Cyberattackers Embrace CAPTCHAs to Hide Phishing

Cyberattackers are using Google’s reCAPTCHA aka the “I am not a robot” function and fake CAPTCHA-like services to obscure various phishing and other campaigns, according to researchers. There are signs however that those evasion efforts may be losing their efficacy. CAPTCHAs are familiar to most...

Windows Hello Bypass Fools Biometrics Safeguards

A vulnerability in Microsoft’s Windows 10 password-free authentication system has been uncovered that could allow an attacker to spoof an image of a person’s face to trick the facial-recognition system and take control of a device. Windows Hello is a feature in Windows 10 that allows users to...

How Fake Accounts and Sneaker-Bots Took Over the Internet

Recently, one of my friends from my submarine days sent me a friend request on Facebook. The weird thing is, I was already connected with this friend. Looking further at the profile, I noticed a few of the same pictures but only 11 friends. So I knew this was some scammer and, being me, I message...

COVID-Related Threats, PowerShell Attacks Lead Malware Surge

Surging numbers of COVID-themed attacks, PowerShell trojans, along with the SolarWinds compromise and the continued spread of Sunburst malware were major contributors to a massive spike in the number of observed attacks in the wild during the last half of 2020, which McAfee’s said averaged 588...

CISA Warns of Security Flaws in GE Power Management Devices

The U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency CISA is warning of critical-severity security flaws in GE’s Universal Relay UR family of power management devices. GE’s UR devices are the “basis of simplified power management for the protection of critical assets,” according to the company...

PYSA Ransomware Pillages Education Sector, Feds Warn

The FBI has issued a warning about an uptick in cyberattacks on the education sector that are delivering the PYSA ransomware. In a “Flash” alert to the cybersecurity community issued on Tuesday, the Feds said that PYSA has been seen in attacks on schools in 12 U.S. states and in the United Kingdo...

Cybersecurity Bug-Hunting Sparks Enterprise Confidence

Nearly three-quarters of IT security professionals 73 percent surveyed say they prefer to buy technology and services from vendors who are proactive about security, including leveraging ethical hacking and having transparent communications about vulnerabilities. But less than half of vendors...

Malicious Code Bombs Target Amazon, Lyft, Slack, Zillow

Researchers have spotted malicious packages targeting internal applications for Amazon, Lyft, Slack and Zillow among others inside the npm public code repository — all of which exfiltrate sensitive information. The packages weaponize a proof-of-concept PoC code dependency-confusion exploit that w...

Breaking Down Joe Biden's $10B Cybersecurity 'Down Payment'

President Joe Biden laid out a series of cybersecurity initiatives last week at his inauguration, including earmarking $10 billion for various cybersecurity defense initiatives. Those included hiring key security personnel to support for the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency CISA. The...

FireEye Cyberattack Compromises Red-Team Security Tools

Cybersecurity firm FireEye has been hit in what CEO Kevin Mandia described as a highly targeted cyberattack. The attacker targeted and was able to access certain Red Team assessment tools that the company uses to test its customers’ security. Mandia on Tuesday said that based on the techniques an...

Phishers Capitalize on Headlines with Breakneck Speed

The speed with which phishers are able to adapt to new messaging based on the latest headlines is accelerating, according to the Proofpoint Threat Research Team, which was able to track backend data from a recent voter-registration scam to uncover just how quickly cybercriminals can pivot to...

Black Hat 2020: Using Botnets to Manipulate Energy Markets for Big Profits

Researchers are warning that a new class of botnets could be marshaled and used to manipulate energy markets via zombie armies of power-hungry connected devices such as air conditioners, heaters, dryers and digital thermostats. A coordinated attack could cause an energy stock index to predictably...

U.S. Offers Reward of $10M for Info Leading to Discovery of Election Meddling

The U.S. government is concerned about foreign interference in the 2020 election, so much so that it will offer a reward of up to $10 million for anyone providing information that could lead to tracking down potential cybercriminals aiming to sabotage the November vote. The U.S. Department of...

Work From Home Opens New Remote Insider Threats

Employees working from home face a new world of workplace challenges. With childcare facilities mostly closed, many are juggling crying babies or barking dogs, all while tending to job responsibilities. Under those conditions mistakes happen, like sending an email – with critical internal company...

Google Location Tracking Lambasted in Arizona Lawsuit

Google has been hit by a lawsuit alleging that it violates user privacy by collecting location data via various means – and claiming that Google makes it nearly “impossible” for users to opt out of such data tracking. The lawsuit, filed by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, alleges that Goog...

Report: Hackers Selling Zoom Zero-Days for Windows, MacOS

Hackers claim they have discovered two zero-day vulnerabilities for the Zoom video conferencing platform that would allow threat actors to spy on people’s private video conferences and further exploit a target’s system. Flaws target Zoom clients for the Windows and the MacOS operating system,...

Hackers Hijack Routers to Spread Malware Via Coronavirus Apps

Cybercriminals are hijacking routers and changing Domain Name System DNS settings, in order to redirect victims to attacker controlled sites promoting fake coronavirus information apps. If victims download these apps, they are infected with information-stealing Oski malware. This latest attack...

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...

Akamai Talks Massive Uptick in Credential-Stuffing Attacks Against Bank APIs

Cybercriminals continue to firehose financial services companies with new and innovative cyberattacks. Research from Akamai recently found that up to 75 percent of all credential abuse attacks against the financial services industry in 2019 targeted APIs directly rather than user-facing login...

Huawei Controversy Highlights 5G Security Implications

The controversy over Huawei’s involvement in the 5G telecom gear market ratcheted up a notch this week. U.S. officials said they have evidence that the Chinese equipment giant has had access to backdoors inside mobile carrier networks for more than 10 years. Officials are trying to make the case...

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...

Scammers Dupe Texas School District Out of $2.3M

A Texas school district, based outside of Austin, Tex., has lost $2.3 million after falling victim to an email scam. The Manor Independent School District encompasses 8,000 students from elementary to high school. Police told local news outlets that the incident started in early November and...

California's Domino Effect on U.S. Privacy Regulation

LAS VEGAS – The California Consumer Privacy Act CCPA, which goes into effect in January 2020, will implement strict requirements for companies to create more transparency about how user data is being used and disseminated. Microsoft’s acknowledgement this week that it will extend CCPA to all of i...

Turla Compromises, Infiltrates Iranian APT Infrastructure

The Turla APT group has been spotted co-opting two cyberweapons from an Iranian APT APT 34, according to one set of researchers, known as the Nautilus and Neuron implants, and deploying them against targets in the Middle East. The group also infiltrated the global operational infrastructure used ...

Trump Campaign Website Left Open to Email Server Hijack

A mistake made by website developers left an official re-election website for President Donald Trump open to attack. The error, impacting hundreds of other websites as well, is tied to a website development tool called Laravel, used to test sites before they go live. The tool, accidentally left...

Vimeo Slapped With Lawsuit Over Biometrics Privacy Policy

Vimeo, the popular ad-free video platform, is facing a lawsuit that alleges it stored people’s facial biometrics without their consent or knowledge. The lawsuit, which was filed on Sept. 20, claims Vimeo violated the Illinois Biometrics Information Privacy Act BIPA. This is a law that imposes...

Feds Indict 281 People for Involvement in Massive Email Fraud Scheme

Federal authorities have arrested 281 people and seized nearly $3.7 million in a coordinated effort between multiple agencies to disrupt a massive email-fraud scheme. Perpetrators of a global business email compromise BEC scheme were the target of a four-month investigation that began in May call...

Cynet Provides Security Responders with Free IR Tool to Validate and Respond to Active Threats

Organizations that suspect an active threat or breach have two options: calling an external incident response provider to manage the investigation and response or trying to handle it internally with their own resources. Cynet is now introducing a free IR offering that caters to both scenarios – a...

ThreatList: Remote Workers Threaten 1 in 3 Organizations

While IT leaders see the benefits of remote working and understand that millennial-friendly telecommuting is unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon, many still fear that the potential of employees to access corporate resources via public Wi-fi and the use of personal devices opens their organizatio...

Card-Skimming Scripts Hide Behind Google Analytics, Angular

A host of credit card-stealing scripts have popped up on the web, injected into websites and purporting to be legitimate Google Analytics or Angular utilities in order to avoid webmaster notice. According to research from Sucuri, the malicious code is obfuscated and injected into legitimate JS...

Intel Responds to Spectre-Like Flaw In CPUs

Intel acknowledged that its processors are vulnerable to another dangerous speculative execution side channel flaw that could give attackers unauthorized read access to memory. The new vulnerability, disclosed by Google Project Zero and Microsoft’s Security Response Center, is called Variant 4, a...

KRACK Vulnerability Puts Medical Devices At Risk

A slew of devices from medical technology company Becton, Dickinson and Company BD are vulnerable to the infamous KRACK key-reinstallation attack, potentially enabling hackers to change and exfiltrate patient records. The KRACK vulnerability, discovered last October, is an industry-wide glitch in...

‘IOTroop’ Botnet Could Dwarf Mirai in Size and Devastation, Says Researcher

A botnet, which is adding new bots every day, has already infected one million businesses during the past month and could easily eclipse the size and devastation caused by Mirai. The malware and botnet, dubbed IOTroop, was spotted in September by researchers at Check Point who warn that 60 percen...

Dedicated Machine Learning Behind Early Phishing Detection in Gmail

Cybercrime and state-sponsored advanced attacks continue to cling to email as a primary distribution vehicle for first-stage malware. Phishing campaigns thrive in targeted attacks, and criminals have even resuscitated old-school macro malware in attachments to gain that initial foothold on a...

WordPress Fixes CSRF, XSS Bugs, Announces Bug Bounty Program

WordPress is urging webmasters to update to the latest version of its content management system to mitigate several issues, including a pair of cross-site scripting XSS bugs and a cross-site request forgery CSRF bug that’s existed for 10 months. The latest iteration of the software, version 4.7.5...

Emergency Java Patch Re-Issued for 2013 Vulnerability

Oracle yesterday released an emergency patch for a Java vulnerability that was improperly patched in 2013. Researchers at Security Explorations in Poland two weeks ago disclosed that a Java patch for an issue the company reported in 2013, CVE-2013-5838, was still trivially exploitable, and it...

Linux Kernel Privilege Escalation Flaw Patched

A patch for a critical Linux kernel flaw, present in the code since 2012, is expected to be pushed out today. The vulnerability affects versions 3.8 and higher, said researchers at startup Perception Point who discovered the vulnerability. The flaw also extends to two-thirds of Android devices, t...

Angler Exploit Kit Exploiting New Adobe Vulnerability, Dropping Cryptowall 3.0

While the Angler Exploit Kit may have already established itself as one of the more sophisticated kits on the underground market, it appears it’s still finding ways to evolve. Angler, this week, was spotted dropping the latest iteration of CryptoWall ransomware and leveraging yet another previous...

Microsoft Warns of Targeted Attacks on Windows 0-Day

Microsoft is warning users about targeted attacks against a new vulnerability in several versions of Windows and Office that could allow an attacker to take over a user’s machine. The bug, which is not yet patched, is being used as part of targeted attacks with malicious email attachments, mainly...

October Patch Tuesday Fixes Critical IE Bugs, 28 Vulnerabilities

As expected, Microsoft began shipping its latest batch of Patch Tuesday patches earlier this afternoon. However, while it was heavily presumed the update would fix at least one Internet Explorer zero day, the update actually fixes two critical vulnerabilities in the browser. Eight bulletins — fou...

NetTraveler Now Using Java Exploits, Watering Hole Attacks

When NetTravler was unveiled in June, Costin Raiu of Kaspersky Lab warned that the espionage campaign was an “ugly gorilla with a thousand faces” and that we hadn’t seen them all yet. A little more than two months later, another profile of the malware targeting activists, diplomats, government...

Cool Exploit Kit Includes Old Internet Explorer Exploit

You cannot accuse the keepers of the Cool Exploit Kit of not recognizing market trends. Given a rash of recent watering hole attacks and zero-day exploits built around Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, it’s no surprise that a 15-month-old IE exploit has been included in the crimeware package...

Bank DDoS Attacks Using Compromised Web Servers as Bots

A rash of politically and socially motivated distributed denial-of-service attacks against major U.S. banks has been able to intermittently disrupt online and mobile banking services. The attackers have been able to fire unprecedented amounts of traffic at the likes of Wells Fargo, Bank of Americ...

Fake Automated Craigslist Email Notifications Link to Blackhole Exploit Kit

UPDATE: A big wave of emails purporting to be Craigslist notifications but containing links to websites hosting the Black Hole exploit kit hit the Internet yesterday, a day that already was filled with drama surrounding the LinkedIn password dump. The malicious emails, 150,000 of which were caugh...

Google Is 'Paranoid' on Security Following Aurora

Google learned some hard security lessons after it was attacked late last year by hackers, said CEO Eric Schmidt. “Google is now particularly paranoid about that,” Schmidt said during a question-and-answer session following Google’s Atmosphere 2010 conference before about 400 CIOs. Read the full...

How DEP Can Mitigate IE Zero-Day Attacks

Jonathan Ness of Microsoft’s Security Research and Defense team explains the inner workings of the Data Execution Prevention technology that can help mitigate the targeted attacks exploiting the vulnerability in Internet Explorer right now...

Microsoft Pushes for Better Software Security Practices

WASHINGTON–Microsoft has spent several years and untold millions of dollars working on methods to write more secure and reliable software, and now the company is encouraging other organizations to make the same investment in software security. One of the outputs of the company’s software security...

New Hacker Forum Takes Pro-Ukraine Stance

A new hacker forum is taking a unique political stance to support Ukraine in its war with Russia, entertaining only topics and threat activity focused against Russia and Belarus, researchers have found. The Russian-language site, DUMPS Forum, has been around since late May, and at first glance...

380K Kubernetes API Servers Exposed to Public Internet

More than 380,000 Kubernetes API servers allow some kind of access to the public internet, making the popular open-source container-orchestration engine for managing cloud deployments an easy target and broad attack surface for threat actors, researchers have found. The Shadowserver Foundation...

‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ Download Installs Cryptominer

Global buzz around the release of Spider-Man: No Way Home is making tons of online noise – an ideal environment for cybercriminals to spread a Monero cryptominer disguised as a download of the newly released film. A torrent download of Spider-Man: No Way Home is circulating, infected with a...