Windows SMB Zero Day to Be Disclosed During DEF CON

LAS VEGAS—A 20-year-old Windows SMB vulnerability is expected to be disclosed Saturday during a talk at DEF CON. Microsoft has said it will not patch the vulnerability, which allows an attacker to remotely crash a Windows server with relative ease using only 20 lines of Python code and a Raspberr...

Mark Dowd on Exploit Mitigation Development

Mark Dowd, fresh off his 2017 Security Analyst Summit keynote, discusses why certain exploit mitigations have been so successful in driving up the cost of exploit development for attackers...

Microsoft Offers Analysis of Zero-Day Exploited By Zirconium Group

Microsoft has released technical details on a zero-day vulnerability being exploited by a little-known APT group known as Zirconium. According to the company the vulnerability CVE-2017-0005 affects mostly older versions of Windows and can allow an adversary to execute remote code if a user either...

Oracle Patches 270 Vulnerabilities With First CPU of 2017

Oracle patched 270 vulnerabilities on Tuesday, many remotely exploitable, across 45 different products–including its E-Business Suite, Financial Services software, and MySQL database–as part of its quarterly Critical Patch Update CPU. The massive update comes close breaking Oracle’s record-settin...

PLC Blaster Worm Targets Industrial Control PLCs

LAS VEGAS – Security researchers at Black Hat USA described a proof-of-concept worm that targets weaknesses within automated industrial control systems used to manage critical infrastructure and manufacturing. The worm, according to OpenSource Security, has the capability to autonomously search f...

Adobe Issues HotFix For ColdFusion

Adobe this afternoon released hotfixes and security updates for three of its products that patch a handful of vulnerabilities, none of which are being publicly exploited. The most serious vulnerabilities were in ColdFusion, Adobe’s web application development platform. The hotfix affects ColdFusi...

Researchers Outline New Italian RAT uWarrior

Details have come to light about a new remote access Trojan called uWarrior that arrives embedded in a rigged .RTF document. Researchers with Palo Alto Networks’ research division, Unit 42, described the malware and how it appears to have emanated from an “unknown actor of Italian origin,” in a...

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...

Microsoft Warns of Crowti Ransomware

Researchers with Microsoft have spotted a spike in Crowti, a ransomware similar to Cryptolocker that encrypts files on victims’ machines and then asks for payment to unlock them. The malware has existed for several months but it wasn’t until mid-October that Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center...

Supermicro IPMI BMCs plaintext passwords exposed

Much has been written about the insecurity of the IPMI protocol present inside embedded baseboard management controllers BMCs. Serious vulnerabilities can be exploited to gain remote control over big servers running BMCs, in particular in hosting environments where the controllers help admins wit...

Exploits for Two-Year-Old PHP Security Vulnerability Found

Close to two years ago, a serious vulnerability in PHP was accidentally disclosed after it was discovered months prior during a hacking contest. A patch was released in relatively short order, and one would assume that given PHP’s prevalence as a web development framework, the fix would have been...

New Web-Based MiniDuke Components Discovered

Researchers at Kaspersky Lab and CrySys Lab have discovered files buried inside a MiniDuke command and control server that indicate the presence of a Web-based facet of the campaign that initially targeted government agencies, primarily in Europe. Users are likely lured to the malicious webpages...

Chaouki Bekrar: The Man Behind the Bugs

VANCOUVER–Say what you will about Chaouki Bekrar, but the man is nothing if not frank. Bekrar, who is the public face of the VUPEN team that has been toying with the Pwn2Own contest this week, has become a lightning rod in the debate over exploit sales, and from all outward appearances, he couldn...

Microsoft Releases Workaround For Kernel Flaw Used By Duqu

Microsoft has released a workaround for the Windows kernel zero-day vulnerability exploited by the Duqu malware, and said that it is working on a permanent patch, but didn’t specify a timeline for its release. The vulnerability is a serious one that can lead to remote code execution on vulnerable...

Blowback: Microsoft, OnStar Pump the Brakes on Location Tracking

Redmond, Washington software giant, Microsoft, and Detroit based GM subsidiary, OnStar backtracked on policies widely seen as egregious privacy violations following lawsuits and public outcry. Here’s the news: Windows Phone Update Requires User Consent For Tracking Microsoft released their “Mango...

Cyber Criminal Underground: The Comics Edition

The criminal underworld is an insular community shrouded in secrecy. That’s helped lend an air of mystique to cyber crime. See also: Bruce Willis in “Die Hard 4: Live Free or Die Hard.”. But it turns out that, like so much else, real life cyber crime is… well… pretty dull. How dull? Comic artist...

Main PHP-Nuke Site Compromised

The main site for the PHP-Nuke content management system software has been compromised and is serving malicious iFrame exploits to visitors. Researchers at Websense found that the phpnuke.org site is currently serving several different exploits. The attack uses the common iFrame-redirection...

MS Discovers Over 1,800 Office 2010 Bugs

Microsoft uncovered more than 1,800 bugs in Office 2010 by tapping into the unused computing horsepower of idling PCs. Office developers found the bugs by running millions of “fuzzing” tests, said Tom Gallagher, senior security test lead with Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group. Read the full...

Stolen Credentials Led to Data Theft at United Nations

A threat actor used stolen credentials from a United Nations employee to breach parts of the UN’s network in April and steal critical data, a spokesman for the intergovernmental organization has confirmed. That data lifted from the network can be used to target agencies within the UN, which alrea...

ProxyShell Attacks Pummel Unpatched Exchange Servers

Over the weekend, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency CISA issued an urgent alert that attackers are actively attacking ProxyShell vulnerabilities in unpatched Microsoft Exchange Servers, joining researchers in urging organizations to immediately install the latest Microsoft Securi...

Phishing Costs Nearly Quadrupled Over 6 Years

Research shows that the cost of phishing attacks has nearly quadrupled over the past six years: Large U.S. companies are now losing, on average, $14.8 million annually, or $1,500 per employee. That’s up sharply from 2015’s figure of $3.8 million, according to a new study from Ponemon Institute th...

Connected Farms Easy Pickings for Global Food Supply-Chain Hack

A group of hackers made an unnerving DEF CON 29 presentation showing how the sprawling growth of digital and automated farming has left the world’s food supply chain vulnerable to cyberattack. A video for DEF CON 29 hacker conference this week put out by the group Sick Codes explained that modern...

What’s Next for REvil’s Victims?

Last week, the servers of ransomware giant REvil vanished. Many applauded as dark-web and clear-web sites used to support the backend infrastructure of REvil, aka Sodinokibi, as well as to leak victims’ data, slipped offline early Tuesday morning. Not REvil’s victims, though. They’re now stuck,...

Fake Zoom App Dropped by New APT ‘Luminous Moth’

Researchers have spotted a weird one: A newly identified threat actor linked to China that’s first mass-attacking, but then cherry-picking, just a few targets to hit with malware and data exfiltration. Kaspersky researchers said in a Wednesday writeup that they’ve named the advanced threat actor...

Steam Gaming Platform Hosting Malware

UPDATE Look out for SteamHide, an emerging malware that disguises itself inside profile images on the gaming platform Steam, which researchers think is being developed for a wide-scale campaign. The Steam platform merely serves as a vehicle which hosts the malicious file, according to research fr...

DarkSide Pwned Colonial With Old VPN Password

It took only one dusty, no-longer-used password for the DarkSide cybercriminals to breach the network of Colonial Pipeline Co. last month, resulting in a ransomware attack that caused significant disruption and remains under investigation by the U.S. government and cybersecurity experts. Attacker...

DoJ Charges Rhode Island Woman in Phishing Scheme Against Politicians

The Department of Justice DoJ has charged a woman in Rhode Island in a phishing campaign against candidates for political office and related associates that impersonated various individuals–including campaign workers and the Microsoft security team—in an attempt to trick victims into providing...

623K Payment Cards Stolen from Cybercrime Forum

The Swarmshop cyber-underground “card shop” has been hit by hackers, who lifted the site’s database of stolen payment-card data and leaked it online. That’s according to researchers at Group-IB, who said that the database was posted on a rival underground forum. Card shops, are online cybercrimin...

Cisco Warns of Critical Auth-Bypass Security Flaw

A critical vulnerability in Cisco Systems’ intersite policy manager software could allow a remote attacker to bypass authentication. The vulnerability is one of three critical flaws fixed by Cisco on this week. It exists in Cisco’s ACI Multi-Site Orchestrator ACI MSO — this is Cisco’s management...

Facebook: Malicious Chrome Extension Developers Scraped Profile Data

Facebook has filed legal action against two Chrome extension developers that the company said was scraping user profile data – including names and profile IDs – as well as other browser-related information. The two unnamed developers under the business name Oink and Stuff, developed Chrome...

Zero-Click Apple Zero-Day Uncovered in Pegasus Spy Attack

Four nation-state-backed advanced persistent threats APTs hacked Al Jazeera journalists, producers, anchors and executives, in an espionage attack leveraging a zero-day exploit for Apple iPhone, researchers said. The attack, carried out in July and August, compromised 36 personal phones belonging...

Security Issues in PoS Terminals Open Consumers to Fraud

Researchers are detailing widespread security issues in point-of-sale PoS terminals – specifically, three terminal device families manufactured by vendors Verifone and Ingenico. Click to register. The issues, which have been disclosed to the vendors and since patched, open several popular PoS...

Trump Campaign Website Defaced by Cryptocurrency Scam

UPDATE Hackers took over President Trump’s 2020 election campaign website late Tuesday, replacing parts of the site with a cryptocurrency scam before returning it to its original content several minutes later. Journalist Gabriel Lorenzo Greschler was the first to notice the attack while he was...

Fileless Malware Tops Critical Endpoint Threats for 1H 2020

In the first half of 2020, the most common critical-severity cybersecurity threat to endpoints was fileless malware, according to a recent analysis of telemetry data from Cisco. Fileless threats consist of malicious code that runs in memory after initial infection, instead of files being stored o...

WolfRAT Android Malware Targets WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger

UPDATE A new Android malware family has been discovered, which targets popular messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to gather intelligence on Android victims. The malware, dubbed WolfRAT, is under active development, and was recently identified in campaigns targeting Thai users...

Podcast: Shifting Cloud Security Left With Infrastructure-as-Code

Companies are increasingly dealing with a slew of security and compliance issues across cloud services and containers – from AWS to Azure to Google Cloud. Infrastructure-as-Code IaC security capabilities can help companies shift their cloud security “left” to improve developer productivity, avoid...

Shade Threat Actors Call It Quits, Release 750K Encryption Keys

The threat actors behind the Shade ransomware have called it quits, releasing 750,000 encryption keys on GitHub and publicly apologizing to victims affected by the malware. User “shade-team” posted four files on the code repository earlier this week, one containing the file keys and four “ReadMe”...

Apple Unpatched VPN Bypass Bug Impacts iOS 13, Warn Researchers

An unpatched bug in the latest version of Apple’s iOS is blocking virtual private network VPN applications from cloaking some private data transmitted between a device and the servers they are requesting data from. While the bug remains unpatched, Apple is suggesting steps users can take to reduc...

Activities of a Nigerian Cybercriminal Uncovered

Ever wonder who’s behind one of those Nigerian cyber-crime email campaigns asking you to enter into a shady business deal and how they’re enacted? In a unique profile, researchers pulled back the curtain on such an attack with a report outlining how a Nigerian cybercriminal made hundreds of...

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...

News Wrap: Authorities Target Evil Corp., Imminent Monitor, Money Mules

In this week’s Threatpost news wrap, editors Tara Seals and Lindsey O’Donnell break down the top infosec news, including: Authorities crack down on cybercrime group Evil Corp. with sanctions and charges against its leader, known for his lavish lifestyle. The developers behind a commodity...

Pipka Card Skimmer Removes Itself After Infecting eCommerce Sites

A new JavaScript payment card skimmer, dubbed Pipka, has been identified on at least seventeen merchant websites attempting to target site visitors’ payment data. Unlike other skimmers, Pipka removes itself from the HTML code of compromised websites after exfiltrating payment card data – a...

Coordinated Ransomware Attack Hits 23 Texas Government Agencies

UPDATE Up to 22 Texas entities – the majority of which are local governments – were hit by a ransomware attack on Friday that Texas officials say is part of a targeted attack launched by a single threat actor. Details remain scant about the specific agencies hit by the ransomware attacks, which...

Cryptolocking WordPress Plugin Locks Up Blog Posts

A malicious WordPress plugin ironically called WP Security has been spotted in the wild encrypting blog posts and rendering the content unreadable. It’s capable of targeting individual posts — an unusual behavior, according to researchers. According to analysis from Sucuri, the plugin obtains a...

Cynet: An Autonomous Security Platform for Any Size Organization

The Cynet security platform takes a different approach to traditional point security offerings, by providing a consolidated solution to all aspects of breach protection through a single interface. Unlike endpoint security solutions that only focus on particular types of threats targeting the...

Microsoft Outlook Breach Widens in Scope, Impacting MSN And Hotmail – Report

UPDATE A recently-disclosed Microsoft email-platform breach is reportedly much worse than previously thought, now impacting a large number of Outlook accounts as well as MSN and Hotmail email accounts. On Friday, a slew of Outlook users reported receiving notifications from Microsoft. The...

Critical Adobe Flash Bug Impacts Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS

Adobe released a patch for a critical flaw on Tuesday that leaves its Flash Player vulnerable to arbitrary code execution by an adversary. Affected are versions of the Flash Player running on Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS. In tandem, a Microsoft Security Advisory was also issued for the bug...

Facebook Bans More Than 800 Accounts in Disinformation Purge

Facebook on Thursday announced it has removed hundreds of pages and accounts as the company cracks down on spam. The move comes at a time when Facebook is under intense scrutiny about how it handles misinformation, particularly as the U.S. midterm elections draw near. The company said it has...

Slideshow: Intel from Virus Bulletin 2018

This year’s Virus Bulletin 2018, held in Montreal Oct. 3-5, featured a keynote from Microsoft’s John Lambert and a range of threat intelligence research from BAE Systems, Check Point, Cisco Talos, Citizens Lab, Digita Security, ESET, GoSecure, Kaspersky Lab, Malwarebytes, Sophos Security and more...

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...