Latest FinSpy Modules Lift Data from Secure Messaging Apps

The latest iOS and Android versions of the FinSpy espionage malware have been deployed in the wild, and are capable of collecting a raft of personal information such as contacts, SMS/MMS messages, emails, calendars, GPS location, photos, files in memory, phone call recordings and data – even from...

GoBotKR Targets Pirate Torrents to Build a DDoS Botnet

A botnet dubbed GoBotKR is targeting fans of Korean TV, compromising computers via pirated copies of South Korean movies, games and TV shows available via Korean and Chinese torrent sites. Ultimately, the cybercriminals are building a network that can then be used to perform DDoS attacks of vario...

RSA Conference 2019: Data-Wiping Cyberattacks Plague Financial Firms

Over a quarter of surveyed financial institutions reported that they were targeted by destructive cyberattacks over the past year, bent on completely destroying data. That’s according to a new Carbon Black report unveiled at RSA this year. The report, “Modern Bank Heists: The Bank Robbery Shifts ...

Oracle Fixes 301 Flaws in October Critical Patch Update

Oracle has released a critical patch update addressing more than 300 vulnerabilities across several of its products – including one flaw with a CVSS 3.0 score of 10 that could allow the takeover of the company’s software package, Oracle GoldenGate. Of the 301 security flaws that were fixed in thi...

Podcast: Key Takeaways For DevOps in BSIMM9

Synopsys released its ninth annual Building Security in Maturity Model report BSIMM9 last week. The report tracked 120 firms to look at 116 unique activities among 415,000 developers. Gary McGraw, vice president of security technology at Synopsys, talked to the Threatpost about an emerging new...

Bluetooth Bug Allows Man-in-the-Middle Attacks on Phones, Laptops

A slew of vendors that have built Bluetooth pairing into their devices without requiring public key validation are issuing fixes for their products. Researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology have identified a cryptography-related security vulnerability CVE-2018-5383 in the Bluetooth...

Samba Patches Two Critical Vulnerabilities in Server Software

Two critical patches for the free networking software Samba were released Tuesday, addressing vulnerabilities that could allow an unprivileged remote attacker to launch a denial of service attack against servers running the software or allow an adversary to change user passwords, including the...

Fuze Patches TPN Handset Vulnerabilties

Fuze, a maker of popular enterprise-grade voice-over-IP handsets, earlier this year patched three vulnerabilities that exposed user account information and enabled unauthorized authentication. The issues were made public today by researchers at Rapid7 who privately disclosed the flaws on April 12...

TP-Link Fixes Code Execution Vulnerability in End of Life Routers

Router manufacturer TP-Link recently fixed a vulnerability in a discontinued line of routers that if exploited could have been used to execute code on the device. Researchers at Senrio, a firm that specializes in IoT security, uncovered a logic vulnerability in a configuration service present in...

Paper Spells Out Tech, Legal Options for Encryption Workarounds

FBI Director James Comey’s dogged attachment to the argument that strong encryption hinders criminal investigations by law enforcement is heading into its third year with little signs of abatement. That insistence comes despite three years of arguments to the contrary from security experts, who...

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...

Cisco Warns of IOS Flaw Vulnerable to ShadowBrokers Attack

Cisco is warning its customers of new activity around the ShadowBrokers data dump, indicating that all versions of its IOS, IOS XE and IOS XR software are vulnerable to one of the many exploits released more than a month ago. “Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team PSIRT is aware of...

Cisco MiniUPnP Stack Smashing Protection Attack

The Internet of Things security challenge is twofold: finding bugs, and more urgent—fixing them. Cisco’s Talos security intelligence and research group found and privately disclosed a serious and trivially exploitable client-side bug in MiniUPnP that was patched in September of last year. The...

Android Devices Linux Zero Day Kernel Vulnerability

Google is downplaying the scope of the critical Linux vulnerability patched this week, suggesting that the number of affected Android devices has been exaggerated. The Android OS is built upon the Linux kernel, but minus many of the libraries that are included in standard Linux builds. Initially,...

Android Stagefright Exploit Code Released to Public

Joshua Drake, the researcher who found the so-called Stagefright vulnerability in Android, today released exploit code to the public, which he hopes will be used to test systems’ exposure to the flaw. The move comes more than a month after vulnerability details were released in August during...

NTP Symmetric Key Authentication Security Vulnerabilities Patched

NTP, the much maligned protocol abused in a number of high volume DDoS attacks a year ago, is suffering from newly patched vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to send unauthenticated packets to a client that would be executed. The Department of Homeland Security and CERT at the Software...

Government Requests for Twitter User Data Continue to Grow

The appetite for Twitter user data from governments around the world continues to grow, with the volume of such requests increasing by 40 percent in the second half of 2014. Requests from the United States government alone went up 29 percent, the company said in its latest transparency report...

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 ...

Vulnerability in Viber Allows Snooping of Images, Videos

UPDATE – Viber, a messaging and VoIP application similar to WhatsApp, is in the middle of patching a vulnerability that could allow an attacker to view sensitive information shared between users like images, videos and location information. The problem is that information transferred by Viber is...

Metasploit Exploit Module for IE Zero-Day Vulnerability

It’s been 14 days since Microsoft issued an advisory and temporary mitigation for a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer, one being actively exploited in the wild and called by some experts as severe a browser bug as you can have. Yet users have since had little more to shield them from...

Attackers Targeting MS13-055 IE Vulnerability

Attackers are using an Internet Explorer vulnerability, which Microsoft patched yesterday, in targeted attacks that also employ a malicious Flash file installed through a drive-by download launched by compromised Web pages. The exploit that’s being used is capable of bypassing both ASLR and DEP...

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...

Attackers Beat Java Default Security Settings with Social Engineering

Oracle’s new security model for Java, in place since the release of Java 7 update 11, is under serious fire now that attackers have demonstrated in the wild how to bypass the updated controls with the help of social engineering. In 7U11, Oracle changed the default security setting in Java from...

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...

Phishing for Fanboys with Phony iPhone 5 Images

There is no such thing as a trivial detail when it comes to the impending release of an Apple product and scammers are well aware of this. A recent attack is exploiting the public’s fascination with all things Apple and the ubiquitous interest in anything iPhone 5-related with an email phishing...

New Gauss Malware, Descended From Flame and Stuxnet, Found On Thousands of PCs in Middle East

A new piece of malware dubbed Gauss, that experts say is a direct descendant of Flame and also related to Stuxnet and Duqu, has been found on thousands of PCs in the Middle East, mostly in Lebanon. Gauss contains some of the same code as Flame, but is markedly different in a number of respects,...

How SQL Injection Attacks Work

SQL injection attacks have been going on for years, and the vulnerabilities and exploitation techniques are well-understood and widely discussed. However, they’re still quite prevalent and are used in a variety of scenarios. One recent example is the attack on a Yahoo site that resulted in a brea...

Olympic Flavored 419 Scams Exploit London Games Fervor

Olympic themed fraud, email scams, and spam campaigns are so banal right now that the official website of the 2012 London Olympic Games contains not only a ‘stay safe online’ page but has also compiled a downloadable list of known scams. The “Stay safe online” page of the London Games’ website...

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...

Exploit Kits Now Updated With New Wares Before Patches Are Ready

The creators and maintainers of exploit kits often rely on public reports of new exploits and proof-of-concept exploit code in order to be able to add new exploits to their software. And in many cases, the exploits included in kits such as Black Hole and Eleonore and others will be for...

Android NFC Bug Could Be First Of Many

Google is working on a fix for a newly discovered vulnerability affecting Nexus S Android phones that could cause applications on the phone to crash using incorrectly formated Near Field Communications NFC transactions. The issue, which will be discussed at an upcoming technical conference on...

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...

End of Support for XP SP2 is End of an Era

Microsoft’s announcement this week that it is preparing to end support for machines running Windows XP SP2 not only represents a challenge for the thousands of businesses still running SP2, but also is the end of an era for both Microsoft and its customers. By the time Microsoft drops support for...

Phishing Attacks Skyrocket with Microsoft and Facebook as Most Abused Brands

The bloom is back on phishing attacks with criminals doubling down on fake messages abusing popular brands compared to the year prior. Microsoft, Facebook and French bank Crédit Agricole are the top abused brands in attacks, according to study on phishing released Tuesday. The study by Vade...

AdSanity, AccessPress Plugins Open Scads of WordPress Sites to Takeover

The WordPress content management system CMS is offering admins more headaches this week, thanks to a pair of disparate but concerning security problems in add-ons for the platform. The first issue affects the WordPress AdSanity plugin. It’s a critical security vulnerability that could allow remot...

Telegram Abused to Steal Crypto-Wallet Credentials

Attackers are targeting crypto-wallets of Telegram users with the Echelon infostealer, in an effort aimed at defrauding new or unsuspecting users of a cryptocurrency discussion channel on the messaging platform, researchers have found. Researchers at the SafeGuard Cyber’s Division Seven threat...

Threat from Organized Cybercrime Syndicates Is Rising

From encrypting communications to fencing ill-gotten gains on underground sites, organized crime is cashing in on the digital revolution. The latest organized crime threat assessment from Europol issues a dire warning about the corrosive effect the rising influence of criminal syndicates is havin...

Apple Patches Critical iOS Bugs; One Under Attack

Apple lovers who haven’t yet updated to iOS 15, you may want to pop into Settings to freshen up your iPhone now: Apple has released several critical security updates that might light a fire under your britches. On Monday and Tuesday, Apple released iOS 14.8.1, iPadOS 14.8.1, watchOS 8.1 and tvOS...

A Guide to Doing Cyberintelligence on a Restricted Budget

For those in the industry, it comes as no surprise that many cybersecurity programs have been impacted by loss of revenue during the pandemic. From cutting tooling and feed budgets to reduction in staff, it’s been challenging at best. In a recent SANS 2021 survey, “Threat Hunting In Uncertain...

Google Report Spotlights Controversial ‘Geofence Warrants’ by Police

Newly released data by Google sheds light on a controversial practice called “geofence warrants”, which describes the practice of law enforcement requesting mobile phone data of users within close proximity of a crime. Google said, in an August report, the number of geofence warrants the company...

‘Azurescape’ Kubernetes Attack Allows Cross-Container Cloud Compromise

A critical security vulnerability allowing attackers to perform cross-account container takeover in Microsoft’s public cloud, dubbed “Azurescape”, has been uncovered by researchers. The issue exists in Azure Container Instances ACI, which is Microsoft’s container-as-a-service CaaS offering which...

ProtonMail Forced to Log IP Address of French Activist

The privacy-hugging, end-to-end encryption-providing email provider ProtonMail was forced to log the IP address of a French activist and turn it over to Europol, according to a French police report that came to light over the weekend. The activist was arrested as a result. In the wake of the news...

US Media, Retailers Targeted by New SparklingGoblin APT

An emerging international cybergang is broadening its targets to include North American media firms, universities and one computer retailer. The advanced persistent threat APT group is new, according to researchers who dubbed it SparklingGoblin. Also new is a novel backdoor technique, called...

Critical Valve Bug Lets Gamers Add Unlimited Funds to Steam Wallets

A security researcher helped Valve, the makers of the gaming platform Steam, plug an easy-to-exploit hole that allowed users to add unlimited funds to their digital wallet. Simply by changing the account’s email address, the exploit allowed anyone to artificially boost their digital billfold to...

Black Hat: Let’s All Help Cyber-Immunize Each Other

LAS VEGAS – The in-person Black Hat USA 2021 cybersecurity conference is back, after a pandemic-forced, year-long hiatus, with attendance notably down but spirts up among attendees eager to get back to networking, learning and returning to some normalcy. Event founder Jeff Moss kicked off...

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...

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...

TeaBot Trojan Targets Banks via Hijacked Android Handsets

Researchers have discovered an Android trojan that can steal victims’ SMS messages and credentials and completely take over devices. The trojan, dubbed TeaBot, is aimed at committing fraud against at least 60 banks in Europe. Join Threatpost for “Fortifying Your Business Against Ransomware, DDoS ...

Lazarus Targets Defense Companies with ThreatNeedle Malware

The prolific North Korean APT known as Lazarus is behind a spear-phishing campaign aimed at stealing critical data from defense companies by leveraging an advanced malware called ThreatNeedle, new research has revealed. The elaborate and ongoing cyberespionage campaign used emails with COVID-19...

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...