Windows 10 Update Bricks PCs, Microsoft Offers Workarounds

Microsoft has acknowledged that a Windows 10 bug is causing some users’ systems to freeze after using their System Restore feature. The issue arose after users complained that when they updated Windows 10 and attempted to restart their system, they were met with a “Stop error” that blocked them...

Billions of Malicious Bots Attacks Take to Cipher-Stunting to Hide

When it comes to cyberattacks, adversaries are focusing not just on advanced malware development, but also on increasing the sophistication of their evasion techniques. This is playing out lately in the form of ballooning instances of “cipher stunting” – a TLS tampering technique that helps...

Researcher: Not Hard for a Hacker to Capsize a Ship at Sea

Maritime transport still contributes in an important way to the world’s economy, with on-time shipments influencing everything from commodities availability and spot pricing to the stability of small countries. Unfortunately, capsizing a ship with a cyberattack is a relatively low-skill enterpris...

Six Vulnerabilities Found in Dell EMC’s Disaster Recovery System, One Critical

A pen-tester has found six vulnerabilities in Dell EMC RecoverPoint devices, including a critical remote code execution flaw that could allow total system compromise. EMC RecoverPoint is a disaster recovery tool that can be used to back up local and remote information storage, across data centers...

Bypass Demonstrated for Microsoft Use-After-Free Mitigation in IE

For a long time, Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday security bulletins have periodically addressed use-after free vulnerabilities, the latest class of memory corruption bugs that have already found their way into a number of targeted attacks. Microsoft has implemented mitigations to address memory...

Darkhotel APT Group Targeting Top Executives in Long-Term Campaign

APT groups tend to be grouped together in a large amorphous blob of sinister intentions and similar targets, but not all APT crews are created equal. Researchers have identified a group that’s been operating in Asia for at least seven years and has been using hotel networks as key infection point...

Free Beacon Article Redirects to ZeroAccess Rootkit, Fake AV

Update: Aaron Harison, president of the Center for American Freedom, told Threatpost this morning that the issue has been resolved and the site is no longer serving malware. Hackers have latched on to the NSA surveillance story—literally. A news story on the outing of whistleblower Edward Snowden...

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...

Mobile Madness

Admit it. It would scarcely break your heart if the legions of slack-jawed smartphone Facebook and FourSquare gawkers were forced to confront their own digital mortality – however briefly – with a few scary exploits made just for them. In 2011, the untethered among us saw several mobile security...

Alex Lanstein on the Rustock Botnet Takedown

Dennis Fisher talks with Alex Lanstein of FireEye about this week’s takedown of the Rustock botnet, the important legal precedent it helped set with Microsoft’s lawsuit and the mechanics behind the operation and dismantling of large-scale botnets. Podcast audio courtesy of sykboy65 Subscribe to t...

The Ryan & Roel Show Episode 7

Emergency IE Patch – Fri, January 9, 2009 Ryan and Roel dissect the latest wave of malware attacks against Microsoft Internet Explorer browser and discuss the company’s plans to ship an emergency out-of-band update. Download episode...

Microsoft Faces Wormable, Critical RCE Bug & 6 Zero-Days

Microsoft has addressed a total of 97 security vulnerabilities in its January 2022 Patch Tuesday update – nine of them rated critical – including six that are listed as publicly known zero-days. The fixes cover a swath of the computing giant’s portfolio, including: Microsoft Windows and Windows...

Critical Security Bugs Fixed in Virtual Learning Software

Netop, the company behind a popular software tool designed to let teachers remotely access student computers, has fixed four security bugs in its platform. Researchers said that the critical vulnerabilities in the company’s Netop Vision Pro system could allow attackers to hijack school networks,...

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...

DeathStalker APT Spices Things Up with PowerPepper Malware

The DeathStalker advanced persistent threat APT group has a hot new weapon: A highly stealthy backdoor that researchers have dubbed PowerPepper, used to spy on targeted systems. DeathStalker offers mercenary, espionage-for-hire services targeting the financial and legal sectors, according to...

VMware Fixes Critical Flaw in ESXi Hypervisor

VMware has hurried out fixes for a critical flaw in its ESXi hypervisor, a few weeks after it was found during China’s Tianfu Cup hacking competition. The use-after-free vulnerability CVE-2020-4004 has a CVSS score of 9.3 out of 10, making it critical. It exists in the eXtensible Host Controller...

Apple Patches Bugs Tied to Previously Identified Zero-Days

Apple has patched three previously identified zero-day vulnerabilities in its iPhone, iPod and iPad devices potentially related to a spate of related flaws recently discovered by the Google Project Zero team that also affect Google Chrome and Windows. Apple this week released iOS 14.2 and iPadOS...

Microsoft Exchange, Outlook Under Siege By APTs

New, sophisticated adversaries are switching up their tactics in exploiting enterprise-friendly platforms — most notably Microsoft Exchange, Outlook Web Access OWA and Outlook on the Web – in order to steal business credentials and other sensitive data. Both Microsoft’s Exchange mail server and...

Ransomware Gang Arrested for Spreading Locky to Hospitals

A cybercriminal gang have been arrested for spreading the Locky ransomware among hospitals, among other crimes. In an operation spearheaded by Romania’s law enforcement department, four people have been taken into custody after their houses were raided – three in Romania and one in neighboring...

Rooster Teeth Attack Showcases New Magecart Approach

The online store for the Rooster Teeth video-streaming service has been hit with a malicious web redirect attack by Magecart, which allowed the cybercriminals to harvest users’ payment-card details. The attack marks a slight departure from the group’s typical tactics. Rooster Teeth, which offers...

CISA Pushing U.S. Agencies to Adopt Vulnerability Disclosure Policies

The U.S. government’s cybersecurity agency has issued a draft directive mandating all agencies to develop vulnerability disclosure policies, which would give ethical hackers clear guidelines for submitting bugs found in government systems. Security experts hope that the directive will light a fir...

Google Play Malicious Apps Racked Up 335M+ Installs In September

Despite Google’s stepped up efforts to ban malicious apps hosted on Google Play 172 harmful apps – installed 335 million times by users – have been discovered on the platform in September alone. ESET researcher Lukas Stefanko said on Tuesday that the majority of those 172 malicious apps were...

Imperva Firewall Breach Exposes Customer API Keys, SSL Certificates

UPDATE Imperva, the security vendor, has made a security breach public that affects customers using the Cloud Web Application Firewall WAF product. Formerly known as Incapsula, the Cloud WAF analyzes requests coming into applications, and flags or blocks suspicious and malicious activity. Users’...

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 ...

Black Hat 2019: WhatsApp Users Still Open to Message Manipulation

LAS VEGAS – Researchers at Black Hat USA 2019 demoed how known vulnerabilities in WhatsApp could still be exploited in several attacks that manipulate chats. Facebook-owned WhatsApp is a popular end-to-end encrypted messaging platform with at least 1.5 billion users. Researchers with Check Point...

Researcher Bypasses Instagram 2FA to Hack Any Account

A researcher earned a $30,000 bug bounty from Facebook after discovering a weakness in the Instagram mobile recovery process that would allow account takeover for any user, via mass brute-force campaigns. Independent researcher Laxman Muthiyah took a look at Instagram’s mobile recovery flow, whic...

Post-Ransomware Attack, Florida City Pays $600K

A Florida city, hit by a ransomware attack that crippled its computer systems for three weeks, voted this week to pay the attackers the requested ransom of $600,000. Riviera Beach, a city in Florida populated by 35,000, was hit by the ransomware attack May 29 after a city employee clicked on a...

Podcast: RSA Conference 2019 Preview

The RSA 2019 conference is right around the corner, kicking off next week in San Francisco. As they prepare to cover the show, Threatpost editors Lindsey O’Donnell, Tom Spring and Tara Seals break down the biggest news, stories and trends – from artificial intelligence and government security to...

Vendors Share Patch Updates on Spectre and Meltdown Mitigation Efforts

Intel, Amazon, Microsoft and others are playing down concerns over the impact of the massive Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities affecting computers, servers and mobile devices worldwide. The two flaws, Spectre and Meltdown, are far reaching and impact a wide range of microprocessors used in the...

Pidgin 2.10.10 Patches SSL MiTM, DoS Vulnerabilities

A handful of security vulnerabilities were patched in the most recent release of the Pidgin open source instant messaging client, Pidgin 2.10.10, including a SSL/TLS certificate validation issue that could be exploited in man-in-the-middle attacks. Reported by Jacob Appelbaum of the Tor Project,...

Threat Modeling, Legos and Dancing Babies

SAN FRANCISCO–The concept of threat modeling has evolved quite a lot in the last few years, moving from an activity that massive software companies such as Microsoft and Google use to anticipate and defend against potential threats to their products to something that many smaller organizations...

IE Zero Day Patch Already in November Patch Tuesday Updates

Microsoft announced this afternoon that the zero-day vulnerability being exploited in a watering hole attack against an unnamed U.S.-based NGO website was already scheduled to be patched in a cumulative Internet Explorer update tomorrow. The zero-day was reported publicly on Friday by FireEye...

Oracle Releases 86 Patches in its January Critical Patch Update

This week’s relentless onslaught of security patches continued late Tuesday afternoon when Oracle released its quarterly Critical Patch Update, a healthy dose of 86 security updates across all major product lines including Oracle Database and MySQL Server. The most serious may be a critical...

Waves of Attacks Target Adobe Reader Bug From 2010

Thanks to the wonderful tendency of users not to update their applications, old vulnerabilities never die, they just get overtaken by newer and shinier ones. The attackers know this well, and every once in a while they serve up a nice reminder to the rest of us. The most recent one of these is a...

The Oracle Quarterly Patch Update

January 18th marks the 6th anniversary of the Oracle Critical Patch Update CPU in its current form as a quarterly patch. For those who remember, before the CPU, Oracle released patches as Security Alerts, the last being Security Alert 68 at the end of August 2004. In the past 6 years, CPUs have...

After attacks, Microsoft readies security patches

From CIO Robert McMillan Corporate IT staffers will get a double whammy next week, as both Microsoft and Oracle are set to release critical security updates cio.com on the same day, including a likely fix for an Excel bug that has been used by cybercriminals. This month, Oracle’s quarterly softwa...

Gaming, Banking Trojans Dominate Mobile Malware Scene

The number of cyberattacks launched against mobile users was down last year, researchers have found — but don’t pop the champagne just yet. The decline was offset by jacked-up, more sophisticated, more nimble mobile nastiness. In a Monday report, Kaspersky said that its researchers have observed ...

Threat Group Takes Aim Again at Cloud Platform Provider Zoho

State-backed adversaries expanded attacks against cloud platform company Zoho and its ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus software, a help desk and asset management solution. A recent campaign marks an uptick in attacks against the firm’s platform, which have also included past targeting of Zoho’s...

Imunify360 Bug Leaves Linux Web Servers Open to Code Execution, Takeover

A high-severity security vulnerability in CloudLinux’s Imunify360 cybersecurity platform could lead to arbitrary code execution and web-server takeover, according to researchers. Imunify360 is a security platform for Linux-based web servers that allows users to configure various settings for...

TA505 Gang Is Back With Newly Polished FlawedGrace RAT

The TA505 cybercrime group is whirring its financial rip-off machinery back up, pelting malware at a range of industries in what was initially low-volume waves that researchers saw spiral up late last month. They do bad things, but they’re so tricky that tracking them is a ton of fun, said Sherro...

NSA Warns Public Networks are Hacker Hotbeds

The U.S. National Security Agency is offering advice to security teams looking for wireless best practices to protect corporate networks and personal devices. The recommendations, while pedestrian in scope, do offer system administrators a solid cheat sheet to share with their work-from-home crow...

Babuk Ransomware Gang Ransomed, New Forum Stuffed With Porn

The Babuk ransomware gang’s new rebrand isn’t going so well. It seems the cybercriminal group has been a victim of a ransomware attack of its own. Babuk’s latest endeavor, a Dark Web ransomware forum called RAMP, was crippled by a spammer over the weekend who overloaded the site with same-sex...

Industrial Networks Exposed Through Cloud OT

The benefits of using a cloud-based management platform to monitor and configure industrial control systems ICS devices are obvious — efficiency, cost-savings and better diagnostics just for starters. But new research found critical vulnerabilities in these platforms that could be used to paralyz...

SonicWall Warns Firewall Hardware Bugs Under Attack

Security vendor SonicWall is warning customers to patch its enterprise secure VPN hardware to thwart an “imminent ransomware campaign using stolen credentials” that’s exploiting security holes in current models and those running legacy firmware. Targeted are the company’s Secure Mobile Access SMA...

Email Bug Allows Message Snooping, Credential Theft

Researchers warn hackers can snoop on email messages by exploiting a bug in the underlying technology used by the majority of email servers that run the Internet Message Access Protocol, commonly referred to as IMAP. The bug, first reported in August 2020 and patched Monday, is tied to the email...

Critical, Unpatched Bug Opens GE Radiological Devices to Remote Code Execution

A pair of critical vulnerabilities have been discovered in dozens of GE Healthcare radiological devices popular in hospitals, which could allow an attacker to gain access to sensitive personal health information PHI, alter data and even shut the machine’s availability down. The flaws affect 100...

Dickey's BBQ Breach: Meaty 3M Payment Card Upload Drops on Joker's Stash

Popular U.S. smoked-meat franchise Dickey’s Barbecue Pit has been hit with a data breach, with cybercriminals posting the fat cap of the compromised data – 3 million payment cards – on the popular Joker’s Stash underground marketplace this week. The Dallas-based franchise, which is a subsidiary o...

India Blocks High-Profile Chinese Apps on Political, Privacy Concerns

India has blocked 118 more mobile apps in its continued crackdown on the use mobile apps from China, citing concerns that they transmit user data out of the country and threaten its “sovereignty and integrity” as political tensions between the two countries rise. Though not all of the apps banned...

The TLS 1.2 Deadline is Looming, Do You Have Your Act Together?

In the pantheon of security configuration duties for organizations running internet assets, maintaining the latest TLS encryption protocols to keep the cryptographic apparatus at full strength is one of the most fundamental. TLS provides cover for the most sensitive personal and financial...

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...