Epic Operation Kicks Off Multistage Turla APT Campaign

The Turla APT campaign has baffled researchers for months as to how its victims are compromised. Peaking during the first two months of the year, Turla has targeted municipal governments, embassies, militaries and other high-value targets worldwide, with particular concentrations in the Middle Ea...

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...

Microsoft Says No to Paying Bug Bounties

Microsoft has no plans to follow in the footsteps of Mozilla and Google and pay researchers cash rewards for the bugs that they find in Microsoft’s products. In the wake of both Mozilla and Google significantly increasing their bug bounties to the $3,000 range, there have been persistent rumors i...

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...

QNAP Customers Adrift, Waiting on Fix for OpenSSL Bug

Customers of Taiwan-based QNAP Systems are in a bit of limbo, waiting until the company releases a patch for an OpenSSL bug that the company has warned affects most of its network-attached storage NAS devices. The vulnerability can trigger an infinite loop that creates a denial-of-service DoS...

400 Banks’ Customers Targeted with Anubis Trojan

Customers of Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Capital One, along with nearly 400 other financial institutions, are being targeted by a malicious app disguised to look like the official account management platform for French telecom company Orange S.A. Researchers say this is just the...

Rickroll Grad Prank Exposes Exterity IPTV Bug

UPDATE When Township High School District 214 in Illinois got rickrolled all at once across its six different schools just before graduation, it was more than a meticulously executed senior prank. Cybersecurity star-in-the-making and recent high-school graduate Minh Duong found, and was able to...

Ransomware Defense: Top 5 Things to Do Right Now

If there is any cyber-threat at the top of everyone’s mind right now, it must be ransomware. Once a “nuisance” threat, ransomware has grown into a layered, multi-billion-dollar industry for attackers. These threat actors are no longer amateurs trying their hand at breaking and entering. Rather, w...

Musk-Themed ‘$SpaceX’ Cryptoscam Invades YouTube Ads

YouTube fans have been swindled out of almost $1 million and counting thanks to an extremely convincing fake SpaceX crypto-coin campaign that uses a popular decentralized finance protocol called Uniswap. The scam is rearing its Elon-Musk-themed head in ads on YouTube that show up before and after...

ThreatList: Pharma Mobile Phishing Attacks Turn to Malware

As pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer race to develop a vaccine for COVID-19, mobile phishing gangs are swapping up their tactics in hopes to get their hands on critical research. Cybercriminals previously targeted pharmaceutical company employee credentials. However, new research shows that...

Amazon Sues Instagram, TikTok Influencers Over Knockoff Scam

Instagram and TikTok social-media influencers Kelly Fitzpatrick and Sabrina Kelly-Krejci are among 13 defendants in a lawsuit filed by Amazon, which alleges that they participated in an an online scam to sell counterfeit luxury goods. Counterfeit goods are strictly forbidden in the Amazon...

Silver Peak SD-WAN Bugs Allow for Network Takeover

Silver Peak’s Unity Orchestrator, a software-defined WAN SD-WAN management platform, suffers from three remote code-execution security bugs that can be chained together to allow network takeover by unauthenticated attackers. SD-WAN is a cloud-based networking approach used by enterprises and...

Microsoft Office 365 Phishing Attack Uses Multiple CAPTCHAs

Researchers are warning of an ongoing Office 365 credential-phishing attack that’s targeting the hospitality industry – and using visual CAPTCHAs to avoid detection and appear legitimate. CAPTCHAs – commonly utilized by websites like LinkedIn and Google – are a type of challenge–response test use...

Microsoft Kills 18 Azure Accounts Tied to Nation-State Attacks

Microsoft has suspended 18 Azure Active Directory applications that were being leveraged for command-and-control C2 infrastructure by what it says is a Chinese nation-state actor. While Microsoft services like Azure Active Directory AD – its cloud-based identity and access management service – ar...

Firefox for Android Bug Allows 'Epic Rick-Rolling'

A vulnerability in Firefox for Android paves the way for an attackers to launch websites on a victim’s phone, with no user interaction. The attack manifests in the form of a Firefox browser window on the target device suddenly launching, without the users’ permission. This can be used for various...

Researchers Warn of High-Severity Dell PowerEdge Server Flaw

Researchers have disclosed details of a recently patched, high-severity Dell PowerEdge server flaw, which if exploited could allow an attacker to fully take over and control server operations. The web vulnerability was found in the Dell EMC iDRAC remote access controller, technology embedded with...

NTT Communications Data Breach Affects Customers, Threatens Supply Chain

Japan-based systems integrator NTT Communications has disclosed a recent data breach that it said impacted hundreds of customers. The total affected comes to as many as 621 customers, the company said, but security experts worry about the impacts of the data breach due to the company’s positionin...

'[F]Unicorn' Ransomware Impersonates Legit COVID-19 Contact-Tracing App

A fresh ransomware strain known as “FUnicorn” has emerged, first seen this week targeting users by pretending to be an official government COVID-19 contact tracing app. According to an advisory from the Computer Emergency Response Team CERT from the Agency for Digital Italy AgID, the malware fami...

Verizon DBIR: Web App Attacks and Security Errors Surge

Verizon’s 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report DBIR, released Tuesday, analyzed 32,002 security incidents and 3,950 data breaches to sniff out the top causes of data breaches over the past year. While cyber-espionage attacks and malware decreased, other trends, such as security “errors” cloud...

Self-Propagating Malware Targets Thousands of Docker Ports Per Day

The Docker cloud containerization technology is under fire, with an organized, self-propagating cryptomining campaign targeting misconfigured open Docker Daemon API ports. Thousands of container-compromise attempts are being observed every day as part of the campaign, according to Gal Singer, a...

Apple Safari Blocks Ad-Targeting Cookie Support

Apple has released an update to its Safari browser that blocks third-party cookies, following an announcement by Google that it would do the same for its Chrome browser. Through the release of Safari 13.1 on Tuesday, alongside some changes to Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention ITP in iOS and...

Defying Covid-19’s Pall: Pwn2Own Goes Virtual

Covid-19 has brought the world to grinding halt, but for the hacking competition Pwn2Own, that wasn’t the case. The event, planned for CanSecWest this week in Vancouver, went virtual along with the conference itself. Faced with travel restrictions and new social-distancing guidelines, contestants...

Sen. Schumer Pushes for TSA Employee Ban on TikTok App at Work

The Transportation Safety Authority TSA has become the latest federal agency to ban the use of TikTok among its employees based on national-security fears over how ByteDance, the Beijing-based company that owns the app, uses the data collected by it. Some TSA employees have used the app to create...

Medtronic Patches Implanted Device, CareLink Programmer Bugs

Medtronic has released updates to address known vulnerabilities in its line of connected medical devices that were initially disclosed last year and in 2018. The vendor has addressed two sets of bugs. The first group, disclosed in March of last year, is found in a range of Medtronic implanted...

Trolls-For-Hire Pave Way For Sophisticated Social Media Hacks

NEW ORLEANS – Researchers have observed the blossoming of a new type of social media nuisance they are calling Trolling-as-a-Service. They say these rabble-rousing efforts have emerged as a clever new way for hackers to launch coordinated and dangerous attacks via Facebook and Twitter. Speaking a...

Critical WordPress Bug Leaves 320,000 Sites Open to Attack

Two WordPress plugins, InfiniteWP Client and WP Time Capsule, suffer from the same critical authorization bypass bug that allows adversaries to access a site’s backend with no password. All an attacker needs is the admin username for the WordPress plugins and they are in, according to researchers...

Stealthy Malware Flies Under AV Radar with Advanced Obfuscation

Researchers warn hackers are putting a new spin on old injection techniques and successfully end-running endpoint protection. They are tracking a campaign, that kicked off in January, that is still going strong exploiting weaknesses in web browsers. The objective is to hide in the background of...

Stubborn Malware Targets QNAP NAS Hardware Specifically

UPDATE Top-selling network attached storage devices NAS made by QNAP Systems are being singled out by attackers, who have crafted malware specifically designed for the vendor’s hardware. Researchers at the Finland’s National Cyber Security Centre NCSC-FI reported the targeted attacks late last...

State Farm Falls Victim to Credential-Stuffing Attack

State Farm Insurance is notifying customers that accounts have been compromised by hackers in a credential-stuffing attack. Credential-stuffing is accomplished by hackers who take advantage of users who often reuse the same passwords across multiple online accounts. The cyberattackers use stolen...

Unpatched Flaws in IoT Smart Deadbolt Open Homes to Danger

UPDATE Researchers have uncovered vulnerabilities in a popular smart deadbolt could allow attackers to remotely unlock doors and break into homes. The manufacturer behind the smart lock, Hickory Hardware, has deployed patches to the affected apps on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. The...

Malvertising Campaigns Skirt Ad Blockers, Serve Up Mac Malware

Two fresh malvertising campaigns are making the scene that are abusing the convoluted underpinnings of the internet economy to find malware victims. One is a large-scale exploit kit EK campaign designed to circumvent traditional safeguards, such as ad blockers, and the other uses web redirects to...

Amazon Alexa Secretly Records Children, Lawsuits Allege

A federal lawsuit is alleging that Amazon is recording children who use its Alexa devices, without their consent or knowledge. Alexa is the built-in voice assistant shipped with devices like Amazon Echo, Amazon Dot, Fire TV and some third-party gadgets. “Alexa routinely records and voiceprints...

Exploits for Social Warfare WordPress Plugin Reach Critical Mass

UPDATE Active exploits for a recently disclosed bug in a popular WordPress plugin, Social Warfare, are snowballing in the wild – potentially putting more than 40,000 websites at risk. The vulnerability, CVE-2019-9978, tracks both a stored cross-site scripting XSS vulnerability and a remote...

Separ Malware Plucks Hundreds of Companies' Credentials in Ongoing Phish

An ongoing phishing campaign is using malicious PDF documents to spread Separ malware and ultimately steal victims’ browser and email credentials. Since the attack started at the end of January, it has affected around 200 companies and over 1,000 individuals, located mainly in Southeast Asia, the...

Microsoft Windows RCE Flaw Gets Temporary Micropatch

Three unfixed Microsoft Windows vulnerabilities have been assigned unofficial, temporary micropatches – including a recently-disclosed high-severity remote code-execution flaw. The micropatches were released Tuesday by ACROS Security’s 0patch platform. 0patch, which is still in its beta stage,...

Cisco, Netgear Readying Patches for Samba Vulnerability

Device manufacturers are combing through code again this week to determine whether their products are affected by a vulnerability tied to the SMB file-sharing protocol. The vulnerability, CVE-2017-7494 disclosed last Wednesday, affects versions of 3.5.0 onward of Samba, the free software...

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...

Microsoft Warns of Crowti Ransomware

Researchers with Microsoft have spotted a spike in Crowti, a ransomware similar to Cryptolocker that encrypts files on victims’ machines and then asks for payment to unlock them. The malware has existed for several months but it wasn’t until mid-October that Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center...

Chaouki Bekrar: The Man Behind the Bugs

VANCOUVER–Say what you will about Chaouki Bekrar, but the man is nothing if not frank. Bekrar, who is the public face of the VUPEN team that has been toying with the Pwn2Own contest this week, has become a lightning rod in the debate over exploit sales, and from all outward appearances, he couldn...

Microsoft Releases Workaround For Kernel Flaw Used By Duqu

Microsoft has released a workaround for the Windows kernel zero-day vulnerability exploited by the Duqu malware, and said that it is working on a permanent patch, but didn’t specify a timeline for its release. The vulnerability is a serious one that can lead to remote code execution on vulnerable...

Google Fixes Six High-Risk Bugs in Chrome, Pays Out $6k in Bounties

Google has fixed seven security vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser, including six high-priority flaws. The new release of Chrome is version 12.0.742.112 and also includes an updated version of Flash. The latest version of Chrome is the third major update from the company since just the end of...

To Combat Firesheep, Microsoft's Bing Looking Into SSL

Microsoft’s Bing is looking into SSL and other privacy settings for the next version of their search engine. Currently the site strips SSL when forced into HTTPS and in turn, brings up an advisory on browsers signaling an unsafe connection. Introduced at Toorcon, the Firefox extension allows...

Windows Exploitation Part 2

In part two of his lecture on exploiting Microsoft Windows, Dino Dai Zovi discusses specific techniques for attacking Windows machines...

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...

Financial Cybercrime: Why Cryptocurrency is the Perfect ‘Getaway Car’

This is Part I of a two-part series on how cybercrooks embrace and use cryptocurrency. To read Part II, please click here. It’s no secret: Hackers are out to make money. Over the summer, it seemed there was practically a new ransomware attack every day of the week. Whether it be Colonial Pipeline...

Windows EoP Bug Detailed by Google Project Zero

It looked like Google Project Zero blew its own 90-day disclosure window when, on Wednesday, it disclosed an elevation of privilege EoP flaw in Windows that it reported to Microsoft just over a month ago on July 8. But no: It turns out that Microsoft flip-flopped on whether or not it was planning...

No More Ransom Saves Victims Nearly €1 billion Over 5 Years

To date, the No More Ransom repository of ransomware decryptors has helped more than 6 million victims recover their files, keeping nearly a billion euros out of the hands of cybercriminals, according to a Monday release. Launched five years ago, No More Ransom is maintained via cooperation betwe...

16-Year-Old HP Printer-Driver Bug Impacts Millions of Windows Machines

Researchers have released technical details on a high-severity privilege-escalation flaw in HP printer drivers also used by Samsung and Xerox, which impacts hundreds of millions of Windows machines. If exploited, cyberattackers could bypass security products; install programs; view, change, encry...

The Evolving Role of the CISO

Digital technologies have infused every aspect of a business, especially with the shutdown of the physical workplace. The increased interdependence between the physical, digital and cybersecurity worlds demand a leadership position that combines both the technical know-how and the ability to...

Pro-Trump Gettr Social Platform Hacked On Day 1

Gettr, a social media platform set up by allies of former President Donald Trump, was still wet and squirming when it got hacked – twice. The first slap on the rump for the politically conservative platform came in the form of Sonic the Hedgehog-themed porn that flooded it over the Fourth of July...