‘Fancy Lazarus’ Cyberattackers Ramp up Ransom DDoSes

A distributed denial-of-service DDoS extortion group has blazed back on the cybercrime scene, this time under the name of “Fancy Lazarus.” It’s been launching a series of new attacks that may or may not have any teeth, researchers said. The new name is a tongue-in-cheek combination of the...

Rocke Group’s Malware Now Has Worm Capabilities

Researchers have identified an updated malware variant used by the cybercrime gang Rocke Group that targets cloud infrastructures with crypto-jacking attacks. The malware is called Pro-Ocean, which was first discovered in 2019, and has now been beefed-up with “worm” capabilities and rootkit...

Internet Explorer 8 includes a bevy of security features

By Robert Westervelt, SearchSecurity.com Microsoft has officially released Internet Explorer 8 today microsoft.com with a number of new security features to improve privacy and protect against phishing and cross-site-scripting attacks. From the article: Microsoft is trying to mitigate some of the...

Microsoft Office SharePoint Targeted With High-Risk Phish, Ransomware Attacks

A phishing campaign, discovered by researchers at Cofense, is draping itself in a Microsoft Office SharePoint theme and successfully bypassing security email gateways SEGs. In a post on Tuesday, the firm said that this is an example of why it’s not always prudent to share documents via Microsoft’...

LabKey Vulnerabilities Threaten Medical Research Data

A trio of vulnerabilities in a popular open source medical data collaboration tool leaves important healthcare research data and potentially subject information open to multiple cross site scripting XSS attacks. The flaws are serious as they allow an attacker to retrieve user credentials once a...

Hoaxcalls Botnet Exploits Symantec Secure Web Gateways

Cyberattackers are targeting a post-authentication remote code-execution vulnerability in Symantec Secure Web Gateways as part of new Mirai and Hoaxcalls botnet attacks. Hoaxcalls first emerged in late March, as a variant of the Gafgyt/Bashlite family; it’s named after the domain used to host its...

Amazon Dismisses Claims Alexa 'Skills' Can Bypass Security Vetting Process

Researchers warn Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa is vulnerable to malicious third-party “skills” – voice assistant capabilities developed by third parties – that could leave smart-speaker owners vulnerable to a wide range of cyberattacks. The security-threat claim is roundly dismissed by Amazon...

Fake News and Influence: Information Warfare in the Digital Age

It’s 2019 and we live in a world where understanding what is real and what is fake can be challenging. For the security community, we increasingly deal with information warfare adversaries that rely on that fact; and, operating at internet scale, are capable of causing plenty of havoc...

Fast-Moving DDoS Botnet Exploits Unpatched ZyXel RCE Bug

A new variant of the Hoaxcalls botnet, which can be marshalled for large-scale distributed denial-of-service DDoS campaigns, is spreading via an unpatched vulnerability impacting the ZyXEL Cloud CNM SecuManager that was disclosed last month. That’s according to researchers at Radware, who also sa...

WooCommerce Falls to Fresh Card-Skimmer Malware

Credit-card-stealing criminals have set their sights on the WordPress plugin known as WooCommerce, an e-tailer platform, with a JavaScript-based card-skimming malware. Sucuri researcher Ben Martin recently investigated a skimmer attack lodged against a WooCommerce site and found that it differs...

ThreatList: Nigerian Cybercrime Surged 54 Percent in 2018

In 2018, Nigeria-based cybercrime jumped 54 percent over the previous year, as groups of scammers expanded their operations adding new tactics and reaching a wider breadth of targets. The increase, outlined in a report released Thursday by Palo Alto Network’s Unit 42, shows that Nigerian scammers...

Pandora Ransomware Hits Giant Automotive Supplier Denso

A multibillion supplier to key automotive companies like Toyota, Mercedes-Benz and Ford confirmed Monday that it was the target of a cyberattack over the weekend – confirmation that came after the Pandora ransomware group began leaking data that attackers claimed was stolen in the incident. The...

Threat Actors Can Exploit Windows RDP Servers to Amplify DDoS Attacks

Cybercriminals can exploit Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol RDP as a powerful tool to amplify distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks, new research has found. Attackers can abuse RDP to launch UDP reflection/amplification attacks with an amplification ratio of 85.9:1, principal engineer Rolan...

Bugs in Firefox, Chrome, Edge Allow Remote System Hijacking

Makers of the Chrome, Firefox and Edge browsers are urging users to patch critical vulnerabilities that if exploited allow hackers to hijack systems running the software. The Mozilla Firefox vulnerability CVE-2020-16044 is separate from a bug reported in Google’s browser engine Chromium, which is...

Ransomware: A Persistent Scourge Requiring Corporate Action Now

A ransomware attack on Belgian airplane manufacturer ASCO this week is the latest in a string of incidents that show the unique danger lurking in this type of malware campaign. The rise of ransomware has cost companies millions to remediate – both in making payments and in system restoration and...

Microsoft Beefs Up Wi-Fi Protection

Microsoft has begun pushing out its May 2019 Windows 10 update, which will flag Wi-Fi networks that are using the outdated and insecure Wired Equivalent Privacy WEP and Temporal Key Integrity Protocol TKIP authentication mechanisms. WEP was introduced in 1997 as part of the original 802.11 Wi-Fi...

TRISIS Group, Known for Physical Destruction, Targets U.S. Electric Companies

XENOTIME, the APT group behind the TRISIS industrial control system ICS event, has expanded its focus beyond the oil and gas industries, according to researchers. The group has recently been seen probing the networks of electric utility organizations in the U.S. and elsewhere – perhaps a precurso...

Apple Fixes Zero‑Day Security Bugs Under Active Attack

Apple has issued out-of-band patches for critical security issues affecting iPad, iPhone and iPod, which could allow remote code execution RCE and other attacks, completely compromising users’ systems. And, the computing giant thinks all of them may have already been exploited in the wild. Three ...

Apple Defends Parental Control App Removal Amid Backlash

Apple is defending its decision to take down several highly popular parental control apps amidst a firestorm of backlash, saying it did so for “privacy and security” reasons. Apple came under scrutiny this weekend after a New York Times article alleged that the phone giant had unfairly removed or...

RCE Bugs in WhatsApp, Other Hugely Popular VoIP Apps: Patch Now!

WhatsApp and BlueJeans are just two of the world’s most popular communication apps that are using an open-source library riddled with newfound security holes. One thing this open-source, flawed library shares with the Apache Log4J logging library fiasco that started in December: It’s ubiquitous...

NFT Investors Lose $1.7M in OpenSea Phishing Attack

Over the weekend, hackers stole millions of dollars worth of non-fungible tokens NFTs belonging to 17 members of the OpenSea NFT marketplace. On Saturday, a small number of OpenSea users noticed their NFTs were missing. NFTs are digital tokens on the blockchain that represent ownership over virtu...

Mojang Resets Users' Passwords, Microsoft Insists Not a Hack

Microsoft confirmed this week that one of its recent acquisitions, the gaming firm Mojang, has not been hacked. Nearly 2,000 credentials belonging to users of the Mojang game Minecraft – email addresses and passwords in plain-text – surfaced on Pastebin earlier this week and speculation began to...

Google Blows Lid Off Conti, Diavol Ransomware Access-Broker Ops

Google’s Threat Analysis Group TAG has provided a rare look inside the operations of a cybercriminal dubbed “Exotic Lily,” that appears to serve as an initial-access broker for both Conti and Diavol ransomware gangs. Researchers’ analysis exposes the business-like approach the group takes to...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday Fixes 6 In-The-Wild Exploits

Microsoft jumped on 50 vulnerabilities in this month’s Patch Tuesday update, issuing fixes for CVEs in Microsoft Windows, .NET Core and Visual Studio, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Edge Chromium-based and EdgeHTML, SharePoint Server, Hyper-V, Visual Studio Code – Kubernetes Tools, Windows HTML...

Breach Exposes Verkada Security Camera Footage at Tesla, Cloudflare

Hackers claim to have breached Silicon Valley startup Verkada to gain unauthorized access to live feeds of 150,000 security cameras. They claim, the hack gave them widespread access to surveillance footage within companies such as Tesla and Cloudflare, as well as hospitals, companies,...

'URGENT/11' Critical Infrastructure Bugs Threaten EternalBlue-Style Attacks

UPDATE A cadre of 11 vulnerabilities, six of them critical remote code-execution RCE bugs, have been uncovered that affect millions of critical infrastructure systems, such as SCADA gear at utilities, elevator and industrial controllers, patient monitors and MRI machines, programmable logic...

Cisco Warns of Critical Flaws in Data Center Network Manager

Cisco Systems has released emergency patches for two critical vulnerabilities in its Data Center Network Manager, which could allow attackers to take control of impacted systems. The Data Center Network Manager DCNM is Cisco’s network management platform for switches running on its network...

Near-Ubiquitous Microsoft RCE Bugs Affect All Versions of Windows

UPDATE Two Microsoft vulnerabilities, CVE-2019-1040 and CVE-2019-1019, would allow attackers to remotely execute malicious code on any Windows machine or authenticate to any web server that supports Windows Integrated Authentication WIA such as Exchange or ADFS. According to researchers at Preemp...

U.S. Manufacturer Most Recent Target of LokiBot Malspam Campaign

The well-known LokiBot malware has popped up in several malicious spam campaigns over the past year, covertly siphoning information from victims’ compromised endpoints. Researchers this week are warning of the most recent sighting of the malware, which was recently spotted in spam messages...

MassMiner Takes a Kitchen-Sink Approach to Cryptomining

Though it falls squarely into the trend of cryptominers setting their sights on the Monero virtual currency, the MassMiner malware family is adding its own special somethin’-somethin’ to the mix. It targets Windows servers with a variety of recent and well-known exploits – all within a single...

Attackers Hijack Email Using Proxy Logon/Proxyshell Flaws

Attackers are gnawing on the ProxyLogon and ProxyShell vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server to hijack email chains, by malspamming replies to ongoing email threads, researchers say. What’s still under discussion: whether the offensive is delivering SquirrelWaffle, the new email loader tha...

4 Android Bugs Being Exploited in the Wild

Google updated its May 3 Android security bulletin on Wednesday to say that there are “indications” that four of the 50 vulnerabilities “may be under limited, targeted exploitation.” That was mostly confirmed by Maddie Stone, a member of Google’s Project Zero exploit research group, who clarified...

News Wrap: Amazon Privacy and Telegram DDoS Attack

Beyond Patch Tuesday, this week was crammed with privacy and security related news. In this week’s Threatpost podcast, editors Tara Seals and Lindsey O’Donnell discussed the top news from the week. That includes: A federal lawsuit alleging that Amazon is recording children who use its Alexa...

Huawei Router Flaw Leaks Default Credential Status

A vulnerability in some Huawei routers used for carrier ISP services allows cybercriminals to identify whether the devices have default credentials or not – without ever connecting to them. CVE-2018-7900 exists in the router panel and allows credentials information to leak – so attackers can simp...

CISA: LokiBot Stealer Storms Into a Resurgence

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA is warning that the LokiBot info-stealing trojan is seeing a surge across the enterprise landscape. The uptick started in July, according to the agency, and activity has remained “persistent” ever since. LokiBot targets Windows and...

Virus Bulletin 2019: Geost Android Botnet Goes After Millions of Euros

LONDON — A powerful Android botnet dubbed Geost has been spotted targeting Russian citizens, with the end goal of distributing a banking trojan to victims. The botnet has infected more than 800,000 Android devices, controlling several million Euros held in five banks, according to researchers fro...

The WannaCry Security Legacy and What’s to Come

May 12 will mark the second anniversary of the WannaCry ransomware cryptoworm attack. It was a troubling time: During the four-day long ordeal, the cryptoworm infected more than 300,000 endpoints among 200,000 separate victims throughout 150 countries. It propagated rapidly through the EternalBlu...

Keksec Cybergang Debuts Simps Botnet for Gaming DDoS

A recently developed botnet named “Simps” has emerged from the cyber-underground to carry out distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks on gaming targets and others, using internet of things IoT nodes. It’s part of the toolset used by the Keksec cybercrime group, researchers said. According to t...

Microsoft Crushes 116 Bugs, Three Actively Exploited

Three bugs under active exploit were squashed by Microsoft Tuesday, part of its July security roundup of fixes for Windows, Microsoft Office, SharePoint Server and Exchange Server. In all, Microsoft patched 116 bugs. Twelve bugs are rated critical, 103 rated important and one classified as modera...

Apple Safari Flaws Enable One-Click Webcam Access

A security researcher has disclosed vulnerabilities in Apple’s Safari browser that can be used to snoop on iPhones, iPads and Mac computers using their microphones and cameras. To exploit the flaws in a real-world attack, all an attacker would need to do is convince a victim to click one maliciou...

Magecart Attack Impacts More Than 10K Online Shoppers

One of the largest known Magecart campaigns to date took place over the weekend, with nearly 2,000 e-commerce sites hacked in an automated campaign that may be linked to a zero-day exploit. The attacks have impacted tens of thousands of customers, who had their credit-card and other information...

Panda Threat Group Mines for Monero With Updated Payload, Targets

The Panda threat group, best known for launching the widespread and successful 2018 “MassMiner” cryptomining malware campaign, has continued to use malware to mine cryptocurrency in more recent attacks. A fresh analysis of the group reveals Panda has adopted a newly-updated infrastructure, payloa...

Just-Released Dark Souls Game, Elden Ring, Includes Killer Bug

The latest installment of the Dark Souls gaming franchise, Elden Ring, contains a security vulnerability that allows bad actors to throw players on PCs into an endless loop of losing their characters’ lives, rendering it essentially unplayable. Malwarebytes Labs researcher Christopher Boyd said...

Attackers Blowing Up Discord, Slack with Malware

Workflow and collaboration tools like Slack and Discord have been infiltrated by threat actors, who are abusing their legitimate functions to evade security and deliver info-stealers, remote-access trojans RATs and other malware. The pandemic-induced shift to remote work drove business processes...

Understanding TRITON and the Missing Final Stage of the Attack

In December 2017 it was reported that a Middle Eastern oil and gas petrochemical facility had undergone a safety system shutdown as the result of a malware attack. The malware, named TRITON also TRISIS or HatMan exceeded other industrial cyberattacks because it directly interacted with and...

Securing Data With a Frenzied Remote Workforce–Podcast

The baby upchucks. The dog loudly informs you that she’s detected a budding squirrel armageddon. Your department’s Zoom meeting starts in four minutes. The Bank of Fezziwig texts: If you haven’t enabled online banking, click here. What. Do. You. DO?!? It doesn’t matter that you’ve been working...

Jailbreak Tool Works on iPhones Up to iOS 14.3

Hackers behind previous iPhone jailbreak tools have released a jailbreak update based on a recently discovered and patched iPhone vulnerability. According to iPhone jailbreakers at UnC0ver, the tool allows users to take full control over unpatched iPhones. The jailbreak—which UnC0ver said works o...

Data Breach Disclosed by Online Invitation Firm Evite

Online invitation and stationary company Evite has notified customers of a data breach that stemmed from an “inactive data storage file” associated with user accounts. The company over the weekend said that during April 2019, it became aware of a “security incident involving potential unauthorize...

Google Boosts Encryption For Low-End Android Devices

Google introduced a new storage encryption solution that it hopes will expand security efforts across its full spectrum of Android-powered devices – including low-end devices that typically can’t support encryption. The new encryption offering, Adiantum, aims to solve a big issue that has plagued...

UC San Diego Health Breach Tied to Phishing Attack

Authorities at the University of California San Diego Health reported a phishing attack led to a major breach of its network, which allowed an adversary to gain access to sensitive patient, student and employee data. A Wednesday notice from UCSD Health explains the attack occurred between Dec. 2,...