FTC Cracks Down on Stalkerware With Retina-X App Bans

UPDATE The Federal Trade Commission FTC has barred the sale of three “stalking apps” until their developer can prove they are used legally. The case is the first crackdown by the FTC on “stalkerware,” which is software that can be installed on devices to track their owners’ location, activity and...

Leaky Server Exposes 419M Phone Numbers of Facebook Users

Phone numbers linked to the Facebook accounts of hundreds of millions of users has been found online on an insecure server in the latest privacy gaffe for the social media giant. The server, which lacked password protection, contained more than 419 million records over several databases of Facebo...

Security Vulnerabilities Are Increasingly Putting Kids at Risk

LAS VEGAS – IoT devices are increasingly coming into the hands of children – from connected watches, to Amazon Echo smart speakers – but security experts worry that these are opening up children’s data to future privacy breaches. The latest example of this fear was seen at Black Hat 2019, where...

Unpatched Apple macOS Hole Exposes Safari Browsing History

A design flaw in Apple’s macOS could allow a malicious application to steal victims’ Safari web browsing history. The security hole exists in every version of the Mac’s Mojave operating system, including macOS Mojave 10.14.3 Supplemental Update recently released on Feb. 7. That’s according to Mac...

Old Printer Vulnerabilities Die Hard

Despite copious warnings and efforts by the security community to harden the defenses of printers, they continue to represent a ripe target for attackers. Just this past summer researchers at Check Point found a vulnerability that allowed an attacker to compromise a multi-function printer with fa...

Multiple D-Link Routers Open to Complete Takeover with Simple Attack

Eight D-Link routers in the company’s small/home office “DWR” range are vulnerable to complete takeover – but the vendor said it is planning on only patching two, according to a researcher. Błażej Adamczyk of the Silesian University of Technology in Poland discovered the vulnerabilities in May,...

Intel’s ‘Virtual Fences’ Spectre Fix Won’t Protect Against Variant 4

Spectre and Meltdown fixes for Intel chips announced in March, to be embedded into new CPUs, do not address the newly disclosed Variant 4, sources said. Intel introduced hardware-based safeguards to its new chips to protect against the Spectre and Meltdown flaws that rocked the silicon industry...

Apache OpenOffice Update Patches Four Vulnerabilities

The Apache Software Foundation fixed four vulnerabilities Friday tied to its popular Apache OpenOffice suite of free productivity applications. The patches are for the suite’s word processing and graphics apps. Each of the vulnerabilities are rated medium in severity. Three of the four bugs patch...

Microsoft Releases Outlook Patches, Fixes Broken Update

During the heat of Black Hat last week, Microsoft pushed out patches for Outlook that address three newly reported vulnerabilities. Last week’s update also included fixes for six of eight vulnerabilities left unpatched after issues were reported with the June Patch Tuesday update. The most seriou...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday Update Fixes 19 Critical Vulnerabilities

Microsoft today released patches for 19 critical vulnerabilities, one of which was publicly known prior to the update. In all, 54 vulnerabilities were patched in Windows, Edge, Internet Explorer, Office and Exchange as part of Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday release; 32 flaws were rated importa...

Google Discloses Unpatched Microsoft Vulnerability

Google’s security researchers disclosed details of an unpatched Microsoft vulnerability in Windows’ GDI library that allows attackers to steal sensitive data from program memory. The flaw was first addressed by Microsoft last June, but Google said the patch was incomplete. As part of its 90-day...

Code Reuse a Peril for Secure Software Development

The amount of insecure software tied to reused third-party libraries and lingering in applications long after patches have been deployed is staggering. It’s a habitual problem perpetuated by developers failing to vet third-party code for vulnerabilities, and some repositories taking a hands-off...

Intel Patches Local EoP Vulnerability Impacting Windows 7

Intel issued an important security patch Monday for a vulnerability that could allow hackers to execute arbitrary code on targeted systems running Windows 7. The bug, located in Intel’s HD graphics Windows kernel driver, leaves affected systems open to a local privilege escalation attacks that...

Public Exploits Available for ImageMagick Vulnerabilities

Within hours of the disclosure of serious vulnerabilities in ImageMagick, public exploits were available increasing the risk to thousands of websites that make use of the open source image-processing software. Attackers can append malicious code to an image file that ImageMagick will process...

USAID a Target of DoL Watering Hole Attackers

One of the nine sites serving malware tied to the recent watering hole attack on the U.S. Department of Labor was located in Cambodia and has ties to the United States Agency for International Development USAID. Speculation has it that the DoL attack was targeting downstream employees at the...

Attack Using Backdoored Apache Binaries to Lead to Blackhole Kit

There is a newly identified ongoing attack campaign in which attackers are using compromised Apache HTTP binaries to redirect users to malicious sites serving various flavors of malware, including the Blackhole exploit kit. Rather than going the traditional route of simply injecting malicious cod...

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...

DHS Chief Uses 'Sandy' to Underscore Cybersecurity Threats

While the eastern United States recovers from this week’s devastasting storm, the nation’s Homeland Security chief used “Superstorm Sandy” to promote the importance of national cybersecurity protection. “One of the possible areas of attack, of course, is attacks on our nation’s control systems —...

More than 300,000 at Risk After Major Breach at Florida College

A security breach initially believed contained to about 50 employee records now appears to involve almost 300,000 students, faculty and employees at a Florida college. Officials at Northwest Florida State College in Niceville today confirmed a massive data breach and hundreds of thousands of stol...

SpyEye and Zeus Malware: Married Or Living Separately?

Everyone knows that the first year of marriage can be a tough one -around three percent of them end in the first 12 months. Looks like the same can be true of malware marriages, with the union of the Zeus and SpyEye Trojan now in question. Just one year after news broke that the Zeus and SpyEye...

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...

Bluetooth Signals Can Be Used to Track Smartphones, Say Researchers

Researchers warn Bluetooth signals can be used to track device owners via a unique fingerprinting of the radio signal. The technique was presented via a paper presented at IEEE Security and Privacy conference last month by researchers at the University of California San Diego. The paper suggests...

Cybercriminals Actively Target VMware vSphere with Cryptominers

Organizations running sophisticated virtual networks with VMware’s vSphere service are actively being targeted by cryptojackers, who have figured out how to inject the XMRig commercial cryptominer into the environment, undetected. Uptycs’ Siddharth Sharma has released research showing threat acto...

SEGA’s Sloppy Security Confession: Exposed AWS S3 Bucket Offers Up Steam API Access & More

Gaming giant SEGA Europe recently discovered that its sensitive data was being stored in an unsecured Amazon Web Services AWS S3 bucket during a cloud-security audit, and it’s sharing the story to inspire other organizations to double-check their own systems. Researcher Aaron Phillips with VPN...

Phishing Scam Aims to Hijack TikTok ‘Influencer’ Accounts

A recently discovered phishing scam tried to takeover more than 125 high-profile user accounts on TikTok. Researchers said the campaign marks one of the first major attacks on “influencers” found on the TikTok social-media platform. Researchers at cloud email security provider Abnormal Security...

3.1M Neiman Marcus Customer Card Details Breached

Dallas-based Neiman Marcus Group is known worldwide as the go-to luxury retailer for the well-heeled. But their reputation for impeccable quality just took a big hit with revelations that the company was breached by an attacker back in May 2020. It took 17 months for the retailer to notice. Just...

BladeHawk Attackers Target Kurds with Android Apps

Attackers have been targeting the Kurdish ethic group for more than a year through an Facebook-based spyware campaign that disguises backdoors in legitimate Android apps, researchers have found. A group called BladeHawk is behind the campaign, discovered by researchers from cybersecurity firm ESE...

Iranian APT Lures Defense Contractor in Catfishing-Malware Scam

Most people have probably heard of catfishing. That’s when someone adopts a fake online persona, usually to trick someone into falling in love. Now, threat actors have developed their own spin on the grift, developing appealing — objectively hot — profiles to charm victims into downloading malwar...

Ruthless Attackers Target Florida Condo Collapse Victims

Families mourning the loss of loved ones to the partial collapse of the Champlain Towers South condo building in Surfside, Fla. are now being urged to check the credit of their deceased relatives thanks to a group of heartless hackers targeting victims in a new identity-theft scheme. Apparently,...

Western Digital Users Face Another RCE

Bad news comes in threes, most particularly for Western Digital customers. As if things weren’t bad enough for the untold number of Western Digital customers whose data blinked out of existence last month, there’s another zero-day waiting for whoever can’t or won’t upgrade its My Cloud storage...

Netgear Authentication Bypass Allows Router Takeover

Netgear has patched three bugs in one of its router families that, if exploited, can allow threat actors to bypass authentication to breach corporate networks and steal data and credentials. Microsoft security researchers discovered the bugs in Netgear DGN-2200v1 series routers while they were...

Details of RCE Bug in Adobe Experience Manager Revealed

Details of an Adobe zero-day bug found in its content-management solution Adobe Experience Manager AEM, which affected customers ranging from Mastercard, LinkedIn and PlayStation, were revealed Monday. The bug, patched in May, allowed hackers to bypass authentication protection and execute code...

5G Security Vulnerabilities Fluster Mobile Operators

As 5G private networks roll out in the coming years, security may be a key issue for enterprises. A survey released at Mobile World Congress on Monday shows that major gaps persist in security capabilities among mobile operators. Some 68 percent of operators already sell private wireless networks...

Critical Palo Alto Cyber-Defense Bug Allows Remote ‘War Room’ Access

A critical security bug in Palo Alto Networks’ Cortex XSOAR could allow remote attackers to run commands and automations in the Cortex XSOAR War Room and to take other actions on the platform, without having to log in. Found internally by Palo Alto, the bug CVE-2021-3044 is an...

IKEA Fined $1.2M for Elaborate ‘Spying System’

IKEA’s French subsidiary was just hit with a $1.2 million fine after it was found guilty of a creepy systematic snooping scheme targeting customers, employees and even prospective hires. Prosecutors said in all, the company illegally surveilled about 400 people in total, according to the BBC. IKE...

FBI Claws Back Millions of DarkSide’s Ransom Profits

United States law enforcement has clawed back approximately $2.3 million of the ransom allegedly paid to DarkSide by Colonial Pipeline last month, the Department of Justice DOJ and FBI announced in a joint press conference on Monday. “Today we turned the tables on DarkSide,” FBI Deputy Director...

REvil Ransomware Ground Down JBS: Sources

The cyberattack that flattened operations at JBS Foods over the weekend was indeed a ransomware strike, the global food distributor has confirmed to the Biden administration, with sources pointing to the REvil Group as the responsible gang. Four people familiar with the matter who weren’t...

Telegram Fraudsters Ramp Up Forged COVID-19 Vaccine Card Sales

Telegram groups are being abused by fraudsters peddling fake COVID-19 vaccination cards to the unvaccinated and anti-vaxxer communities, according to researchers. Brittany Allen, trust and safety architect at Sift, noticed the illicit sales on the encrypted messaging platform as the COVID-19...

Gig Workers Being Paid $500 for Payroll Passwords

Fintech startup Argyle, a financial-services platform aimed at gig workers, is working to replace credit scores assigned by bureaus like Equifax. But closer security analysis hints that Argyle could be just the latest incarnation of an ongoing data-collection campaign, paying people to give up...

Tax Phish Swims Past Google Workspace Email Security

A W2 tax email scam is circulating in the U.S. using Typeform, a popular software that specializes in online surveys and form building. The campaign is aimed at harvesting victims’ email account credentials, researchers said. According to Armorblox, the campaign also bypasses native Google...

E.O. Would Strengthen Federal Cyber Requirements

The U.S. federal government is mulling changes to up its cybersecurity software game in the wake of the sprawling SolarWinds cyberattacks that came to light in December, including requiring data-breach notifications. In a draft executive order from President Joe Biden, software companies would be...

Dark Web Markets for Stolen Data See Banner Sales

Despite an explosion in the sheer amount of stolen data available on the Dark Web, the value of personal information is holding steady, according to the 2021 Dark Web price index from Privacy Affairs. That leaves these thriving dirty data dealers in a familiar predicament — they need to lock down...

Malicious Mozilla Firefox Extension Allows Gmail Takeover

A newly uncovered cyberattack is taking control of victims’ Gmail accounts, by using a customized, malicious Mozilla Firefox browser extension called FriarFox. Researchers say the threat campaign, observed in January and February, targeted Tibetan organizations and was tied to TA413, a known...

Microsoft: SolarWinds Attackers Downloaded Azure, Exchange Code

Threat actors downloaded some Microsoft Exchange and Azure code repositories during the sprawling SolarWinds supply-chain attack but did not use the company’s internal systems or products to attack other victims. That’s the final verdict this week by the tech giant now that it’s completed a...

Google Forms Set Baseline For Widespread BEC Attacks

A threat actor has been sending thousands of emails to organizations, in what researchers warn is a reconnaissance campaign to identify targets for a possible follow-up business-email-compromise BEC attack. So far, researchers have observed thousands of messages being sent to companies since...

Ex-Cisco Employee Convicted for Deleting 16K Webex Accounts

A man has been sentenced to two years in jail after being convicted of hacking Cisco’s Webex collaboration platform in an insider-threat case brought to the U.S. District Court in California. Sudhish Kasaba Ramesh, 31, admitted that he broke into Cisco’s cloud infrastructure in 2018, hosted on...

Nando's Hackers Feast on Customer Accounts

Diners at a popular chicken-dinner chain have seen hundreds of dollars siphoned out of their bank accounts, after cybercriminals were able to access their restaurant ordering credentials. The issue though is that payment-card information is not stored within Nando’s accounts, leaving some questio...

Ransomware Attackers Buy Network Access in Cyberattack Shortcut

For prices between $300 and $10,000, ransomware groups have the opportunity to easily buy initial network access to already-compromised companies on underground forums. Researchers warn this opportunity gives groups like Maze or Sodinokibi the ability to more easily kickstart ransomware attacks...

Mozi Botnet Accounts for Majority of IoT Traffic

The Mozi botnet, a peer-2-peer P2P malware known previously for taking over Netgear, D-Link and Huawei routers, has swollen in size to account for 90 percent of observed traffic flowing to and from all internet of things IoT devices, according to researchers. IBM X-Force noticed Mozi’s spike with...

Report: Most Popular Home Routers Have ‘Critical’ Flaws

A security review of 127 popular home routers found most contained at least one critical security flaw, according to researchers. The “Home Router Security Report” PDF by Peter Weidenbach and Johannes vom Dorp—both from the German think tank Fraunhofer Institute–found that not only did all of the...