimmer attack bent on stealing payment data from a slew of websites, including ones selling anything from Olympic tickets to emergency preparation kits. Over the past few weeks, the group h...

Microsoft Zaps Actively Exploited Zero-Day Bug

Microsoft has issued fixes for 36 CVEs for December 2019 Patch Tuesday across a range of products, with seven of them rated critical in severity – and one that’s already being exploited in the wild as a zero-day bug. The computing giant’s scheduled security update this month is relatively light,...

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...

Intel CPUs Impacted By New Class of Spectre-Like Attacks

A new class of side channel vulnerabilities impacting all modern Intel chips have been disclosed, which can use speculative execution to potentially leak sensitive data from a system’s CPU. Intel said that the newest class of vulnerabilities, dubbed Microarchitectural Data Sampling MDS, consist o...

Microsoft Patches Two Win32k Bugs Under Active Attack

Microsoft released patches for two Win32k bugs actively under attack, along with fixes for four additional bugs that are publicly known, as part of its March Patch Tuesday security bulletin. The Win32k bugs are both elevation of privilege vulnerabilities, rated important, and tied to the way...

On Microsoft's XP Patches, Hidden Cobra, MacRansom, and More

Mike Mimoso and Chris Brook discuss the news of the week, including Microsoft’s XP patches, Hidden Cobra, a Nigerian BEC campaign, MacRansom, and more. Download: ThreatpostNewsWrapJune162017.mp3 Music by Chris Gonslaves...

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...

Why Healthcare Keeps Falling Prey to Ransomware and Other Cyberattacks

The healthcare industry is under attack like never before. What started as a surge in criminal activity during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic has now metastasized into a full-blown crisis within the healthcare industry worldwide. The recent disruptive ransomware attacks on Scripps...

Ransomware Attack Strikes Spain’s Employment Agency

The Spanish State Employment Service SEPE in Spain has been hit by a cyberattack, suspending its communications systems across hundreds of offices and delaying thousands of appointments. SEPE is an “autonomous body” in Spain that manages and controls unemployment benefits. The cyberattack hit...

TA416 APT Rebounds With New PlugX Malware Variant

The TA416 advanced persistent threat APT actor is back with a vengeance: After a month of inactivity, the group was spotted launching spear-phishing attacks with a never-before-seen Golang variant of its PlugX malware loader. TA416, which is also known as “Mustang Panda” and “RedDelta,” was spott...

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...

Troy Hunt Looks to Sell Have I Been Pwned

Citing overwhelming demands on his time, Troy Hunt is looking for a buyer for his site, Have I Been Pwned HIBP. HIBP offers a free service for consumers wanting to know if their user names and passwords have been compromised in a data breach; it also offers commercial services that include alerts...