ThreatList: APT Adversaries Up the Ante on Speed, Target Telecom

Despite law-enforcement wins in the form of several high-profile arrests and indictments during 2018, nation-state adversaries have upped their games when it comes to speed. That’s according to CrowdStrike’s 2019 Global Threat Report, which found that when analyzing how long it takes to go from...

Google Pulls Data-Chugging App From iOS Devices

Google has found itself in hot water for a research app that may have violated Apple’s policies by collecting user data in exchange for gift cards. The tech giant said it has now disabled Screenwise Meter“audience measurement” app – which voluntarily collects data from users’ phones, browsers and...

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...

US-CERT Warns of Crypto Bugs in IEEE Standard

Recent academic work focused on weak cryptographic protections in the implementation of the IEEE P1735 standard has been escalated to an alert published Friday by the Department of Homeland Security. DHS’ US-CERT warned the IEEE P1735 standard for encrypting electronic-design intellectual propert...

PHPMailer Bug Leaves Millions of Websites Open to Attack

UPDATE A critical PHPMailer bug tied to the way websites handle email and feedback forms is leaving millions of websites hosted on popular web-publishing platforms such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla open to attack. The flaw was disclosed by researcher Dawid Golunski of Legal Hackers, who said t...

August 2016 Microsoft Patch Tuesday Security Bulletins

A tricky vulnerability patched today in the Windows PDF Library could have put Microsoft Edge users on Windows 10 systems at risk for remote code execution attacks. Edge automatically renders PDF content when it’s set as a computer’s default browser, unlike most other browsers; the feature means...

Apple Patches Dozens of Flaws in iOS 8.4, OS X 10.10.4

Apple has released new versions of iOS and OS X, both of which include a significant number of security patches, several for bugs that can lead to remote code execution and other serious issues. Version 8.4 of iOS contains fixes for more than 30 security vulnerabilities, including bugs in the iOS...

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...

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...

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...

Volume of NTP Amplification Attacks Getting Louder

No security arena is better representative of the cat and mouse game between hackers and defenders than DDoS attacks and prevention/mitigation. Enterprises and service providers have invested heavily in DDoS mitigations in order to keep critical services available. That’s forced hackers to crank ...

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...

New Linux Rootkit Emerges

A new Linux rootkit has emerged and researchers who have analyzed its code and operation say that the malware appears to be a custom-written tool designed to inject iframes into Web sites and drive traffic to malicious sites for drive-by download attacks. The rootkit is designed specifically for...

Use of Java Zero-Day Flaws Tied to Nitro Attack Crew

Researchers say that one of the attack groups using the two new Java zero-day vulnerabilities is the same group that was behind an earlier targeted attack campaign from 2011. That group was traced back to China and was essentially running a spear-phishing campaign, but now the crew, known as Nitr...

New Toolkit Able to Track and Trace Duqu Worm

The Hungarian research facility that helped discover Duqu, the much-blogged about Trojan, has now released an open-source toolkit that can be used to help detect traces and instances of the worm. The Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security CrySys at the Budapest University of Technology an...

Apple Zaps JailbreakMe Bugs in Record Time

Less than two weeks after exploits for a pair of serious security vulnerabilities were fitted into an automated JailbreakMe.com exploit, Apple has rushed out a patch to block the jailbreaking of iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices. The iOS 3.2.2 for iPad and iOS 4.0.2 iPhone and iPod Touch update...

Apple Patches Critical Safari Vulnerabilities

Apple today shipped Safari 4.0.4 to fix a total of seven security flaws that expose Windows and Mac users to a wide range of malicious hacker attacks. The high-priority update patches vulnerabilities that allow remote code execution drive-by downloads if a user simply surfs to a maliciously rigge...

U.S. Water Utilities Prime Cyberattack Target, Experts

Industrial controls governing water-related U.S. critical infrastructure are woefully under-estimated as cyberattack targets. The potential for attack, say policymakers, is too great to ignore with consequences potentially devastating to populations. On Wednesday, the Center on Cyber and Technolo...

‘Fully Undetected’ SysJoker Backdoor Malware Targets Windows, Linux & macOS

A brand-new multiplatform malware, likely distributed via malicious npm packages, is spreading under the radar with Linux and Mac versions going fully undetected in VirusTotal, researchers warned. The Windows version, according to a Tuesday writeup from Intezer, has only six detections as of this...

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...

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...

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...

Linux Systems Under Attack By New RedXOR Malware

Researchers have discovered a new backdoor targeting Linux systems, which they link back to the Winnti threat group. The backdoor is called RedXOR – in part because its network data-encoding scheme is based on the XOR encryption algorithm, and in part because its samples were found on an old...

Apple’s Device Location-Tracking System Could Expose User Identities

Two vulnerabilities in a crowdsourced location-tracking system that helps users find Apple devices even when they’re offline could expose the identity of users, research claim. Offline Finding, a proprietary app introduced by Apple in 2019 for its iOS, macOS and watchOS platforms, enables the...

WordPress Injection Anchors Widespread Malware Campaign

The downloader malware known as Gootloader is poisoning websites globally as part of an extensive drive-by and watering-hole cybercampaign that abuses WordPress sites by injecting them with hundreds of pages of fake content. The adversaries have so far delivered the Cobalt Strike intrusion tool,...

Singtel Suffers Zero-Day Cyberattack, Damage Unknown

Singtel, Tier 1 telecom carrier throughout Asia and owner of Australian telco Optus, has been impacted by a software security hole in a third-party file transfer appliance targeted by attackers. Singtel is one of multiple organizations affected by the bug, including an Australian medical research...

Cisco DNA Center Bug Opens Enterprises to Remote Attack

A cross-site request forgery CSRF vulnerability in the Cisco Digital Network Architecture DNA Center could open enterprise users to remote attack and takeover. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2021-1257, exists in the web-based management interface of the Cisco DNA Center, which is a centralized...

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...

Android Messenger App Still Leaking Photos, Videos

The GO SMS Pro Android app has published two new versions on Google Play since a major security weakness was disclosed in November – but neither fixes the original issue, leaving 100 million users at risk for privacy violations, researchers said. Meanwhile, a raft of exploitation tools have been...

'Among Us' Mobile Game Under Siege by Attackers

The meteoric rise of the game Among Us appears to be outpacing its developer’s ability to keep up with malicious actors. On Sunday night, a specific ongoing attack forced InnerSloth, the company behind the game, to hastily roll out an update designed to kick bad actors off the game’s servers —...

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...

California Elementary Kids Kicked Off Online Learning by Ransomware

As students head back to the classroom, the spate of ransomware attacks against schools is continuing. The latest is a strike against a California school district that closed down remote learning for 6,000 elementary school students, according to city officials. The cyberattack, against the Newha...

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...

‘Hack-For-Hire’ Firms Spoof WHO To Target Google Credentials

“Hack-for-hire” organizations are the latest group of cybercriminals to take advantage of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, using COVID-19 as a lure in phishing emails bent on stealing victims’ Google credentials. Researchers with Google’s Threat Analysis Group TAG warned that they’ve spotted a...

Silent Night Banking Trojan Charges Top Dollar on the Underground

A descendant of the infamous Zeus banking trojan, dubbed Silent Night by the malware’s author, has emerged on the scene, with a host of functionalities available in a spendy malware-as-a-service MaaS model. Custom builds can run as much as $4,000 per month to use, which researchers say is now...

Verizon Data Breach Report: DoS Skyrockets, Espionage Dips

Denial-of-service DoS attacks have spiked over the past year, while cyber-espionage campaigns have spiraled downwards. That’s according to Verizon’s 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report DBIR released Tuesday, which analyzed 32,002 security incidents and 3,950 data breaches across 16 industry...

ProLock Ransomware Teams Up With QakBot Trojan to Infect Victims

A relatively new ransomware, ProLock, has paired up with the QakBot banking trojan to access victims’ networks. ProLock’s leveraging of QakBot gives it bolstered persistence, anti-detection and credential-dumping techniques. ProLock ransomware first emerged in March as a successor to another rece...

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,...

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...

Bezos, WhatsApp Cyberattacks Show Growing Mobile Sophistication

NEW ORLEANS – Sophisticated nation-state groups are increasingly using mobile devices as an infection vector. Oded Vanunu, head of products vulnerability research at Check Point research, told Threatpost during CPX 360 this week that because mobile devices come equipped with varying technologies,...

Mandatory IoT Security in the Offing with U.K. Proposal

The U.K. government has unveiled a proposed law aimed at securing internet of things IoT devices, which have historically been riddled with basic security issues. The drafted law, announced on Monday, comprises three main mandates for IoT manufacturers. First, all consumer IoT device passwords mu...

LifeLabs Pays Hackers Who Accessed 15M Customers’ Lab Test Results

LifeLabs, a Canadian laboratory testing company, said it has paid hackers after they accessed the data of 15 million customers – including highly-sensitive lab test results. In a letter sent Tuesday to customers, LifeLabs said that the breach affected customer information including names,...

GE, Dunkin', Forever 21 Caught Up in Broad Internal Document Leak

A marketing firm exposed hashed passwords and sensitive public relations documents of thousands of customers via a leaky Amazon S3 database – including big-name brands like GE, Dunkin’ Donuts, Forever 21 and more. Researchers with UpGuard in October discovered a misconfigured Amazon S3 storage...

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 ...

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...

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...

2019 and Beyond: The (Expanded) RSAC Advisory Board Weighs in on What’s Next

Just when we thought we’d escaped 2018 without an attack on the scale of WannaCry, NotPetya or Equifax, we were struck by Marriott’s November news of a breach affecting 500 million guests and once again reminded that complacency is the enemy of cybersecurity. We were also reminded that predicting...

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...

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...