Zero Trust for Data Helps Enterprises Detect, Respond and Recover from Breaches

AUTHOR: Mohit Tiwari, CEO and Co-Founder, Symmetry Systems Compromised credentials and identities, third-party breaches, API attacks, and application exploits are all foundational entry points for today’s hackers. Recent months have brought many high-profile breaches from Samsung and Nvidia to Ok...

Russia Lays Groundwork for Cyberattacks on U.S. Infrastructure

The Russian government is exploring “options for potential cyberattacks” on critical infrastructure in the U.S., the White House warned on Monday, in retaliation for sanctions and other punishments as the war in Ukraine grinds on. Officials said that its latest intelligence shows cyber-related...

Dark Souls 3 Servers Shut Down Due to Critical RCE Bug

There’s a dangerous remote-code execution RCE bug in the Dark Souls video game that could let attackers brick the PCs of online players. The flaw could allow attackers to do pretty much anything: As Kaspersky researchers explained on Monday, the bug “allows an attacker to execute almost any progr...

Podcast: Could the Zoho Flaw Trigger SolarWinds 2.0?

A month ago, the FBI, CISA and the U.S. Coast Guard Cyber Command CGCYBER warned that state-backed advanced persistent threat APT actors are likely among those who’d been actively exploiting a critical flaw in a Zoho-owned single sign-on and password management tool since early August. At issue w...

Verizon’s Visible Wireless Carrier Confirms Credential-Stuffing Attack

On Wednesday, Verizon’s Visible – an all-digital, uber-cheap wireless carrier – confirmed what customers have been complaining about on Reddit and Twitter all week: They lost control of their accounts; had their passwords and shipping addresses changed; and some got stuck with bills for pricey ne...

Proxyware Services Open Orgs to Abuse – Report

Services that allow consumers to resell their own internet bandwidth for profit to businesses that want to resell it are ripe for abuse, according to researchers. The burgeoning business model is growing in popularity with consumers who earn about $1 for every 10GB of their bandwidth shared with...

DOJ: Creep Coach Finagles Nude Athlete Photos

A former track-and-field coach who worked at several universities has been arrested and is facing up to five years in prison for attempting to solicit nude photos of his athletes through sham social-media accounts and cyberstalking. The Department of Justice alleged that Steve Waithe, while...

Adware Spreads via Fake TikTok App, Laptop Offers

Malicious Android apps disguised as TikTok and offers for free Lenovo laptops are being used in ad-stuffing attacks underway against devices on the Jio telecom network in India, security researchers warn. Researchers from Zscaler report this threat actor has been operating various phishing scams...

A New Paradigm in Data Security: Insider Risk Management

The pandemic was a force accelerator for digital transformation in the enterprise. It’s not just the dramatic remote work shift — it’s a profound shift toward prioritizing speed and flexibility as the drivers of a company’s competitive advantage. But as faster, more agile ways of working...

Discord-Stealing Malware Invades npm Packages

Three malicious software packages have been published to npm, a code repository for JavaScript developers to share and reuse code blocks. The packages represent a supply-chain threat given that they may be used as building blocks in various web applications; any applications corrupted by the code...

Ransomware Attackers Publish 4K Private Scottish Gov Agency Files

On the heels of a ransomware attack against the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency SEPA, attackers have now reportedly published more than 4,000 files stolen from the agency – including contracts and strategy documents. After hitting SEPA on Christmas Eve with the attack, cybercriminals...

Cybercriminals Ramp Up Exploits Against Serious Zyxel Flaw

Security experts are warning hackers are ramping up attempts to exploit a high-severity vulnerability that may still reside in over 100,000 Zyxel Communications products. Zyxel, a Taiwanese manufacturer of networking devices, on Dec. 23 warned of the flaw in its firmware CVE-2020-29583 and releas...

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...

Cybercrime Moves to the Cloud to Accelerate Attacks Amid Data Glut

Cybercriminals are embracing cloud-based services and technologies in order to accelerate their attacks on organizations and better monetize their wares, researchers have found. This is largely driven by cybercriminals who sell access to what they call “clouds of logs,” which are caches of stolen...

Wormable Apple iCloud Bug Allows Automatic Photo Theft

A group of ethical hackers cracked open Apple’s infrastructure and systems and, over the course of three months, discovered 55 vulnerabilities, a number of which would have given attackers complete control over customer and employee applications. Of note, a critical, wormable iCloud account...

Black Hat 2020: Open-Source AI to Spur Wave of 'Synthetic Media' Attacks

An abundance of deep-learning and open-source technologies are making it easy for cybercriminals to generate fake images, text and audio called “synthetic media”. This type of media can be easily leveraged on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms to launch disinformation campaigns wi...

Millions of Brute-Force Attacks Hit Remote Desktop Accounts

A rash of brute-forcing attempts aimed at users of Microsoft’s proprietary Remote Desktop Protocol RDP has come to light, striking millions per week. The attacks are a likely offshoot of cybercriminals looking to take advantage of the unprecedented numbers of employees working from home amid the...

Millions of Guests Impacted in Marriott Data Breach, Again

For the second time in two years, the Marriott hotel empire has suffered a major data breach. This time, approximately 5.2 million guests have been affected. The attack was carried out via third-party software that Marriott’s hotel properties use to provide guest services, according to an online...

Critical Netgear Bug Impacts Flagship Nighthawk Router

Netgear is warning users of a critical remote code execution bug that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to take control of its Wireless AC Router Nighthawk R7800 hardware running firmware versions prior to 1.0.2.68. The warnings, posted Tuesday, also include two high-severity bugs impacting...

Bruce Schneier Proposes 'Hacking Society' for a Better Tomorrow

SAN FRANCISCO – Cybersecurity experts have long stayed in their problem-solving lane when it comes to finding vulnerabilities, patching bugs and keeping networks safe. But maybe it is time they applied their defensive skillsets and adversarial understanding of cyberthreats to help solve some of...

Iranian APT Targets Govs With New Malware

SAN FRANCISCO – A never before seen credential-stealing malware, dubbed ForeLord, has been uncovered in recent spear phishing emails. Researchers have attributed the campaign to a known Iranian advanced persistence threat APT group. The emails distributing ForeLord were uncovered as part of a...

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...

Amazon Fixes Ring Video Doorbell Flaw That Leaked Wi-Fi Credentials

UPDATE Amazon has patched a vulnerability in its Ring smart doorbell device that could allow attackers to access the owner’s Wi-Fi network credentials and potentially reconfigure the device to launch an attack on the home network, researchers have found. Researchers discovered the problem in...

Gamers Hit with Nvidia GPU Driver, GeForce Flaws

Nvidia has issued fixes for high-severity flaws in two popular gaming products, including its graphics driver for Windows and GeForce Experience. The flaws can be exploited to launch an array of malicious attacks – from denial-of-service efforts DoS to escalation of privileges. The majority of th...

Survey Finds People are Privacy Hypocrites

Even while people remain concerned about their own privacy in the workplace and online, most still admit to violations of their coworkers’ privacy by “creeping” on PC screens and “peeking” at documents found in printer trays, a new survey has found. The survey—commissioned by HP as part of Nation...

Asus, Lenovo and Other Routers Riddled with Remotely Exploitable Bugs

More than a hundred vulnerabilities have been found in small office/home office SOHO routers and network-attached storage devices NAS from vendors that include Asus, Zyxel, Lenovo, Netgear and other top names, which open them up to remote attackers. That’s according to Independent Security...

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...

Google Touts Android Q's New Security Update Process and Better Privacy Controls for Apps

Google said its next-generation mobile operating system, Android Q, revamps the way it delivers direct over-the-air updates and will bolster individual app privacy controls. Google detailed Android Q 10.0 at the Google I/O 2019 developer conference on Tuesday. There it touted almost 50 changes to...

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...

Sierra Wireless Patches Critical Vulns in Range of Wireless Routers

Sierra Wireless has patched two critical vulnerabilities for its range of wireless gateways that would leave the enterprise devices helpless to an array of remote threats, including the charms of the Reaper IoT botnet. The more critical of the two with a 9.4 CVSSv3 Temp Score is a...

Adobe Flash Player Zero-Day Spotted in the Wild

The South Korean Computer Emergency Response Team issued a warning Wednesday of a new Adobe Flash Player zero-day spotted in the wild. The security bulletin warns that the attacks are focused on South Koreans and involve malicious Microsoft Word documents. According to the South Korean Computer...

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...

Old Android Flaw Elevates Privileges, Steals SMS, Call Logs

A five-year-old Android vulnerability disclosed today affects hundreds of different device models going back to Jelly Bean 4.3. Older devices are at the greatest risk; newer devices running Android with SE Android, the OS’ implementation of Security Enhanced Linux, are at a lesser risk. The...

Google Fixes 51 Bugs in Chrome 41

Google released the latest build of its browser Tuesday, Chrome 41.0.2272.76, patching 51 different bugs and paying out over $50,000 in bounties. Google paid bounties for 18 bugs ranging from medium to high severity. The bounties for all of the vulnerabilities totaled $52,000. 13 of those bugs ca...

Lessons Learned in Building a Vulnerability Coordination Program

CANCUN – Bounty programs are mislabeled creatures, too often pigeonholed as a payoff for finding individual vulnerabilities in software. Wrong. “The name bug bounty is actually a false categorization of what is truly just an incentive program,” said Katie Moussouris, chief policy officer at...

Android Root Access Vulnerability Affecting Most Devices

A recently disclosed vulnerability in version 3.14.5 of the Linux kernel is also present in most versions of Android and could give attackers the ability to acquire root access on affected devices. Researchers at Lacoon Mobile Security are calling the bug “TowelRoot,” because it is the very same...

SSL Pulse Scans Quantify Vulnerable OpenSSL Servers

Certain mitigating factors made the recent OpenSSL man-in-the-middle vulnerability a notch or two below Heartbleed in terms of criticality. With that in consideration, it’s probably no surprise that patching levels for CVE-2014-0224 aren’t as high out of the gate as they were for Heartbleed. Ivan...

The Java Zero-Day Procession Continues

After a glorious 72-hour stretch without one, security researchers confirmed yesterday that they found yet another zero-day vulnerability in Oracle’s thoroughly troubled Java platform. With a little help from Hermes Bojaxhi and his team at Cyber Engineering Services, researchers from the security...

Researchers Bypass Microsoft Fix It for IE Zero Day

Expect amped up pressure aimed in Microsoft’s direction for a patch for the Internet Explorer zero day that surfaced last week, now that researchers at Exodus Intelligence reported today they have developed a bypass for the Fix It that Microsoft released as a temporary mitigation. Their new explo...

Ubiquitous Linux Bug: ‘An Attacker’s Dream Come True’

UPDATE Every major Linux distribution has an easily exploited memory-corruption bug that’s been lurking for 12 years – a stunning revelation that’s likely to be followed soon by in-the-wild exploits, researchers warn. Successful exploitation gives full root access to any unprivileged user. The...

Ditch the Alert Cannon: Modernizing IDS is a Security Must-Do

After more than 20 years of underwhelming results, security leaders have accepted their intrusion detection system IDS programs as no more than a compliance checkoff. It’s no secret that IDS’s reliance on bi-modal signatures is brittle, easily evaded and often referred to as an “alert cannon.” Ti...

Airline Credential-Theft Takes Off in Widening Campaign

A two-year-old espionage campaign against the airline industry is ongoing, with AsyncRAT and other commodity remote-access trojans RATs helping those efforts take flight. The campaign can effectively be a bird strike to the business engine, so to speak, resulting in data theft, financial fraud or...

Financial Cybercrime: Why Cryptocurrency is the Perfect ‘Getaway Car’

This is Part I of a two-part series on how cybercrooks embrace and use cryptocurrency. To read Part II, please click here. It’s no secret: Hackers are out to make money. Over the summer, it seemed there was practically a new ransomware attack every day of the week. Whether it be Colonial Pipeline...

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...

Zoom Settlement: An $85M Business Case for Security Investment

Ransomware isn’t the only way lax security can cost a business eight figures in damage. Zoom just lost an $85 million class-action lawsuit this week for its cybersecurity missteps, proving that even the most essential and relied-upon brands can be tripped up by inadequate security. More...

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,...

BEC Losses Top $1.8B as Tactics Evolve

Business email compromise BEC attacks ramped up significantly in 2020, with more than $1.8 billion stolen from organizations with these types of attacks last year alone — and things are getting worse. BEC attacks are carried out by cybercriminals either impersonating someone inside an organizatio...

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...