Google Bans 600 Android Apps for Obnoxious Ads

Google has removed nearly 600 Android apps from the Play Store for serving up obnoxious, invasive ads that aren’t easily “x’d” out of. The internet giant said the enforcement action was a strike against mobile ad fraud. Google said Thursday that the apps violated its disruptive ads policy – and a...

Supply Chain Account Takeover: How Criminals Exploit Third-Party Access

Empower Your Suppliers Against Attack The average business shares data with a complex network of third parties, depending on their operational needs. In a survey of security and risk professionals, Forrester learned that the average business has 4,700 third-party partners with some access to...

Amazon Fixes Ring Video Doorbell Flaw That Leaked Wi-Fi Credentials

UPDATE Amazon has patched a vulnerability in its Ring smart doorbell device that could allow attackers to access the owner’s Wi-Fi network credentials and potentially reconfigure the device to launch an attack on the home network, researchers have found. Researchers discovered the problem in...

Apple Removes 17 Malicious iOS Apps From App Store

Researchers have uncovered 17 apps on Apple’s official App Store infected with malware. Apple has since removed the apps from the App Store – but a “significant” number of iOS users could have installed them, researchers said. Once downloaded, the malicious apps infect victims with a trojan...

Survey Finds People are Privacy Hypocrites

Even while people remain concerned about their own privacy in the workplace and online, most still admit to violations of their coworkers’ privacy by “creeping” on PC screens and “peeking” at documents found in printer trays, a new survey has found. The survey—commissioned by HP as part of Nation...

Intimate Details on Healthcare Workers Exposed as Cloud Security Lags

Yet another non-password protected cloud database has come to light, this time exposing a raft of highly personal information on healthcare workers and traveling nurses – including drug tests and arrest records. The incident showcases the unfortunate reality that cloud data security remains a...

Major Groupon, TicketMaster Fraud Scheme Exposed By Insecure Database

UPDATE After discovering a cache of 17 million emails exposed on an unsecured database, researchers with vpnMentor began to hunt for its owner — but to their surprise, they found that the database belonged not to a company, but to a sophisticated criminal network. Cybercriminals had been both...

IoT Security Challenges in a 5G Era: Expert Advice

When it comes to what we can expect with 5G mobile networks, they promise a more IoT friendly ecosystem, with vast improvements over the current capabilities of the 4G. Providing ultra low-latency and exponentially faster throughput along with sensors that will boast a 10-year battery life 5G pav...

4 Dating Apps Pinpoint Users' Precise Locations – and Leak the Data

Four popular dating apps that together can claim 10 million users have been found to leak precise locations of their members. “By simply knowing a person’s username we can track them from home, to work,” explained Alex Lomas, researcher at Pen Test Partners, in a blog on Sunday. “We can find out...

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...

Airbnb Superhost Secretly Recorded Guests with Hidden Bedroom Camera

An Airbnb “superhost” in China has been arrested after a guest staying in his house found a hidden camera recording her in the bedroom. The guest, an unnamed woman who was staying in the Airbnb in eastern China last week, said she discovered the camera after spotting a light that looked unusual i...

Google Touts Android Q's New Security Update Process and Better Privacy Controls for Apps

Google said its next-generation mobile operating system, Android Q, revamps the way it delivers direct over-the-air updates and will bolster individual app privacy controls. Google detailed Android Q 10.0 at the Google I/O 2019 developer conference on Tuesday. There it touted almost 50 changes to...

Fin7 Ramps Up Campaigns With Two Fresh Malware Samples

Despite the arrest of several Fin7 members in 2018, the cybercrime group has ramped up its efforts in a series of widespread campaigns hitting businesses with two never-before-seen malware samples. Researchers with Flashpoint said Wednesday that they have discovered a new administrative panel and...

Fourth Major Credential Spill in a Month Hits DreamMarket

The hacker behind more than 840 million account records appearing for sale on the Dark Web in February in dumps collectively known as Collections 1-3 is back with 26.42 more records from six companies. The adversary, who goes by the handle Gnosticplayers, is asking just 1.2431 in Bitcoin roughly...

Adobe Patches Critical Photoshop, Digital Edition Flaws

Adobe on Tuesday released its March Security Update, reporting and fixing only two critical flaws: one in Photoshop CC and one in Adobe Digital Editions. Both critical flaws could allow a bad actor to achieve arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user, Adobe said. The company sai...

6 Signs of Successful Threat Hunting

When a threat hunting program is established by an organization, their goal is to proactively hunt threats, with a focus on newer, more sophisticated attacks for which reliable signatures or indicators are not yet available. However, without an effective threat hunting program, the attacker is...

Microsoft Patches Actively Exploited Bug as Part of Patch Tuesday

UPDATE Microsoft has patched an elevation-of-privilege vulnerability it said is actively being exploited by hackers. The fix was part of Microsoft’s scheduled September Patch Tuesday release, which also included fixes for two other bugs found being used in the wild, including the zero-day found i...

Microsoft Patches Office Bug Actively Being Exploited

Security experts are urging network administrators to patch a Microsoft Office vulnerability that has been exploited in the wild. The vulnerability CVE-2017-11826 could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted Office file. It was one of 62 vulnerabilities patched by Microso...

Serious Dirty Cow Linux Vulnerability Under Attack

A nine-year-old Linux vulnerability that affects most of the major distributions has been recently used in public attacks. The flaw, nicknamed Dirty Cow because it lives in the copy-on-write COW feature in Linux, is worrisome because it can give a local attacker root privileges. While the Linux...

Protecting Cloud APIs Critical to Mitigating Total Compromise

When it comes to cloud computing, APIs more or less drive everything, but in the eyes of some researchers, existing security controls around them haven’t kept pace. While individual components of a system can be secure, when that system gets deployed in the cloud it can often become insecure – an...

Issue with SWFUploader Could Lead to XSS Vulnerabilities, Content Spoofing

UPDATED Many versions of SWFUpload – an applet that combines Flash and JavaScript that’s used in millions of websites, including WordPress sites– are vulnerable to content spoofing and a cross-site scripting vulnerability that could lead to the takeover of accounts, according to reports this week...

Experts Downplay MySQL Database Zero-Days

A rash of zero-day exploits and vulnerabilities in the MySQL database were disclosed to the Full Disclosure mailing list over the weekend, but experts are saying they’re much ado about nothing. Of the half-dozen zero-days reported by a researcher known as King Cope, all but one require legitimate...

New Linux Distro Promoted as Anonymous-OS

A new Ubuntu Linux distribution is being marketed as “Anonymous-OS” and comes pre-loaded with tools for hacking and protecting anonymity online. However, it is unclear whether the new operating system was created by the anarchic hacking group, or even has its endorsement. Anonymous-OS Version 0.1...

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...

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...

Stephen Toulouse on the MSRC, the Evolution of Security at Microsoft and Securing Xbox Live

Dennis Fisher talks with Stephen Toulouse, director of policy and enforcement for Xbox Live at Microsoft, about his years at the Microsoft Security Response Center, the evolution of security at Microsoft and the joy and pain of being the bad guy on Xbox Live. Download Subscribe to the Digital...

Microsoft Scrambling to Close Stubborn Security Hole

From Washington Post Brian Krebs Microsoft may soon be taking the unusual step of issuing an out-of-band security update to address multiple weaknesses that stem from a Windows security flaw that the software giant tried to fix earlier this month. Read the full story washingtonpost.com See more...

Microsoft issues PowerPoint zero-day warning

Microsoft has issued an advisory to warn about an under-attack zero-day vulnerability affecting its PowerPoint software. According to the pre-patch advisory, the flaw allows remote code execution if a user opens a booby-trapped PowerPoint file. The company described the attacks as “limited and...

Attacker Breach ‘Dozens’ of GitHub Repos Using Stolen OAuth Tokens

GitHub revealed details tied to last week’s incident where hackers, using stolen OAuth tokens, downloaded data from private repositories. “We do not believe the attacker obtained these tokens via a compromise of GitHub or its systems because the tokens in question are not stored by GitHub in thei...

Ubiquitous Linux Bug: ‘An Attacker’s Dream Come True’

UPDATE Every major Linux distribution has an easily exploited memory-corruption bug that’s been lurking for 12 years – a stunning revelation that’s likely to be followed soon by in-the-wild exploits, researchers warn. Successful exploitation gives full root access to any unprivileged user. The...

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...

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...

Monumental Supply-Chain Attack on Airlines Traced to State Actor

A monster cyberattack on SITA, a global IT provider for 90 percent of the world’s airline industry, is slowly unfurling to reveal the largest supply-chain attack on the airline industry in history. The enormous data breach, estimated to have already impacted 4.5 million passengers, has potentiall...

Fresh Loader Targets Aviation Victims with Spy RATs

A cyberattack campaign that goes after aviation targets has been uncovered, which is spreading remote access trojan RAT malware bent on cyber-espionage. Researchers from Microsoft said this week on Twitter that spear-phishing emails are the main attack vector. Individuals in the aerospace and...

$4,000 COVID-19 'Relief Checks' Cloak Dridex Malware

Cybercriminals have wasted no time in hopping on the American Rescue Plan – the COVID-19 relief legislation just signed into law – as a lure for email-based scams. According to researchers at Cofense, a campaign began circulating in March that capitalized on Americans’ interest in the forthcoming...

Critics Blast Google’s Aim to Replace Browser Cookie with ‘FLoC’

This month Google begins a public test of a technology it says will eventually replace browser cookies in an effort to boost Chrome browser user privacy. However, critics say the switch is a half-measure and does not protect the web movements of Chrome users adequately. The Google solution–called...

2020 Work-for-Home Shift: What We Learned

Goodbye, 2020 — and good riddance, right? Most of us don’t want to take too much from this year into the next — but let’s make an exception for what we learned about security in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021 after all, more enterprises will permanently downsize their physical spaces...

Spotify Changes Passwords After Another Data Breach

Spotify has alerted users that some of their registration data was inadvertently exposed to a third-party business partner, including emails addresses, preferred display names, passwords, gender and dates of birth. This is at least the third breach in less than a month for the world’s largest...

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...

Dating Site Bumble Leaves Swipes Unsecured for 100M Users

After a taking closer look at the code for popular dating site and app Bumble, where women typically initiate the conversation, Independent Security Evaluators researcher Sanjana Sarda found concerning API vulnerabilities. These not only allowed her to bypass paying for Bumble Boost premium...

Mac, Linux Users Now Targeted by FinSpy Variants

The FinSpy commercial spyware is back in recently observed campaigns against organizations and activists in Egypt. While the spyware previously targeted Windows, iOS and Android users, researchers have discovered these campaigns using new variants that target macOS and Linux users. FinSpy is a...

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...

NSA, FBI Warn of Linux Malware Used in Espionage Attacks

UPDATE The U.S. government is warning of new malware, dubbed Drovorub, that targets Linux systems. It also claims the malware was developed for a Russian military unit in order to carry out cyber-espionage operations. The malware, Drovorub, comes with a multitude of espionage capabilities,...

Microsoft Adds DNS-Over-HTTPS Support for Windows 10 Insiders

Microsoft has announced the first testable version of DNS-Over-HTTPS DoH support, available for its Windows 10 operating system. Support for the DoH protocol, which Microsoft first announced in November, is available in the Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 19628. This is accessible for members of...

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...

Spearphishing Campaign Exploits COVID-19 To Spread Lokibot Infostealer

Researchers have discovered threat actors once again capitalizing on the COVID-19 pandemic and current attention on the World Health Organization WHO with a new spearphishing email designed to spread the LokiBot trojan sent using the WHO trademark as a lure. Researchers at FortiGuard Labs on Marc...