NVIDIA Patches High-Severity GeForce Spoof-Attack Bug

NVIDIA gaming graphics software called GeForce Experience, bundled with the chipmaker’s popular GTX GPU, is flawed and opens the door to a remote attacker that can exploit the bug to steal or manipulate data on a vulnerable Windows computer. NVIDIA notified customers late last week of the bug and...

Google Patches Critical Wi-Fi and Audio Bugs in Android Handsets

Google patched ten critical bugs as part of its December Android Security Bulletin. The worst of the bugs was tied to the Android media framework component and gives attacker remote control of vulnerable handsets. Google did not reveal the technical specifics of the critical flaw, tracked as...

QNAP High-Severity Flaws Plague NAS Systems

QNAP Systems is warning of high-severity flaws that plague its top-selling network attached storage NAS devices. If exploited, the most severe of the flaws could allow attackers to remotely take over NAS devices. NAS devices are systems that consist of one or more hard drives that are constantly...

Sophisticated Android Ransomware Executes with the Home Button

A fresh variant of a sophisticated Android ransomware known as MalLocker locks up mobile devices – surfacing its ransom note when a user hits the Home button. According to research from Microsoft, MalLocker is spreading via malicious website downloads disguised as popular apps, cracked games or...

Spear-Phishing Attack Spoofs EE To Target Executives

Researchers warn of an ongoing spear-phishing attack mimicking a well-known telecommunications company, EE, to snatch up corporate executives’ credentials and payment details. Highly targeted emails have been sent to a few executives – including one at a leading financial firm – purporting to be...

Emerging MakeFrame Skimmer from Magecart Sets Sights on SMBs

Researchers have observed a new skimmer from the prolific Magecart Group that has been actively harvesting payment-card data from 19 different victim websites, mainly belonging to small- and medium-sized businesses SMBs, for several months. RiskIQ researchers first discovered the skimmer, dubbed...

Microsoft Patches 26 Critical Bugs in Big March Update

Microsoft tackled 115 bug fixes as part of its March Patch Tuesday update – 26 rated critical and 88 rated medium severity. The bugs patched span its product catalog, from Azure DevOps to Windows 10. This month’s haul is notable in its quantity and that there are only a few stand-out bugs causing...

Maze Ransomware Behind Pensacola Attack, Data Breach Looms

The Maze ransomware is likely the culprit behind the recently reported cyberattack on Pensacola, Fla. that occurred earlier this week, which downed systems citywide. In an email sent to county commissioners, IT administrators said that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said that the...

LenovoEMC Storage Gear Leaks Sensitive Financial Data

Researchers are warning of a vulnerability in LenovoEMC storage hardware and legacy Iomega-branded network attached storage NAS appliances that could lead to a breach of data stored on the devices. The bug, disclosed Tuesday by Lenovo, is rated high-severity and can be triggered via specially...

How I Got Here: Katie Moussouris

Dennis Fisher talks with Katie Moussouris of Microsoft about her childhood exploits with Commodore 64 programming, ignoring her Barbies, growing up as a hacker, her days as a pen tester and the challenges of working on security at Microsoft. Download: 12moussouris.mp3 Microsoft image via Robert...

Microsoft Finally Shuts Door on ATL Bugs

Computerworld’s Gregg Keizer brings word that this week’s record-setting batch of patches from Microsoft actually closed the book on the vexing ATL code library issues that first surfaced in July 2009. Keizer quotes Ryan Smith, one of the hackers credited with discovering the flaw, as saying that...

Attackers Pounce on Microsoft FTP in IIS Vulnerability

Less than a week after the publication of exploit code for a gaping hole in the FTP Service in Microsoft Internet Information Services IIS, attackers are launching what is described as “limited attacks” against Windows users. Microsoft has updated its security advisory to warn of the new attacks...

Most Email Security Approaches Fail to Block Common Threats

On overwhelming number of security teams believe their email security systems to be ineffective against the most serious inbound threats, including ransomware. That’s according to a survey of business customers using Microsoft 365 for email commissioned by Cyren and conducted by Osterman Research...

Toyota to Close Japan Plants After Suspected Cyberattack

What was potentially a cyberattack hit one of Toyota’s parts suppliers, causing the company to move to shut down about a third of the company’s global production tomorrow, the company announced on Monday. Toyota doesn’t know how long the 14 plants will be unplugged. The closure will mean that the...

Pair of Google Chrome Zero-Day Bugs Actively Exploited

Google has addressed two zero-day security bugs that are being actively exploited in the wild. As part of the internet giant’s latest stable channel release version 93.0.4577.82 for Windows, Mac and Linux, it fixed 11 total vulnerabilities, all of them rated high-severity. The two zero days are...

Postmortem on U.S. Census Hack Exposes Cybersecurity Failures

Threat actors exploited an unpatched Citrix flaw to breach the network of the U.S. Census Bureau in January in an attack that was ultimately halted before a backdoor could be installed or sensitive data could be stolen, according to a report by a government watchdog organization. However,...

Critical Jira Flaw in Atlassian Could Lead to RCE

Atlassian has dropped a patch for a critical vulnerability in many versions of its Jira Data Center and Jira Service Management Data Center products, which can lead to arbitrary code execution. Atlassian is a platform that’s used by 180,000 customers to engineer software and manage projects, and...

Japanese Aerospace Firm Kawasaki Warns of Data Breach

Japanese aerospace company Kawasaki Heavy Industries on Monday warned of a security incident that may have led to unauthorized access of customer data. According to the company’s data breach notification, it first discovered unauthorized parties accessing a server in Japan, from an overseas offic...

PGMiner, Innovative Monero-Mining Botnet, Surprises Researchers

An innovative Linux-based cryptocurrency mining botnet has been uncovered, which exploits a disputed PostgreSQL remote code-execution RCE vulnerability to compromise database servers. The malware is unusual and completely novel in a host of ways, researchers said. According to researchers at Palo...

German COVID-19 Contact-Tracing Vulnerability Allowed RCE

A security vulnerability in the infrastructure underlying Germany’s official COVID-19 contact-tracing app, called the Corona-Warn-App CWA, would have allowed pre-authenticated remote code execution RCE. Researcher Alvaro Muñoz wrote in a report this week that he and his team at GitHub Security La...

Nation-State Attackers Actively Target COVID-19 Vaccine-Makers

Three nation-state cyberattack groups are actively attempting to hack companies involved in COVID-19 vaccine and treatment research, researchers said. Russia’s APT28 Fancy Bear, the Lazarus Group from North Korea and another North Korea-linked group dubbed Cerium are believed to be behind the...

WordPress, Apache Struts Attract the Most Bug Exploits

WordPress and Apache Struts vulnerabilities were the most-targeted by cybercriminals in web and application frameworks in 2019 – while input-validation bugs edged out cross-site scripting XSS as the most-weaponized weakness type. That’s according to the RiskSense Spotlight Report, which analyzed...

Ransomware Attack Downs Hosting Service SmarterASP.NET

SmarterASP.NET, a popular web hosting provider with more than 440,480 customers, has been hit with a ransomware attack that took down its customers’ websites that were hosted by the company. The company on Monday said it is in the process of recovering impacted data. SmarterASP.NET offers shared...

Imperva: Data Breach Caused by Amazon Cloud Misconfiguration

Imperva, the security vendor, said this week that a misconfiguration of an Amazon Web Services AWS cloud instance allowed hackers to exfiltrate information on customers using its Cloud Web Application Firewall WAF product. Formerly known as Incapsula, the Cloud WAF analyzes requests coming into...

Ransomware Attacks Leave U.S. Hospitals Turning Away Patients

A rash of ransomware attacks this week targeted hospitals in the U.S. and Australia. The cyberattacks froze the computer systems of several medical facilities, to the point where they needed to turn away new patients and even cancel surgery appointments. A ransomware attack, reported on Tuesday,...

200K Sign Petition Against Equifax Data Breach Settlement

Consumers are furious over what they view as an unfair settlement between the U.S. government and Equifax over the latter’s now-infamous 2017 data leak–so much so that more than 200,000 of them so far have signed a petition against the deal. “Don’t let Equifax escape liability” is the title of th...

News Wrap: Emotet's Return, U.S. Vs. Snowden, Physical Pen Testers Arrested

From the re-emergence of an infamous malware, to a new lawsuit against Edward Snowden, Threatpost editors Lindsey O’Donnell and Tara Seals break down this week’s top news. Top stories include: Emotet, the notorious banking trojan, is back after a summer hiatus. The U.S. sued Edward Snowden over h...

LastPass Fixes Bug That Leaks Credentials

LastPass has patched a bug that could potentially allow malicious websites to access a web user’s credentials from a previously visited site. Tavis Ormandy, a vulnerability researcher from Google Project Zero, discovered the flaw in the LastPass password manager and published it on the project’s...

Google Announces DNS over HTTPS 'General Availability'

Google announced general availability of its Public DNS-over-HTTPS service Wednesday, based on the Internet Engineering Task Force’s RFC 8484 standard. The move is a culmination of three years of Google fine-tuning DNS over HTTPS, otherwise known as DoH. “Today we are announcing general...

WordPress Plugin Has Unpatched Privilege Escalation Flaw, Warn Researchers

A WordPress plugin, Slick Popup, has a serious privilege escalation flaw – and it has yet to be patched. WordPress plugin Slick Popup, which has 7,000 active installs and provides a tool for displaying the Contact Form 7 as a popup on WordPress websites. However, researchers with Wordfence said...

Tales of WordPress Plugin Insecurity Overblown Researchers Say

The insecurity of WordPress plugins has been well documented, especially over the last year, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not as bad as it seems, experts claim. Hendrik Buchwald, a researcher and cofounder of RIPS, a German firm that performs static source code analysis, recently combe...

Microsoft Brings HSTS to Windows 7 and 8.1

In the midst of a relatively light Patch Tuesday, Microsoft yesterday introduced an extra measure of security for users running Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 machines: HSTS. Short for HTTP Strict Transport Security, HSTS is a browser header that forces any sessions sent over...

Microsoft to Fix Broken Patch Tuesday Security Update

Microsoft is still hammering away at a fix for a security update released last week that caused a small number of computers to crash and blue screen. “We are aware of some issues related to the recent updates and we are working on a fix,” a Microsoft representative today told Threatpost. MS14-045...

Microsoft EMET 5.0 Technical Preview Released

SAN FRANCISCO – Enterprises beat up by wave after wave of Java exploits and calls to disable the platform may soon have some relief in sight. Microsoft’s free Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit will soon have a new feature that allows users to configure where plug-ins, especially those target...

Windows XP End of Life a Security Milestone

Forget for a moment the impending cryptoapocalypse because of aging and/or subverted encryption standards and algorithms. Microsoft this week put out the word on the scourge that is Windows XP. The latest Microsoft Security Intelligence Report goes to great pains to encourage users to move off th...

Researchers Uncover Targeted Attack Campaign Using Android Malware

Android attacks have become all the rage in the last year or two, and targeted attacks against political activists in Tibet, Iran and other countries also have been bubbling up to the surface more and more often lately. Now those two trends have converged with the discovery of a targeted attack...

Inside the 1,000 Red October Cyberespionage Malware Modules

The Red October espionage malware campaign is providing security researchers with a deep dive into the complexity of targeted attacks, which in this case made use of more than 1,000 malware modules for everything from reconnaissance on targets to exfiltration of data to command and control server...

Microsoft Warns Users About ChapCrack Tool Availability

Microsoft is warning customers about the availability of the ChapCrack tool that Moxie Marlinspike built to crack the VPN credentials for systems built on MS-CHAPv2 protocol. The company said that while it’s not aware of any active attacks using the tool, customers can protect themselves by...

Researcher Will Demo Bypass of Windows Service Isolation Feature

A prominent researcher will use an upcoming security conference in Buenos Aires to demonstrate an exploit that allows hackers to bypass the Windows Service Isolation feature, despite Microsoft’s efforts to close the security loophole. Security researcher Cesar Cerrudo of Argeniss Information...

Cyberattackers Cook Up Employee Personal Data Heist for Meyer

Meyer Corp., maker of Farberware and the largest cookware and bakeware distributor in the U.S., has begun notifying 2,747 employees that a cyberattack that occurred on Oct. 25 compromised their personal data. Meyer filed a notice with the state of Maine disclosing the breach, which it discovered ...

Windows 10 Drive-By RCE Triggered by Default URI Handler

Researchers have discovered a drive-by remote code-execution RCE bug in Windows 10 via Internet Explorer 11/Edge Legacy – the EdgeHTML-based browser that’s currently the default browser on Windows 10 PCs – and Microsoft Teams. According to a report posted Tuesday by Positive Security, the...

Fortress Home Security Open to Remote Disarmament

A pair of vulnerabilities in the Fortress S03 WiFi Home Security System could allow cyberattackers to remotely disarm the system, leaving homes open to unlawful entry. The Fortress platform is a consumer-grade home security system that allows users to mix and match various sensors, IP cameras and...

Cloud Attacks Are Bypassing MFA, Feds Warn

The Feds are warning that cybercriminals are bypassing multi-factor authentication MFA and successfully attacking cloud services at various U.S. organizations. According to an alert issued Wednesday by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA, there have been “several recent...

Netgear Won't Patch 45 Router Models Vulnerable to Serious Flaw

UPDATE Netgear will not patch 45 router models that are vulnerable to a high-severity remote code execution flaw, the router company revealed last week. However, the company says that routers that won’t receive updates are outdated or have reached EOL End of Life. The remote code execution...

High-Severity Flaws Plague Intel Graphics Drivers

Intel has issued security patches for six high-severity vulnerabilities in its Windows graphics drivers which, if exploited, could enable escalation of privilege, denial of service DoS and information disclosure. The graphics driver is software that controls how graphic components work with the...

Dell, HP Memory-Access Bugs Open Attacker Path to Kernel Privileges

Vulnerabilities in Dell and HP laptops could allow an attacker to access information and gain kernel privileges via the devices’ Direct Memory Access DMA capability. DMA is a processing-efficiency approach for peripherals such as PCI cards or network interface cards that, as the name suggests,...

Email Voted a Weak Link for Election Security, with DMARC Lagging

As the 2020 Presidential election looms closer in the United States, a key focus will be on securing election infrastructure to prevent tampering. In a recent analysis, researchers found that email remains a potential weak link, with most counties failing to implement DMARC protections. DMARC whi...

Black Friday Shoppers Targeted By Scams and Fake Domains

Black Friday and Cyber Monday-related scams are nothing new — but researchers warn that this year, they are seeing an uptick in scams using more sophisticated methods to lure users to hand over their payment data. Research released Tuesday by ZeroFOX uncovered some of the threats that attackers a...

Cisco Fixes Critical Flaw in Wireless VPN, Firewall Routers

Cisco is urging customers to update their wireless VPN and firewall routers, after patching a critical vulnerability that could allow unauthenticated, remote attackers to execute arbitrary code. The vulnerability, CVE-2019-1663, has a CVSS score of 9.8 and impacts the Cisco RV110W Wireless-N VPN...

'Cloudborne' IaaS Attack Allows Persistent Backdoors in the Cloud

An attack scenario affecting various cloud providers could allow an attacker to implant persistent backdoors for data theft into bare-metal cloud servers, which would be able to remain intact as the cloud infrastructure moves from customer to customer. This opens the door to a wide array of attac...