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...

SolarWinds Issues Hotfix for Zero-Day Flaw Under Active Attack

SolarWinds has issued a hotfix for a zero-day remote code execution RCE vulnerability already under active, yet limited, attack on some of the company’s customers. Microsoft alerted the company about the flaw, which affects its Serv-U Managed File Transfer Server and Serv-U Secured FTP products...

Nvidia Squashes High-Severity Jetson DoS Flaw

Nvidia has patched three vulnerabilities affecting its Jetson lineup, which is a series of embedded computing boards designed for machine-learning applications, in things like autonomous robots, drones and more. A successful exploit could potentially cripple any such gadgets leveraging the affect...

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...

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...

Apple Knocked Off Perch as Most Imitated Brand for Phishing Attacks

Google and Amazon overtook Apple in the second quarter Q2 of 2020 as the brand most spoofed by attackers to lure people into falling for phishing attacks. The leaderboard change is likely due to activity related to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new research. While the number of so-called...

4 Unpatched Bugs Plague Grandstream ATAs for VoIP Users

UPDATE Multiple high-severity vulnerabilities in the Grandstream HT800 series of Analog Telephone Adaptors ATAs threaten home office and midrange users alike, with outages, eavesdropping and device takeover. The HT800 series of ATAs is designed for everyone from home or small-office users to...

WFH Alert: Critical Bug Found in Old D-Link Router Models

D-Link is urging customers to replace its now obsolete line of DIR-865L Wireless Routers in reaction to a recently discovered critical command-injection bug that leaves users open to a denial-of-service attack. The routers, first introduced in 2013, reached end-of-life support in Feb. 2016. In Au...

‘Coronavirus Report’ Emails Spread NetSupport RAT, Microsoft Warns

A recent spear-phishing campaign has been spotted spreading a weaponized NetSupport Manager remote access tool RAT, which is a legitimate tool used for troubleshooting and tech support. Attackers use the ongoing coronavirus pandemic as a lure, as well as malicious Excel documents, to convince...

TikTok Violated Children’s Privacy Law, FTC Complaint Says

The popular video sharing app TikTok has landed in hot water again over privacy issues. On Thursday, a group of privacy advocates filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission FTC alleging the platform failed to adequately protect children’s privacy. The complaint alleged that TikTok violat...

Apple App Store Riddled With Money-Sucking Fleeceware Apps

Researchers are warning iPhone users of fleeceware apps after finding more than 30 examples of them on Apple’s App Store. Fleeceware is jargon for apps that trick users into paying excessive fees for basic applications and functionality that is available free elsewhere. Many of these fleeceware...

Coronavirus Poll Results: Cyberattacks Ramp Up, WFH Prep Uneven

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to sweep the globe and Americans are told to isolate from others, many organizations are sending employees home to work. While most respondents in a Threatpost poll this week said they feel prepared from a security standpoint for this transition, a fifth of them...

What is the Best Defense Against Phishing Attacks?

Whether the subject line was “You’re account will be closed!” or the email address was [email protected], we have all received and rolled our eyes at a poorly disguised phishing attempt. While many view phishing as a small annoyance, this attack method has maintained longevity for a reason and...

Burning Man Tickets for $225? Yep, Too Good to Be True

Burning Man aficionados anxious to get their tickets squared away for the 2020 “experience” should beware: Fake concert organizers are offering passes in what researchers say is a very convincing and sophisticated scam effort. Burning Man, which bills itself as a “vibrant participatory metropolis...

Equifax Breach: Four Members of Chinese Military Charged with Hacking

U.S. authorities have charged four Chinese military officers in the 2017 Equifax data breach, which compromised the data of nearly 150 million. The four, Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke and Liu Lei, are believed to be members of the 54th Research Institute of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army PLA...

LoRaWAN for IoT: Beware Encryption Misconfigurations and Security Pitfalls

UPDATE The LoRaWAN protocol, which efficiently supports low-power wireless devices over wide area networks, has become standard in the world of the industrial internet of things IoT. One of its benefits is its support for end-to-end encryption. However, researchers are warning that while LoRaWAN...

N.Y. Could Ban Cities from Paying Ransomware Attackers

New York State may soon ban municipalities from paying ransomware demands in the event of a cyberattack. State Senators Phil Boyle, George M. Borrello and Sue Serino introduced Senate Bill S7246 earlier this month, in response to the rising tide of cyberattacks targeting government agencies and...

Oil-and-Gas APT Pivots to U.S. Power Plants.

A known APT group with ties to the Iran-linked APT33, dubbed Magnallium, has expanded its targeting from the global oil-and-gas industry to specifically include electric companies in North America. That’s according to a report from Dragos, released Thursday, which noted that the discovery is part...

Top 10 IoT Disasters of 2019

IoT Disasters 2019 Though more light was shed around insecure Internet of Things IoT devices in 2019 – consequently leading to more calls for regulation– connected devices themselves seemingly stayed just as insecure. From privacy concerns in smart home devices, to botnets evolving to launch...

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...

Global Crime Ring Bilks U.S. Military Members, Vets Out of Millions

Operators of a widespread identity-theft and fraud scheme have bilked thousands of U.S. servicemembers and veterans out of millions of dollars in stolen funds and Veterans Affairs VA benefits payments. Fredrick Brown pled guilty this week, revealing that in his role as a civilian medical records...

U.S. Government, Military Personnel Data Leaked By Autoclerk

A leaky database owned by reservations management system Autoclerk has exposed the personal data and travel information for thousands of users – including U.S. government and military personnel. Autoclerk, which was acquired by the Best Western Hotel and Resorts Group in August, provides...

Energy Sector Phish Swims Past Microsoft Email Security via Google Drive

A targeted spearphishing campaign has hit an organization in the energy sector – after using a savvy trick to get around the company’s Microsoft email security stack. According to Aaron Riley, a researcher from Cofense, the campaign impersonated the CEO of the targeted company, sending email via...

Microsoft Lab Offers $300K For Working Azure Exploits

Las Vegas – In an attempt to sniff out bugs in its Azure cloud platform, Microsoft announced at Black Hat USA 2019 on Monday that it will offer rewards of up to $300,000 for researchers who launch successful test exploits for the platform. Microsoft has launched a dedicated Azure cloud host testi...

WhatsApp, Telegram Coding Blunders Can Expose Personal Media Files

Though WhatsApp and Telegram tout themselves as secure messaging services, faulty developer coding that allows cyberattackers to intercept media files sent on the Android versions of the services like photos and videos, documents and voice memos undercuts that claim. The security weakness, dubbed...

WWDC 2019: Apple Takes Aim at Facebook on Privacy

Apple took a swipe at Facebook at its Worldwide Developers’ Conference WWDC on Monday, unveiling fresh privacy features for the upcoming version of its iOS operating system for iPhone and iPad iOS 13. Most notably, it took the wraps off of an authentication mechanism that will allow users to sign...

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...

RSA Conference 2019: How to Be Better, on Trust, AI and IoT

SAN FRANCISCO – The slogan of this year’s RSA Conference is “Better” – and accordingly, Tuesday morning’s keynotes zeroed in on reversing some of the disturbing sociological trends that have been festering of late. That includes “information warfare,” meant to undermine citizens’ trust in media a...

Project Zero Discloses High-Severity Apple macOS Flaw

Researchers have disclosed what they say is a high-severity security flaw in Apple’s MacOS operating system – which has not yet been patched. The flaw gives an attacker privileges to perform malicious actions on a mounted filesystem – without the victim knowing. The Google Project Zero team...

2019 Already Marred By Slew of Data Breach Incidents

It has been a busy year for data breaches already, and January isn’t even officially over. This past week has been no exception. In past seven days, in addition to the Airbus news that we previously reported, Discover Financial, IT management giant Rubrik, the City of St. John in New Brunswick,...

Up to 35 Million 2018 Voter Records For Sale on Hacking Forum

Up to 35 million voter records have been found up for sale on a popular hacking forum from 19 states, researchers discovered. Researchers at Anomali Labs and Intel 471 on Monday said that they discovered Dark Web communications offering a large quantity of voter databases for sale – including...

Another Linux Kernel Bug Surfaces, Allowing Root Access

A high-severity cache invalidation bug in the Linux kernel has been uncovered, which could allow an attacker to gain root privileges on the targeted system. This is the second kernel flaw in Linux to debut in the last week; a local-privilege escalation issue was also recently discovered. The flaw...

Cross-Site Scripting Flaw in Apache ActiveMQ Threatens Web Visitors

Researchers have found a cross-site scripting XSS flaw in Apache ActiveMQ that could enable a remote attacker with no privileges to launch an array of attacks against visitors to compromised websites. The vulnerability CVE-2018-8006 was disclosed today and impacts ActiveMQ versions earlier than...

Project Zero Chains Bugs for ‘aPAColypse Now’ Attack on Windows 10

Google’s Project Zero released details of a local proof-of-concept attack against a fully patched Windows 10 PC that allows an adversary to execute untrusted JavaScript outside a sandboxed environment on targeted systems. The attack is a variation of a WPAD/PAC attack. In Project Zero’s case, the...

Newly Published Exploit Code Used to Spread Mirai Variant

Qihoo 360 Netlab researchers reported on Friday that they are tracking an uptick in botnet activity associated with a variant of Mirai. Targeted are ports 23 and 2323 on internet-connected devices made by ZyXEL Communications that are using default admin/CenturyL1nk and admin/QwestM0dem telnet...

Critical Moodle Vulnerability Could Lead to Server Compromise

A critical vulnerability in Moodle, an open source PHP-based learning management system deployed across scores of schools and universities, could expose the server its running on to compromise. Tens of thousands of universities worldwide, including the California State University system, the...

Cisco Warns of Critical Vulnerability Revealed in WikiLeaks 'Vault 7' Data Dump

Cisco Systems warned customers on Friday of a critical vulnerability that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code and obtain full control on more than 300 different models of its switches and routers. Cisco said it became aware of the vulnerability after WikiLeaks released its Vault 7...

Adobe Auto-Update Flash Player Zero Day Patch

Adobe on Saturday began patching a zero-day vulnerability in Flash Player, exploits for which have been included in the notorious Angler Exploit Kit. This is the second of two previously unreported critical flaws in the software that have been patched in the last five days. Adobe last Thursday se...

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...

Blackhole and Cool Exploit Kits Nearly Extinct

When authorities in Russia arrested Paunch, the alleged creator of the Blackhole exploit kit, last month, security researchers and watchers of the malware underground predicted that taking him off the board would put a dent in the use of Blackhole and force its customers onto other platforms. Six...

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...

PHP Group Releases New Versions, But Patch Doesn't Fix CVE-2012-1823 Bug

UPDATE–The developers of PHP have released new versions of the scripting language to fix a remotely exploitable vulnerability announced earlier this week that enables an attacker to pass command-line arguments to the PHP binary. The flaw has been in the code for more than eight years and The PHP...

Microsoft Pushes for Better Software Security Practices

WASHINGTON–Microsoft has spent several years and untold millions of dollars working on methods to write more secure and reliable software, and now the company is encouraging other organizations to make the same investment in software security. One of the outputs of the company’s software security...

Microsoft Security Intelligence Report: The Vinny and Tim Show

This video features Tim Rains and Vinny Gullotto of Microsoft discussing the major threats from the second half of 2008...

Watering Hole Attacks Push ScanBox Keylogger

A China-based threat actor has ramped up efforts to distribute the ScanBox reconnaissance framework to victims that include domestic Australian organizations and offshore energy firms in the South China Sea. The bait used by the advanced threat group APT is targeted messages that supposedly link...

Critical Flaws in Popular ICS Platform Can Trigger RCE

Critical flaws in a popular platform used by industrial control systems ICS that allow for unauthorized device access, remote code execution RCE or denial of service DoS could threaten the security of critical infrastructure. OAS—offered by a company of the same name–makes it easy to transfer dat...

Rethinking Cyber-Defense Strategies in the Public-Cloud Age

The pandemic has fast-tracked migration to the public cloud, including Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Platform and Microsoft Azure. But the journey hasn’t exactly been smooth as silk: The great migration has brought a raft of complex security challenges, which have led to headline-grabbing...

Cyberattackers Put the Pedal to the Medal: Podcast

Cyber-defenders have a lot on their plates: Rapid vulnerability exploitation. Ransomware-apalooza. Botnet infestations on the order never seen in the past. How can IT security teams effectively deal with the escalating volume of threats, especially as those threats become more sophisticated and...

Common Cloud Misconfigurations Exploited in Minutes, Report

Poorly configured cloud services can be exploit by threat actors in minutes and sometimes in under 30 seconds. Attacks include network intrusion, data theft and ransomware infections, researchers have found. Researchers at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 used a honeypot infrastructure of 320 nodes...

Novel Meteor Wiper Used in Attack that Crippled Iranian Train System

An attack earlier this month on Iran’s train system, which disrupted rail service and taunted Iran’s leadership via hacked public transit display screens, used a never-before-seen wiper malware called Meteor that appears to have been design for reuse, a security researcher has found. The initial...