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...

LockBit 2.0 Ransomware Proliferates Globally

The LockBit ransomware-as-a-service RaaS gang has ramped up its targeted attacks, researchers said, with attempts against organizations in Chile, Italy, Taiwan and the U.K. using version 2.0 of its malware. Attacks in July and August have employed LockBit 2.0, according to a Trend Micro analysis...

Bug in Millions of Flawed IoT Devices Lets Attackers Eavesdrop

Security researchers have discovered a critical flaw that affects tens of millions of internet-of-things IoT devices – one that exposes live video and audio streams to eavesdropping threat actors and which could enable attackers to take over control of devices, including security webcams and...

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...

The Gig Economy Creates Novel Data-Security Risks

As businesses strive to move faster and faster, many are adopting a “just-in-time” strategy of spinning up human resources on demand – a phenomenon known as the gig economy, familiar to most via Uber, Instacart or DoorDash. But it’s a concept that enterprises are embracing too – inadvertently...

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...

Azure Functions Weakness Allows Privilege Escalation

A privilege-escalation vulnerability Microsoft’s Azure Functions cloud container feature could ultimately allow a user to escape the container, according to researchers. Intezer researchers dubbed the bug “Royal Flush” after a flush-to-disk limitation that an exploit would need to evade. Flushing...

Conti Gang Demands $40M Ransom from Florida School District

UPDATE The Conti Gang has demanded a $40 million ransom from a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., school district after a ransomware attack last month. Attackers stole personal information from students and teachers, disrupted the district’s networks, and caused some services to be unavailable. The incident...

Cisco Plugs Security Hole in Small Business Routers

A popular line of small business routers made by Cisco Systems are vulnerable to a high-severity vulnerability. If exploited, the flaw could allow a remote – albeit authenticated – attacker to execute code or restart affected devices unexpectedly. Cisco issued fixes on Wednesday for the flaw in i...

NanoCore RAT Scurries Past Email Defenses with .ZIPX Tactic

A spate of malicious emails with attachments delivering the NanoCore remote access trojan RAT is evading anti-malware and email scanners by abusing the .ZIPX file format. That’s according to researchers at Trustwave, who found that the campaign is effectively hiding a malicious executable by givi...

Sextortionist Campaign Targets iOS, Android Users with New Spyware

New spyware is targeting iOS and Android frequenters of adult mobile sites by posing as a secure messaging application in yet another twist on sextortionist scams. The spyware, dubbed Goontact, targets users of escort-service sites and other sex-oriented services – particularly in Chinese-speakin...

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...

Authentication Bug Opens Android Smart-TV Box to Data Theft

A critical bug in the Hindotech HK1 TV Box would allow root-privilege escalation thanks to improper access control. A successful exploit would allow attackers to steal social-networking account tokens, Wi-Fi passwords, cookies, saved passwords, user-location data, message history, emails, contact...

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...

Understanding the Payload-Less Email Attacks Evading Your Security Team

The traditional image of a successful email attack is that of a naive employee clicking the link in a crudely crafted spam email bent on phishing. But times have changed, and employees are much more security-educated than they used to be. So, today’s threat actors are creating increasingly...

NTT Communications Data Breach Affects Customers, Threatens Supply Chain

Japan-based systems integrator NTT Communications has disclosed a recent data breach that it said impacted hundreds of customers. The total affected comes to as many as 621 customers, the company said, but security experts worry about the impacts of the data breach due to the company’s positionin...

Verizon DBIR: Web App Attacks and Security Errors Surge

Verizon’s 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report DBIR, released Tuesday, analyzed 32,002 security incidents and 3,950 data breaches to sniff out the top causes of data breaches over the past year. While cyber-espionage attacks and malware decreased, other trends, such as security “errors” cloud...

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...

Apple Safari Blocks Ad-Targeting Cookie Support

Apple has released an update to its Safari browser that blocks third-party cookies, following an announcement by Google that it would do the same for its Chrome browser. Through the release of Safari 13.1 on Tuesday, alongside some changes to Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention ITP in iOS and...

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...

Flaws Riddle Zyxel’s Network Management Software

Security researchers are warning that networking hardware vendor Zyxel and its Cloud CNM SecuManager software is chock-full of unpatched vulnerabilities that kick open the doors for hackers to exploit. In all, researchers have identified 16 vulnerabilities, ranging from multiple backdoors and...

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...

RSAC 2020: Smart Baby Monitor Vulnerable to Remote Hackers

SAN FRANCISCO – Researchers have discovered a slew of security vulnerabilities in a popular baby monitor, which if exploited allows attackers to remotely access the camera’s video footage. The vulnerabilities were discovered in the iBaby Monitor M6S connected baby camera by researchers with...

Critical Adobe Flaws Fixed in Out-of-Band Update

Adobe has issued unscheduled patches for two critical vulnerabilities that, if exploited, enable an attacker to execute remote code on targeted devices. The two apps affected by the critical flaws are Adobe After Effects, a visual effects and motion graphics app used for post-production film maki...

Report to Your Management with the Definitive ‘IR Management and Reporting’ presentation Template

The realistic approach to security is that incidents occur. While ideally, the CISO would want to prevent all of them, in practice some will succeed to a certain degree—making the ability to efficiently manage an incident response process a mandatory skill for any CISO. Moreover, apart from 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...

Facebook Security Debacles: 2019 Year in Review

Facebook Security: 2019 Year in Review Facebook spent the past year both trying to deal with the consequences of the Cambridge Analytica scandal that rocked its public relations in 2018, as well as other issues afflicting the social media platform – from data security challenges to political...

Senate Passes Bill Aimed At Combating Ransomware Attacks

The U.S. Senate has approved new legislation aimed at helping government agencies and private-sector companies combat ransomware attacks. The legislation comes as local governments and schools continue to be hit by sophisticated – and in some cases coordinated – ransomware attacks. The proposed...

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...

WordPress Plugins Anchor Widespread Malvertising, Rogue Backdoor Campaign

A malvertising campaign redirecting website visitors and surfacing popups is plaguing the WordPress ecosystem, according to researchers, using known vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins as the attack vector. The campaign has been ongoing all summer, with cybercrooks bent on redirecting website...

Puzzling Gwmndy Botnet Focuses on Low-Volume Proxy Connections

An odd botnet has been spotted targeting Fiberhome routers, in a quest to add 200 of them per day to its botnet web. That’s a low number in the world of botnets, according to 360 Netlab researchers, which observed a previously unknown malware strain called Gwmndy after the attackers’ domain name...

Amazon Alexa Secretly Records Children, Lawsuits Allege

A federal lawsuit is alleging that Amazon is recording children who use its Alexa devices, without their consent or knowledge. Alexa is the built-in voice assistant shipped with devices like Amazon Echo, Amazon Dot, Fire TV and some third-party gadgets. “Alexa routinely records and voiceprints...

Hackers Favor Weekdays for Attacks, Share Resources Often

Do threat actors carry out phases of their attack on different days of the week? Do threats use the same infrastructure for exploitation and control? These may not be the sort of questions that cybersecurity professional usually think about, but their implications can actually have an important...

MacOS Zero Day Allows Trusted Apps to Run Malicious Code

A researcher has revealed a zero-day flaw in Apple’s Mojave operating system tied to the way the OS verifies apps. The bug allows attackers to sneak past macOS security measures and run whitelisted apps that have been manipulated to run malicious code. macOS researcher Patrick Wardle revealed the...

Retefe Banking Trojan Resurfaces, Says Goodbye to Tor

The Retefe banking trojan resurfaced in April after going dormant for months, with a makeover that includes a move away from Tor to secure its communications as well as the abuse of a legitimate shareware application. Retefe has always stood out from other banking trojans, with a consistent...

Romanian Duo Convicted of Malware Scheme Infecting 400,000 Computers

A Romanian duo has been convicted for infecting hundreds of thousands of computers with malware that scooped up credentials and financial information, and scamming victims out of millions of dollars. The two, Bogdan Nicolescu, 36, and Radu Miclaus, 37, were convicted by a federal jury in Ohio on...

Citrix Falls Prey to Password-Spraying Attack

Citrix is warning that its internal network has been hit by international cybercriminals. The digital workspace and enterprise networks vendor said in a website notice that the FBI contacted it on Wednesday, saying that there was evidence of a successful cyberattack on its network. While details...

Separ Malware Plucks Hundreds of Companies' Credentials in Ongoing Phish

An ongoing phishing campaign is using malicious PDF documents to spread Separ malware and ultimately steal victims’ browser and email credentials. Since the attack started at the end of January, it has affected around 200 companies and over 1,000 individuals, located mainly in Southeast Asia, the...

Dailymotion Fights Ongoing Credential-Stuffing Attack

Dailymotion, the video-sharing platform, said Friday that it had fallen victim to a “large-scale” and ongoing credential-stuffing assault by attackers looking to harvest user data. The French YouTube competitor said in an alert that it has “successfully contained the attacks following the...

New APT Could Signal Reemergence of Notorious Comment Crew

A recently observed APT campaign, dubbed Operation Oceansalt, could herald the return of the infamous China-linked hacking group known as Comment Crew or APT1. Attacks are cunning and are defined by their their deep targeting and use of an innovative multi-wave attack methodology. Operation...

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...

New Spectre-Level Flaw Targets Return Stack Buffer

Researchers have discovered yet another speculative execution side-channel flaw enabling attackers to access sensitive data at the CPU level. The new Spectre-class exploit, dubbed SpectreRSB, was detailed by researchers from the University of California at Riverside in a research paper on Friday...

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...

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...

Lenovo Warns Critical WiFi Vulnerability Impacts Dozens of ThinkPad Models

Lenovo warned customers on Friday that two critical Broadcom vulnerabilities impacts 25 models of its popular ThinkPad brand. The vulnerabilities were first revealed in September and originally they were only reported to impact specific Broadcom chipsets used in Apple iPhones, Apple TV and Androi...

Cisco, Netgear Readying Patches for Samba Vulnerability

Device manufacturers are combing through code again this week to determine whether their products are affected by a vulnerability tied to the SMB file-sharing protocol. The vulnerability, CVE-2017-7494 disclosed last Wednesday, affects versions of 3.5.0 onward of Samba, the free software...

Google Chrome 57 Browser Update Patches 'High' Severity Flaws

Google released an updated version of its Chrome browser on Thursday to fix nine high-severity vulnerabilities that if exploited could allow adversaries to take control of targeted systems. As part of the update, Google thanked nearly two dozen bug hunters with bug bounty payments totaling $38,00...

GPG Patches 18-Year-Old Libgcrypt RNG Bug

New versions of Libgcrypt and Gnu Privacy Guard GnuPG or GPG released on Wednesday include security fixes for vulnerabilities discovered in the mixing functions of the Libgcrypt random number generator. The flaws were privately disclosed by Felix Dörre and Vladimir Klebanov of Karlsruhe Institute...

New Research Refines Security Vulnerability Metrics

Adequate security metrics have seemingly been an unattainable goal, especially when it comes to software security. Too often, organizations simply rely on vulnerability counts for flaws disclosed in an operating system or popular application as a measure of its security. But too often, variables...

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...