Mysterious Silver Sparrow Malware Found Nesting on 30K Macs

Hard on the heels of a macOS adware being recompiled to target Apple’s new in-house processor, researchers have discovered a brand-new family of malware targeting the platform. Curiously, in the samples seen so far by analysts at Red Canary, the malware dubbed Silver Sparrow has been executing on...

Mimecast Confirms SolarWinds Hack as List of Security Vendor Victims Snowball

The Mimecast certificate compromise reported earlier in January is part of the sprawling SolarWinds supply-chain attack, the security firm has confirmed. Mimecast joins other cybersecurity vendors like CrowdStrike, Fidelis, FireEye, Malwarebytes, Palo Alto Networks and Qualys in being targeted in...

Feds: K-12 Cyberattacks Dramatically on the Rise

The feds have warned that cyberattacks on the K-12 education sector are ramping up alarmingly. In an alert from the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA, officials said that data from the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center MS-ISAC shows that in August...

Zoom Takes on Zoom-Bombers Following FTC Settlement

Zoom has once again upped its security controls to prevent “Zoom-bombing” and other cyberattacks on meetings. The news comes less than a week after Zoom settled with the Federal Trade Commission over false encryption claims. Two of the new features allow moderators to act as “club bouncers,” givi...

NSA Mass Surveillance Program Illegal, U.S. Court Rules

A U.S. federal appeals court ruled that the controversial National Security Agency NSA mass surveillance program exposed in 2013 was illegal – and may have even been unconstitutional. The call comes seven years after former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden outed the mass surveillan...

Twitter Confirms it was Hacked in an Unprecedented Cryptocurrency Scam

Twitter locked down thousands of verified accounts belonging to elite Twitter users and high-profile companies Wednesday afternoon in an effort to prevent hackers from perpetrating a massive cryptocurrency scam. The accounts fell victim to a compromise of the company’s internal systems by a group...

Adobe Discloses Critical Code-Execution Bugs in July Update

Adobe has released its scheduled July 2020 security updates, covering flaws in five different product areas: Creative Cloud Desktop; Media Encoder; Download Manager; Genuine Service; and ColdFusion. Four of the bugs are rated critical in severity, with the others ranked as important. Most of the...

Firefox Bug Opens iPhone AirPods to Third-Party Snooping

Five high-severity bugs were fixed in the Firefox web browser with the release of version 74 by the Mozilla Foundation on Tuesday. In addition, Mozilla reported a quirky moderate-severity flaw that allows hackers to target iPhone users and collect data tied to connected AirPods, if in use. In...

500 Malicious Chrome Extensions Impact Millions of Users

Researchers say that 500 Google Chrome browser extensions were discovered secretly uploading private browsing data to attacker-controlled servers, and redirecting victims to malware-laced websites. The browser extensions, all of which have now been removed, were downloaded millions of times from...

Avast Network Breached As Hackers Target CCleaner Again

Czech antivirus vendor Avast on Monday warned that hackers were able to access its internal network using a temporary VPN account. Avast said that it believes that the intrusion, first detected on Sept. 25, was likely targeting its CCleaner business in a supply chain attack. CCleaner, which is...

Strangest Phishing Lures of 2019: From Divorce Papers to Real Estate Decoys

Hackers aren’t just targeting infrastructure anymore – they’re actively playing on the emotions of people, whether it’s a consumer who desperately wants to lose weight to an employee who is nervous he will lose his job if he doesn’t do exactly what his boss says. That’s according to Proofpoint’s...

Malicious App on Google Play Tallies 100 Million Downloads

Call it the case of a good app gone bad! For some time, a handy PDF creator and optical character recognition OCR app available via Google Play offered users utility and convenience. The app, downloaded more than 100 million times, is called CamScanner and allows Android phone owners to snap a...

Oil and Gas Firms Targeted By New LYCEUM Threat Group

Researchers have identified a never-before-seen threat group targeting Middle East critical infrastructure organizations with novel malware, sent via spearphishing emails. The threat group, LYCEUM, was observed in 2019 sending spear phishing emails harboring malicious Microsoft Excel attachments ...

Tor Browser Issues Update for Critical System Takeover Flaw

Tor Browser has updated to version 8.5.2, to address a critical security flaw in Mozilla’s Firefox browser that is under active exploit in the wild. The critical flaw CVE-2019-11707 is a type confusion vulnerability in the Array.pop, which is an array method that is used in JavaScript objects in...

Gatekeeper Bug in MacOS Mojave Allows Malware to Execute

Researcher Filippo Cavallarin disclosed a bug in the macOS security feature Gatekeeper that allows malicious code execution on systems running the most recent version of Mojave 10.14.0. MacOS Gatekeeper is an Apple security feature that enforces code signing and verifies downloads and apps before...

Goodbye Passwords: Hello Identity Management

Keeping track of user names and passwords sounds easy, but it is not. In a world where protected network resources are accessed by employees on mobile devices, outside contractors, web applications and internet of things IoT devices – passwords just don’t cut it anymore. The stakes are high:...

'Unhackable' Biometric USB Offers Up Passwords in Plain Text

A USB stick dubbed eyeDisk that uses iris recognition to unlock the drive claims to be “unhackable” – only, it isn’t. In fact, a simple Wireshark analysis revealed the device’s password – in plain text. David Lodge of Pen Test Partners noticed the product on Kickstarter, where it amassed enough...

Zero-Days in Counter-Strike Client Used to Build Major Botnet

A proprietor of a Counter-Strike gaming server promotion service has used multiple zero-days in the Counter-Strike client to create a large botnet. The network is made up of fake game servers for the popular online multiplayer game. The attacker has had quite a bit of success. In a recent analysi...

Google Ditches Passwords in Latest Android Devices

Half of all Android users can now log into apps and websites on their devices – without having to remember a cumbersome password. On Monday, Google and the Fast IDentity Online FIDO Alliance announced that devices running Android 7 or later are certified by the FIDO2 standard, meaning that users...

Ever-Changing Emotet Evolves Again with Fresh Evasion Tactic

The Emotet trojan has seen a spike in activity in the last month, with a campaign that once again showcases its ability to evolve quickly: It’s now employing a different delivery mechanism than has previously been seen, in what appears to be an effective tactic for evasion. Emotet, which has beco...

NotPetya Linked to Industroyer Attack on Ukraine Energy Grid

The massive NotPetya ransomware outbreak that crippled organizations around the world last year turns out to have links to the Industroyer backdoor, which targets industrial control systems ICS and took down the Ukrainian power grid in Kiev in 2016. In fact, the same threat actor – dubbed TeleBot...

Microsoft Fixes 17 Critical Bugs in July Patch Tuesday Release

UDPATE Browser vulnerabilities took center stage in Microsoft’s July Patch Tuesday security bulletin. In all, Microsoft patched 17 bugs rated critical, with ten tied to scripting engine flaws impacting Internet Explorer. In total, Microsoft is reporting 53 bugs: 17 critical, 34 rated important, o...

Microsoft Addresses NTLM Bugs That Facilitate Credential Relay Attacks

NTLM has a long history of serious vulnerabilities and of causing anxiety for Windows and UNIX server admins. Their collective angst is unlikely to lessen today with the disclosure of a pair of new vulnerabilities in the protocol suite. Microsoft today patched one of the issues among its Patch...

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...

FreeBSD Patches TCP Processing DoS Vulnerability

FreeBSD has patched a denial-of-service vulnerability that could affect a host of third-party packages built atop the UNIX-like operating system. The vulnerability—found in the way FreeBSD processes TCP packets—was discovered by a member of Juniper Networks’ incident response team. FreeBSD’s...

Pwn2Own IE Vulnerabilities Missing from Microsoft Patch Tuesday Updates

UPDATE – In an unexpected turn, Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday security updates released today did not include patches for Internet Explorer vulnerabilities used during the Pwn2Own contest one month ago. The popular hacker contest attracted researchers from all over who were targeting all the...

Errors, Outliers Obscure Cybercrime Losses

Estimates of the extent of cyber crime are hopelessly overblown, two computer security researchers argue in an editorial from Sunday’s New York Times. Arguing counter to the prevailing opinion that online crime is a modern day Yukon Gold Rush for entrepreneurial hackers, the two Microsoft...

Facebook’s In-app Browser on iOS Tracks ‘Anything You Do on Any Website’

Users of Apple’s Instagram and Facebook iOS apps are being warned that both use an in-app browser that allows parent company Meta to track ‘every single tap’ users make with external websites accessed via the software. Researcher Felix Krause, who outlined how Meta tracks users in a blog posted...

Cisco Confirms Network Breach Via Hacked Employee Google Account

Cisco Systems revealed details of a May hack by the Yanluowang ransomware group that leveraged a compromised employee’s Google account. The networking giant is calling the attack a “potential compromise” in a Wednesday post by the company’s own Cisco Talos threat research arm. “During the...

Apple Fixes 2 Zero-Day Security Bugs, One Exploited in the Wild

Apple on Wednesday released 13 patches for serious security bugs in macOS and 10 for flaws in iOS/iPadOS. They include fixes for two zero-day bugs, one of which may have been exploited by attackers in the wild. The first zero-day CVE-2022-22587 is a memory-corruption issue that could be exploited...

3.8 Billion Users’ Combined Clubhouse, Facebook Data Up for Sale

On its own, the database of 3.8 billion phone numbers leaked from social-media platform Clubhouse didn’t have much value on the underground market. In fact, they were eventually dumped in a hacker forum for free. But an enterprising threat actor has reportedly combined those phone numbers with 53...

Bluetooth Bugs Open Billions of Devices to DoS, Code Execution

Researchers have disclosed a group of 16 different vulnerabilities collectively dubbed BrakTooth, which impact billions of devices that rely on Bluetooth Classic BT for communication. According to an academic paper from the University of Singapore, the bugs are found in the closed commercial BT...

North Korea Targets Security Researchers in Elaborate 0-Day Campaign

Hackers linked to North Korea are targeting security researchers with an elaborate social-engineering campaign that sets up trusted relationships with them — and then infects their organizations’ systems with custom backdoor malware. That’s according to Google’s Threat Analysis Group TAG, which...

Linux Devices Under Attack by New FreakOut Malware

Researchers are warning a novel malware variant is targeting Linux devices, in order to add endpoints to a botnet to then be utilized in distributed-denial-of-service DDoS attacks and cryptomining. The malware variant, called FreakOut, has a variety of capabilities. Those include port scanning,...

Aliens and UFOs: A Final Frontier for Social Engineers

Buried deep within the most recent round of COVID-19 stimulus legislation was a little provision with potentially explosive consequences: The Pentagon has six months to release a full report on what they know about the existence of what they term Unidentified Aerial Phenomena UAP — or UFOs to the...

VMware Rolls a Fix for Formerly Critical Zero-Day Bug

VMware has patched a zero-day bug that was disclosed in late November – an escalation-of-privileges flaw that impacts Workspace One and other platforms, for both Windows and Linux operating systems. VMware has also revised the CVSS severity rating for the bug to “important,” down from critical. T...

Unpatched Bugs in Oracle iPlanet Open Door to Info-Disclosure, Injection

A pair of vulnerabilities in Oracle’s iPlanet Web Server have been disclosed that can lead to sensitive data exposure and image injections onto web pages if exploited. However, no patch is forthcoming for either flaw. The bugs CVE-2020-9315 and CVE-2020-9314 are specifically found in the web...

Malicious Google Web Extensions Harvest Cryptowallet Secrets

Large campaigns that are spreading malicious browser extensions are abusing Google Ads and well-known cryptocurrency brands to draw in victims. Extensions can be installed to add widgets or other functionality to web browsers; they offer the ability to do everything from setting a special search...

PowerPoint ‘Weakness’ Opens Door to Malicious Mouse-Over Attack

A researcher is sounding the alarm over what he believes could be a novel attack vector which allows a hacker to manipulate a PowerPoint file to download and begin the installation of malware, simply by hovering over a hypertext link. The technique does require a victim to accept one pop-up...

Cisco Warns of High-Severity SD-WAN Flaws

Cisco Systems has fixed three high-severity vulnerabilities in its software-defined networking for wide-area network SD-WAN solutions for business users. If exploited, the flaws could enable bad actors to execute commands with root privileges on affected systems. To exploit the vulnerabilities...

Critical Bugs in Rockwell, Johnson Controls ICS Gear

Security vulnerabilities that require very little skill to exploit have been discovered in industrial control systems ICS gear from Rockwell Automation and Johnson Controls, which anchor a flurry of bug disclosures impacting critical infrastructure. First, a set of critical vulnerabilities in...

Critical Cisco Bug Opens Software Licencing Manager to Remote Attack

A critical flaw in the High Availability HA service of Cisco Smart Software Manager On-Prem Base has been uncovered, which would open the door to remote attackers thanks to its use of a static, default password, even if the platform isn’t directly connected to the internet. Cisco Smart Software...

Ashley Madison Breach Extortion Scam Targets Hundreds

Nearly five years after the high-profile Ashley Madison data breach, hundreds of impacted website users are being targeted by a new extortion attack this past week. The 2015 data breach of the adultery website led to 32 million accounts being publicly dumped online, including victims’ names,...

MTTD and MTTR: Two Metrics to Improve Your Cybersecurity

For any organization to protect itself from cyberattacks and data breaches, it’s critical to discover and respond to cyber threats as quickly as possible. Shutting the window of vulnerabilities promptly makes the difference between a mild compromise and a catastrophic data breach. Understanding...

Podcast: NSA Reports Major Crypto-Spoofing Bug to Microsoft

A major Microsoft crypto-spoofing bug impacting Windows 10 made waves this Patch Tuesday, particularly as the flaw was found and reported by the U.S. National Security Agency NSA. Microsoft’s January Patch Tuesday security bulletin disclosed the “important”-severity vulnerability, which could all...

.WAVs Hide Malware in Their Depths in Innovative Campaign

UPDATE Audio .WAV files are the latest hiding place for obfuscated malicious code; a campaign has been spotted in which malicious content was secretly woven throughout the file’s audio data. The embedded code consists of two different payloads: A XMRig/Monero CPU cryptominer and Metasploit code...

Behind the Naming of ZombieLoad and Other Intel Spectre-Like Flaws

There was a lot more to the name game behind choosing titles for ZombieLoad, Spectre and Meltdown than picking cool and edgy attack titles. If you have ever wondered why they were named what they were, Threatpost tracked down one of the researchers behind the naming convention and discovery and...

Grindr Poses National Security Risk, U.S. Gov Says

UPDATE The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States CFIUS has named the ownership of popular gay dating app Grindr a national security risk, according to a report. Grindr describes itself as “the world’s largest social networking app for gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.” A...

Forrester: Ransomware Set to Resurge As Firms Pay Off Attacks

SAN FRANCISCO – Ransomware may be poised to return as a top scourge for companies, as more and more of them pay up after an attack in an effort to minimize the cost of recovery. That’s just one insight gleaned from an interview at RSA Conference 2019 last week with Josh Zelonis, senior analyst at...

Thunderclap Flaws Shatter Peripheral Security

UPDATE A set of vulnerabilities collectively dubbed “Thunderclap” is putting computers at risk from weaponized peripheral devices think network cards, storage and graphics cards, and even chargers and video projectors. The flaws reside in the Thunderbolt hardware interface developed by Intel in...