Nintendo Confirms Breach of 160,000 Accounts

Nintendo said over 160,000 accounts have been hacked, due to attackers abusing a legacy login system. Over the past few weeks, Nintendo gamers have been reporting suspicious activities on their accounts. According to the complaints, aired out on Twitter and Reddit, unauthorized actors were loggin...

A Dozen Nation-Backed APTs Tap COVID-19 to Cover Spy Attacks

Cybercriminals have seized on the novel coronavirus as a theme in their attacks, and it turns out that the most sophisticated players on that scene are no exception. According to Google’s Threat Analysis Group TAG, more than a dozen nation-state-backed APTs are using the COVID-19 pandemic as a...

As Zoom Booms, Incidents of ‘ZoomBombing’ Become a Growing Nuisance

Officials at Zoom have released tips for users of their video-conferencing platform to help avoid getting “Zoom-bombed” by trolls and even more serious threat actors during online meetings. The developers of the online video-conferencing service cautioned users to avoid sharing Zoom meeting links...

Microsoft Edge Shares Privacy-Busting Telemetry, Research Alleges

Microsoft Edge is one of the least private web browsers — even more so than other popular browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox — according to academic researchers. According to the analysis, from Douglas Leith with the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College in...

Researchers Warn of Novel PXJ Ransomware Strain

Researchers have discovered a new strain of ransomware, dubbed “PXJ,” which emerged in the wild in early 2020. While PXJ performs functions similar to other ransomware variants, it does not appear to share the same underlying code with most known ransomware families, researchers said. They first...

Critical Bugs in Rockwell, Johnson Controls ICS Gear

Security vulnerabilities that require very little skill to exploit have been discovered in industrial control systems ICS gear from Rockwell Automation and Johnson Controls, which anchor a flurry of bug disclosures impacting critical infrastructure. First, a set of critical vulnerabilities in...

16Shop Phishing Gang Goes After PayPal Users

A prolific phishing gang known as 16Shop has added PayPal customers to its target set. According to researchers at the ZeroFOX Alpha Team, the latest version of the group’s phishing kit is designed with a number of features that are aimed to steal as much personally identifiable information PII a...

On-Board 'Mystery Boxes' Threaten Global Shipping Vessels

Commercial shipping environments are rife with vulnerabilities, according to researchers – up to and including unpatched “mystery boxes” that no one knows anything about. “In every single nautical pen test to date we have unearthed a system or device, that of the few crew that were aware, no one...

Edward Snowden Sued by U.S. Over New Memoir

The U.S. has sued whistleblower Edward Snowden over his new memoir, alleging he published the book in violation of non-disclosure agreements signed with both the CIA and NSA. Edward Snowden, a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency and contractor for the National Security Agency NSA, ...

Fortnite Ransomware Masquerades as an Aimbot Game Hack

A ransomware that calls itself “Syrk” is targeting gaming juggernaut Fortnite’s enormous user base, purporting to be a game hack tool. Syrk promises players an “aimbot” for aiming more accurately while playing, and “ESP,” for discovering other player’s locations in the game. What it really gives...

Google and ARM Tackle Android Bugs with Memory-Tagging

Aiming at improving the security of the Android ecosystem, Google has partnered up with mobile silicon-maker ARM to implement a hardware-based bug detection tool specifically for memory-safety vulnerabilities. Dubbed the memory-tagging extension MTE, the feature helps mitigate these kinds of bugs...

Malware Loader ‘Brushaloader’ Grows More Menacing

The tenacious loader malware called Brushaloader is growing more menacing, showing no signs of abatement despite best efforts by security professionals. First identified in June 2018, the Brushaloader malware is now more pervasive, stealthy and growing in popularity faster than ever before. New...

JetBlue Bomb Scare Set Off with Apple AirDrop

The feature in Apple mobile devices that allows people to send photos to nearby phones via Bluetooth is at the heart of a terrorism scare on a JetBlue flight over the weekend. According to the New York Daily News, a prankster sent a photo of a suicide vest to everyone who had an Apple device on t...

Google Titan Security Key Recalled After Bluetooth Pairing Bug

Google is recalling Bluetooth versions of its Titan Security Key after finding a vulnerability that allows attackers in close proximity to take control of the device. Google’s Titan Security Key, launched in the U.S. market last August, is a USB dongle that offers an added layer of security...

Free Cynet Threat Assessment for Mid-sized and Large Organizations

If you cannot see what’s happening in your network, your ability to make smart security decisions will suffer. Many vendors offer threat assessment options, but they usually require an investment of time and resources. One vendor out there – Cynet – is offering a no-cost threat assessment to...

ASUS Patches Live Update Bug That Allowed APT to Infect Thousands of PCs

ASUS has expedited a patch for a major bug impacting thousands of PCs that allowed an advanced persistent threat group to launch a supply-chain attack dubbed “Operation ShadowHammer.” The vulnerability targeted a range of new ASUS PCs with a backdoor injection technique tied to the PC-maker’s...

Federal Focus on Cyber Plays Out in President's Budget, IoT Legislation

The federal government is stepping up its game this week on the cybersecurity front, with both proposed budget line items that would requisition nearly $11 billion for cyber, and the introduction of the Internet of Things IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2019, which would require that devices...

Cisco Patches High-Severity Webex Vulnerability For Third Time

Cisco Systems is hoping three times is a charm. The networking giant has issued a third patch for a stubborn high-severity flaw in its Webex Meetings platform after researchers once again discovered a way to bypass the previous fix. The privilege elevation vulnerability CVE-2019-1674 exists in th...

RSAC 2019: Bronze Union APT Updates Remote Access Trojans in Fresh Wave of Attacks

The notorious Chinese-linked threat group, dubbed Bronze Union, has been spotted in a widespread 2018 campaign updating its arsenal of cyberweapons by breathing new life into old tools. The threat group was spotted in 2018 using updated source code to target data owned by political, technology,...

GitHub Increases Rewards, Scope For Bug Bounty Program

GitHub has bolstered its bug-bounty program with increased rewards, an expanded scope of products and the addition of legal “safe-harbor” terms aiming to protect bounty hunters. The web-based hosting service announced Tuesday that its program, first launched in 2014, will no longer have a maximum...

Tumblr Privacy Bug Could Have Exposed Sensitive Account Data

Tumblr on Wednesday disclosed it had fixed a vulnerability that could have exposed sensitive account information including usernames/passwords and individual IP addresses. However, the company stressed there’s no evidence that any data was exposed. The bug existed in the “Recommended Blogs” featu...

ICS Security Plagued with Basic, Avoidable Mistakes

At least 33 percent of the security issues found in industrial control systems ICS are rated as being of high or critical risk. FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence compiled data from dozens of ICS security health assessment engagements performed by its Mandiant division, and found that these issues inclu...

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...

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...

Rubella Crimeware Kit: Cheap, Easy and Gaining Traction

A crimeware kit dubbed the Rubella Macro Builder is betting on a “dirty deeds done dirt cheap” approach to gain popularity in the criminal underground. The kit does two things: with a point-and-click builder functionality, it generates an initial malware payload for social-engineering spam...

Microsoft Fixes 66 Bugs in April Patch Tuesday Release

Microsoft’s April Patch Tuesday release includes fixes for 66 bugs, 24 of which are rated critical. Notable is Microsoft’s disclosure of a publicly known SharePoint elevation of privilege bug CVE-2018-1034, rated important, which has no fix but has not been publicly exploited. Microsoft SharePoin...

Hackers Prepping IOTroop Botnet with Exploits

Hackers moved one step closer to launching full-scale DDoS attacks using millions of IoT devices herded into the botnet known as Reaper or IOTroop. Researchers at NewSky Security warn that hackers are swapping scripts on forums that can scan the internet for vulnerable IoT devices and dump defaul...

Apple Patches 'BroadPwn' Bug in iOS 10.3.3

Apple released iOS 10.3.3 Wednesday, which serves as a cumulative update that includes patches for multiple vulnerabilities including the high-profile BroadPwn bug that allowed an attacker to seize control of a targeted iOS device. BroadPwn was revealed earlier this month as a flaw in Broadcom...

Average Bug Bounty Payments Growing

HackerOne said Monday its average dollar payouts to participants are up, and cross site scripting vulnerabilities cause the biggest headaches for companies. The bug bounty platform provider culled data from the past four years, analyzing 50,000 reported bugs and more than $17 million in payouts t...

Old Linux Kernel Code Execution Bug Patched

A critical, local code-execution vulnerability in the Linux kernel was patched more than a week ago, continuing a run of serious security issues in the operating system, most of which have been hiding in the code for years. Details on the vulnerability were published Tuesday by researcher Philip...

Microsoft Tears off the Band-Aid with EMET

Microsoft last week extended the end-of-life expiration date to July 2018 on its exploit mitigation add-on, the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit EMET. But for some time, the once-useful tool has been well on its way out to pasture. While EMET was never meant to be anything more than stopgap...

Badlock Windows, Samba Man-in-the-Middle Vulnerability

Weeks of anxiety and concern over the Badlock vulnerability ended today with an anticlimactic thud. Badlock was the security boogeyman since the appearance three weeks ago of a website and logo branding the bug as something serious in Samba, an open source implementation of the server message blo...

VMware Releases Patches for XSS, Cert. Validation Issue

VMware released a handful of patches late last week to fix several vulnerabilities, including a nasty cross-site scripting issue in one of its server virtualization platforms. The vulnerabilities lie in VMware’s vCenter Server Appliance vCSA – a module for VMware’s vCenter Server. The main bug, a...

Charney on Trustworthy Computing: 'I Was the Architect of These Changes'

Scott Charney, the head of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing efforts, said that he was the one who decided it was time to move the TwC group in a new direction and integrate the security functions more deeply into the company as a whole. “I was the architect of these changes. This is not about th...

September 2014 Microsoft Patch Tuesday advance notification

Microsoft today announced a relatively light load of patches will be delivered on Patch Tuesday next week, along with some numbers that demonstrate public vulnerability disclosures continue to rise. Four security bulletins, one rated critical, are scheduled to be released next Tuesday. In what’s...

New OpenSSL MITM Flaw Affects All Clients, Some Server Versions

There is a new, remotely exploitable vulnerability in OpenSSL that could enable an attacker to intercept and decrypt traffic between vulnerable clients and servers. The flaw affects all versions of the OpenSSL client and versions 1.0.1 and 1.0.2-beta1 of the server software. The new vulnerability...

Microsoft to Patch IE 10 Zero Day March 2014 Patch Tuesday

Microsoft will patch a lingering zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer next Tuesday, one of five bulletins it will release as part of its March 2014 Patch Tuesday security updates. The IE 10 zero-day was disclosed close to a month ago when researchers at FireEye reported on Operation SnowMa...

From Three Nations and Three Different Perspectives, Blue Hat Finalists Focus on Defense

By Rob Lemos LAS VEGAS — If Jared DeMott hadn’t been eager to take a different path, he would never be in security, much less a finalist in Microsoft’s search for defensive technologies, known as the Blue Hat Prize.Raised in a manufacturing town, he was accepted to the Air Force Academy in 1996,...

Google Fixes 15 Flaws in Chrome

Google has fixed 15 security vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser, including six high-risk bugs. As part of its reward program, Google paid out $6,000 in rewards to researchers who reported flaws. This is one of the larger groups of bug fixes that Google has included in recent releases of Chrome...

PBS Website Compromised, Used to Serve Exploits

Some sections of the popular PBS.org Web site have been hijacked by hackers serving up a cocktail of dangerous exploits. According to researchers at Purewire, attempts to access certain PBS Web site pages yielded JavaScript that serves exploits from a malicious domain via an iframe. The malicious...

IE8 security stops memory bypass attacks

When Mark Dowd and Alex Sotirov demonstrated a technique for bypassing Vista’s memory protections at Black Hat last year, the security community was stunned. Microsoft officials said at the time they were working on ways to defeat the pair’s attack and now that protection has arrived, in the form...

Open Redirect Flaw Snags Amex, Snapchat User Data

Attackers are exploiting a well-known open redirect flaw to phish people’s credentials and personally identifiable information PII using American Express and Snapchat domains, researchers have found. “Since the first domain name in the manipulated link is in fact the original site’s, the link may...

Patchable and Preventable Security Issues Lead Causes of Q1 Attacks

Eighty-two percent of attacks on organizations in Q1 2022 were caused by the external exposure of a known vulnerabilities in the victim’s external-facing perimeter or attack surface. Those unpatched bugs overshadowed breach-related financial losses tied to human error, which accounted for 18...

McAfee Bug Can Be Exploited to Gain Windows SYSTEM Privileges

McAfee has patched two high-severity vulnerabilities in a component of its McAfee Enterprise product that attackers can use to escalate privileges, including up to SYSTEM. According to McAfee’s bulletin, the bugs are in versions prior to 5.7.5 of McAfee Agent, which is used in McAfee Endpoint...

1M Stolen Credit Cards Hit Dark Web for Free

Threat actors have leaked 1 million stolen credit cards for free online as a way to promote a fairly new and increasingly popular cybercriminal site dedicated to…selling payment-card credentials. Researchers from threat intelligence firm Cyble noticed the leak of the payment-card data during a...

The True Impact of Ransomware Attacks

One of the most damaging myths about ransomware attacks is, “If your company does regular system backups, you don’t have to worry. Just restore from the backup.” While system backups are crucial — power outages, natural disasters, or even mistakes by employees can destroy data just as quickly as ...

Cryptominer Farm Rigged with 3,800 PS4s Busted in Ukraine

Authorities in Ukraine have made another cybersecurity bust — this time shutting down what they said is one of the largest underground cryptomining operations ever found. The ring was apparently run by stringing together 3,800 Sony PlayStation 4 PS4 gaming consoles. Cryptominers serve as auditors...

Tulsa’s Police-Citation Data Leaked by Conti Gang

The city of Tulsa, OK is asking some of its residents to keep a close eye on their personal and financial accounts after the Conti ransomware group leaked some 18,000 city files, mostly police citations, on the dark web. The leak stemmed from a May 6 ransomware attack that caused the city to shut...

Cryptominers Slither into Python Projects in Supply-Chain Campaign

A group of cryptominers was found to have infiltrated the Python Package Index PyPI, which is a repository of software code created in the Python programming language. Similar to other repositories like GitHub, npm and RubyGems, PyPI is part of the software supply chain. It offers a place where...

Volkswagen Vendor Exposed Data of 3.3m Drivers

One of Volkswagen’s vendors left one of its systems open for nearly two years, exposing the personal data of 3.3 million customers – nearly all of them owners or wannabe owners of the automaker’s luxury brand of Audis – Volkswagen America said last week. The breach took place between August 2019...