Wizard Spider Upgrades Ryuk Ransomware to Reach Deep into LANs

The Ryuk ransomware has added two features to enhance its effectiveness: The ability to target systems that are in “standby” or sleep mode; and the use of Address Resolution Protocol ARP pinging to find drives on a company’s LAN. Both are employed after the initial network compromise of a victim...

Millions of Medical Documents for Addiction and Recovery Patients Leaked

As if wrestling with addiction and recovery weren’t difficult enough, tens of thousands of patients of a rehab clinic in Pennsylvania may find their personal information hijacked and manipulated by identity thieves or extortionists. An ElasticSearch database that was left open to the internet...

SAS 2019: Fake News Peddlers Adopt Clever New Trick to Fool Facebook, Twitter

Fake news peddlers have devised a cunning new way to stump Facebook, Twitter and others cracking down on lies and half-truths spreading on social media. Instead of linking to fake news, bad actors are now linking to posts promoting older news articles that may no longer be accurate – but won’t be...

Apple Blasts Facebook Over Data-Sucking 'Research' App

Apple has revoked Facebook’s enterprise iOS developer certificate on the heels of a “Facebook Research” VPN app that was being distributed to consumers; the app paid teens and Millennial users in exchange for being able to track their phone and web activity, and has been available since 2016. App...

Researchers Allege 'Systemic' Privacy, Security Flaws in Popular IoT Devices

Researchers are highlighting the insecure nature of Internet of Things devices in a report released Tuesday alleging a bevy of popular consumer connected devices sold at major retailers such as Walmart and Best Buy are riddled with security holes and privacy issues. In analyzing 12 different IoT...

Threatpost News Wrap Podcast For Oct. 12

Threatpost editors Lindsey O’Donnell and Tara Seals discuss the top news of the week ended Oct. 12. The week started with a bang with a report that Google did not disclose a potential data breach in Google+, likely contributing to the tech giant’s decision to shut down the social networking...

Researchers Blame ‘Monolithic’ Linux Code Base for Critical Vulnerabilities

In an exhaustive study of critical Linux vulnerabilities, a team of academic and government-backed researchers claim to have proven that almost all flaws could be mitigated to less than critical severity – and that 40 percent could be completely eliminated – with an OS design based on a verified...

Podcast: Why Bitcoin Miners Target Critical Infrastructure Networks

On this week’s Threatpost Podcast show, we sit down with Ronen Rabinovich from Cyberbit to discuss bitcoin mining on operational technology and critical infrastructure networks. Rabinovich talks about why the massive amount of computing power and lack of security and monitoring tools make...

Intel Smart Sound Tech Vulnerable to Three High-Severity Bugs

Intel issued three fixes for bugs that could allow a local attacker to execute code on Intel Core and Atom processor-based PCs. The vulnerabilities are tied to versions of its own Intel Smart Sound Technology, used to boost audio processing for tasks such as voice commands and interactions with...

Operation Prowli Profits On Weak IoT Devices, Servers

A malicious campaign has compromised more than 40,000 machines globally, carrying out traffic-hijacking and cryptomining. Researchers at Guardicore Labs, who called the campaign Operation Prowli, said it targets a variety of platforms – including Drupal CMS websites, WordPress sites, backup serve...

Microsoft Fixes Bad Patch That Left Win7, Server 2008 Open to Attack

Microsoft released an out-of-band fix on Thursday for a Windows vulnerability introduced earlier this year as a patch. If exploited, the bug could allow an authenticated attacker to install programs, access stored data or create new accounts with full user rights on Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2...

Apple Patches Critical Kernel Vulnerabilities

Apple today released new versions of iOS and macOS Sierra and addressed some overlapping code execution vulnerabilities in both its mobile and desktop operating systems. The updates were part of a bigger release of security updates from Apple that also included Safari, iCloud for Windows, and...

Serious TCP Bug in Linux Systems Allows Traffic Hijacking

A serious vulnerability in the TCP implementation in Linux systems deployed since 2012 version 3.6 of the Linux kernel can be used by attackers to identify hosts communicating over the protocol and ultimately attack that traffic. Researchers from the University of California, Riverside and the U....

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...

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...

January 2015 Oracle Critical Patch update

Oracle’s first Critical Patch Update of the year arrived Tuesday with its usual volume, and some disturbing fanfare. Oracle admins today are staring at 169 patches on their collective plates across the company’s product line. One of the more pressing fixes is for a an issue in the Oracle E-Busine...

PHP Patches Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities

UPDATE Developers at PHP recently pushed out a series of patches to fix a handful of vulnerabilities, including one that can lead to a heap-based buffer overflow. Researchers at the Swiss firm High-Tech Bridge dug up the vulnerabilities in versions 5.6.1, 5.5.17, and 5.4.33 of the framework. The...

OpenSSL Releases Patch for POODLE Attack

The OpenSSL Project has released a new version of the encryption software, which patches several security flaws, including the bug that is exploited by the POODLE attack on SSLv3. The updated versions of OpenSSL come just a couple of days after a trio of researchers at Google revealed the POODLE...

Microsoft Expands TLS, Forward Secrecy Support

Microsoft is no exception when it comes to large technology providers committing to encrypting the services its users depend on. Today, the company announced an update on the progress it has made in engineering those changes, including the news that Outlook.com, its web-based email service,...

New Internet Explorer Zero Day Used in Targeted Attacks

There’s a new zero-day vulnerability in many of the current versions of Internet Explorer and is being used in active attacks right now. The exploit that’s in use has the ability to bypass both DEP and ASLR and researchers say it’s being used by a known APT group. Microsoft has issued an advisory...

counterfeit merchandise domains seized

In an attempt to curb the rampancy of fraud throughout the holiday shopping season, a coalition of international law enforcement agencies seized 706 Internet domains allegedly involved in the sale of counterfeit merchandise. The United States Homeland Security Investigations’ HSI National...

Three New APTs Spotted Piling On IE Zero Day

Attackers are continuing to pile on a critical Internet Explorer zero day that remains unpatched two weeks after it was reported. During the last two weeks, it appears that at least three separate targeted attack campaigns have been using the same bug previously used by Operation Deputy Dog, a...

Metasploit Module Adds Sudo Vulnerability for OS X

Attackers looking to exploit a previously disclosed and apparently still unpatched bug in sudo, a Unix-based Linux command found in most Apple OS X builds have gotten a little more help this week. As Threatpost reported in March, the vulnerability CVE-2013-1775 can essentially set back the...

Adobe ColdFusion Exploits in Wild; Patch Remains Week Away

Adobe is recommending ColdFusion users apply a series of mitigations to counter active exploits against vulnerabilities in the application server. An advisory was released late Friday night that the trio of flaws are being targeted by attackers, and that the company would not have a patch availab...

Kelihos Update Includes New TLD and USB Infection Capabilities

There’s a little Michael Myers in the Kelihos botnet; maim it, kill it and it keeps on coming back to wreak more havoc. The 2011 takedown of the Kelihos botnet was one of Microsoft’s high-profile success stories against spambots and the like, yet Kelihos was back for more at the start of 2012 usi...

New Java Attack Introduced into Cool Exploit Kit

A new exploit has been found in the Cool Exploit Kit for a vulnerability in Java 7 Update 7 as well as older versions, a flaw that’s been patched by Oracle in Java 7 Update 9. Cool Exploit Kit was discovered last month and is largely responsible for dropping the Reveton ransomware. A new Metasplo...

Nitol Infections Fall, But Malware Still Popping Up

When Microsoft went after the Nitol botnet in September, one of the key details in the investigation was the fact that much of the botnet was built by pre-loading malware onto laptops during the manufacturing process in China. This was the clearest case yet of the phenomenon of certified pre-owne...

Apple Fixes Flaws, Updates Java 6 for OS X

Apple pushed out a Java update for its Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion systems Wednesday, fixing vulnerabilities Oracle tackled in last week’s emergency CVE-2012-4681 patch. Both Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 10 and Java for OS X 2012-005 update the Java SE 6 plugin and, in what might be a...

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...

Apple Releases New Java Updates, Fix 17 Flaws

Apple pushed out a new batch of Java updates for Mac OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard and 10.7 Lion yesterday, bringing the two operating systems up to date with Oracle’s Java SE 6 Update 29. In its update summary, Apple claims multiple vulnerabilities exist in Java’s previous build 1.6.026, including on...

OpenOffice Zaps Six Security Bugs

OpenOffice.org has shipped a new version of the desktop productivity suite to patch six vulnerabilities that could expose users to malicious hacker attacks. The flaws fixed in OpenOffice.org 3.2 could be exploited via GIF, XPM files and Microsoft Word document processing, according to an advisory...

MS Patch Tuesday: 13 Bulletins, 26 Vulnerabilities

Microsoft today released 13 security bulletins with fixes for 26 vulnerabilities affecting Windows and Office users and warned customers to pay special attention to a slew of flaws that can be trivially exploited by malware miscreants. The company urged customers to prioritize and deploy four...

Authentication Risks Discovered in Okta Platform

Researchers at Authomize have discovered four “high impact” security risks in the identity and access management IAM platform Okta, according to a Tuesday report. The risks include cleartext password leakage via SCIM – the System for Cross-domain Identity Management – sharing of passwords and oth...

Emerging H0lyGh0st Ransomware Tied to North Korea

Microsoft researchers have linked an emerging ransomware threat that already has compromised a number of small-to-mid-sized businesses to financially motivated North Korean state-sponsored actors that have been active since last year. The group has successfully compromised small-to-mid-sized...

Leaky Access Tokens Exposed Amazon Photos of Users

The Amazon Photos app for Android insufficiently protected user access tokens, according to a blog post published on Wednesday. Theoretically, with exposed tokens, an attacker could’ve accessed users’ personal data from a number of different Amazon apps – not just Photos but also, for example,...

Box 2FA Bypass Opens User Accounts to Attack

UPDATE A security hole in Box, the cloud-based file-sharing service, paved the way for busting its multifactor authentication MFA, researchers said – and it’s the second such MFA bypass they have discovered in the service so far. Clearly, the stakes are high – gaining access to a Box account coul...

‘DarkWatchman’ RAT Shows Evolution in Fileless Malware

A novel remote access trojan RAT being distributed via a Russian-language spear-phishing campaign is using unique manipulation of Windows Registry to evade most security detections, demonstrating a significant evolution in fileless malware techniques. Dubbed DarkWatchman, the RAT – discovered by...

Online Merchants: Prevent Fraudsters from Becoming Holiday Grinches

As the holiday shopping season gets into full swing, merchants aren’t the only ones expecting to have a prosperous year. Fraudsters, too, are out to grab their illicit share of the money changing hands or accounts in the weeks ahead. Especially susceptible to theft by fraud are millions of...

How to Choose the Right DDoS Protection Solution

Pankaj Gupta, Senior Director at Citrix Distributed denial of service DDoS attacks have become increasingly sophisticated, bigger, and economically motivated. Even after 25 years, they still pose a huge security risk for every business. This is in large part because DDoS attacks are relatively ea...

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...

Cisco SD-WAN Security Bug Allows Root Code Execution

Cisco SD-WAN implementations are vulnerable to a high-severity privilege-escalation vulnerability in the IOS IE operating system that could lead to arbitrary code execution. Cisco’s SD-WAN portfolio allows businesses of all sizes to connect disparate office locations via the cloud using various...

No Patch for High-Severity Bug in Legacy IBM System X Servers

Two legacy IBM System x server models, retired in 2019, are open to attack and will not receive security patches, according to hardware maker Lenovo. However, the company is offering workaround mitigation. The two models, IBM System x 3550 M3 and IBM System x 3650 M3, are both vulnerable to comma...

ZLoader’s Back, Abusing Google AdWords, Disabling Windows Defender

A targeted campaign delivering the ZLoader banking trojan is spreading via Google AdWords, and is using a mechanism to disable all Windows Defender modules on victim machines, researchers have found. That’s according to SentinelLabs, which said that to lower the rates of detection, the infection...

Friends Reunion Anchors Video Swindle

The second quarter saw a rise in entertainment lures for fraud and phishing, including one campaign capitalizing on the buzz around “Friends: The Reunion.” Researchers at Kaspersky found fake sites supposedly hosting video for the much-anticipated special episode of the popular sitcom, according ...

Babuk Ransomware Builder Mysteriously Appears in VirusTotal

The Babuk ransomware gang’s source code has been uploaded to VirusTotal, making it available to all security vendors and competitors. It’s unclear however just how that happened. According to a Wednesday posting from Malwarebytes, the operators of the ransomware – perhaps best-known for hitting t...

Peloton Bike+ Bug Gives Hackers Complete Control

The popular Peloton Bike+ and Peloton Tread exercise equipment contain a security vulnerability that could expose gym users to a wide variety of cyberattacks, from credential theft to surreptitious video recordings. According to research from McAfee’s Advanced Threat Research ATR team, the bug no...

Police Grab Slilpp, Biggest Stolen-Logins Market

The U.S. Department of Justice DOJ announced on Thursday that a multinational operation has led to the seizure of Slilpp, a well-known marketplace for selling stolen online logins that offered more than 80 million sets of credentials for sale. Since 2012, Slilpp has been an underground market to...

How Mobile Ad Fraud has Evolved in the Year of the Pandemic

The past 18 months have arguably been the most turbulent on record for the mobile industry. The majority of the world spent significant portions of 2020 under some kind of lockdown, with pressure mounting on mobile operators to keep us connected to the outside world, and with each other. This...

Child Tweets Gibberish from U.S. Nuke Account

A nonsense tweet sent out from the official account of U.S. Strategic Command is no reason for alarm, according to the department. The social media manager’s kid found an open laptop, pounded on a few random keys and sent the tweet, which read, “;l;;gmlxzssaw” last Sunday. The tweets were met wit...

Let’s Encrypt to Replace 200M Certificates a Day

Let’s Encrypt just announced an infrastructure makeover which means the open certificate authority CA is able to re-issue up to 200 million certificates in a 24-hour period, something the service said could be necessary in “some of the worst scenarios.” The upgrade comes a year after Let’s Encryp...