MS Denies Windows 7 Backdoor Allegations

Microsoft today denied that it has built a backdoor into Windows 7, a concern that surfaced yesterday after a senior National Security Agency NSA official testified before Congress that the agency had worked on the operating system. “Microsoft has not and will not put ‘backdoors’ into Windows,” a...

Microsoft explains how ActiveX in Office is abused by attackers

On the Microsoft Secure Windows Iniative blog, software engineer Chengyun discusses the default behaviour of ActiveX controls embedded in Office documents. The software giant also provides information on how can an attacker abuse ActiveX and how Office users can change the behavior of ActiveX...

Fake Reservation Links Prey on Weary Travelers

A longtime threat group identified as TA558 has ramped up efforts to target the travel and hospitality industries. After a lull in activity, believed tied to COVID-related travel restrictions, the threat group has ramped up campaigns to exploit an uptick in travel and related airline and hotel...

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...

Log4J-Related RCE Flaw in H2 Database Earns Critical Warning

Researchers discovered a bug related to the Log4J logging library vulnerability, which in this case opens the door for an adversary to execute remote code on vulnerable systems. However, this flaw does not pose the same risk as the previously identified in Log4Shell, they said. JFrog security...

Apple Releases Urgent iOS Updates to Patch New Zero-Day Bug

Apple on Monday rushed out a security update for iOS 15.0.2 and iPadOS 15.0.2 to fix a remote code-execution RCE zero-day vulnerability that’s being actively exploited. Within hours, a security researcher had picked the bug apart and published both proof-of-concept code and an explanation of the...

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...

Ransomware Attack Foils IoT Giant Sierra Wireless

A ransomware attack on leading internet-of-things IoT manufacturer Sierra Wireless this week ground its production activity to a halt and froze various other internal operations. The Canadian multinational manufacturer creates a broad array of communications equipment – from gateways to routers,...

Microsoft Wraps Up a Lighter Patch Tuesday for the Holidays

Microsoft has addressed 58 CVEs nine of them critical for its December 2020 Patch Tuesday update. This brings the computing giant’s patch tally to 1,250 for the year – well beyond 2019’s 840. This month’s security bugs affect Microsoft Windows, Edge EdgeHTML-based, ChakraCore, Microsoft Office an...

Laser-Based Hacking from Afar Goes Beyond Amazon Alexa

Imagine someone hacking into an Amazon Alexa device using a laser beam and then doing some online shopping using that person account. This is a scenario presented by a group of researchers who are exploring why digital home assistants and other sensing systems that use sound commands to perform...

Magecart Credit-Card Skimmer Adds Telegram as C2 Channel

The e-commerce card-skimming landscape has a new wrinkle: Cybercriminals affiliated with the Magecart collective are using encrypted messaging service Telegram as a channel for sending stolen credit-card information back to its command-and-control C2 servers. That’s according to researchers who...

Microsoft Warns of Critical Windows Zero-Day Flaws

Microsoft is warning of critical zero-day flaws in its Windows operating system that could enable remote code execution. The unpatched flaws are being exploited by attackers in “limited, targeted” attacks, the company said. According to Microsoft, two remote code execution vulnerabilities exist i...

DeathRansom Campaign Linked to Malware Cornucopia

An ongoing DeathRansom malware campaign has been found by researchers to be part of a larger collection of malicious offensives, all carried out by an actor going by the nickname “scat01.” According to Artem Semenchenko and Evgeny Ananin at FortiGuard Labs, evidence found on Russian underground...

Religious Website Data Exposed for Months

Religious website service Clover Sites exposed customer data for at least six to seven months, with the dataset found twice in two separate, insecure cloud databases. Clover offers a content management system for building and managing faith-based websites, with a “Clover Donations” module for...

New Reductor Malware Hijacks HTTPS Traffic

Researchers have discovered a new malware strain, dubbed Reductor, that allows hackers to manipulate Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure HTTPS traffic by tweaking a browser’s random numbers generator, used to ensure a private connection between the client and server. Once infected, Reductor is use...

Unpatched Bug Under Active Attack Threatens WordPress Sites with XSS

An unpatched vulnerability in the Rich Reviews plugin for WordPress is putting an estimated 16,000 sites in danger of stored cross-site scripting XSS attacks. Sites running the plugin are vulnerable to unauthenticated plugin option updates, which can be used to deliver malware payloads; and...

Amazon Employees Given 'Broad Access' to Personal Alexa Info

Employees at Amazon can access geolocation information for Alexa users, according to reports – thus uncovering their home addresses and even satellite pictures of their houses generated from a service such as Google Earth. Alexa is the built-in voice assistant shipped with devices like Amazon Ech...

RSA Conference 2019: NIST's Privacy Framework Starts to Take Shape

Data privacy has been thrust into the limelight with the passage of the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe last year and a string of high-profile consumer privacy snafus. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has plans to help companies address data privacy with the...

Necurs Botnet Evolves to Hide in the Shadows, with New Payloads

Necurs, the prolific and globally dispersed spam and malware distribution botnet, has been spotted using a fresh hiding technique to avoid detection while quietly adding more bots to its web. According to research from Black Lotus Labs, which is telecom and ISP provider CenturyLink’s network...

As End of Life Nears, More Than Half of Websites Still Use PHP V5

Almost 62 percent of all websites are still running PHP version 5 – even as version 5.6 of the server-side scripting language inches toward an ominous end-of-life. Hypertext Preprocessor PHP, a programming language designed for use in web-based applications with HTML content, supports a wide...

Microsoft Plans to Disable SSLv3 in IE, All Online Services

Microsoft is planning to disable support for the weak SSLv3 protocol in Internet Explorer at some undetermined point in the future, and also will remove support for it in the company’s online services soon. The security and utility of SSLv3 has been an issue for a long time, but it came into...

Popular Sports Site Goal.com Serves Malware

Goal.com, a popular football aka “soccer” for all us Yanks news site was hacked and found serving malware via drive-by-downloads between April 27 and 28, according to a post by Web security firm Armorize. In an analysis of the attack, Armorize researcher Wayne Huang suggests that a hacker...

Microsoft Yanks Buggy Windows Server Updates

Microsoft has yanked the Windows Server updates it issued on Patch Tuesday after admins found that the updates had critical bugs that break three things: They trigger spontaneous boot loops on Windows servers that act as domain controllers, break Hyper-V and render ReFS volume systems unavailable...

Navy Warship’s Facebook Page Hacked to Stream ‘Age of Empires’ Gaming

The official Facebook page of a destroyer-class Navy warship, the USS Kidd, has gone rogue: Someone has taken over the page in order to…stream Age of Empires play. Age of Empires is a real-time online multiplayer strategy game in which the objective is to advance one’s civilization. Players “buil...

MacOS Being Picked Apart by $49 XLoader Data Stealer

There’s a new version of the old FormBook form-stealer and keylogger that’s added Mac users to its hit list, and it’s selling like hotcakes on underground markets for as low as $49. It’s not only cheap; it’s easy. The data stealer is distributed in the form of malware-as-a-service MaaS and stands...

Critical Slack Bug Allows Access to Private Channels, Conversations

A critical vulnerability in the popular Slack collaboration app would allow remote code-execution RCE. Attackers could gain full remote control over the Slack desktop app with a successful exploit — and thus access to private channels, conversations, passwords, tokens and keys, and various...

IBM AI-Powered Data Management Software Subject to Simple Exploit

The IBM’s next-gen data-management software suffers from a shared-memory vulnerability that researchers said could lead to other threats — as demonstrated by a new proof-of-concept exploit for the bug. The IBM Db2 is a family of hybrid data-management products containing artificial intelligence,...

Attacks on Linksys Routers Trigger Mass Password Reset

UPDATE Home Linksys router users were targeted in a cyberattack that changed router settings, and redirected requests for specific webpages and domains to malicious Coronavirus-themed landing pages that were booby-trapped with malware. Researchers identified the attack last month, and earlier thi...

Data Breach Occurs at Agency in Charge of Secure White House Communications

Hackers have compromised the Department of Defense DoD agency in charge of securing and managing communications for the White House, leaking personally identifiable information PII of employees and leading to concerns over the safety of the communications of top-level U.S. officials in the run-up...

Popular Apps on Google Play Store Remain Unpatched

Most people think if they keep their mobile apps updated to the latest version, they also are patching for critical vulnerabilities. Not so, said researchers from Check Point Software, which discovered that outdated code—including known vulnerabilities—are still present in hundreds of popular app...

Tianfu Cup Round-Up: Safari, Chrome, D-Link Routers and Office 365 Successfully Hacked

Hackers over the weekend successfully compromised widely used software and hardware–including browsers Safari and Chrome, D-Link routers and the Office 365 suite–using zero-day vulnerabilities at the annual Tianfu Cup gathering. The hacking competition, held in Chengdu, China, is very similar to...

Double Vision: Stealthy Malware Dropper Delivers Dual RATs

A newly discovered initial-stage malware dropper has been discovered sneaking by antivirus products, with the ultimate goal of delivering a double-pronged whammy of RevengeRAT and WSH RAT payloads onto targeted Windows machines. A FortiGuard Labs team recently captured a sample file that had been...

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...

CISO/CIO: Get an iPad and Apple Watch with an App Monitoring your Security 24/7

If you are a CISO or CIO, you need to know what is going on with your organizational security. Together with that, you cannot afford to be inundated with alerts, messages and other data whenever something happens. On the one hand, you need to be in the know, because cyberattacks can occur at any...

Intel Patches High-Severity Flaw in Processor Diagnostic Tool

Intel has patched a high-severity vulnerability in its processor diagnostic tool, which could allow local attackers to launch several malicious attacks on affected devices, such as escalation of privilege or denial of service. The Intel Processor Diagnostic tool is a free product that allows user...

Mac Malware Pushed via Google Search Results, Masquerades as Flash Installer

Never-before-seen Mac malware, dubbed OSX/CrescentCore, has been discovered in the wild. The trojan, spotted on various websites masquerading as an Adobe Flash Player installer, drops malicious applications and browser extensions on victims’ systems when downloaded. OSX/CrescentCore is spread via...

Slack Bug Allows Remote File Hijacking, Malware Injection

A remotely exploitable vulnerability in the Windows desktop app version of the Slack collaboration platform has been uncovered, which allows attackers to alter where files from Slack are downloaded. Nefarious types could redirect the files to their own SMB server; and, they could manipulate the...

Lax Telco Security Allows Mobile Phone Hijacking and Redirects

As anyone who has called into a bank or utility provider lately knows, security for customer service routines – the prescribed ways in which support reps verify the identity of customers that call in – are being continually upgraded. Two-factor authentication, voice passwords, various security...

Users Urged to Uninstall WordPress Yuzo Plugin After Flaw Exploited

UPDATE Users of the popular Yuzo Related Posts plugin are being urged to uninstall the plugin after a flaw was discovered being exploited in the wild – putting tens of thousands of websites at risk. Yuzo Related Posts, which enables WordPress websites to display “related posts” segments, is...

Cisco Patches Critical ‘Default Password’ Bug

Cisco Systems is warning customers that a discovery tool for network devices can be accessed by a remote and unauthenticated attacker. The flaw could allow an adversary to log into the system and collect sensitive data tied to host operating systems and hardware. The disclosure is part of a Cisco...

Threatlist: Hackers Turn to Python as Attack Coding Language of Choice

Python was recently touted as on track to become the world’s most prevalent coding language, looking to swallow, as it were, the majority of the market share for developers. According to recent analysis, Python’s popularity also extends to black hats. Mirroring the findings around its use by code...

EternalBlue Exploit Spreading Gh0st RAT, Nitol

EternalBlue, the exploit used in the WannaCry ransomware outbreak, is now being leveraged to distribute the Nitol backdoor and Gh0st RAT malware. Security researchers at FireEye said, just as WannaCry criminals did, threat actors are leveraging the same Microsoft Server Message Block SMB protocol...

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...

End of Life Internet Explorer 8, 9, 10 Security Support

Anxiety was high around April 8, 2014 when Microsoft officially closed the door on security support for Windows XP. Many envisioned black hats worldwide stockpiling exploits waiting for the day when XP machines would be left permanently exposed. The anticipated malware apocalypse, however, never...

Microsoft Fixes BEAST SSL Bug in January Patch Tuesday

Microsoft on Tuesday patched the vulnerability in Windows that was exploited by the BEAST SSL attack tool developed by Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong last year. The patch is one of several rated important that was issued by Microsoft in January’s Patch Tuesday release, and there also was a critical...

Millions of Routers, IoT Devices at Risk from BotenaGo Malware

Newly surfaced malware that is difficult to detect and written in Google’s open-source programming language has the potential to exploit millions of routers and IoT devices, researchers have found. Discovered by researchers at AT&T AlienLabs, BotenaGo can exploit more than 30 different...

WordPress Sites Abused in Aggah Spear-Phishing Campaign

Threat actors are using compromised WordPress websites to target manufacturers across Asia with a new spear-phishing campaign that delivers the Warzone RAT, a commodity infostealer available widely for purchase on criminal forums, researchers have found. The threat group Aggah, believed to be...

Cisco Smart Switches Riddled with Security Holes

Cisco has flagged and patched several high-severity security vulnerabilities in its Cisco Small Business 220 Series Smart Switches that could allow session hijacking, arbitrary code execution, cross-site scripting and HTML injection. It also issued fixes for high-severity problems in the AnyConne...

Utah Ponders Making Online ‘Catfishing’ a Crime

Legislature introduced in Utah means it could soon be illegal there to pretend to be someone else when engaging in certain types of deceptive activities on the internet, a practice known as “catfishing.” The Online Impersonation Prohibition up for debate this week in the Utah House of...

Critical Cisco SD-WAN Bugs Allow RCE Attacks

Cisco is warning of multiple, critical vulnerabilities in its software-defined networking for wide-area networks SD-WAN solutions for business users. Cisco issued patches addressing eight buffer-overflow and command-injection SD-WAN vulnerabilities. The most serious of these flaws could be...