Xsser Trojan Spies on Jailbroken iOS Devices in Hong Kong

An iOS version of an Android espionage Trojan targeting activists and protestors in Hong Kong has been discovered on the command and control server hosting the Android malware. The iOS version, a mobile remote access Trojan dubbed Xsser by Lacoon Mobile Security, affects only jailbroken iOS...

OpenVPN vulnerable to Shellshock Bash vulnerability

OpenVPN wasn’t immune to the Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL, and it’s not going to sidestep Shellshock either. Fredrick Stromberg, cofounder of Mullvad, a Swedish VPN company, reported that OpenVPN servers are vulnerable to Shellshock , the vulnerability in Bash plaguing Linux, UNIX and Mac ...

Microsoft to Patch Zero Day in January 2014 Security Updates

Microsoft announced Thursday that it plans to release four bulletins next week as part of the year’s first batch of Patch Tuesday security updates, none of which are rated critical. Despite the relatively light load, the patches do address a zero-day vulnerability in Windows XP and Windows Server...

Oil, Energy Watering Hole Attacks Linked to DOL attack

A string of watering hole attacks targeting oil and energy companies dating back to May could be linked to similar attacks against the U.S. Department of Labor website. Researchers at Cisco discovered the compromised domains of 10 oil and energy companies worldwide, including hydroelectric plants...

BlackBerry Z10 Privilege Escalation Security Vulnerability

BlackBerry has released a security update resolving an escalation of privilege vulnerability that existed in “BlackBerry Protect” enabled devices running version 10.0.10.261 and earlier operating systems. The company says that version 10.0.9.2743 is not affected and that they have found no eviden...

Safe Targeted Espionage Campaign Borrows from Cybercriminals

More and more, we’re hearing about a crossing of the streams, if you will, between cybercrime and state-sponsored attackers. Elements of malware, code persistence and distribution techniques are bleeding over between one realm of hacking into the other as each side tries to fill gaps in their...

NBC Website Hacked, Leading Visitors to Citadel Banking Malware

Another day, another media company hacked. This time it’s NBC which has fallen to victim hackers on the heels of compromises of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal websites. Various experts have confirmed that NBC’s website is compromised and leading visitors to the dangerous Citadel banki...

Oracle Releases Fix For Java CVE-2012-4681 Flaw

Oracle on Thursday released a new version of Java that included a fix for the CVE-2012-4681 vulnerability that has been used in limited targeted attacks in the last couple of weeks. The release of Java 7 update 7 comes about four days after the Java flaw was publicly disclosed, but several months...

Attackers Target CVE-2012-0754 Adobe Flash Bug

An Adobe Flash vulnerability fixed last month is being used in targeted attacks right now, with attackers attempting to persuade victims to open a malicious Word document that contains the payload for the Flash bug. The vulnerability has been patched for nearly a month, but history has shown that...

Mozilla to Fix Libpng Bug in Firefox and Thunderbird

Mozilla is preparing to release a fix for a serious vulnerability in both Firefox and Thunderbird that could result in remote code execution. The update comes just a few days after the company released version 10.0.1 of Firefox, fixing a separate security bug. The new update for Firefox and...

Microsoft to Issue Seven Bulletins, One Critical, on Patch Tuesday

Microsoft plans to issue seven security bulletins in the January Patch Tuesday release next week, fixing six vulnerabilities rated important and one rated critical. The bugs affect a variety of products, including Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, Server 2003 and 2008 and Microsoft Developer Tools an...

Hack-a-mole: Disgruntled Programmer Accused of Sabotaging Arcade Game Classic

Marvin Walter Wimberly, Jr., a sixty one year-old programmer and game board designer has been charged by authorities in Florida with committing computer crimes with the intent to defraud after his employer, game maker Bob’s Space Racers BSR uncovered an elaborate scheme in which popular arcade...

Facebook Announces Hacker's Cup

Social networking Web site Facebook has announced that they will begin accepting registrations for the 2011 Hacker Cup, the first annual programming and puzzle solving contest open to software engineers, programmers, puzzle solvers and assorted hackers from around the world.Facebook said this wee...

New Windows netbooks may harbor malware

From Computerworld Gregg Keizer After discovering attack code on a brand new Windows XP netbook, anti-virus vendor Kaspersky Labs warned users yesterday that they should scan virgin systems for malware before connecting them to the Internet. When Kaspersky developers installed their...

Beijing Olympics App Flaws Allow Man-in-the-Middle Attacks

The mobile app that all attendees and athletes of the upcoming Beijing Winter Olympics must use to manage communications and documentation at the event has a “devastating” flaw in the way it encrypts data that can allow for man-in-the-middle attacks that access sensitive user information,...

Critical Cisco Contact Center Bug Threatens Customer-Service Havoc

A critical security bug affecting Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Enterprise UCCE portfolio could allow privilege-escalation and platform takeover. Cisco UCCE is an on-premises customer-service platform capable of supporting up to 24,000 customer-service agents using channels that include inbound...

CISA Urges Sites to Patch Critical RCE in Discourse

Discourse – the ultra-popular, widely deployed open-source community forum and mailing list management platform – has a critical remote code-execution RCE bug that was fixed in an urgent update on Friday. Tracked as CVE-2021-41163, the flaw is found in Discourse versions 2.7.8 and earlier. It’s...

Transnational Fraud Ring Bilks U.S. Military Service Members Out of Millions

More than 3,300 U.S. military service members, military dependents and civilians employed by the Department of Defense were compromised as part of a transnational cybercrime ring created to defraud them out of $1.5 million in military benefits from the DoD and the Department of Veterans Affairs. ...

The Gig Economy Creates Novel Data-Security Risks

As businesses strive to move faster and faster, many are adopting a “just-in-time” strategy of spinning up human resources on demand – a phenomenon known as the gig economy, familiar to most via Uber, Instacart or DoorDash. But it’s a concept that enterprises are embracing too – inadvertently...

Man Arrested for AWS Bomb Plot

A Texas man has been charged with plotting a bombing of Amazon Web Services in a quest to allegedly “kill off the internet.” Seth Aaron Pendley was arrested in Ft. Worth after allegedly attempting to get an explosive device from an undercover FBI employee in a sting. The feds were alerted to...

Clearview Facial-Recognition Technology Ruled Illegal in Canada

Canadian authorities have found that the collection of facial-recognition data by Clearview AI is illegal because it violates federal and provincial privacy laws, representing a win for individuals’ privacy and potentially setting a precedent for other legal challenges to the controversial...

Agent Tesla Trojan 'Kneecaps' Microsoft's Anti-Malware Interface

Researchers have identified new versions of the Agent Tesla remote access trojan RAT that target the Windows anti-malware interface used by security vendors to protect PCs from attacks. The newly discovered variants have also adopted new obfuscation capabilities, raising the stakes for businesses...

Medical Device Security: Diagnosis Critical

A hacked insulin pump is the last thing a diabetic wants to worry about when life-saving fluids are pumped into their body. Sadly, concerns about medical device IT security are a healthcare reality. Last year, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA issued more than a...

Florida Ethics Officer Charged with Cyberstalking

A Tallahassee city ethics officer was arrested and charged with cyberstalking her coworker and former lover, and is now banned by a judge from using the internet for anything besides work, paying bills and her legal defense. Julie Meadows-Keef is accused of cyberstalking Bert Fletcher, the...

Telegram Bots at Heart of Classiscam Scam-as-a-Service

A new automated scam-as-a-service has been unearthed, which leverages Telegram bots in order to steal money and payment data from European victims. The scam, which researchers call Classiscam, is being sold as a service by Russian-speaking cybercriminals, and has been used by at least 40 separate...

NSA Urges SysAdmins to Replace Obsolete TLS Protocols

The National Security Agency NSA is lighting a fire under system administrators who are dragging their feet to replace insecure and outdated Transport Layer Security TLS protocol instances. The agency this week released new guidance and tools to equip companies to update from obsolete older...

FBI Warn Hackers are Using Hijacked Home Security Devices for 'Swatting'

Stolen email passwords are being used to hijack smart home security systems to “swat” unsuspecting users, the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned this week. The announcement comes after concerned device manufacturers alerted law enforcement about the issue. Swatting is a dangerous prank where...

'Amnesia:33' TCP/IP Flaws Affect Millions of IoT Devices

Researchers – as well as the U.S. Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency CISA – are warning of a set of serious vulnerabilities affecting TCP/IP stacks. The flaws impact millions of internet-of-things IoT devices and embedded systems, including smart thermometers, smart plugs and printers...

Turla's 'Crutch' Backdoor Leverages Dropbox in Espionage Attacks

Researchers have discovered a previously undocumented backdoor and document stealer, which they have linked to the Russian-speaking Turla advanced persistent threat APT espionage group. The malware, which researchers call “Crutch,” is able to bypass security measures by abusing legitimate tools –...

Amazon Fires Employee Who Leaked Customer Names, Emails

Amazon has fired an employee who shared customers’ names and email addresses with a third party. An Amazon spokesperson told Threatpost that it has systems in place to limit and control access to information, and processes in place for identifying and investigating suspicious behavior. These...

IoT Device Takeovers Surge 100 Percent in 2020

Connected cameras, refrigerators and other seemingly-mundane internet-of-things IoT devices are a cybercriminal favorite this year, with new research showing a sharp increase 100 percent in IoT infections observed on wireless networks. IoT devices are now responsible for 32.72 percent of all...

Georgia Election Data Hit in Ransomware Attack

Ransomware gangs have officially entered the 2020 election fray, with reports of one of the first breaches of the voting season, on Hall County, Ga. The county’s database of voter signatures was impacted in the attack along with other government systems. Although the county said the voting proces...

News Wrap: Barnes & Noble Hack, DDoS Extortion Threats and More

The Threatpost editors break down the top security stories of the week ended Oct. 16, including: Patch Tuesday insanity, with Microsoft and Adobe releasing fixes for severe vulnerabilities – including a critical, potentially wormable remote code execution bug known as the “Ping of Death” Barnes a...

Software AG Data Released After Clop Ransomware Strike – Report

Clop and the group’s signature malware has struck again — this time hitting a giant target in the form of German software conglomerate Software AG. The company isn’t paying a mammoth $23 million ransom so far, and over the weekend it confirmed that the crooks were releasing company data, accordin...

Disinformation Spurs a Thriving Industry as U.S. Election Looms

In the years since the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, threat actors have pieced together a new playbook for sowing confusion and doubt within the American electorate. On Wednesday, researchers with Cisco Talos released a report PDF that details how a number of these new sophisticated campaigns...

Researchers Sound Alarm Over Malicious AWS Community AMIs

Researchers are sounding the alarm over what they say is a growing threat vector tied to Amazon Web Services and its marketplace of pre-configured virtual servers. The danger, according to researchers with Mitiga, is that threat actors can easily build malware-laced Community Amazon Machine Image...

Agent Tesla Spyware Adds Fresh Tricks to Its Arsenal

Since COVID-19 cast its pall in March, the Agent Tesla remote-access trojan RAT has exploited the pandemic and added a raft of functionality that has helped it dominate the enterprise threat scene. Though Agent Tesla first made a splash six years ago, it hasn’t lost any momentum – in fact, it is...

Black Hat 2020: Satellite Comms Globally Open to $300 Eavesdropping Hack

Satellite internet communications are susceptible to eavesdropping and signal interception by far-flung attackers located in a different continent or country from their victims. And all they need is $300 worth of off-the-shelf equipment to pull it off. That’s the word from James Pavur, an academi...

Paving the Path to Passwordless

Passwords seem to be the digital equivalent of the phrase, “can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em.” They’re supposed to protect sensitive information and data, but passwords can also be incredibly frustrating; you shouldn’t use the same one across the board, which means you probably have...

Cerberus Banking Trojan Unleashed on Google Play

A malicious Android app has been uncovered on the Google Play app marketplace that is distributing the banking trojan, Cerberus. The app has 10,000 downloads. Researchers said that the trojan was found within the last few days, as it was being spread via a Spanish currency converter app called...

Steganography Anchors Pinpoint Attacks on Industrial Targets

A targeted series of attacks on suppliers of equipment and software for industrial enterprises is playing out globally, researchers said, hinging on phishing and a steganography tactic to hide malware on public, legitimate image resources. According to Kaspersky ICS CERT, the attacks seem bent on...

ThreatList: People Know Reusing Passwords Is Dumb, But Still Do It

More than half of people haven’t changed their password in the last year – even after they’ve heard about a data breach in the news. That’s according to a recent survey, “Psychology of Passwords: The Online Behavior That’s Putting You At Risk,” that examined the online security and password...

New PoetRAT Hits Energy Sector With Data-Stealing Tools

A never-before-seen remote access trojan RAT has been discovered in a set of campaigns targeting the energy sector, with a slew of post-exploitation tools to log keystrokes, record footage from webcams and steal browser credentials. Researchers called the malware “PoetRAT” due to various referenc...

'Fake Fingerprints' Bypass Scanners with 3D Printing

New research has found that it’s possible to use 3D printing technology to create “fake fingerprints” that can bypass most fingerprint scanners used by popular devices. But, creating the attack remains costly and time-consuming. Researchers with Cisco Talos created different threat models that us...

‘Wildly Different’ Privacy Regulations Causing Compliance Chaos

From the General Data Protection Regulations GDPR to the California Consumer Privacy Act CCPA, the security landscape is becoming increasingly fraught with regulatory efforts. While privacy regulation has positive implications for data security, companies are finding themselves struggling to stay...

Google's Plan to Crunch Health Data on Millions of Patients Draws Fire

Tech behemoth Google is using artificial intelligence to reportedly slice and dice personal healthcare details on millions of Americans. That has some researchers diagnosing the company with HIPAA violations and prescribing regulatory controls as a remedy. And, at least one federal regulator is...

Presentation Template: Build Your 2020 Security Plan

As the end of the year approaches, security decision makers are creating their 2020 plans and running them by management for approval. In most cases, this means requesting and making the case for the necessary resources that need to be allocated, while still providing value to the organization. T...

MSPs Can Now Provide Managed Detection and Response with Cynet 360

Today, managed detection and response MDR is a rapidly growing market segment, actively pursued by some 27 percent of organizations, according to April 2019 numbers released by ESG Research. According to the same, another 11 percent of organizations plan to pursue MDR in the future. The Cynet 360...

Nation-State APTs Target U.S. Utilities With Dangerous Malware

Researchers believe that nation-state actors are behind several spearphishing campaigns targeting U.S. utility companies with a newly-identified malware, which has the capabilities to view system data and reboot machines. Lure emails were sent to three U.S. utilities companies between July 19 and...

Avengers: Endgame Sites Promise Digital Downloads, Deliver Info-Harvesting

Marvel Studio’s long-awaited superhero juggernaut Avengers: Endgame, represents the second-largest worldwide box-office haul for any film, ever – raking in $2.2 billion in its first two weekends. With demand like that, perhaps it’s not surprising that enterprising scammers are already luring in...