Microsoft to Release Emergency Fix for ASP.NET DoS Flaw

UPDATED Microsoft on Thursday plans to release an emergency out-of-band update to address a vulnerability in ASP.NET that could allow an attacker to consume all of the resources on a vulnerable server with a single specially designed HTTP request. The vulnerability affects a wide range of Web...

Ken "Skywing" Johnson joins Microsoft security team

Microsoft has hired yet another well-known security researcher to join its ever-growing team of exploit and defense experts. This time it’s Ken Johnson, known in the hacker world as Skywing. Johnson is known as an expert on debugging and reverse engineering, and has done a tremendous amount of wo...

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...

VMware Warns of Ransomware-Friendly Bug in vCenter Server

VMware has released a security update that includes patches for 19 CVE-numbered vulnerabilities that affect the company’s vCenter Server virtualization management platform and its hybrid Cloud Foundation platform for managing VMs and orchestrating containers. They’re all serious, but one –...

FIN8 Targets US Bank With New ‘Sardonic’ Backdoor

The financially motivated FIN8 cybergang used a brand-new backdoor – dubbed Sardonic by the Bitdender researchers who first spotted it – in attempted but unsuccessful breaches of networks belonging to two unidentified U.S. financial organizations. It’s a nimble newcomer, researchers wrote: “The...

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,...

DanaBot Malware Roars Back into Relevancy

Researchers are warning that a new fourth version of the DanaBot banking trojan has surfaced after months of mysteriously going quiet. The latest variant, still under analysis by researchers, is raising concerns given the number of past DanaBot effective campaigns. From May 2018 to June 2020,...

Wiper Malware Called "Coronavirus" Spreads Among Windows Victims

A new Windows malware has emerged that makes disks unusable by overwriting the master boot record MBR. It takes its cue from the COVID-19 pandemic, calling itself simply “Coronavirus.” Overwriting the MBR is the same trick that the infamous NotPetya wiper malware used in 2017 in a campaign that...

Critical, Unpatched 'MDhex' Bugs Threaten Hospital Devices

A collection of six cybersecurity vulnerabilities in a range of GE Healthcare devices for hospitals has been discovered. Dubbed “MDhex” by the researchers at CyberMDX who discovered them, the bugs would allow attackers to disable the devices, harvest personal health information PHI, change alarm...

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...

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...

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...

Tap 'n Ghost Attack Creatively Targets Android Devices

Researchers have created a novel proof-of-concept PoC attack named Tap ‘n Ghost, which targets Near Field Communication NFC-enabled Android smartphones. This allows an attacker to take control of a target phone simply by tricking the victim into placing their handset on a specially crafted surfac...

Adobe Addresses Critical Adobe Flash Player, Acrobat Reader Flaws

Adobe has issued patches for critical flaws across its Adobe Flash Player and Acrobat Reader products, which could enable arbitrary code execution. Overall, the company fixed 87 vulnerabilities across Acrobat and Reader, Flash Player and Adobe Media Encoder as part of its regularly-scheduled...

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...

RSAC 2019: 58% of Orgs Have Unfilled Cyber Positions

SAN FRANCISCO – Much has been made of the cybersecurity workforce gap, and it appears to be a persistent issue: A full 69 percent of respondents in a recent survey said that they have cybersecurity teams that are understaffed. According to ISACA’s State of Cybersecurity 2019 survey, released at t...

What are Data Manipulation Attacks, and How to Mitigate Against Them

Conventional wisdom says that once an attacker is in the system, moving laterally from network to network, the damage is already done. The adversary has found a way in and more than likely identified the data they’re after. They simply need to exfiltrate it, the last step of the kill chain, to la...

Cryptojacking Campaign Exploits Drupal Bug, Over 400 Websites Attacked

UPDATE – Hundreds of websites running on the Drupal content management system – including those of the San Diego Zoo and the National Labor Relations Board – have been targeted by a malicious cryptomining campaign taking advantage of unpatched and recently revealed vulnerabilities. The attacks,...

OpenSSL Patches High-Severity OCSP Bug, Mitigates SWEET32 Attack

A vulnerability in the OpenSSL implementation of the Online Certificate Status Protocol OCSP was patched this week, closing a denial-of-service weakness in affected servers. The patch was the most severe of 14 released yesterday by OpenSSL. OCSP is an alternative in many cases to Certificate...

China APT Gang Targets Hong Kong Media via Dropbox

An APT gang linked to China and alleged to be responsible for targeted attacks against foreign governments and ministries, has now pointed its focus inward at China’s autonomous territory Hong Kong. An August attack against several media companies in Hong Kong was carried out shortly after a...

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...

Microsoft's SDL Expands Beyond Redmond

It’s been more than 10 years now since Microsoft began the initiative that would eventually become Trustworthy Computing, and while the effects it’s had inside the company have been well documented, the utility and adoption of the Security Development Lifecycle by outside organizations and...

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...

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...

Starlink Successfully Hacked Using $25 Modchip

A Belgian security researcher has successfully hacked the SpaceX operated Starlink satellite-based internet system using a homemade circuit board that cost around $25 to develop, he revealed at Black Hat. Lennert Wouters revealed a voltage fault injection attack on a Starlink User Terminal UT—or...

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...

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...

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...

Microsoft Rushes Fix for ‘PetitPotam’ Attack PoC

Microsoft was quick to respond with a fix to an attack dubbed “PetitPotam” that could force remote Windows systems to reveal password hashes that could then be easily cracked. To thwart an attack, Microsoft recommends system administrators stop using the now deprecated Windows NT LAN Manager NTLM...

Critical Bug in VMWare Carbon Black Allows Takeover

A critical security vulnerability in the VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload appliance would allow privilege escalation and the ability to take over the administrative rights for the solution. The bug CVE-2021-21982 ranks 9.1 out of 10 on the CVSS vulnerability-severity scale. The VMware Carbon...

Energy Giant Shell Is Latest Victim of Accellion Attacks

Energy giant Royal Dutch Shell is the latest victim of a series of attacks on users of the Accellion legacy File Transfer Appliance FTA product, which already has affected numerous companies and been attributed to the FIN11 and the Clop ransomware gang. “Shell has been impacted by a data-security...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Driver Disaster: Over 40 Signed Drivers Can’t Pass Security Muster

LAS VEGAS – An insecure driver can be just what a hacker needs to get its foot in the door to a Windows environment. Compromised drivers are at the heart of massive security headaches ranging from recent Slingshot APT campaigns and LoJax malware. That’s why researchers at Eclypsium are sounding t...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Facebook Releases osquery to Open Source

Facebook is in a giving mood today. The social networking giant announced today that it will release to open source a framework that detects and logs state changes in an operating system likely caused by an attack or performance meltdown. It also announced that it will hand out up to $300,000 nex...

New Trojan For Mac Used In Attacks On Tibetan NGOs

The security firm Alienvault reports that its own research on phishing attacks against non governmental organizations supporting the Tibetan Government in Exile is now being used as bait in a new round of phishing attacks on those same NGOs. The firm warned the public on Monday about a round of...

Inside Microsoft's July Security Patch Batch

Microsoft released six security bulletins today — three rated Critical and three rated Important. Two of the issues are being actively exploited on the Internet and four of the issues are client-side vulnerabilities, which means the exploit can only occur if a user visits an evil website or opens...

Apple Patches Zero-Day Flaw in MacOS that Allows for Sneaky Screenshots

Apple has patched a critical bug in macOS that could be exploited to take screenshots of someone’s computer and capture images of their activity within applications or on video conferences without that person knowing. Apple addressed the vulnerability—discovered by researchers at enterprise...

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...

Tesla Hacked and Stolen Again Using Key Fob

Researchers have demonstrated for the third time how hacking into the key fob of a Tesla can allow someone to access and steal the car in minutes. The new attack again shows a security vulnerability in the keyless entry system of one of the most expensive electric vehicles EVs on the market...

Adobe Patches 18 Critical Flaws in Out-Of-Band Update

Adobe patched 18 critical vulnerabilities Tuesday impacting key products Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Premiere Rush and Audition. The out-of-band fixes address vulnerabilities allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code, if bugs are exploited. In its security bulletin Adobe...

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...