Katie Moussouris on Microsoft, Trustworthy Computing and the Evolution of the Security Community

Dennis Fisher talks with Microsoft’s Katie Moussouris about the way that the Trustworthy Computing effort at Microsoft has changed, how the security community has evolved since she got involved in the 1990s and the challenges–and fun–of being a woman in security. Podcast audio courtesy of sykboy6...

Microsoft Takes the Lead in Security

From InfoWorld Roger Grimes Talk about a turnaround. It’s always hard to recognize the larger, slow-moving paradigm shifts as they happen. But after a decade of bad press regarding its commitment to software security, Microsoft seems to have turned the tide. Redmond is getting consistent security...

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...

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...

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...

Critical Linux Kernel Bug Allows Remote Takeover

A critical heap-overflow security vulnerability in the Transparent Inter Process Communication TIPC module of the Linux kernel could allow local exploitation and remote code execution, leading to full system compromise. TIPC is a peer-to-peer protocol used by nodes within a Linux cluster to...

OpenSea ‘Free Gift’ NFTs Drain Cryptowallet Balances

Users of OpenSea, the world’s largest digital-collectible marketplace, have found their cryptocurrency wallets ripped off thanks to cyberattackers weaponizing security bugs that allowed them to highjack user accounts. The attacks revolved around boobytrapped art files, which circulated in the for...

Microsoft Office Users Face Malware-Protection Bypass

Legacy users of Microsoft Excel are being targeted in a malware campaign that uses a novel malware-obfuscation technique to disable Office defenses and deliver the Zloader trojan. The attack, according to research published Thursday by McAfee, marries functions in Microsoft Office Word and Excel ...

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...

Feds Shut Down Fake COVID-19 Vaccine Phishing Website

Federal law enforcement in Maryland has shut down a fraudulent website targeting immigrant communities that claimed to be for a company developing a COVID-19 vaccine. Instead, the site was stealing information from people with the purpose of using it for future cybercriminal activity. The U.S...

iOS Kids Game Morphs into Underground Crypto Casino

A kids’ game called “Jungle Run” that, until recently, was available in the Apple App store, was secretly a cryptocurrency-funded casino set up to scam people out of money. Join experts from Digital Shadows Austin Merritt, Malwarebytes Adam Kujawa and Sift Kevin Lee to find out how cybercrime...

Fake Google reCAPTCHA Phishing Attack Swipes Office 365 Passwords

Microsoft users are being targeted with thousands of phishing emails, in an ongoing attack aiming to steal their Office 365 credentials. The attackers add an air of legitimacy to the campaign by leveraging a fake Google reCAPTCHA system and top-level domain landing pages that include the logos of...

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...

Spearphishing Attack Spoofs Microsoft.com to Target 200M Office 365 Users

A spearphishing attack is spoofing Microsoft.com to target 200 million Microsoft Office 365 users in a number of key vertical markets, including financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and utility providers. Researchers at Ironscales discovered the campaign targeting several thousand...

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...

Security Takeaways from the Great Work-from-Home Experiment

As states deal with re-opening and in some cases, re-closing, the reality is that for many organizations, remote work will play a significant role in business through 2020 and beyond. And so will increased cybercriminal activity, as demonstrated by a 131 percent increase in viruses and about 600...

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...

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...

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...

WhatsApp Phone Numbers Pop Up in Google Search Results — But is it a Bug?

UPDATE A researcher is warning that a WhatsApp feature called “Click to Chat” puts users’ mobile phone numbers at risk — by allowing Google Search to index them for anyone to find. But WhatsApp owner Facebook says it is no big deal and that the search results only reveal what the users have chose...

Trump, Biden Campaign Staffers Targeted By APT Phishing Emails

With the U.S. presidential election months away, advanced persistent threat APT groups are targeting the campaign staffers of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden in recent phishing attacks. On Thursday, Shane Huntley with Google’s Threat Analysis Group said on Twitter that two separate phishing...

ACLU Sues Clearview AI Over Faceprint Collection, Sale

The American Civil Liberties Union ACLU has sued a New York-based startup for amassing a database of biometric face-identification data of billions of people and selling it to third parties without their consent or knowledge The U.S. citizens’-rights watchdog organization has filed suit in the...

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...

REvil Ransomware Attack Hits A-List Celeb Law Firm

A popular law firm that works with several A-list celebrities, including Lady Gaga, Drake and Madonna, has been hit by a ransomware attack. Hackers are now threatening to release the 756 gigabytes of data allegedly stolen – including non-disclosure agreements, client contracts and personal...

EFF: Google, Apple's Contact-Tracing System Open to Cyberattacks

Privacy advocates are urging developers to proceed with caution as they use technology released by Apple and Google to build COVID-19 contact-tracing apps — and are warning against the potential for cybercriminal use. On the latter point, the system is meant to help people know if they have come...

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...

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...

New Mirai Variant 'Mukashi' Targets Zyxel NAS Devices

Another variant of the shape-shifting Mirai botnet is attacking Zyxel network-attached storage NAS devices using a critical vulnerability that was only recently discovered, according to security researchers. The variant, dubbed Mukashi, takes advantage of a pre-authentication command injection...

Let’s Encrypt Pushes Back Deadline to Revoke Some TLS Certificates

Let’s Encrypt said it will give users of its Transport Layer Security TLS certificates more time to replace 1 million certificates that are still active and potentially affected by a Certificate Authority Authorization CAA bug before it revokes them. The popular free certificate authority had giv...

Puerto Rico Gov Hit By $2.6M Phishing Scam

A phishing scam has swindled a Puerto Rico government agency out of more than $2.6 million, according to reports. According to reports, the email-based phishing scam hit Puerto Rico’s Industrial Development Company, which is a government-owned corporation aimed at driving economic development to...

FBI: $3.5B Lost in 2019 to Known Cyberscams, Ransomware

Cybercriminals are focusing on previously successful internet scams to defraud businesses and individuals in the United States out of more money than ever before, according to the FBI’s annual report on cybercrime. Meanwhile, ransomware continues to take a big financial toll on victims. Businesse...

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...

200K WordPress Sites Vulnerable to Plugin Flaw

A high-severity vulnerability exists in a popular WordPress plugin, potentially opening up 200,000 websites to takeover. The WordPress plugin in question in Code Snippets, which allows users to run small chunks of PHP code on their websites. This can be used to extend the functionality of the...

Ring Doorbell App for Android Caught Sharing User Data with Facebook, Data-Miners

UPDATE Amazon’s Ring Doorbell app for Android is a nexus for data-harvesting, according to an investigation by the Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF. Privacy advocates allege Ring goes so far as to silently deliver updates on Ring customer usage to Facebook, even if the Ring owner doesn’t have a...

Pwn2Own Miami Contestants Haul in $180K for Hacking ICS Equipment

The very first Pwn2Own hacking competition that exclusively focuses on the industrial control systems ICS has kicked off in Miami. So far, a total of $180,000 has been awarded for pwning five different products. The contest hosts at Trend Micro’s Zero Day initiative ZDI have allocated more than...

Feds Offer $5M Reward to Nab 'Evil Corp' Dridex Hacker

U.S. authorities are offering up $5 million for information leading to the arrest of Evil Corp. leader Maksim V. Yakubets, 32, of Russia, who goes under the moniker “aqua.” The U.S. alleges that Yakubets and his company have stolen millions of dollars from victims using the Dridex banking trojan...

PoS Malware Exposes Customer Data of Catch Restaurants

Popular NYC restaurants Catch NYC, Catch Roof and Catch Steak discovered and removed malware on their point-of-sale PoS systems — but not before it exposed credit-card information from unknowing diners. Catch Hospitality Group, which owns the three NYC hotspots, said in a data-breach notice this...

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...

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...

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...

Cloud Security Concerns Loom for 93% of Businesses Adopting Apps and BYOD

With the increasing popularity of bring-your-own-device BYOD policies and public cloud offerings, enterprises are moving from on-premises applications to cloud apps – but they still lack faith in cloud security. A recent July Bitglass study found that 67 percent of respondents believe cloud apps...

March Madness Scams Give Attackers Fast Break

With the 2019 NCAA tournament’s Final Four around the corner, researchers are urging viewers to be wary of a slew of March Madness-related phishing attacks, adware installers and other security threats. While security concerns regarding popular sporting events – from the World Cup to the Super Bo...

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...

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...

Password Manager Firms Blast Back at ‘Leaky Password’ Revelations

Secure password firms 1Password, Dashlane, KeePass and LastPass are blasting a research report that highlights how a local adversary can crack open and steal passwords stored by the utilities. The uproar began Tuesday when lead researcher, Adrian Bednarek with Independent Security Evaluators ISE,...

Airbus Data Takes Flight; and Billions of Credentials Dumped on Dark Web

French airplane and military aircraft behemoth Airbus SE has become the latest victim of a cyberattack leading to a data breach, with an incident detected on its “commercial aircraft business” information systems. It is only the latest high-profile data exposure to come to light in recent days, a...

Stealthy Malware Disguises Itself as a WordPress License Key

UPDATE A spam-injecting malware is targeting WordPress site owners by disguising itself as a legitimate license key for a WordPress design theme. According to analysis from Sucuri, a customer opened a malware removal ticket reporting “some weird spam URLs injected onto their WordPress website.”...

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...

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...

Adobe Patches Critical Bugs In Flash Player, Creative Cloud

Adobe has fixed several critical vulnerabilities – including a critical code execution bug in Adobe Flash Player – as part of its regularly scheduled May Security Bulletin, on Tuesday. In all, Adobe released patches for five critical and important vulnerabilities spanning Creative Cloud, Adobe...