Alureon Rootkit Morphs Again, Adds Steganography

The Alureon rootkit has become not just a major headache for its victims, with its insidious infection routines and persistence once on a machine. But it also has proved to be a challenge for researchers engaged in trying to identify new versions and unwind its new tactics and techniques. The...

Free COFEE Helps Law Enforcement Forensics

Microsoft has announced plans to give away free versions of its COFEE Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor utility to help law enforcement agencies in cyber-crime investigations. COFEE uses digital forensic technologies to help investigators gather evidence of live computer activity at the...

MacOS Malware: Myth vs. Truth – Podcast

Remember those ads with a sneezing guy in a suit who says he’s a PC and to stay away, he’s got that nasty virus that’s going around? “That’s OK,” says the young, hip guy in blue jeans: He’s a Mac. … as if any machine that runs code could possibly be immune to malware…? Boy, was that a stretch. Th...

Russia Leaks Data From a Thousand Cuts–Podcast

Information about nuclear plants and air force capabilities. Conti ransomware gang crooks conjecturing that the National Security Agency NSA was maybe behind the mysterious, months-long TrickBot lull. Doxxed data about 120K Russian soldiers. Those are just some of the sensitive, valuable data...

Mercedes-Benz Customer Data Flies Out the Window

Ahh, the luxury of Mercedes-Benz cars: The high-end upholstery, plush carpeting, polished wood trim, LED mood lighting. “Even the scent signals that this vehicle is special,” as the automaker sighs. Of course, even a company like Mercedes-Benz can inadvertently fart out customer data. That’s what...

Intel Plugs 29 Holes in CPUs, Bluetooth, Security

Intel has unleashed 29 security advisories to plug up some serious bugs in the BIOS firmware for Intel processors, as well as in its Bluetooth products, Active Management Technology tools, the NUC Mini PC line, and, ironically, in its own security library. Details about the advisories can be foun...

Critical Cisco SD-WAN, HyperFlex Bugs Menace Networks

Cisco has addressed two critical security vulnerabilities in the SD-WAN vManage Software, one of which could allow an unauthenticated attacker to carry out remote code execution RCE on corporate networks or steal information. The networking giant also disclosed a denial-of-service issue in vManag...

Hades Ransomware Gang Exhibits Connection to Hafnium

The Hades ransomware gang has several unique characteristics that set it apart from the rest of the pack, according to researchers – including potentially having more than extortion on the to-do list. The group appears to use multiple nation-state tools and techniques. The researchers said that i...

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...

Novel Online Shopping Malware Hides in Social-Media Buttons

A payment card-skimming malware that hides inside social-media buttons is making the rounds, compromising online stores as the holiday shopping season gets underway. According to researchers at Sansec, the skimmer hides in fake social-media buttons, purporting to allow sharing on Facebook, Twitte...

BlueLeaks Server Seized By German Police: Report

German authorities have reportedly seized a server hosting the massive BlueLeaks data dump, which was released earlier in June and exposed thousands of sensitive police department and law enforcement files. According to a Wednesday report by PCMag, the server was based in Falkenstein, Germany and...

High-Severity Windows UAC Flaw Enables Privilege Escalation

Researchers disclosed details of a high-severity Microsoft Windows vulnerability that could give attackers elevated privileges – ultimately allowing them to install programs, and view, change or delete data. The bug stems from User Account Control UAC, a security feature of Windows within Secure...

DEF CON 2019: 35 Bugs in Office Printers Offer Hackers an Open Door

LAS VEGAS — At least 35 significant vulnerabilities in six commonly used enterprise printers have been uncovered, manufactured by HP, Ricoh, Xerox, Lexmark, Kyocera and Brother. The bugs will be presented by NCC Group at a DEF CON session entitled “Why You Should Fear Your Mundane Office Equipmen...

Turla APT Returns with New Malware, Anti-Censorship Angle

The Turla APT has revamped its arsenal in 2019, creating new weapons and tools for targeting government entities. It’s now using booby-trapped anti-internet censorship software as an initial infection vector, suggesting Turla is going after dissident or other civil-society targets. The...

Active Scans Target Vulnerable Cisco Routers for Remote Code-Execution

UPDATE Malicious scanning activity targeting Cisco Small Business RV320 and RV325 Dual Gigabit WAN VPN routers is underway, with a swell of opportunistic probes looking for vulnerable devices ramping up since Friday. According to Bad Packets Report’s honeypot data, cyberattackers are targeting a...

Google Releases Supplemental Patch for Dirty Cow Vulnerability

Google’s November Android Security Bulletin, released Monday, patched 15 critical vulnerabilities and addressed 85 CVEs overall. But conspicuously absent is a fix for the Linux race condition vulnerability known as Dirty Cow Copy-on-Write that also impacts Android. While Google didn’t issue an...

Microsoft to End Email Security Notifications

Update: Microsoft today has reversed course on its decision to suspend security email notifications, and will resume doing so on Thursday. The original decision, made in response to Canada’s antispam law set to go into effect tomorrow, was announced on Friday. This afternoon, however, a Microsoft...

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...

How Assumptions May Be Making Us All Less Secure

In the space of a given year, untold thousands of vulnerabilities are found in operating systems, applications and plug-ins. In many cases, the affected vendors fix the flaws, either with a patch, a workaround or some other mitigation. But there’s also a huge population of security bugs that...

Millions of Routers Exposed to RCE by USB Kernel Bug

Millions of popular end-user routers are at risk of remote code execution RCE due to a high-severity flaw in the KCodes NetUSB kernel module. The module enables remote devices to connect to routers over IP and access any USB devices such as printers, speakers, webcams, flash drives and other...

Unpatched Windows 10 Zero-Day Allows Privileged File Access

An unpatched Windows security vulnerability could allow information disclosure and local privilege escalation LPE, researchers have warned. The issue CVE-2021-24084 has yet to get an official fix, making it a zero-day bug – but a micropatch has been rolled out as a stop-gap measure. Security...

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...

‘Lone Wolf’ APT Uses Commodity RATs

An APT described as a “lone wolf” is exploiting a decades-old Microsoft Office flaw to deliver a barrage of commodity RATs to organizations in India and Afghanistan, researchers have found. Attackers use political and government-themed malicious domains as lures in the campaign, which targets...

Feds Told to Better Manage Facial Recognition, Amid Privacy Concerns

Though the federal government widely uses facial recognition for various uses from criminal investigations to collecting traveler data, this use is largely unmonitored and unmanaged — a scenario that must change to protect people’s privacy and avoid inaccurate identification of perpetrators, a...

Microsoft Teams: Very Bad Tabs Could Have Led to BEC

Attackers could have stepped through a yawning security hole in the 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 Microso...

APT Exploits Microsoft Zerologon Bug: Targets Japanese Companies

China-backed APT Cicada joins the list of threat actors leveraging the Microsoft Zerologon bug to stage attacks against their targets. In this case, victims are large and well-known Japanese organizations and their subsidiaries, including locations in the United States. Researchers observed a...

15 Billion Credentials Currently Up for Grabs on Hacker Forums

Fifteen billion usernames and passwords for a range of internet services are currently for sale on underground forums – shedding light on the sheer scope of compromised credentials that are fueling account takeovers on the internet. A report released Wednesday — “From Exposure to Takeover” by the...

Adobe Patches Critical Bugs in Illustrator, Media Encoder

Adobe Systems is warning Illustrator 2019 users that two critical memory-corruption vulnerabilities could allow for an attacker to remotely connect to a Windows machine, execute code and gain control of the targeted system. The create-suite behemoth also warned Tuesday, as part of its regular...

Firefox 69 Release Kills Default Tracking Cookies, Flash Support

Mozilla has released its latest Firefox browser iteration, Firefox 69, which by default blocks third-party cookies and cryptominers; it also disables default support for Adobe Flash Player. In addition, the browser has squashed several critical and high-severity vulnerabilities. Mozilla has long...

Android Ransomware Spreads Via 'Sex Simulation Game' Links on Reddit, SMS

Researchers are warning of a new Android ransomware being spread via links in online forums and SMS messages. The malicious links purport to connect back to a sex simulation game, but in reality lead to ransomware that encrypts victims’ files. The Android ransomware, dubbed Android/Filecoder.C, h...

Millions of Linux Servers Under Worm Attack Via Exim Flaw

A widespread campaign is exploiting a vulnerability in the Exim mail transport agent MTA to gain remote command-execution on victims’ Linux systems. Researchers say that currently more than 3.5 million servers are at risk from the attacks, which are using a wormable exploit. Specifically under...

Hackers Abuse Google Cloud Platform to Attack D-Link Routers

Hackers have been abusing Google’s cloud computing service to redirect and intercept web and mail traffic on an array of vulnerable consumer routers. A researcher said that he has seen the Google Cloud Platform being abused to carry out three separate waves of DNS hijacking attacks over the past...

Google Play Touts Certs in Quest For Enterprise Security

Google is now touting three new security certifications for Managed Google Play, which the company hopes will serve as a badge of security honor for companies thinking about using its enterprise-focused app marketplace. The move comes as Google continues to try to amp up efforts around the securi...

New Cryptominer Distributes XMRig in Aggressive Attacks

Hackers behind cryptominer attacks are growing more aggressive and ruthless. Case and point, a cryptominer malware sample dubbed WinstarNssmMiner has been tracked in 500,000 attacks in the past three days, earning the crooks $28,000, according to researchers. What makes the cryptominer so vicious...

Microsoft issues Advisory on ASP.NET Hole

Microsoft has issued a security advisory for a recently disclosed vulnerability in the ASP.NET that could leave millions of Web pages vulnerable to attack. The company on Friday released Security Advisory 2416728 addressing the ASP.NET security hole, which was first disclosed by researchers at th...

Most Orgs Would Take Security Bugs Over Ethical Hacking Help

Enterprises are putting greater stock in cybersecurity, but outdated “security by obscurity” is still prevailing as companies wrestle with security awareness and shy away from bug-bounty programs. That’s according to new survey data from HackerOne, which found that a full 65 percent of...

Apple Patches Zero-Day MacOS Bypass Bug

Apple patched a zero-day vulnerability in its MacOS that can bypass critical anti-malware capabilities and which a variant of the notorious Mac threat Shlayer adware dropper already has been exploiting for several months. Security researcher Cedric Owens first discovered the vulnerability, tracke...

Critical WordPress Plugin Flaw Allows Site Takeover

Researchers are urging WordPress websites that utilize the NextGen Gallery plugin to apply a patch addressing critical and high-severity flaws. The NextGen Gallery plugin, which is installed on 800,000 WordPress websites, allows sites to upload photos in batch quantities, import metadata and edit...

Fake Forcepoint Chrome Extension Hacks Windows Users

Cybercriminals have been using a novel approach to exfiltrate data that involves directly injecting malicious Google Chrome extensions onto victims’ Windows machines via the abuse of Google’s cloud synching function. The goal of the recently-identified campaign is to manipulate data in internal w...

Zerologon Attacks Against Microsoft DCs Snowball in a Week

A spike in exploitation attempts against the Microsoft vulnerability CVE-2020-1472, known as the Zerologon bug, continues to plague businesses. That’s according to researchers from Cisco Talos, who warned that cybercriminals are redoubling their efforts to trigger the elevation-of-privilege bug i...

Firefox Zero-Day Flaws Exploited in the Wild Get Patched

Mozilla patched two Firefox browser zero-day vulnerabilities actively being exploited in the wild. The flaws, both use-after-free bugs, have been part of “targeted attacks in the wild,” according to a Mozilla Foundation security advisory posted Friday. Both bugs have critical ratings and allow...

Intel Warns of Critical Info-Disclosure Bug in Security Engine

A critical security bug in the Intel Converged Security and Manageability Engine CSME could allow escalation of privilege, denial of service or information disclosure. The details are included in a bug advisory that in total covers 77 vulnerabilities, 67 of which were found by internal Intel staf...

Google July Android Security Bulletin Fixes 3 Critical RCE Bugs

Google has released fixes for three critical remote code execution bugs in the media framework of its Android operating system. These flaws could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code. The flaws are part of Google’s July Android Security Bulletin, which included fixes for 12 critical...

Finding Beauty in the IT Architecture

I have a confession to make. I’m a sucker for good architecture. Visiting places like Singapore, London, Rome, Buenos Aires, and New York City, I quickly find myself gravitating towards beautiful archways, spires, and even the voids used in designing some of the world’s most amazing buildings. I...

Critical WinRAR Flaw Found Actively Being Exploited

A critical 19-year-old WinRAR vulnerability disclosed last week has now been spotted actively being exploited in a spam campaign spreading malware. The campaign, discovered by researchers with 360 Threat Intelligence Center, takes advantage of a path-traversal WinRAR vulnerability, which could...

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft Kills Pwn2Own Browser Bug

The Microsoft Patch Tuesday train rolled into town today, dropping off a massive 10 security bulletins with fixes for at least 34 documented vulnerabilities. Three of the bulletins are rated “critical” because of the risk of remote code execution attacks. Affected products include the Windows...

Student Loan Breach Exposes 2.5M Records

EdFinancial and the Oklahoma Student Loan Authority OSLA are notifying over 2.5 million loanees that their personal data was exposed in a data breach. The target of the breach was Nelnet Servicing, the Lincoln, Neb.-based servicing system and web portal provider for OSLA and EdFinancial, accordin...

Supply Chain Security Is Not a Problem…It’s a Predicament

In the late 19th century, many large cities faced an unpleasant predicament due to too much horse manure piling up in the streets. Aside from the direct impact of the odors and unsightly excrement, it indirectly poisoned the water supply and accelerated the spread of disease. There were some ways...

DarkSide Wanted Money, Not Disruption from Colonial Pipeline Attack

Threat actors behind last week’s Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack that crippled a major U.S. oil pipeline said that financial gain–not political, economic or social disruption–is the goal of their nefarious activities, vowing to choose their targets more carefully in the future. Join Threatpos...

Two Zoom Zero-Day Flaws Uncovered

UPDATE Two zero-day flaws have been uncovered in Zoom’s macOS client version, according to researchers. The web conferencing platform vulnerabilities could give local, unprivileged attackers root privileges, and allow them to access victims’ microphone and camera. As of Thursday, the two...