Emotet Now Hacks Nearby Wi-Fi Networks to Spread Like a Worm

A newly uncovered Emotet malware sample has the ability to spread to insecure Wi-Fi networks that are located nearby to an infected device. If the malware can spread to these nearby Wi-Fi networks, it then attempts to infect devices connected to them — a tactic that can rapidly escalate Emotet’s...

Linux Webmin Servers Under Attack by Roboto P2P Botnet

Vulnerable Linux Webmin servers are under active attack by a newly-discovered peer-to-peer P2P botnet, dubbed Roboto by researchers. The botnet is targeting a remote code-execution vulnerability CVE-2019-15107 in Webmin, a web-based system configuration tool for Linux servers. CVE-2019-15107 was...

Trivial Bug Turns Home Security Cameras Into Listening Posts

A vulnerability in the consumer-grade Amcrest IP2M-841B IP home security video camera would allow an attacker to remotely listen to the camera’s audio over the internet, without authentication. “Essentially, if this thing is connected directly to the internet, it’s anyone’s listening device,”...

Newly-Identified BEC Cybergang Targets U.S. Enterprise Victims

LONDON, U.K. – Researchers have identified a highly-sophisticated Nigerian business email compromise gang targeting U.S enterprises and government institutions. The cybercrime group, dubbed Scattered Canary, has evolved over the past 10 years from a one-man shop working Craigslist scams into a...

RSAC 2019: TLS Markets Flourish on the Dark Web

SAN FRANCISCO – Thriving marketplaces for TLS certificates have emerged on the Dark Web, which are hawking the certs both as individual goods and packaged with an array of malware and other ancillary services. The research, from Venafi, the University of Surrey and the Evidence-based Cybersecurit...

Microsoft Waits for Patch Tuesday to Fix SMB Zero Day

Microsoft will not rush out an emergency patch for a zero-day vulnerability disclosed on Wednesday in the Windows implementation of the Server Message Block protocol. Researcher Laurent Gaffie announced in a tweet, below, that he’d found a zero-day vulnerability in SMBv3 and released a...

Upatre Downloader Spreading Dyreza Banking Trojan

The Upatre downloader is the vehicle that has driven numerous banking Trojan and ransomware attacks to the front door of countless victims at great cost. Microsoft on Thursday warned of a wire-transfer spam campaign that it’s spotted that is spreading Upatre and eventually loading the dangerous...

Operation b54 Knocks 1,000+ Citadel Botnets Offline

UPDATE – Calling it the company’s “most aggressive” botnet operation operation to date, Microsoft has joined with the FBI for a massive disruption of the Citadel botnet. More than 1,400 individual botnets associated with the Citadel malware affecting more than five million people in total were...

Research Reveals Huge Cache of FTP, Email Credentials Stolen by Waledac

Researchers have discovered that the gang behind the once-and-future botnet Waledac has gathered nearly 500,000 stolen passwords for email accounts, along with close to 125,000 sets of pilfered credentials for FTP accounts. The discovery isn’t so surprising in its details, but rather in its scope...

New Unpatched Flaw Surfaces in SQL Server

There is an unpatched flaw in Microsoft SQL Server that could enable an attacker to access users’ passwords on the database server. The vulnerability is in SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008. The SQL Server vulnerability was discovered last fall by database-security vendor Sentrigo, which then report...

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...

Embryology Data Breach Follows Fertility Clinic Ransomware Hit

A fertility clinic serving the Atlanta area has been hit with a ransomware attack that also exposed private health information for 38,000 of its patients. Reproductive Biology Associates RBA, along with its affiliate My Egg Bank North America, is a well-known pioneer in in-vitro fertilization IVF...

Microsoft Gets Second Shot at Banning hiQ from Scraping LinkedIn User Data

The U.S. Supreme Court has granted LinkedIn another legal option to try to prevent rival hiQ Labs from scraping public information from its user profiles, something the Microsoft-owned professional networking platform has claimed is a violation of user privacy and a misuse of its data. The court...

U.S. Agencies Must Adopt Vulnerability-Disclosure Policies by March 2021

The U.S. government’s cybersecurity agency is now requiring federal agencies to implement vulnerability-disclosure policies VDPs, which would give ethical hackers clear guidelines for submitting bugs found in government systems, by next March. Currently, most federal agencies lack a formal...

ID Thieves Turn to Snail Mail as Juicy Target for Financial Crimes

As it gets harder for cybercriminals to bypass business email compromise BEC defenses, some hackers are switching from email scams to real-mail cons. Researchers at Flashpoint said they are monitoring hacker forums where criminals are swapping tips on a growing ID theft and financial crime area,...

Breached Passwords Still in Use By Hundreds of Thousands

Hundreds of thousands of web visitors continue utilizing passwords that have previously been compromised. Worse, they are reusing the breached credentials for some of their most sensitive financial, government and email accounts. That’s according to a new Google study released this week, which wa...

Apple Transparency Report Now Includes App Store Takedown Requests

For the first time Apple added to its transparency report the number of App Store takedown requests it has received from governments. The report, released Tuesday, also puts some hard numbers on how often law enforcement and governments request device and user data. App Takedown Request Apple’s...

Windows Zero-Day Drops on Twitter, Developer Promises 4 More

UPDATE A Windows zero-day exploit dropped by developer SandboxEscaper would allow local privilege-escalation LPE, by importing legacy tasks from other systems into the Task Scheduler utility. It’s the latest zero-day from SandboxEscaper, who said that she has four more in the hopper that she’d li...

How Decoding Network Traffic Can Save Your Data Bacon

The number of breaches impacting corporate networks has reached epidemic proportions. This year is currently on track to break all records for breaches. Already this year there have been 1,900 reported breaches in just the past three months, according to Risk Based Security. One of the troubling...

RSAC 2019: An Antidote for Tech Gone Wrong

SAN FRANCISCO – Tech innovation can move faster than its own good might dictate, often leaving the public interest as an afterthought. Take, for example, hot-button topics such as artificial intelligence, network neutrality and social network user privacy – and consider the ensuing debates. The...

Where's the Equifax Data? Does It Matter?

It’s been 17 months since the infamous 2017 Equifax data breach was revealed to have compromised the data of about 147.9 million people i.e., almost every adult in the U.S., with more than 45 percent of the population directly affected by the incident. But an investigative report from CNBC found...

Cybercriminals Aim for the Super Bowl Goal Posts

Ah, the Super Bowl. For some, this Sunday’s show down between the Los Angeles Rams and the New England Patriots will be about gathering family and friends around for a great American pastime: The Super Bowl party. Some are just in it for the commercials. Some see a gambling opportunity; and for...

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...

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...

Attackers Target Intuit Users by Threatening to Cancel Tax Accounts

Just in time for tax season, Intuit is warning customers of a phishing campaign that threatens to close user accounts if they don’t click on a malicious link. The attacks on the accounting-software specialist that many people use for filing U.S. income tax forms comes as phishers overall are...

Microsoft Teams: Very Bad Tabs Could Have Led to BEC

Attackers could have stepped through a yawning security hole in Microsoft Teams chat service that would have let them masquerade as a targeted company’s employee by reading and sending email on their behalf. On Monday, Tenable’s Evan Grant explained in a post that he found the bug in Microsoft...

Nefilim Ransomware Gang Hits Jackpot with Ghost Account

A Nefilim ransomware attack that locked up more than 100 systems stemmed from the compromise of an unmonitored account belonging to an employee who had died three months previously, researchers said. Nefilim a.k.a. Nemty is a ransomware strain that emerged in 2020, with its operators adopting the...

Critical Microsoft Defender Bug Actively Exploited; Patch Tuesday Offers 83 Fixes

Microsoft addressed 10 critical bugs, one under active exploit and another publicly known, in its January Patch Tuesday roundup of fixes. In total it patched 83 vulnerabilities. The most serious bug is a flaw in Microsoft’s Defender anti-malware software that allows remote attackers to infect...

Google Warns of Critical Android Remote Code Execution Bug

Google has fixed two critical bugs affecting its Android handsets. The more serious flaws exists in the Android System component and allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code. The two critical vulnerabilities are part of Google’s January Android security bulletin, released Monday. The...

How to Update Your Remote Access Policy – And Why You Should Now

For close to two decades, organizations have allowed privileged employees to work remotely by offering remote access solutions as a part of the daily work environment. But until recently, working remotely was more of a luxury than a necessity. With the rise of COVID-19, many organizations moved...

Apple Fixes iOS Flaw That Opened iPhones to Jailbreaks

Apple has released an emergency patch fixing a kernel vulnerability – for the second time – after it was accidentally unpatched in iOS 12.4. The flaw CVE-2019-8605, a use-after-free issue existing in the kernel, could enable a malicious application to execute arbitrary code with system privileges...

20-Year-Old Bug in Legacy Microsoft Code Plagues All Windows Users

A 20-year-old vulnerability present in all versions of Microsoft Windows could allow a non-privileged user to run code that will give him or her full SYSTEM privileges on a target machine. The bug is notable because of where it resides: In a legacy, omnipresent protocol named Microsoft CTF. First...

Firmware Bugs Plague Server Supply Chain, 7 Vendors Impacted

Two firmware vulnerabilities impacting Lenovo, Acer and five additional server brands allow adversaries to brick servers, run arbitrary code on targeted systems and maintain a persistent foothold – surviving even an operating system reinstallation. The bugs are tied to Gigabyte motherboards used ...

RSA Conference 2019: The Expanding Automation Platform Attack Surface

SAN FRANCISCO – Automation platforms are increasingly being used to chain multiple IoT devices together to create user-friendly smart applications – but that’s also creating unpredictable attack surfaces that can be hard to manage. A Trend Micro report released at RSA Conference 2019 warns that...

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...

Kronos Banking Trojan Surfaces After Years of Silence

The Kronos banking trojan is back from the malware dustbin. After years of lying dormant, hackers have reworked the underlying code and are actively targeting victims in Germany, Japan and Poland. The latest variant has incorporated a new command-and-control feature designed to work with the Tor...

Microsoft Online Services Bug Bounty Program Launches

Microsoft had always rejected the possibility of a full-scale bug bounty, relying instead on solid relationships it spent the better part of a decade fostering with researchers worldwide who submit vulnerabilities to the Microsoft Security Research Center MSRC. Yet in the past couple of years, th...

Follina Exploited by State-Sponsored Hackers

Researchers have added state-sponsored hackers to the list of adversaries attempting to exploit Microsoft’s now-patched Follina vulnerability. According to researchers at Proofpoint, state-sponsored hackers have attempted to abuse the Follina vulnerability in Microsoft Office, aiming an email-bas...

Menswear Brand Zegna Reveals Ransomware Attack

High-end Italian fashion house Ermenegildo Zegna revealed on Monday that it was the target of a ransomware attack last August — and that it managed to recover its systems from back-up without paying a ransom. The Milan-based firm already had revealed on Aug. 6, 2021, that it became aware of...

Tax-Season Scammers Spoof Fintechs, Including Stash, Public

Threat actors have new targets in their sites this tax season during the annual barrage of cyber-scams as people file their U.S. income-tax documents. Novel email campaigns are spoofing popular financial technology fintech applications and their tax notifications to try to dupe victims into givin...

Multi-Ransomwared Victims Have It Coming–Podcast

You hate to blame the victim, but the fact of the matter is that businesses are just asking to get whacked with ransomware multiple times. A recent study of IT leaders from cloud-native network detection and response firm ExtraHop shows that businesses aren’t even aware of the “attack me,” “easy...

Working PoC Is Out for VMware vCenter CVE-2021-22005 Flaw

A fully working exploit for the critical CVE-2021-22005 remote code-execution RCE vulnerability in VMware vCenter is now public and being exploited in the wild. Released on Monday by Rapid7 security engineer William Vu who goes by the Twitter handle wvu, this one’s different from the incomplete...

On the Taxonomy and Evolution of Ransomware

Given the frequency with which “ransomware” appears in news articles, it may be worthwhile to take a step back and actually consider what the term means. Any malware or attack that culminates in extorting ransom from the victim is commonly referred to as ransomware. The general idea is to encrypt...

Verizon: Pandemic Ushers in ⅓ More Cyber Misery

Thanks for just showing up, said the team that cranked out the Verizon 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report DBIR. It’s quite the accomplishment that we all made it through the “often frightening and always unpredictable dystopian wasteland that was 2020,” the carrier noted, with cybersecurity...

Mimecast: SolarWinds Attackers Stole Source Code

Hackers who compromised Mimecast networks as part of the SolarWinds espionage campaign have swiped some of the security firm’s source code repositories, according to an update by the company. The email security firm initially reported that a certificate compromise in January was part of the...

Leaked Details of 142 Million MGM Hotel Guests Found for Sale on Dark Web

Researchers have found 142 million personal details from former guests at the MGM Resorts hotels for sale on the Dark Web, evidence that a data leak from the hotel chain last summer may be far bigger in scope than previously thought. An advertisement on a hacker forum has put 142,479,937 details...

EvilQuest Mac Ransomware Has Keylogger, Crypto Wallet-Stealing Abilities

A rare new ransomware strain targeting macOS users has been discovered, called EvilQuest. Researchers say the ransomware is being distributed via various versions of pirated software. EvilQuest, first discovered by security researcher Dinesh Devadoss, goes beyond the normal encryption capabilitie...

EFF Talks the Corporate Surveillance of Consumers

You can’t protect your privacy if you don’t know how it’s being violated. That’s the essence of a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that shines a bright disinfecting light on how corporations are collecting data on consumers. Think Facebook-like data collection on steroids and you begi...

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...

Android Keyboard App Could Swindle 40M Users Out of Millions

Researchers are warning users to delete a popular Android keyboard app that, once downloaded, makes unauthorized purchases of premium digital content. Google told Threatpost it has removed the app from its Google Play marketplace – but researchers say it was downloaded on at least 40 million phon...