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...

Babuk Ransomware Builder Mysteriously Appears in VirusTotal

The Babuk ransomware gang’s source code has been uploaded to VirusTotal, making it available to all security vendors and competitors. It’s unclear however just how that happened. According to a Wednesday posting from Malwarebytes, the operators of the ransomware – perhaps best-known for hitting t...

QR Codes Offer Easy Cyberattack Avenues as Usage Spikes

The use of mobile quick-response QR codes in daily life, for both work and personal use, continues to rise – and yet, most people aren’t aware that these handy mobile shortcuts can open them up to savvy cyberattacks. That’s according to Ivanti, which carried out a survey of 4,157 consumers across...

Novel Email-Based Campaign Targets Bloomberg Clients with RATs

A new email-based campaign by an emerging threat actor aims to spread various remote access trojans RATs to a very specific group of targets who use Bloomberg’s industry-based services. Cisco Talos Intelligence researchers discovered the campaign, dubbing it and its perpetrator “Fajan,” and...

Call of Duty Cheats Expose Gamers to Malware

Activision, the company behind Call of Duty: Warzone, has issued a warning that a threat actor is taking out ads for cheat tools, which instead turn out to be remote-access trojan RAT malware . The scam was first floated in March when a cyberattacker posted in hacking forums that they had a free,...

Four More Bugs Patched in Microsoft’s Azure Sphere IoT Platform

Details tied to a pair of remote code execution bugs in Microsoft’s IoT security platform called Azure Sphere were released Monday. Also made public were specifics associated with two additional privilege escalation flaws impacting the same cloud security platform. Public disclosure of all four o...

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...

Attackers Claim Identity of Financial NGO to Steal Sharepoint, Office Credentials

A new phishing campaign is targeting investment brokers with fraudulent emails aimed at stealing their Microsoft SharePoint and Office credentials, by invoking the identity of a credible financial regulatory organization. The “widespread, ongoing phishing campaign” is using emails that claim to b...

Public Sector Ransomware Attacks Rage On: Can Your Organization Repel Them?

To pay or not to pay? That is the question many public-sector organizations must grapple with when faced with a complex ransomware attack – even while the COVID-19 pandemic rages on around them. Ransomware attacks to municipal, local, and state government agencies are on the rise. Places as...

Hackers Actively Exploit 0-Day in CCTV Camera Hardware

Multiple zero-day vulnerabilities were actively being exploited in CCTV security cameras manufactured by Taiwan-based LILIN, researchers found. The company, an IP video solution provider, was being targeted by hackers hijacking the company’s DVR hardware. Once commandeered, hackers then planted...

Free Download: The Ultimate Security Pros’ Checklist

You are a cybersecurity professional with the responsibility to keep your organization secured, you know your job chapter and verse, from high-level reporting duties to the bits and bytes of what malware targeted your endpoints a week ago. But it’s a lot to hold in one’s mind, so to make your lif...

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...

Ransomware Attack Hinders Toll Group Operations

Australian transportation and logistics giant Toll Group said a ransomware attack is to blame for several key services being debilitated and delivery operations being delayed over the past week. Toll Group, a subsidiary of Japan Post Holdings, is a freight and delivery service company operating...

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...

Zero Day Initiative Bug Hunters Rake in $1.5M in 2019

Zero Day Initiative ZDI awarded more than $1.5 million in cash and prizes to bug-hunters throughout 2019, it said, resulting in 1,035 security vulnerability advisories for the year. Most of those advisories 88 percent were published in conjunction with a patch from the vendor, Zero Day Initiative...

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...

Serious Security Flaws Found in Children's Connected Toys

Various connected toys for children – hot off the shelves from this holiday shopping season – have been found with deep-rooted security issues, including missing authentication for device pairing and a lack of encryption for connected online accounts. The research, formed by a partnership between...

Americans Concerned and Confused Over Privacy, Survey Reveals

Call it a case of Facebook privacy breach fatigue. When asked, Americans say companies do a worse job than the government when it comes to protecting data collected on their behalf. They also complain potential risks they face because of data collection by companies outweigh the benefits. The...

Lizard Squad Threatens UK's Labour Leader with Cyberattacks Against His Family

Lizard Squad, the well-known hacktivist cybergang, is pledging to mount personal cyberattacks on Britain’s Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. As the UK continues to be roiled by Brexit debate ahead of a Dec. 12 general election, the Labour Party said on Tuesday that it had been targeted by a...

Murky Details Surround Bed, Bath and Beyond Breach

Housewares and home furnishings purveyor Bed, Bath and Beyond has disclosed a data-thieving cyber attack that allowed the adversaries to access customers’ online accounts. According to a Tuesday SEC filing, the company “discovered that a third party acquired email and password information from a...

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...

New! RFP Template for Selecting EDR/EPP and APT Security

Once upon a time, only big organizations worried about Advanced Persistent Threats. But it soon became obvious that every organization could find itself under fire, regardless of size or industry, and whether as direct targets or collateral damage. Most security decision makers in these...

Adwind Spyware-as-a-Service Attacks Utility Grid Operators

A phishing campaign that spoofs a PDF attachment to deliver Adwind spyware has been taking aim at national grid utilities infrastructure. Adwind, a.k.a. JRAT or SockRat, is being used in a malware-as-a-service model in this campaign, researchers said. It offers a full cadre of info-gathering...

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...

Researchers Weigh in on Trump's Cyber Workforce Executive Order

Security researchers are reacting to a cybersecurity workforce executive order from the White House that came down Thursday, aimed at improving the level of cyber-expertise at federal agencies. While outlining no specific steps or actions, the order creates a directive to create “a superior...

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...

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,...

Monero: Cybercrime's Top Choice for Mining Malware

An academic analysis of cryptomining malware has determined that the Monero virtual currency XMR is “by far” the most popular cryptocurrency to mine among cybercriminals. And, it would appear that cryptomining as a criminal enterprise is unlikely to wane anytime soon. After examining approximatel...

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...

Multiple Bugs Found in QNAP Q’Center Web Console

Researchers found an array of high severity vulnerabilities in network storage vendor QNAP’s web console, which could enable an authenticated attacker to gain privileges and execute arbitrary commands on the system. The web-based platform, Q’center, allows users to manage network attached storage...

Drupalgeddon 2.0 Still Haunting 115K+ Sites

More than 115,000 sites are still vulnerable to a highly critical Drupal bug – even though a patch was released three months ago. When it was first revealed, the bug, which has been dubbed Drupalgeddon 2.0, impacted an estimated 1+ million sites running Drupal – including major U.S. educational...

Google Patches 29 Critical Android Vulnerabilities Including Holes in Mediaserver, Qualcomm

Google has patched ten critical vulnerabilities tied to problem-plagued Android components like Mediaserver, NVIDIA’s GPU driver, and Qualcomm’s driver. The most serious bug, according to Google’s January Android Security Bulletin, is the Mediaserver vulnerability. “The most severe of these issue...

Remote Code Execution Bug Found in Ubuntu Quantal

A remote code execution bug has been patched in the default installation of Ubuntu Desktop affecting all default installations of Quantal version 12.10 and later. According to researcher Donncha O’Cearbhaill, the bug allows for code injection when a user opens a specially crafted malicious file...

Fix Coming for Flash Vulnerability Under Attack

Adobe today said it will patch Flash Player this week, addressing a vulnerability being exploited in “limited, targeted attacks.” The flaw, CVE-2016-4171, exists in versions of Flash prior to, and including, 21.0.0.242 on Windows, Macintosh, Linux and ChromeOS platforms. “Successful exploitation...

APT Groups Exploiting Patch Microsoft Office Flaw CVE-2015-2545

A Microsoft Office vulnerability patched six months ago continues to be a valuable tool for APT gangs operating primarily in Southeast Asia and the Far East. Researchers at Kaspersky Lab today published a report describing how attackers continue to flourish exploiting CVE-2015-2545, a remote code...

Office, Java Patches Erase Latest APT 28 Zero Days

An APT group thought to be tied to Russia is flying against conventional wisdom, having as recently as the last three weeks dropped its sixth zero-day in the past four months. Given the underground value of unpatched and unreported vulnerabilities, this is highly unusual behavior, even for a...

Ghost glibc Vulnerability Patching and Exploits

There are some silver linings in the wake of yesterday’s disclosure of the Ghost vulnerability in the Gnu C library, glibc, which affects all Linux systems and seemed to harken yet another Internet-wide vulnerability. First, the 15-year-old bug isn’t the showstopper that the Shellshock...

GHOST glibc Linux Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

A critical vulnerability has been found in glibc, the GNU C library, that affects all Linux systems dating back to 2000. Attackers can use this flaw to execute code and remotely gain control of Linux machines. The issue stems from a heap-based buffer overflow found in the nsshostnamedigitsdots...

White House Security Czar Howard Schmidt Retiring

Howard Schmidt, the top White House information security adviser, is retiring after more than two years on the job and several decades in security both in government and private industry. Schmidt is in his second stint as the White House security chief and he’s leaving at a time when cybersecurit...

Another Set of PHP Releases Pushed Out to Fix CVE-2012-1823 Flaw

For the second time in less than a week, the developers of PHP have released new versions of the language that include a fix for the remotely exploitable vulnerability that was disclosed last week. The group is encouraging users to upgrade to PHP 5.4.3 or 5.3.13 immediately. The vulnerability...

Microsoft Defends Secure Boot in Windows 8

Microsoft officials are seeking to assuage concerns that its implementation of UEFI in Windows 8 will prevent users from loading non-Microsoft operating systems or applications on their machines. Despite concerns raised by security researchers and open-source advocates about vendor lock-in and...

Microsoft Warns of Attacks Against ASP.NET Flaw

Microsoft is warning customers that it has seen ongoing attacks against the recently disclosed padding oracle vulnerability in ASP.NET and is encouraging them to implement a workaround that will help protect against the publicly disclosed exploit for the bug. The workaround that Microsoft has...

Windows Exploitation Part 2

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

Conti’s Reign of Chaos: Costa Rica in the Crosshairs

Any time conflict erupts, people tend to take sides, even when it comes to cybercrime. Since the beginning of the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war, some bad actors have made their alliances known publicly. The Conti Ransomware-as-a-Service RaaS group is one of the most notable – declaring in Februar...

How War Impacts Cyber Insurance

Author Chris Hallenbeck is CISO for the Americas at Tanium In the words of former FBI director, Robert Mueller, “There are only two types of companies: those that have been hacked and those that will be.” This unavoidable truth, coupled with growing mainstream awareness and the ever-increasing...

‘Fully Undetected’ SysJoker Backdoor Malware Targets Windows, Linux & macOS

A brand-new multiplatform malware, likely distributed via malicious npm packages, is spreading under the radar with Linux and Mac versions going fully undetected in VirusTotal, researchers warned. The Windows version, according to a Tuesday writeup from Intezer, has only six detections as of this...

URL Parsing-Library Bugs Allow DoS, RCE, Spoofing & More

Eight different security vulnerabilities arising from inconsistencies among 16 different URL parsing libraries could allow denial-of-service DoS conditions, information leaks and remote code execution RCE in various web applications, researchers are warning. The bugs were found in third-party web...

Epik Confirms Hack, Gigabytes of Data on Offer

Epik, the domain registrar known for hosting several large right-wing organizations, has confirmed a hack of its systems, a week after attackers branding themselves part of the Anonymous hacktivist collective said that they had obtained and leaked gigabits of data from the hosting company,...

ZLoader’s Back, Abusing Google AdWords, Disabling Windows Defender

A targeted campaign delivering the ZLoader banking trojan is spreading via Google AdWords, and is using a mechanism to disable all Windows Defender modules on victim machines, researchers have found. That’s according to SentinelLabs, which said that to lower the rates of detection, the infection...

NFT Collector Tricked into Buying Fake Banksy

An attacker was apparently able to breach the site for famed street artist Banksy and sell a fake non-fungible token NFT of the artist’s work for more than $336,000. The fraudster has since returned the ill-gotten cash, less a “transaction fee.” But the incident has delivered an invaluable lesson...