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 ...

Red October Attackers Return With CloudAtlas APT Campaign

The attackers behind the Red October APT campaign that was exposed nearly two years ago have resurfaced with a new campaign that is targeting some of the same victims and using similarly constructed tools and spear phishing emails. Red October emerged in January 2013 and researchers found that th...

Three Critical Fixes in July Microsoft Patch Tuesday

Microsoft issued nine bulletins fixing 16 vulnerabilities in the July 2012 edition of Patch Tuesday. Three of the bulletins received Microsoft’s most severe ‘critical’ rating, while the remaining six were deemed merely ‘important.’ First and foremost among the critical patches is MS12-043, a fix...

Researchers: NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware Should Spark Bans, Apple Accountability

News of a zero-click zero-day in Apple’s iMessage feature being incorporated into the notorious Pegasus mobile spyware from NSO Group has drawn a variety of reactions from the security community, including concerns about the security of Apple’s closed ecosystem, and varying views on NSO Group’s...

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...

Apple Accidentally Notarizes Shlayer Malware Used in Adware Campaign

Apple accidentally approved one of the most popular Mac malware threats – OSX.Shlayer – as part of its security notarization process. The Apple notary service is an automated system on recent macOS versions that scans software ranging from macOS apps, kernel extensions, disk images and installer...

High-Severity Bug Leaves Cisco TelePresence Gear Open to Attack

Cisco Systems has patched two high-severity vulnerabilities that can be exploited by remote unauthenticated adversaries to launch denial of service attacks. Impacted are Cisco’s TelePresence Video Communication Server and the company’s ASA 5500-X Series Firewalls. The vulnerability with the wides...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

‘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...

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Plugs Critical Bug in Edge Platform Tool

Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPE is urging customers to patch one of its premier edge application management tools that could allow an attacker to carry out a remote authentication bypass attack and infiltrate a customer’s cloud infrastructure. Join Threatpost for “Fortifying Your Business Against...

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...

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...

AMD Radeon Graphics Cards Open VMware Workstations to Attack

A remote code-execution bug exists in some configurations of the AMD Radeon graphics card that could allow an attacker to take control of a targeted system. The hack entails luring users of vulnerable systems to visit a specially crafted website that can deliver “a malformed pixel shader” to eith...

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...

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...

Serious Phar Flaw Allows Arbitrary Code Execution on Drupal

Multiple content management systems – including Drupal, Joomla and Typo3 – are open to a vulnerability that can lead to arbitrary code execution on some systems. The flaw CVE-2019-11831 exists in the phar stream wrapper component used in PHP-driven projects. A Phar archive is used to distribute a...

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...

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...

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...

Feds: APTs Have Tools That Can Take Over Critical Infrastructure

Threat actors have built and are ready to deploy tools that can take over a number of widely used industrial control system ICS devices, which spells trouble for critical infrastructure providers—particularly those in the energy sector, federal agencies have warned. In a joint advisory, the...

Severe WordPress Plug-In UpdraftPlus Bug Threatens Backups

The WordPress plug-in “UpdraftPlus” was patched on Wednesday to correct a vulnerability that left sensitive backups at risk, potentially exposing personal information and authentication data. UpdraftPlus is a tool for creating, restoring and migrating backups for WordPress files, databases,...

Public Clouds & Shared Responsibility: Lessons from Vulnerability Disclosure

The inexorable movement of data and applications to the cloud that began several years ago and accelerated during the pandemic shows no signs of slowing down. The rationale for this transformation is driven by a desire to outsource non-critical functions building and maintaining data centers,...

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...

Bug in NVIDIA’s Tegra Chipset Opens Door to Malicious Code Execution

A flaw impacting millions of mobile and internet of things IoT devices running NVIDIA’s Tegra processor opens the door for a variety of attacks, including device hijacking or siphoning of data. The warning comes from researcher Triszka Balázs, who discovered the flaw and asserts that the bug...

RSA Conference 2019: BleedingBit Flaws Continue to Plague Firms

UPDATE SAN FRANCISCO – Mobile key platform UniKey has patched vulnerabilities related to the infamous BleedingBit attack in its platform. BleedingBit is an issue in Bluetooth Low-Energy chips made by Texas Instruments and used in millions of wireless access points, which was disclosed in November...

Highly Critical Drupal CMS Flaw Affects Millions of Websites

The Drupal open-source content management system platform has issued an advisory for a highly critical remote-code execution RCE flaw in the Drupal core. The vulnerability CVE-2019-6340 arises from the fact that “some field types do not properly sanitize data from non-form sources,” according to...

New Threat Actor ‘Rocke’: A Rising Monero Cryptomining Menace

Researchers are warning of a Chinese-language threat actor leveraging a wide array of Git repositories to infect vulnerable systems with Monero-based cryptomining malware. Researchers at Cisco Talos, who discovered the threat actor they call “Rocke”, said they have been tracking the adversary sin...

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...

Flash Exploit Found in Seven Exploit Kits

A nasty Adobe Flash zero-day vulnerability that was remediated in an emergency update in October 2015 was thereafter co-opted by seven exploit kits, according to an analysis published today by researchers at Recorded Future. The Adobe vulnerability, CVE-2015-7645, was also used by the Russian APT...

Microsoft Ships Anti-Exploit Tool for IT Admins

LAS VEGAS — Microsoft today released a new tool to help IT administrators backport anti-exploit mitigations like ASLR Address Space Layout Randomization and DEP Data Execution Prevention to older versions of Windows. The tool, called Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit EMET works by applying...

Black Hat: Scaling Automated Disinformation for Misery and Profit

LAS VEGAS – Researchers recently demonstrated the weaponization of deep neural networks that can be used to shape public opinion, enrage people on Twitter and possibly spark QAnon 2.0. The research, presented last week at Black Hat by Drew Lohn, senior fellow at the Center for Security and...

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...

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...

Keeper Threat Group Rakes in $7M from Hundreds of Compromised E-Commerce Sites

Since its launch three years ago, the Keeper threat group has compromised more than 570 e-commerce websites, from online liquor stores to Apple product resellers. And experts warn of future, increasingly sophisticated attacks against online merchants worldwide. The Keeper group, a faction of the...

Rash of Exploits Targets Critical vBulletin RCE Bug

A critical remote code execution RCE bug affecting default 5.x versions of vBulletin CVE-2019-16759 is being actively exploited in the wild, allowing unauthenticated attackers to take control of web hosts. A zero-day proof-of-concept code was anonymously published on Monday, ahead of vBulletin...

Critical Exim Flaw Opens Millions of Servers to Takeover

UPDATE Researchers are urging users to upgrade their Exim servers immediately after millions of servers were found to be vulnerable to a critical flaw that could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to take full control of them. Exim, which is free software used on Unix-like operating systems...

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...

Cybercriminals Have a Heyday with WinRAR Bug in Fresh Campaigns

A recently discovered vulnerability in the WinRAR file archival utility has been exploited in a slew of new campaigns, including one with a never-before-seen payload. The flurry of activity shows no sign of waning as cybercriminals continue to find success exploiting the bug. The campaigns take...

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...

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...

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...

The Harsh Truths of Cybersecurity in 2022, Part Two

In part one of this series, I outlined some harsh truths of cybersecurity in 2022 and the first three of the top six steps you should take to ensure resiliency against today’s most pervasive threat—ransomware. Here, I’ll cover the remaining three: But first, let’s take a quick step back. It used ...

‘Trojan Source’ Hides Invisible Bugs in Source Code

Researchers have found a new way to encode potentially evil source code, such that human reviewers see a harmless version and compilers see the invisible, wicked version. Named “Trojan Source attacks,” the method “exploits subtleties in text-encoding standards such as Unicode to produce source co...

Cyberpunk 2077 Headaches Grow: New Spyware Found in Fake Android Download

Threat actors continue to take advantage of the hype surrounding the release of the videogame Cyberpunk 2077 in a variety of ways. The latest twist is ransomware targeting Android devices disguised as a legitimate download of the new open-world game. Kaspersky researcher Tatyana Shishkova...

Newsletter WordPress Plugin Opens Door to Site Takeover

Newsletter, a WordPress plugin with more than 300,000 installations, has a pair of vulnerabilities that could lead to code-execution and even site takeover. The Newsletter plugin offers site admins a visual editor that can be used to create newsletters and email campaigns from within WordPress...