Major Container Security Flaw Threatens Cascading Attacks

runc, a building-block project for the container technologies used by many enterprises as well as public cloud providers, has patched a vulnerability that would allow root-level code-execution, container escape and access to the host filesystem. Discovered by researchers Adam Iwaniuk and Borys...

XBash Malware Packs Double Punch: Destroys Data and Mines for Crypto Coins

Researchers have discovered a new sophisticated malware family in the wild, which wrecks havoc on Windows and Linux systems with a combination of data destructive ransomware and malicious cryptomining. The malware, dubbed by Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 researchers who discovered it as Xbash, has...

Millions of Home Fiber Routers Vulnerable to Complete Takeover

UPDATE Consumers lucky enough to have blazing-fast 1Gbps internet access in their homes are likely to use the internet more than lower-broadband households; however, millions of them are at risk for hackers to gain wide-ranging access to their internet activities including being able to view full...

Experts Weigh In On Spectre Patch Challenges

The race to patch against the Meltdown and Spectre processor vulnerabilities disclosed last week is on. As of today, there are no known exploits in the wild impacting vulnerable Intel, AMD and ARM devices. Currently, vendors are focused on three main mitigation efforts. Patches that address the...

Flaw Found In Dirty COW Patch

A flaw in the original patch for the notorious Dirty COW vulnerability could allow an adversary to run local code on affected systems and exploit a race condition to perform a privilege escalation attack. The flaw in the Dirty COW patch CVE-2016-5195, released in October 2016, was identified by...

April 2016 Google Android Nexus Security Bulletin

Google has patched a vulnerability being exploited in the wild to root Nexus 5 Android devices. The public exploit—a rooting application—was privately disclosed to Google on March 15 by Zimperium researchers, and a less than a month after CORE Team researchers reported that CVE-2015-1805, which w...

DHCP Denial of Service Vulnerability Patched

The Internet Systems Consortium ISC on Tuesday patched a denial-of-service vulnerability in numerous versions of DHCP. The flaw affects nearly all IPv4 DHCP clients and relays and most servers, ISC said in its advisory. “A badly formed packet with an invalid IPv4 UDP length field can cause a DHCP...

PointDNS Recovers from Massive DDoS Attack

PointDNS says most of its DNS servers are online again after a massive DDoS attack late last week took down the service provider. A post on the company’s Twitter account on Friday said the provider was adding nameservers and working with network providers to restore service to its customers. Many...

Microsoft to Fix Critical Word Flaw in October Patch Tuesday

Microsoft will release seven bulletins in the October Patch Tuesday next week, fixing 20 total vulnerabilities in Windows, Office, Lync and SQL Server. Only one of the bulletins is rated critical, while the six others are rated important. The one critical bulletin affects Microsoft Office 2003,...

Vasillis Pappas Wins $200,000 Microsoft Blue Hat Prize

LAS VEGAS–Microsoft on Thursday handed out three rather large checks to a trio of security researchers, the largest one–$200,000–going to Vasillis Pappas who won the company’s first Blue Hat Prize competition for defensive technologies. Pappas’s kBouncer ROP mitigation technology edged out...

Researcher Publishes Android Browser Exploit

UPDATE: A researcher at security firm Alert Logic has published code that could be used to compromise some versions of Google’s Android Operating System. The exploit, if properly adapted, could make Android phones vulnerable to remote attacks and compromises. Researcher MJ Keith published a Rever...

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...

Phishing Attacks Spawn Three New Malware Strains

Two waves of global financial phishing attacks that swamped at least 50 organizations in December have delivered three new malware families, according to a report from FireEye’s Mandiant cybersecurity team. On Tuesday, the team said that they’ve dubbed the hitherto-unseen malware strains...

Home Chef Serves Up Data Breach for 8 Million Records

Mail-order meal kits have become even more popular as the coronavirus pandemic has kept people home and cooking on a regular basis. Unfortunately, one of these, the popular Kroger’s Home Chef service, recently served up a side of data breach along with its perfectly measured ingredients. Accordin...

Travelex Pays $2.3M in Bitcoin to Hackers Who Hijacked Network in January

Travelex has paid out $2.3 million in Bitcoin to hackers to regain access to its global network after a malware attack at the new year knocked the global currency exchange offline and crippled its business during the month of January. The move—reported by the Wall Street Journal—may seem...

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...

New TrickBot Variant Updates Anti-Analysis Tricks

Researchers uncovered a new variant of the TrickBot malware that relies on new anti-analysis techniques, an updated method for downloading its payload as well as adopting minor changes to the integration of its components. TrickBot is a module-based malware that, while first identified as a banki...

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...

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...

Google Enlists Help to Fight Bad Android Apps

After years of unsuccessfully battling malware and bad apps in the Google Play store and on more than 2.5 billion Android devices, Google is finally doing something about it. The tech giant this week unveiled an alliance with three companies with specific expertise in endpoint security to help...

MSP or System Integrator? Add Incident Response to Your Portfolio at No Cost

As breaches and cyberattacks grow in a steady upward trajectory, organizations are increasingly looking for ways to protect their assets, outsourcing critical Incident Response IR services to third-party providers. Cynet is now providing its IR services at no cost in a market-first offering which...

Black Hat 2019 News Wrap: The Best and Worst of the Show

LAS VEGAS – Black Hat and DEF CON 2019 may be wrapping up, but the dual conferences last week in Las Vegas left the security industry with a flurry of new security flaws, topics and announcements to discuss for the weeks to come. Threatpost editors Tara Seals and Lindsey O’Donnell get together to...

Researchers Bypass Apple FaceID Using Biometrics 'Achilles Heel'

LAS VEGAS – Vulnerabilities have been uncovered in the authentication process of biometrics technology that could allow bad actors to bypass various facial recognition applications – including Apple’s FaceID. But there is a catch. Doing so requires the victim to be out cold. Researchers on...

Black Hat 2019: Ethical Hackers Must Protect Digital Human Rights

LAS VEGAS – At a time when technology is being utilized for human-rights abuses, the security space needs to turn its focus to public interest defense technology, security stalwarts urged during Black Hat USA 2019. Security has long focused on protecting company data and providing cyber-defense f...

Millions of Android Smartphones Vulnerable to Trio of Qualcomm Bugs

UPDATE Security researchers from Tencent’s Blade Team are warning Android smartphone and tablet users of flaws in Qualcomm chipsets, called QualPwn. The bugs collectively allow hackers to compromise Android devices remotely simply by sending malicious packets over-the-air – no user interaction...

Black Hat USA 2019 Preview

Las Vegas – Despite bizarre reports of a grasshopper infestation, Black Hat USA 2019 and DEF CON are set to kick off next week in Las Vegas, bringing on a wave of sessions, keynotes and security-themed villages. The Threatpost team, which will be on the frontlines of next week’s shows, discuss wh...

Chinese Hackers Behind 2015 Anthem Data Breach Indicted

Two Chinese nationals have been charged in the massive 2015 data breach of health insurer Anthem that impacted more than 78 million people. Fujie Wang, 32, and another Chinese man, who remains unnamed, were allegedly part of a China-based hacking group that was behind the breach of Indiana-based...

OceanLotus APT Uses Steganography to Shroud Payloads

The advanced persistent threat APT group OceanLotus has switched up its tactics to use steganography to cloak encrypted payloads within .png image files. Researchers said that they discovered the OceanLotus APT group – a Vietnam-linked cyber-espionage group also known as APT32 – using the tactic ...

Facebook Alleges Two Ukrainians Scraped Data From 63K Profiles

Facebook has sued two Ukrainian men that it says used quiz apps and malicious browser extensions to scoop up private data from 63,000 platform users, and then use that data for advertising purposes. A lawsuit filed Friday by Facebook alleged that the two men, Gleb Sluchevsky and Andrey Gorbachov,...

RSA Conference 2019 Recap

SAN FRANCISCO – The RSA Conference 2019 is wrapping up, and Threatpost has been on the show floor this week covering the barrage of security news from the conference – including the annual cryptographers’ panel, big tech companies’ thoughts on privacy, and new vulnerabilities and patches that wer...

Modern Cybercrime: It Takes a Village

LAS VEGAS – Contrary to the pop-culture image of the hoodie-clad lone hacker with mad keyboard “skillz” siphoning off funds and making people’s lives miserable with a few lines of brilliant code, increasingly cybercrime “takes a village”. The true face of cybercrime today is a more democratic one...

Old Printer Vulnerabilities Die Hard

Despite copious warnings and efforts by the security community to harden the defenses of printers, they continue to represent a ripe target for attackers. Just this past summer researchers at Check Point found a vulnerability that allowed an attacker to compromise a multi-function printer with fa...

GreyEnergy Spy APT Mounts Sophisticated Effort Against Critical Infrastructure

A new APT group, dubbed GreyEnergy by researchers, has emerged as a successor to the infamous BlackEnergy APT group, which was behind the electric grid cyberattack and resulting power outage in the Ukraine in December 2015. However, GreyEnergy’s focus and targeting revolve around cyber-espionage...

Wicked Botnet Uses Passel of Exploits to Target IoT

Yet another variant of the Mirai botnet has appeared on the scene, but this one has a twist: The code is integrated with at least three exploits that target unpatched IoT devices, including closed-circuit cameras and Netgear routers. It also has ties to a web of other botnets, made for DDoS...

Google Patches Critical 'Broadpwn' Bug in July Security Update

Google released a security patch Wednesday that addresses a critical vulnerability dubbed “Broadpwn” found in millions of Android devices that could allow remote attackers to execute code on targeted devices. The so-called Broadpwn bug is tied to a vulnerability in Broadcom’s BCM43xx family of Wi...

Apache Attack Traffic Dropping, Limited to Few Sources

Malicious traffic stemming from exploits against the Apache Struts 2 vulnerability disclosed and patched this week has tapered off since Wednesday. Researchers at Rapid7 published an analysis of data collected from its honeypots situated on five major cloud providers and a number of private...

Pornhub Hack Earns Researchers $22,000

A PHP vulnerability that exposed adult website PornHub’s user data to hackers and allowed for code execution on servers hosting the site, earned a trio of German researchers $22,000 as part of a bug bounty program. PHP patched the vulnerability in June. The flaw is tied to a use-after-free memory...

Microsoft Bans Superfish SSL Interception Adware

Microsoft has taken steps to impede the next Superfish from impacting users. Superfish was pre-installed adware found on new Lenovo laptops earlier this year. The software exposes users to man-in-the-middle attacks because of the way it injects advertisements into the browser. It comes with a...

September 2015 Microsoft Patch Tuesday Security Bulletins

Microsoft today patched a vulnerability in its graphics component present in Windows, Office and Lync that has been publicly attacked, and is one of five vulnerabilities patched this month that have been publicly disclosed. Microsoft released a dozen bulletins today, five of them it rates critica...

Microsoft Giving .NET Users The Option to Shed RC4

Microsoft didn’t beat around the bush when it warned customers to stay away from the deprecated RC4 algorithm last fall. Now it’s giving those who use its .NET software framework an option to disable the cipher in Transport Layer Security TLS as well. In a security advisory issued on its Security...

IE 11 Stands Up to Pwn2Own Exploit Attempt

VANCOUVER – Successful exploits at the Pwn2Own contest get all the glitz, but the rarities are the exploits that fail. A group of four young South Korean hackers from ASRT, all of them well shy of their thirtieth birthdays, stood in proxy for Jung Hoon Lee. Lee was home fulfilling a military...

Volume of Malware Targeting Java CVE-2012-1723 Flaw Spikes

It’s been nearly two months since Oracle patched the CVE-2012-1723 Java vulnerability, a serious remote pre-authentication flaw that’s present in the Java Runtime Environment. It’s taken a little time, but the attacker community has decided that this bug deserves some serious attention, and as a...

Google Fixes More Than 30 Flaws in Chrome

Google has fixed more than 30 security vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser with a new version the company released on Friday. The company also paid out more than $14,000 in rewards to the various researchers who reported bugs that were fixed with Chrome 14.0.835.163. The new version of Chrome...

Botnets Hit Perl Testers With Denial of Service Attack

According to a posting on the CPAN Testers’ blog, the CPAN Testers’ server has been being aggressively scanned by “20-30 bots every few seconds” in what they call “a dedicated denial of service attack”; these bots “completely ignore the rules specified in robots.txt”. Read the full article. The H...

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...

Mitigating the Slowloris HTTP DoS Attack

Enterprise IT security staffs looking for some mitigation for the newly released HTTP DoS tool may have a few options. The analysts at the SANS Internet Storm Center are recommending that organizations running Web servers that are vulnerable to the tool’s attack make some basic configuration...

Microsoft's Threat Management Gateway is a mixed bag

Microsoft’s initial move into the security products market, the ISA Server, has evolved well beyond its firewall roots. Now known as the Threat Management Gateway, the product is being positioned as a comprehensive Web security gateway. But as Eric Ogren writes in his review of the Threat...

Top 3 Attack Trends in API Security – Podcast

In late July 2021, online retailers got hit with a jaw-dropping 2,800 percent increase in attack takeovers. Dead-set on gift card fraud via “scrape for resale” and other types of fraud, the attacks spiraled up to the rate of 700,000 attacks per day. In a separate case – of a loan application frau...

PHP Everywhere Bugs Put 30K+ WordPress Sites at Risk of RCE

Tens of thousands of WordPress sites are at risk from critical vulnerabilities in a widely used plug-in that facilitates the use of PHP code on a site. One of the bugs allows any authenticated user of any level – even subscribers and customers – to execute code that can completely take over a sit...

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...