Three Zero-Day Bugs Plague Kaseya Unitrends Backup Servers

There are three new, unpatched zero-day vulnerabilities in Kaseya Unitrends that include remote code execution RCE and authenticated privilege escalation on the client-side. The Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure DIVD on Monday issued a public advisory warning that the service and clien...

Linux Variant of HelloKitty Ransomware Targets VMware ESXi Servers

For the first time, researchers have publicly spotted a Linux encryptor used by the HelloKitty ransomware gang: the outfit behind the February attack on videogame developer CD Projekt Red. On Wednesday, MalwareHunterTeam disclosed its discovery of numerous Linux ELF-64 versions of the HelloKitty...

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...

TrickBot Continues Resurgence with Port-Scanning Module

The TrickBot trojan is continuing its bounce-back from an autumn takedown, recently adding a network-scanning module that uses the Masscan open-source tool to look for open ports. Masscan is a mass TCP/IP port scanner, which can scan the entire internet in under five minutes according to its...

2.28M MeetMindful Daters Compromised in Data Breach

More than 2.28 million members of the online dating site MeetMindful have reportedly been caught up in a wide-ranging data breach that exposes everything from Facebook tokens to physical characteristics. The ShinyHunters hacking group has stolen and published the personally identifiable PII data ...

As Modern Mobile Enables Remote Work, It Also Demands Security

Smartphones, tablets, collaboration apps and other modern framework tools are critical to maintaining productivity remotely, but they also demand an integrated security strategy purpose-built for mobile devices. The coronavirus pandemic has completely upended the way we work, educate and socializ...

Two Chrome Browser Updates Plug Holes Actively Targeted by Exploits

Flaws in Google’s Chrome desktop and Android-based browsers were patched Monday in an effort to prevent known exploits from being used by attackers. Two separate security bulletins issued by Google warned that it is aware of reports that exploits for both exist in the wild. Google’s Project Zero...

Instagram 'Help Center' Phishing Scam Pilfers Credentials

Turkish-speaking cybercriminals are sending Instagram users seemingly legitimate messages from the social media company, with the aim of stealing their Instagram and email credentials. Researchers said that the campaign has been targeting hundreds of celebrities, startup business owners, and othe...

Amazon-Themed Phishing Campaigns Swim Past Security Checks

Amazon in the era of COVID-19 has become a staple of many people’s lives, as they order everything from sourdough starter to exercise equipment. Cybercrooks have latched onto the delivery behemoth as a lure for phishing emails, knowing that plenty of legitimate delivery messages are also making i...

Cobalt Ulster Strikes Again With New ForeLord Malware

A new credential-stealing malware, dubbed ForeLord, has been uncovered in a recent spear phishing campaign. Researchers tie the attack to a known advanced persistence threat APT group known as Cobalt Ulster. The emails distributing ForeLord were uncovered as part of a campaign, running between...

TrickBot Switches to a New Windows 10 UAC Bypass to Evade Detection

The TrickBot trojan has evolved again to bolster its ability to elude detection, this time adding a feature that can bypass Windows 10 User Account Control UAC to deliver malware across multiple workstations and endpoints on a network, researchers have discovered. Researchers at Morphisec Labs te...

‘Fleeceware’ Apps Downloaded 600M Times from Google Play

Google has made a concerted effort in recent months to try to eliminate bad apps for its Android mobile platform on the Google Play store—something the company historically has battled. However, fleeceware apps—which trick users into paying excessive amounts of money for simple apps with...

Facebook Cracks Down on Deepfake Videos

Facebook is banning deepfake videos, which stem from a technique of human-image synthesis based on artificial intelligence AI to create fake content. Over the past year, security experts and lawmakers have voiced concerns about malicious deepfake applications, particularly as a vessel for...

Microsegmentation and Isolation: 2 Essential Strategies in Zero-Trust Security

The headlines over the past few years have been consistent – enterprises are pouring more and more money into cybersecurity countermeasures. Indications are that 2020 will be no different, with reports that nearly three quarters of CISOs plan to ask their CFOs for increased cybersecurity investme...

Fancy Bear Targets Sporting, Anti-Doping Orgs As 2020 Olympics Loom

At least 16 anti-doping authorities and sporting organizations around the world have been hit by cyberattacks as the world begins to gear up for the Tokyo Summer Olympic Games, which kick off July 2020. The attacks, which began Sept. 16, have been linked to infamous Russian threat group Fancy Bea...

More U.S. Utility Firms Targeted in Evolving LookBack Spearphishing Campaign

A spearphishing campaign, first spotted in July targeting three U.S. utility companies with a new malware variant, has evolved its tactics and extended its targeting to include nearly 20 companies. The campaign was first discovered in phishing emails, sent between July 19 and 25, which targeted...

British Airways E-Ticketing Flaw Exposes Passenger Flight, Personal Data

A security bug discovered in British Airways’ e-ticketing system has the potential to expose passengers’ data, including their flight booking details and personal information. Researchers on Tuesday said that check-in links being sent by British Airways to their passengers via email are unencrypt...

Facebook Removes Accounts Used to Infect Thousands With Malware

Facebook has shut down more than 30 accounts spreading malware through malicious links that purport to be news about the ongoing political situation in Libya. The campaign, ongoing since 2014, has infected tens of thousands of victims with remote access trojans RATs, according to researchers. The...

Hackers Take Down Safari, VMware and Oracle at Pwn2Own

Hackers took down Apple Safari, VMware Workstation, and Oracle VirtualBox on Wednesday, the first day of Pwn2Own, the annual hacking competition held in tandem with the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver. Contestants with the team of Fluoroacetate Amat Cama and Richard Zhu were the first to hit p...

Facebook Stored Passwords in Plain Text For Years

Hundreds of millions of Facebook user passwords have been stored in plain text for years, the social media giant acknowledged on Thursday. KrebsOnSecurity, which first reported the news, said that specifically between 200 and 600 million passwords were stored in plain text as early as 2012, and...

Intel Windows 10 Graphics Drivers Riddled With Flaws

Intel has patched 19 vulnerabilities across its popular graphics drivers for Windows 10, including two high-severity flaws. CVE-2018-12216 and CVE-2018-12214 could both allow a privileged user to execute arbitrary code via local access, according to an Intel advisory. “Multiple potential security...

Attackers Mining Cryptocurrency Using Exploits for Samba Vulnerability

Unknown attackers are using a recently patched vulnerability in Samba to spread a resource-intensive cryptocurrency mining utility. To date, the operation has netted the attackers just under $6,000 USD, but the number of compromised computers is growing, meaning that a significant number of Samba...

Cody Pierce on the Future of Exploit Development

Mike Mimoso talks to Cody Pierce, director of vulnerability research and prevention with Endgame, at RSA Conference 2017 about how attackers are changing their techniques in the face of mitigations and continuing to base exploits around legitimate APIs and functions to thwart detection. Download:...

OpenSSL Fixes Critical Bug Introduced by Latest Update

OpenSSL today released an emergency security update after a patch in its most recent update issued last week introduced a critical vulnerability in the cryptographic library. The new flaw affects only OpenSSL 1.1.0a, which was made available last Thursday; users are urged to update to 1.1.0b...

Microsoft Schannel Vulnerable to FREAK

Microsoft today issued an advisory warning Windows users that Secure Channel, or Schannel, the Windows implementation of SSL/TLS, is vulnerable to the FREAK attack. Disclosed this week, FREAK CVE-2015-1637 is the latest big Internet bug. It affects a number of SSL clients, including OpenSSL, and...

Era Ends With Break Up of Trustworthy Computing Group at Microsoft

In a move that has surprised many in the security community, Microsoft has disbanded its Trustworthy Computing unit, the group that was responsible for the pioneering work that helped reverse the company’s security reputation and make Windows a much more secure and reliable computing platform. Th...

A Decade of Microsoft Patch Tuesday Security Updates

On Oct. 9, 2003, Microsoft announced its new security patching process that would end up being a catalyst for significant change in the information security community. Ten years ago, the program was announced with a press release that promised “Improved patch management processes, policies and...

Gong Da Exploit Kit Bundling Numerous Java Attacks

Don’t expect any relief from the current assault on Java. A new sandbox-escape exploit targeting a vulnerability in the Java Runtime Environment has been integrated into both the Black Hole and Gong Da exploit kits, setting the stage for additional attacks, researchers said. The exploit was...

Navy Hires Contractor to Data-Mine Gaming Consoles

The U.S. Navy recently hired an outside contractor, Obscure Technologies, to develop computer forensics tools capable of analyzing network traffic and stored data on gaming consoles. The contract, valued at $177,237.50, calls on Obscure Technologies to create hardware and software tools that can ...

Microsoft IE 8 Shines in Web Browser Security Test

From Network World Ellen Messmer Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 rated tops among five browsers tested by NSS Labs for effectiveness in protecting against malware and phishing attacks — though NSS Labs acknowledges Microsoft paid for the tests. Nevertheless, the test process, which lasted over a...

Feds: APTs Have Tools That Can Take Over Critical Infrastructure

Threat actors have built and are ready to deploy tools that can take over a number of widely used industrial control system ICS devices, which spells trouble for critical infrastructure providers—particularly those in the energy sector, federal agencies have warned. In a joint advisory, the...

Financial Cybercrime: Following Cryptocurrency via Public Ledgers

This is Part II of a two-part series on how cybercrooks embrace and use cryptocurrency. To read Part I, please click here. While Bitcoin transactions are anonymous, it’s possible to follow the money through public ledgers to see what those transactions actually are and how they flow. This allows ...

Reboot of PunkSpider Tool at DEF CON Stirs Debate

Researchers will release a reboot of a controversial tool that crawls the web to identify back-end vulnerabilities in websites in the hopes that companies will quickly fix them and reduce security risks. However, experts have mixed feelings about the tool called PunkSpider, created by the analyti...

FIN7 Liquor Lure Compromises Law Firm with Backdoor

Financial cybercrime gang FIN7 has rebounded after the jailing of some key members, launching a campaign that uses as a lure a legal complaint involving the liquor company that owns Jack Daniels whiskey. The gambit successfully compromised at least one law firm, giving them a shot of the JSSLoade...

Kubernetes Cloud Clusters Face Cyberattacks via Argo Workflows

Kubernetes clusters are being attacked via misconfigured Argo Workflows instances, security researchers are warning. Argo Workflows is an open-source, container-native workflow engine for orchestrating parallel jobs on Kubernetes – to speed up processing time for compute-intensive jobs like machi...

MosaicLoader Malware Delivers Facebook Stealers, RATs

A never-before-documented Windows malware strain dubbed MosaicLoader is spreading worldwide, acting as a full-service malware-delivery platform that’s being used to infect victims with remote-access trojans RATs, Facebook cookie stealers and other threats. That’s according to Bitdefender...

New Crypto-Stealer ‘Panda’ Spreads via Discord

Yet another new information stealer – Panda Stealer – is being spread through a worldwide spam campaign. On Tuesday, Trend Micro researchers said that they first spotted the new stealer in April. The most recent wave of the spam campaign has had the biggest impact in Australia, Germany, Japan and...

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...

Apple Mail Zero-Click Security Vulnerability Allows Email Snooping

A zero-click security vulnerability in Apple’s macOS Mail would allow a cyberattacker to add or modify any arbitrary file inside Mail’s sandbox environment, leading to a range of attack types. According to Mikko Kenttälä, founder and CEO of SensorFu, exploitation of the bug could lead to...

Europol Credits Sweeping Arrests to Cracked Sky ECC Comms

Europol launched “major interventions” against organized crime on March 9, which it said were made possible by monitoring the encrypted messages of around 70,000 users of the Sky ECC service since mid-February. Sky ECC, which focuses on selling mobile phones with specialized, private...

Cisco Webex 'Ghost' Flaw Opens Meetings to Snooping

A vulnerability in Cisco’s Webex conferencing application could allow an attendee to act as a “ghost” in the meeting – allowing them to spy in on potentially sensitive company secrets. To exploit the flaw CVE-2020-3419, attackers can be remote – however, they would need access to join the Webex...

Joker Trojans Flood the Android Ecosystem

More variants of the Joker Android malware are cropping up in Google Play as well as third-party app stores, in a trend that researchers say points to a relentless targeting of the Android mobile platform. Researchers at Zscaler have found 17 different samples of Joker being regularly uploaded to...

FortiGate VPN Default Config Allows MitM Attacks

Default configurations of Fortinet’s FortiGate VPN appliance could open organizations to man-in-the-middle MitM attacks, according to researchers, where threat actors could intercept important data. According to the SAM IoT Security Lab, the FortiGate SSL-VPN client only verifies that the...

Attackers Horn in on MFA Bypass Options for Account Takeovers

An uptick in business email compromise attacks is being attributed to successful compromises of multi-factor authentication MFA and conditional access controls, according to researchers. While brute-forcing and password spraying techniques are the most common way to mount account takeovers, more...

Eight Common OT / Industrial Firewall Mistakes

Most industrial sites deploy firewalls as the first line of defense for their Operations Technology OT / industrial networks. However, configuring and managing these firewalls is a complex undertaking. Configuration and other mistakes are easy to make. This article explores eight common mistakes...

xHelper: The Russian Nesting Doll of Android Malware

The “undeletable” xHelper malware – which ultimately results in the installation of the Triada trojan – has become a virulent scourge for Android devices this year, according to researcher analysis – bringing with it a hallmark of being virtually indestructible for the common user. xHelper is kno...

Official Government COVID-19 Mobile Apps Hide a Raft of Threats

A rash of COVID-19 Android mobile apps have emerged that are aimed at helping citizens in Iran, Italy and Colombia track symptoms and virus infections. However, they’re also putting people’s privacy and the security of their data at risk, researchers have found. Security researchers at the ZeroFO...

Video: Ransomware a Growing Industrial Security Threat

SAN FRANCISCO – Today, Operational Technology OT and Information Technology systems are merging and changing security playbooks. Here at RSA Conference 2020, Waterfall Security‘s CEO and co-founder Lior Frenkel describes the front lines of the convergence. Frenkel maintains that just as more...

Apple iPhone Users Bombarded with Bogus Dating App for Valentine's Day

A malicious email campaign aimed at iPhone owners is making the rounds this week, using a bouquet of different themes to scam victims, just in time for Valentine’s Day – including a fake dating app. The gambit begins far afield from romance however, with an email from “Nerve Renew,” claiming to...

Iranian Hackers Target U.S. Gov. Vendor With Malware

Iran-linked threat actor APT34 has been observed sending targeted, malicious email attachments to customers and employees of a company that works closely with U.S. government agencies. The company in question is U.S.-based Westat, a professional services company that provides research services to...