Government VPN Servers Targeted in Zero-Day Attack

As the Chinese government turns to virtual private networks VPNs to provide access to official resources for those working remotely amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the DarkHotel APT has seized the opportunity to target those VPNs in a zero-day attack, researchers said. According to security analysts...

Fake Smart Factory Honeypot Highlights New Attack Threats

A honeypot set up to observe the current security landscape in smart manufacturing systems observed numerous threats—including cryptomining malware and ransomware—in just a few months, highlighting the new threats that industrial control systems ICS face with increased exposure to the internet...

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...

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 ...

Is 'Sign in with Apple' Marketing Spin or Privacy Magic? Experts Weigh In

Apple’s “Sign in with Apple” feature promises to protect user privacy – and while many are looking at that claim as more of a marketing move than anything else, authentication experts say it has the potential to have an enormous impact on the data privacy ecosystem. The giant from Cupertino took...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Impact of New Linux Kernel DCCP Vulnerability Limited

Linux providers are busy developing and pushing out patches for a vulnerability in an obscure networking protocol that could allow a local attacker to crash the kernel and elevate privileges. Google software engineer Andrey Konovalov privately disclosed the vulnerability on Monday. The...

Microsoft Patches USB-Related Flaw Used in Targeted Attacks

It used to be that dropping a USB stick in a parking lot in the hope that someone plugs the malicious peripheral into an important computer was the realm of penetration testers and ambitious nation-state actors. That’s just not so anymore. The practice has gone mainstream, even infiltrating popul...

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...

Ten Years After Gates's Memo, Effects Still Being Felt

Ten years. That’s a really long time. Think about what you were doing 10 years ago. Can you even remember? Maybe you were in college or high school, or cripes, even grade school. Or maybe you were working in security already, trying to figure out why your network kept getting overrun by viruses a...

Microsoft accused of downplaying IIS flaw

A security researcher from nCircle is accusing Microsoft of gamesmanship in its description of an unpatched IIS vulnerability in the way the WebDAV extension decodes a requested URL. The end result is that a successful exploit would allow a hacker to bypass authentication and gain unauthorized...

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 ...

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...

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...

F5 Big-IP Vulnerable to Security-Bypass Bug

F5 Networks’ Big-IP Application Delivery Services appliance contains a Key Distribution Center KDC spoofing vulnerability, researchers disclosed – which an attacker could use to get past the security measures that protect sensitive workloads. Join Threatpost for “Fortifying Your Business Against...

Linux Kernel Bug Opens Door to Wider Cyberattacks

An information-disclosure security vulnerability has been discovered in the Linux kernel, which can be exploited to expose information in the kernel stack memory of vulnerable devices. Specifically, the bug CVE-2020-28588 exists in the /proc/pid/syscall functionality of 32-bit ARM devices running...

IcedID Banking Trojan Surges: The New Emotet?

The banking trojan known as IcedID appears to be taking the place of the recently disrupted Emotet trojan, according to researchers. IcedID a.k.a. BokBot, bears similarities to Emotet in that it’s a modular malware that started life as a banking trojan used to steal financial information...

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...

Troves of Zoom Credentials Shared on Hacker Forums

Hackers have a new favorite topic of conversation on underground forums: How to obtain – and leverage – valuable credentials for Zoom, Skype, Webex and other web conferencing platforms increasingly used by remote workers. That’s what Etay Maor, chief security officer at IntSights, has discovered...

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...

Revamped HawkEye Keylogger Swoops in on Coronavirus Fears

There’s a new variant of the HawkEye keylogging malware making the rounds, featuring expanded info-stealing capabilities. Its operators are looking to capture the zeitgeist around the novel coronavirus. It’s being distributed using spam that purports to be an “alert” from the Director-General of...

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...

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...

Mozilla Firefox 73 Browser Update Fixes High-Severity RCE Bugs

Mozilla has launched the latest version of its Firefox browser, which knocks out high-severity security flaws that leave systems open to attack by a remote adversary. The patched version of Mozilla’s browser, launched on Tuesday, is Firefox 73 and Firefox ESR 68.5. The Firefox ESR browser is its...

Pitney Bowes Hit with Ransomware Attack

Shipping services company Pitney Bowes was hit with a ransomware attack that disrupted customer access to key services, the company said Monday. The attack comes on the heels of an FBI advisory on Oct. 2 that U.S. companies should be on alert for ransomware attacks, which are increasing in...

News Wrap: Deepfake CEO Voice Scam, Facebook Phone Data Exposed

In this week’s news wrap ended Sept. 6, the Threatpost team breaks down the biggest news of the week, including: Cybercrooks successfully fooling a company into a large wire transfer using an AI-powered deepfake of a chief executive’s voice and Facebook, Microsoft and a number of universities...

Gamers Beware: Zero-Day in Steam Client Affects All Windows Users

UPDATE A researcher has dropped a zero-day vulnerability that affects the Steam game client for Windows, after Valve said it wouldn’t fix it. Valve then published a patch, that the same researcher said can be bypassed. The bug is a privilege-escalation vulnerability that can allow an attacker to...

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...

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...

Facial Recognition 'Consent’ Doesn’t Exist, Threatpost Poll Finds

Half of respondents in a recent Threatpost poll said that they don’t believe consent realistically exists when it comes to real-life facial recognition. The recent poll of 170 readers comes as facial recognition applications continue to pop up in the real world – from airports to police forces...

Intel Patches High-Severity Flaws in Media SDK, Mini PC

Intel has released security updates addressing two high-severity vulnerabilities in its Intel Media Software Development Kit SDK and Intel NUC mini PC. Overall, the chip giant on Tuesday patched four flaws across its products; the most severe of these vulnerabilities exist in Intel’s Media Softwa...

Google's April Android Security Bulletin Warns of 3 Critical Bugs

Google has fixed three critical remote code execution bugs in its Android operating system, which could allow a remote attacker to hijack a vulnerable system simply by sending a malicious file. The flaws are part of Google’s April Android Security Bulletin, which includes patches for three critic...

Malware Payloads Hide in Images: Steganography Gets a Reboot

One of the challenges of cybersecurity is that overfocusing on one threat trend means that another one can sneak up on you. This is especially problematic as our networks and the attack surface expands. Beyond threat vectors, though, we also need to pay attention to the entire spectrum of threat...

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...

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...

Energy, Nuclear Targeted with Template Injection Attacks

Days after news broke last week that advanced, persistent threat actors penetrated nuclear facilities, researchers are explaining techniques used by adversaries to gain toeholds in similar targets in energy. Cisco Talos reported Friday that email-based attacks, leveraging template injection...

Dennis Fisher and Mike Mimoso on the End of the Patch Tuesday Era, Section 215 and More

Dennis Fisher and Mike Mimoso talk about the end of the Patch Tuesday era for most Microsoft customers, the appeals court ruling on Section 215 metadata collection and Dennis’s idea for a security industry commission. Download: digitalunderground201.mp3 Music by Chris Gonsalves...

April 2015 Microsoft Patch Tuesday Security Bulletins

Microsoft has patched a critical vulnerability in the Windows HTTP protocol stack, known as HTTP.sys, which could have devastating consequences once it’s inevitably publicly exploited. The bulletin, MS15-034, is one of four critical bulletins issued today by Microsoft. Experts warn that exploitin...

Fixes for IE, Flash Player in October Patch Tuesday Release

Microsoft and Adobe issued their monthly patch Tuesday releases today, and Microsoft posted eight bulletins, three of which are considered critical including the now-monthly cumulative Internet Explorer update, addressing 24 vulnerabilities in various products. Adobe has fixes for three...

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...

Microsoft Protects User Accounts with New Security Features

Microsoft announced yesterday that it will complement the two-factor authentication it enabled for account holders in April with additional security features designed to deny account hijacking and unauthorized access. Windows PC and mobile users, along with Outlook, SkyDrive, Xbox, Skype and othe...

Millions of Java Apps Remain Vulnerable to Log4Shell

Four months after the discovery of the zero-day Log4Shell critical flaw, millions of Java applications still remain vulnerable to compromise, researchers have found. Rezilion expected that due to the “massive amount of media coverage” the bug unsurprisingly received, the majority of applications...

Where the Latest Log4Shell Attacks Are Coming From

Cybersecurity professionals across the world have been scrambling to shore up their systems against a critical remote code-execution RCE flaw CVE-2021-44228 in the Apache Log4j tool, discovered just days ago. Now under active exploit, the “Log4Shell” bug allows complete server takeover. Researche...

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...