Fitbit Spyware Steals Personal Data via Watch Face

A wide-open app-building API would allow an attacker to build a malicious application that could access Fitbit user data, and send it to any server. Kev Breen, director of cyber threat research for Immersive Labs, created a proof-of-concept for just that scenario, after realizing that Fitbit...

HEH P2P Botnet Sports Dangerous Wiper Function

A freshly discovered botnet dubbed HEH by researchers is casting a wide net, looking to infect any and all devices that use Telnet on ports 23/2323. It’s particularly destructive: It contains code that wipes all data from infected systems. Perhaps ironically, its operators also have a penchant fo...

'Lamphone' Hack Uses Lightbulb Vibrations to Eavesdrop on Homes

Researchers have discovered a novel way to spy on conversations that are happening in houses from almost a hundred feet away. The hack stems simply from a lightbulb hanging in the home. The hack, dubbed “lamphone,” is performed by analyzing the tiny vibrations of a hanging lightbulb, which are...

Mean Time to Hardening: The Next-Gen Security Metric

On average, it takes an organization 15 times longer to close a vulnerability than it does for attackers to weaponize and exploit one. Seven days to weaponize and 102 days to patch. Let that sink in. Once a vulnerability is disclosed, it’s you against them in a race to either secure or exploit; a...

WhatsApp Remote Code Execution Triggered by Videos

Facebook has quietly patched a vulnerability in the popular WhatsApp messaging platform, which could be exploited to launch remote-code-execution or denial-of-service attacks on victims. Attackers can exploit the flaw merely by sending a target user a video — specifically, a specially crafted MP4...

Website, Know Thyself: What Code Are You Serving?

When we think of “securing our website” from attackers, we often think of securing against hooded figures somewhere in Eastern Europe working out of a smoky office above an illegal gambling den. Not only is that probably geographically insensitive, it’s also not necessarily the best way threat to...

Zappos Offers Users 10% Discount in 2012 Breach Settlement

Online retailer Zappos will give customers a 10 percent discount to its online store as settlement for a 2012 data breach that affected 24 million customers, while lawyers in the case will win $1.6 million in fees. The news shows customers once again getting the short end of the stick when it com...

Unencrypted Mobile Traffic on Tor Network Leaks PII

Unencrypted, sensitive and confidential user data originating from millions of mobile devices is carried on the Tor network every day. Now researchers say they have devised away to scoop up that data and create personal profiles for specific mobile users, that include GPS coordinates, web...

Mozilla Confirms Premium Firefox Browser With Security Features

Mozilla Corporation is launching a premium version of the Firefox browser that will tout improved security features such as virtual private network and secure cloud storage, according to CEO Chris Beard. In a Friday interview with German media publication T3N, Beard said that the premium service,...

Critical Flaws in Khan Academy Opened Door to Account Takeovers

Two critical cross-site request forgery CSRF flaws in educational non-profit Khan Academy’s website may have affected some users by allowing account takeover. Khan Academy, a non-profit learning organization, produces short lessons in the form of videos that can be accessed online. The two critic...

How the Dark Web Data Bazaar Fuels Enterprise Attacks

It seems every aspect of our lives is available to be found somewhere on the internet. And the information available isn’t simply embarrassing browsing histories but ranges from our medical histories to the logon credentials we use to access many of our online services. This is certainly a privac...

Adobe Fixes Two Critical Acrobat and Reader Flaws

Adobe on Thursday released unscheduled security updates for Adobe Acrobat and Reader for Windows and MacOS. The updates fix two critical vulnerabilities, CVE-2018-16011 and CVE-2018-19725. Successful exploitation of the flaws could lead to arbitrary code execution in the context of the current...

Apache Foundation Refutes Involvement in Equifax Breach

A group of developers behind Apache Struts, believed by some to be the culprit behind last week’s Equifax breach, took umbrage with those claims over the weekend. René Gielen, vice president of the Apache Struts Project Management Committee PMC at the Apache Software Foundation, wrote Saturday th...

Creaking Patch Tuesday's Viability Rests with Quality, Speed

Today is Patch Tuesday, the 11-year-old procession of security bulletins from Microsoft streamed out automatically to consumers of Windows Update, and pulled en masse by enterprise admins worldwide needing to test each for compatibility. This is how it’s been done since shortly after Bill Gates’...

NetTraveler Attackers Using PRISM Program as Bait

Never let it be said that attackers don’t keep up with the news. The crew behind the NetTraveler cyberespionage attacks is now using the news about the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program as bait in a new spear-phishing campaign. Security researcher Brandon Dixon of 9bplus came across a malicious...

Microsoft Plans To Fix 16 Vulnerabilities With July Patch Release

Microsoft has announced it will issue nine bulletins for its July Patch Tuesday release next week. Included in the update are three critical patches for security holes that, if left unaddressed, could result in remote code execution on vulnerable systems. In all, the Redmond, Washington company...

The Inside Story of the Kelihos Botnet Takedown

Earlier this week, Microsoft released an announcement about the disruption of a dangerous botnet that was responsible for spam messages, theft of sensitive financial information, pump-and-dump stock scams and distributed denial-of-service attacks. Kaspersky Lab played a critical role in this botn...

Hackers for Hire: Adversaries Employ ‘Cyber Mercenaries’

A for-hire cybercriminal group is feeling the talent-drought in tech just like the rest of the sector and has resorted to recruiting so-called “cyber-mercenaries” to carry out specific illicit hacks that are part of larger criminal campaigns. Dubbed Atlas Intelligence Group A.I.G., the cybergang...

MFA Glitch Leads to 6K+ Coinbase Customers Getting Robbed

The accounts of at least 6,000 Coinbase customers were robbed of funds after attackers bypassed the cryptocurrency exchange’s multi-factor authentication MFA. According to a notification letter PDF – seen and posted by BleepingComputer, which first reported the story – that Coinbase sent to...

Hezbollah-Linked Lebanese Cedar APT Infiltrates Hundreds of Servers

Advanced persistent threat APT group Lebanese Cedar has compromised at least 250 public-facing servers since early 2020, researchers said, with its latest malware. The group has added new features to its custom “Caterpillar” webshell and the “Explosive RAT” remote access trojan RAT, both of which...

Air-Gap Attack Turns Memory Modules into Wi-Fi Radios

Super-secure air-gapped computers are vulnerable to a new type of attack that can turn a PC’s memory module into a modified Wi-Fi radio, which can then transmit sensitive data at 100 bits-per-second wirelessly to nearly six feet away. Noted air-gap researcher Mordechai Guri created the...

Firefox Patches Critical Mystery Bug, Also Impacting Google Chrome

A Mozilla Foundation update to the Firefox web browser, released Tuesday, tackles one critical vulnerability and a handful of high-severity bugs. The update, released as Firefox version 84, is also billed by Mozilla as boosting the browser’s performance and adding native support for macOS hardwar...

New ‘CacheOut’ Attack Targets Intel CPUs

Researchers have identified a new speculative execution type attack, dubbed CacheOut, that could allow attackers to trigger data leaks from most Intel CPUs. The more serious of the two bugs, revealed Monday, is rated medium severity by Intel, who said fixes for both flaws are on the way. The more...

Hacker Leaks More Than 500K Telnet Credentials for IoT Devices

A hacker has published a list of credentials for more than 515,000 servers, home routers and other Internet of Things IoT devices online on a popular hacking forum in what’s being touted as the biggest leak of Telnet passwords to date, according to a published report. The leak—revealed in a repor...

Smart TVs, Subscription Services Leak Data to Facebook, Google

Smart TVs and so-called “over the top” OTT platforms are the latest IoT devices found “spying” on users and leaking sensitive data to companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Google and Netflix, according to two separate studies conducted by university researchers as well as independent research done ...

Massive Malvertising Campaign Reaches 100M Ads, Manipulates Supply Chain

A Hong Kong-based advertiser has mounted a snowballing campaign, compromising more than 100 million ads to date by forming relationships with legitimate ad platforms to gain access to premium audiences. From there, it often pushes malware onto victim machines. The malvertiser, operating under the...

Local-Privilege Escalation Flaw in Linux Kernel Allows Root Access

A local-privilege escalation vulnerability in the Linux kernel affects all current versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS, even in their default/minimal installations. It would allow an attacker to obtain full administrator privileges over the targeted system, and from there potentially...

Barracuda Networks Launches Bug Bounty Program

Following the lead of Mozilla and Google, Barracuda Networks is launching a bug bounty program that will pay out cash rewards for vulnerabilities found in the company’s own products. The move by Barracuda, a maker of mail security and data protection products, is the first such bug bounty program...

UK Cops Collar 7 Suspected Lapsus$ Gang Members

City of London Police have arrested seven people suspected of being connected to the Lapsus$ gang. The bust came within hours of Bloomberg having published a report about a teenage boy living at his mother’s house near Oxford, England who’s suspected of being the Lapsus$ mastermind. The police...

Kaseya Patches Zero-Days Used in REvil Attacks

Kaseya made good on its promise to issue patches by July 11. On Saturday, the company behind the Virtual System/Server Administrator VSA platform that got walloped by the REvil ransomware-as-a-service RaaS gang in a massive supply-chain attack released urgent updates to address critical zero-day...

VMware Sounds Ransomware Alarm Over Critical Severity Bug

VMware patched a critical bug impacting its vCenter Server platform with a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10. The company said the flaw could allow a remote attacker to exploit its products and take control of a company’s affected system. VMware went a step further on Tuesday, calling on IT securi...

Accellion FTA Zero-Day Attacks Tied to Clop, FIN11

Researchers have identified a set of threat actors dubbed UNC2546 and UNC2582 with connections to the FIN11 and the Clop ransomware gang as the cybercriminal group behind the global zero-day attacks on users of the Accellion legacy File Transfer Appliance product. Click to Register Multiple...

Elegant sLoad Carries Out Spying, Payload Delivery in BITS

A fresh analysis of the trojan sLoad sheds light on the growing trend of advanced malware “living off the land” of a targeted system and successfully evading detection and carrying out malicious activities. SLoad is a PowerShell downloader type of malware and is known for its impressive...

Retail Org Cyberattacks Set to Soar 20% in 2019 Holiday Season

As cybercriminals grow more sophisticated and holiday shoppers continue to flock online, researchers warn internet-based retailers could face a 20 percent uptick in cyberattacks this holiday season compared to last year. In the report titled “Holiday Season Cyber Heists”, released Thursday mornin...

Twitter Uses Phone Numbers, Emails to Sell Ads

Twitter has acknowledged that user phone numbers and email addresses gathered for security purposes, as part of its two-factor authentication policy, may have been used to sell ads. It calls the move an accident. The revelation is being widely criticized for its obvious breach of user privacy,...

News Wrap: GandCrab Operators Resurface, Utilities Firms Hit By LookBack Malware

On this week’s news wrap podcast, Threatpost editors Tara Seals and Lindsey O’Donnell break down the top news, including: Despite claiming they were retiring, GandCrab’s authors have been linked to the REvil/Sodinokibi ransomware via a technical analysis. A spearphishing campaign, first spotted i...

Payment Card Breach Hits 8 Cities Using Vulnerable Bill Portal

A vulnerable municipality payment software, which previously led to the breach of hundreds of thousands of payment cards in 2017, has been targeted once again. This time it was part of a breach involving of eight cities in August. The hack targets a flaw in Click2Gov software, which is used in...

Vulnerabilities in D-Link, Comba Routers Can Leak Credentials

Researchers have discovered vulnerabilities in D-Link and Comba Telecom routers that can leak passwords for the devices and have the potential to affect every user on networks that use them for access. Trustwave SpiderLabs Security Researcher Simon Kenin discovered the vulnerabilities—two in a...

DEF CON 2019: Researchers Demo Hacking Google Home for RCE

LAS VEGAS – The Tencent Blade Team of researchers demonstrated several ways they have developed to hack and run remote code on Google Home smart speakers. The hacks center around what is known as a Magellan vulnerability, which can be used to exploit the massively popular SQLite database engine...

Amazon Admits Alexa Voice Recordings Saved Indefinitely

Amazon has acknowledged that it retains the voice recordings and transcripts of customers’ interactions with its Alexa voice assistant indefinitely. The admission raises questions about how long companies should be able to save highly-personal data collected from voice assistant devices. After U....

Linux Command-Line Editors Vulnerable to High-Severity Bug

A high-severity bug impacting two popular command-line text editing applications, Vim and Neovim, allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary OS commands. Security researcher Armin Razmjou warned that exploiting the bug is as easy as tricking a target into clicking on a specially crafted text fil...

Verizon Data Breach Report: Espionage, C-Suite and Cloud Attacks on the Rise

Corporate espionage is on the rise as a motivation for cyberattacks, with a full quarter of all network compromises associated with reconnaissance and data exfiltration in the last 12 months. However, financially motivated attacks aren’t going anywhere; social-engineering attacks aimed at stealin...

Remote Code Implantation Flaw Found in Medtronic Cardiac Programmers

A flaw in Medtronic’s CareLink 2090 and CareLink Encore 29901 programmers, which are portable computer systems used to manage implanted cardiac devices in clinical settings, would have allowed remote code implantation over Medtronic’s dedicated Software Deployment Network SDN. The programmers are...

ShadowBrokers' Windows Zero-Days Already Patched

Hours after what was thought to be a damaging release of NSA hacking tools for Windows systems, Microsoft quelled some anxiety with a late-night statement on Friday that most of the vulnerabilities disclosed by the ShadowBrokers had already been patched. The biggest surprise was that the most...

Tools Used by Lamberts APT Found in Vault 7 Dumps

Links have emerged connecting targeted attacks going back a decade against high-profile government, industrial and financial targets around the world to hacking tools and documents leaked in the Vault 7 dump. Researchers at Kaspersky Lab today published a technical report on the activities of a...

Microsoft Releases EMET 5.0 Exploit Mitigation Tool

The latest version of Microsoft’s freely available stopgap against zero-day exploits was released today with two new exploit mitigations and a batch of new configuration options. The update to Microsoft’s Enhanced Mitigation Experience Tool kit, or EMET, comes six months after a technical preview...

Ryan Naraine on Exploit Mitigations and the MS12-020 RDP Bug

Dennis Fisher talks with Ryan Naraine about whether exploit mitigations such as ASLR and DEP really make any difference in preventing browser attacks and the seriousness of the MS12-020 RDP vulnerability that was patched during March’s Patch Tuesday release. Podcast audio courtesy of sykboy65...

Microsoft warning to XP users: Update Flash Player Now

Microsoft has shipped a security advisory with an urgent message for Windows XP users: Update your Flash Player immediately. The Adobe Flash Player 6 that ships by default in Windows XP is vulnerable to multiple code execution vulnerabilities that could lead to PC takeover attacks, according to t...

New Flaw in Microsoft Office Web Components Under Attack

From SearchSecurity Robert Westervelt Microsoft issued an advisory Monday, warning of a new vulnerability in Office Web Components being actively targeted by attackers. The Office Web Components allow users to view spreadsheets, charts and databases on the Web. Microsoft said the vulnerability is...

MSHTML Flaw Exploited to Attack Russian Dissidents

A spearphishing campaign targeting Russian citizens and government entities that are not aligned with the actions of the Russian government is the latest in numerous threats that have emerged since Russia invaded the Ukraine in February. Researchers from MalwareBytes identified a campaign last we...