Google Faces Privacy Lawsuit Over Tracking Users in Incognito Mode

Google faces a $5 billion class-action lawsuit over claims that it has been collecting people’s browsing information without their knowledge even when using the incognito browsing mode that’s meant to keep their online activities private. The lawsuit, filed in the federal court in San Jose,...

News Wrap: Ransomware Extortion Tactics, Contact-Tracing App Security Worries

Threatpost editors discuss the top news stories of the week ended May 15, including: Recent ransomware attacks, including ones targeting healthcare giant Magellan, the IT office that supports Texas appellate courts and judicial agencies, and a popular law firm that works with several A-list...

Quantum Security Goes Live with Samsung Galaxy

Samsung and South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom have debuted the Galaxy A Quantum 5G smartphone, sporting a quantum random number generation RNG chipset. It’s the first commercialization of quantum technology for mobile phones, and it will serve as a significant bellwether for full quantum...

ThreatList: Human-Mimicking Bots Spike, Targeting e-Commerce and Travel

Bad bots, bad bots, whatcha gonna do? Target e-commerce, the travel industry, media and online marketplaces, that’s what. Those are the top four verticals attacked by bots in the last year, according to data released on Wednesday from Radware, with e-commerce accounting for the most activity. In...

Copycat Site Serves Up Raccoon Stealer

Someone is targeting web denizens with a malicious, copycat Malwarebytes website, which serves up the Raccoon information stealer malware to unsuspecting visitors. According to the security firm itself, the attackers set up the domain “malwarebytes-free.com” with a domain registrar in Russia in...

Responding to the New Normal: How to Prevent Added Risk in Your Business

Our world has shifted dramatically over the last few weeks. Many people have moved from shock to acceptance as the novel coronavirus COVID-19 has taken hold across the world, across our nation, in our states, in our communities, and even in our organizations. Companies are particularly vulnerable...

Metamorfo Returns with Keylogger Trick to Target Financial Firms

Researchers have discovered a recent spate of phishing emails spreading a new variant of Metamorfo, a financial malware known for targeting Brazilian companies. Now, however, it’s expanding its geographic range and adding a new technique. Metamorfo was first discovered in April 2018, in various...

California Adopts Strictest Privacy Law in U.S.

A landmark privacy rights bill took effect Jan. 1, 2020 in California and will have broad implications for U.S. consumers and businesses. The California Consumer Privacy Act CCPA mandates strict requirements for companies to notify users about how their user data will be used and monetized along...

Insecure Database Exposes Millions of Private SMS Messages

Tens of millions of SMS messages have been found on an unprotected database, putting the private data of hundreds of millions of people in the United States at risk for theft or exposure and leaving a communications company open for potential intrusion, security researchers discovered. Noam Rotem...

Data-Enriched Profiles on 1.2B People Exposed in Gigantic Leak

An open Elasticsearch server has exposed the rich profiles of more than 1.2 billion people to the open internet. First found on October 16 by researchers Bob Diachenko and Vinny Troia, the database contains more than 4 terabytes of data. It consists of scraped information from social media source...

Insurance Pays Out a Sliver of Norsk Hydro's Cyberattack Damages

On the heels of a severe cyberattack, aluminum giant Norsk Hydro has received only $3.6 million in cyber-insurance – just a fraction of the total costs in damage. Overall, the Oslo, Norway-based company incurred between $60 million to $71 million in damages from the incident, which forced it to...

Joker's Stash Drops Largest-Ever Credit Card Cache on Dark Web

Joker’s Stash, a Dark Web destination that specializes in trading in payment-card data, has added 1.3 million credit and debit cards to its inventory, belonging to Indian banking customers. Researchers said it’s the largest stolen payment card cache ever put up for sale. According to Group-IB, th...

New Threat Actor Fraudulently Buys Digital Certificates to Spread Malware

Researchers have identified a new threat actor that is using impersonation fraud to purchase digital certificates that are then used for the spread of malware. Security firm ReversingLabs identified a bad actor that deceives certificate authorities into selling them legitimate digital certificate...

Library-Themed University Phishing Attack Expands to Massive Scale

Indicating a campaign of massive scale, at least 20 new phishing domains targeting more than 60 universities in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States have cropped up, bent on lifting credentials from students heading back to school. The domains are...

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...

Google Targets Data-Abusing Apps with Bug Bounty Launch

Google is looking to squash vulnerabilities on its Google Play app marketplace with a new bug-bounty program aimed at identifying data-abuse issues in Android apps and Chrome extensions. The company on Thursday announced the Developer Data Protection Reward Program, which, depending on the impact...

Phishing Attacks Enlist Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure in Ploys

Recent phishing campaigns have been spotted boosting their anti-detection efforts by using Amazon Web Services to host their landing pages. It’s a sign of a nascent trend towards using public cloud storage, according to researchers. The attackers are also layering on various obfuscation technique...

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...

Ubiquitous Bug Allows HIPAA-Protected Malware to Hide Behind Medical Images

A bug in a 30-year-old standard used for the exchange and storage of medical images has been uncovered; it allows an adversary to embed fully-functioning executable code into the image files captured by medical devices such as CT and MRI machines. This results in hybrid files that allow malware...

RSA Conference 2019: Microsoft, Google, Twitter on Federal Privacy Regs

SAN FRANCISCO – With the advent of General Data Protection Regulation in Europe and state measures like the California Consumer Privacy Act CCPA of 2018 talk about a comprehensive U.S. privacy law has grown louder. However, some privacy advocates fear that any such federal legislation will be a...

RSAC 2019: Malicious Emailed URLs See Triple-Digit Increase

SAN FRANCISCO: Business emails laced with malicious URLs in the message body have spiked by more than 125 percent in Q4 2018 in comparison with the quarter before. According to Mimecast’s latest Email Security Risk Assessment ESRA report, released at the RSA Conference 2019 in San Francisco this...

Microsoft Issues Multiple Critical Patches for Edge Browser

Microsoft patched a bevy of critical bugs impacting its Edge browser that could allow an attacker to hijack a targeted PC simply by steering a victim to a rigged website harboring specially crafted exploit code. In all, Microsoft tackled four critical Edge vulnerabilities, part of the company’s...

Pinterest Browser Extension Injects Unwanted Code into 5K Websites

A buggy Mozilla Firefox browser extension for sharing links to Pinterest has automatically injected malformed code into at least 5,000 websites. The code injection in this instance was not malicious, but researchers at Sucuri, which discovered and reported the problem on Tuesday, said the inciden...

Shipping Industry Cybersecurity: A Shipwreck Waiting to Happen

The global shipping industry is vulnerable to a range of hacks, including one that can send multi-million dollar vessels on a collision course for disaster, according researchers. Worse, the flaws are trivial to execute and easy to mitigate against, according to a report by Pen Test Partners. “Sh...

Browser Side-Channel Flaw De-Anonymizes Facebook Data

A side-channel vulnerability in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox allows drive-by de-anonymization of Facebook users. An exploit would allow an attacker to pick up the profile picture, username and the “likes” of unsuspecting visitors who find themselves landing on a malicious website – with no...

Cisco Warns of Three Critical Bugs in Digital Network Architecture Platform

Cisco Systems patched three bugs on Wednesday that are rated critical, tied to its Digital Network Architecture DNA Center platform. Cisco also warned of four additional vulnerabilities – each rated high. All of the vulnerabilities have available patches for mitigation. All three of the critical...

Apple Releases Spectre Patches for Safari, macOS and iOS

Apple released iOS 11.2.2 software Monday for iPhones, iPads and iPod touch models that patch for the Spectre vulnerabilities. A macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 supplemental update was also released to bolster Spectre defenses in Apple’s Safari browser and WebKit, the web browser engine used by Safari,...

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...

Patched BadTunnel Windows Bug Has 'Extensive' Impact

Among the more than three dozen vulnerabilities Microsoft patched on Tuesday was a fix for a bug that the researcher who found it said has “probably the widest impact in the history of Windows.” “There were also some wide impact vulnerabilities before, but maybe not like this extensive,” Chinese...

Google Updates Chrome, Fixes Three High Severity Issues

Google pushed out the latest version of its flagship browser Chrome on Tuesday, fixing three high severity bugs in the process. The update graduates the browser to version number 49.0.2623.87 for Windows, Mac, and Linux, according to a post on Google’s Chrome Releases blog this week. Two of the...

Oracle Patches Java Zero Day

Oracle has released its quarterly patch update, which includes fixes for nearly 200 vulnerabilities. The most notable bug fixed in this release is the Java zero day that’s been used in an ongoing attack campaign. The massive release from Oracle has patches for a long list of products, but the Jav...

KCodes NetUSB Vulnerability Details Surface

The Department of Homeland Security-sponsored CERT at Carnegie Mellon University today issued an alert warning of a serious vulnerability in KCode NetUSB, which is integrated into products sold by a number of networking vendors. KCodes NetUSB is a Linux kernel module that enables several users on...

Exploit for Flash Zero Day Appears in Angler Exploit Kit

The dangerous Angler exploit kit has a new piece of ammunition to use in its attacks: a fresh Adobe Flash zero-day vulnerability. The kit is exploiting the previously unknown vulnerability in several versions of Internet Explorer running on Windows 7 and Windows 8. French security researcher...

Emergency Adobe Flash Player Patches Fix Pair of Zero Days

Exploits targeting two previously unreported flaws in Flash Player prompted Adobe to release an emergency patch yesterday. One of the attacks is targeting aerospace and other manufacturing companies, and is being delivered via infected Microsoft Office documents. The other is being carried out ov...

Google Repairs High-Risk Flaw in Chrome

Google has fixed a couple of security vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser, including a high-risk use-after-free bug and a problem in the way that the Apple OS X driver for some Intel GPUs handles rendering. The biggest fix in Chrome 23 is a patch for the use-after-free vulnerability in the Chro...

Researcher Charlie Miller Joins Twitter Security Team

Twitter quietly is assembling a serious security team, with the most recent addition being Charlie Miller, the security researcher known for finding a long line of bugs in the iPhone and other Apple products. Miller, a respected and prolific researcher, will join the social network’s security tea...

New Morto Strain Emerges With File Infection Capability

A new strain of the Morto worm has added a file infection capability in addition to its existing ability to compromise remote desktop connections, according to new research from Microsoft. Now Morto is infecting files in the default RDP file share, ‘tsclient,’ after it determines which drives it...

Google Fixes 30 Bugs in Chrome, Pays $17K in Bounties

Google has fixed 30 bugs in version 13.0.782.107, the latest build of its Chrome browser, pushed to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux today. 14 of the bugs are deemed high-risk, including cross-origin script injection, HTML range handling and URI handling issues. Nine of the bugs are...

Recently Patched Adobe PDF Flaw Being 'Actively Exploited'

Malicious hackers have pounced on a newly patched Adobe PDF Reader vulnerability to plant Trojan downloaders on tardy Windows users. According to researchers in Microsoft’s malware protection center, the vulnerability CVE-2010-0188 was patched less than a month ago, proving that malicious hackers...

Xiaomi Phone Bug Allowed Payment Forgery

Smartphone maker Xiaomi, the world’s number three phone maker behind Apple and Samsung, reported it has patched a high-severity flaw in its “trusted environment” used to store payment data that opened some of its handsets to attack. Researchers at Check Point Research revealed last week in a repo...

Bad Actors Are Maximizing Remote Everything

The rise of remote work and learning opened new opportunities for many people – as we’ve seen by the number of people who have moved to new places or adapted to “workcations.” Cybercriminals are taking advantage of the same opportunities – just in a different way. Evaluating the prevalence of...

New Twists on Gift-Card Scams Flourish on Black Friday

Black Friday cyber-pariahs have revamped gift-card scams to better target modern online shoppers hungry for deals post-Thanksgiving. Experts warn new tactics include bogus gift-card generators that install malware designed to sniff out a victim’s cryptocurrency wallet address. Internet-based Blac...

REvil Affiliates Confirm Getting Screwed Out of Payments

A day after news broke about REvil having screwed their own affiliates out of ransomware payments – by using double chats and a backdoor that let REvil operators hijack ransom payments – those affiliates took to the top Russian-language hacking forum to renew their demands for REvil to fork over...

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,...

Fake Kaseya VSA Security Update Drops Cobalt Strike

A malware spam campaign is milking the Kaseya ransomware attacks against its Virtual System/Server Administrator VSA platform to spread a link pretending to be a Microsoft security update, along with an executable file that’s dropping Cobalt Strike, researchers warn. On Tuesday night, Malwarebyte...

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...

Cyberpunk 2077 Hacked Data Circulating Online

New data from the February hack of CD Projekt Red, the videogame-development company behind Cyberpunk 2077 and the Witcher series, is circulating online. Earlier this year, the company suffered a ransomware attack in which a cyberattack group believed by some to be the HelloKitty gang “gained...

‘Agrius’ APT Launches Wiper Attacks Against Israelis

A new attack group called Agrius is launching damaging wiper attacks against Israeli targets, which researchers said are hiding behind ransomware to make their state-sponsored activities appear financially motivated. Sentinel Labs analysts said they have been tracking Agrius’ operations in Israel...

Peloton’s Leaky API Spilled Riders’ Private Data

Peloton has hit a pothole. Its API was leaking riders’ private data, it ignored a vulnerability disclosure from a penetration testing company, and it partially fixed the hole but didn’t get around to telling the researcher until he reached out to a cybersecurity journalist for some help. This is...