Feds Warn BlackMatter Ransomware Gang is Poised to Strike

Federal authorities are warning businesses to shore up cybersecurity defenses as it carefully monitors the reemergence of the DarkSide ransomware gang, believed responsible for the crippling Colonial Pipeline attack in May 2021. The ransomware-as-a-service gang has regrouped under the moniker...

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...

MacOS Flaw in Telegram Retrieves Deleted Messages

A vulnerability in a high-level privacy feature of Telegram on macOS that sets up a “self-destruct” timer for messages on both the sender’s and recipient’s devices can allow someone to retrieve these messages even after they’ve been deleted, a researcher has found. Reegun Richard Jayapaul,...

Kaseya Attack Fallout: CISA, FBI Offer Guidance

The REvil cybergang is taking credit for Friday’s massive ransomware attack against managed service provider Kaseya Ltd. The criminals behind the attack claim it infected 1 million systems tied to Kaseya services and are demanding $70 million in bitcoin in exchange for a decryption key. Federal...

Utilities ‘Concerningly’ at Risk from Active Exploits

The amount of time that utility networks spend exposed to a known application exploit has spiked over the past two months — something analysts called out as a “concerning datapoint,” and an important reminder that ransomware isn’t the only threat utility networks need to secure against. A new...

FBI Claws Back Millions of DarkSide’s Ransom Profits

United States law enforcement has clawed back approximately $2.3 million of the ransom allegedly paid to DarkSide by Colonial Pipeline last month, the Department of Justice DOJ and FBI announced in a joint press conference on Monday. “Today we turned the tables on DarkSide,” FBI Deputy Director...

Cyber-Insurance Fuels Ransomware Payment Surge

Ransomware victims are increasingly falling back on their cyber-insurance providers to pay the ransom when they’re hit with an extortion cyberattack. But security researchers warn that this approach can quickly become problematic. In the first half of 2020, ransomware attacks accounted for 41...

Telegram Platform Abused in 'ToxicEye' Malware Campaigns

Hackers are leveraging the popular Telegram messaging app by embedding its code inside a remote access trojan RAT dubbed ToxicEye, new research has found. A victim’s computer infected with the ToxicEye malware is controlled via a hacker-operated Telegram messaging account. The ToxicEye malware ca...

A Post-Data Privacy World and Data-Rights Management

The reality is that today, almost everyone is being tracked and monitored 24/7 with cameras recording our expressions, interactions and speech to determine what we might be thinking, where we are going and who we are meeting. While privacy differs from nation to nation and culture to culture, one...

Security Analysis Clears TikTok of Censorship, Privacy Accusations

Nebulous privacy and censorship criticisms about video social-media app TikTok have been swirling for months. Security analysts from CitizenLab are the first to collect real data on the platform’s source code, and reported that TikTok meets reasonable standards of security and privacy. The...

CopperStealer Malware Targets Facebook and Instagram Business Accounts

A malware that until now has gone undocumented has been quietly hijacking online accounts of advertisers and users of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google and other web giants since July 2019 and then using them for nefarious activity, researchers have found. Dubbed CopperStealer, the malware acts...

Dark Web Markets for Stolen Data See Banner Sales

Despite an explosion in the sheer amount of stolen data available on the Dark Web, the value of personal information is holding steady, according to the 2021 Dark Web price index from Privacy Affairs. That leaves these thriving dirty data dealers in a familiar predicament — they need to lock down...

Mobile Adware Booms, Online Banks Become Prime Target for Attacks

Hackers painted a bullseye on the backs of online financial institutions in 2020 as the pandemic shuttered local branch offices and forced customers online. Over the past 12 months, incidents of adware nearly tripled. And, overall in 2020 researchers saw a slight drop in the number of mobile...

Valentine’s Day Malware Attack Mimics Flower Store

With Valentine’s Day approaching this weekend, several people have received “recent order” email confirmations for flowers or lingerie. These emails are actually part of a spear-phishing attack, which ultimately leads recipients to a malicious document that executes the BazaLoader malware. The...

Android Devices Prone to New Botnet’s DDoS Onslaught

Researchers are warning a new botnet is recycling the Mirai malware framework and is now targeting Android devices in order to launch distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks. The botnet is dubbed Matryosh after a Matryoshka Russian nesting doll due to many of its functions being “nested” in...

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...

Outgoing FCC Chair Issues Final Security Salvo Against China

Outgoing Federal Communications Chair Ajit Pai has issued a final warning about Chinese telcos at the end of a tenure spent cracking down on companies like Huawei, ZTE and China Telecom. Pai, a former telecommunications industry lobbyist and in-house counsel for Verizon, told Reuters that managin...

Einstein Healthcare Network Announces August Breach

Einstein Health Network, a Pennsylvania-based company operating medical rehab, outpatient and primary care centers, announced a breach of its employee email system, which exposed patient personal and medical information. The company waited more than five months to make the compromise public...

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...

TikTok Takes Teen Accounts Private

TikTok has decided to boost privacy measures for its underage users, the popular video-sharing social-media company announced. TikTok’s popularity is being driven by teens — the company reported in 2019 about 60 percent of its 26.5 monthly users are between the ages of 16 and 24, and these latest...

Cyberattacks on Healthcare Spike 45% Since November

As COVID-19 ravages international healthcare systems, cybercriminals have decided to leverage the increasingly dire circumstances to squeeze a few bucks out of the human suffering. According to new findings from Check Point Software, healthcare organizations have seen a 45-percent increase in...

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...

Cloud is King: 9 Software Security Trends to Watch in 2021

IT security professionals have largely spent the year managing a once-in-a-generation workforce shift from office to home in 2020. With the initial push over, experts predict that 2021 will be focused on shoring up the cloud and re-imagining organizational workflows under this new normal. Softwar...

Making Sense of the Security Sensor Landscape

We have a serious sensor problem in the cybersecurity world. And it’s bad. Particularly when it comes to network intrusion detection and prevention sensors IDS/IPS. It seems like many security operations center SOC teams have completely given up on them being effective. But is the problem with...

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...

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...

How Zero Trust and SASE Can Redefine Network Defenses for Remote Workforces

Zero Trust has been touted for years as the future of network security. But, only recently has it started to gain traction as a practical enterprise security framework. The implementation of digital transformation initiatives has thrust Zero Trust into the spotlight as network applications and...

APIs Are the Next Frontier in Cybercrime

Application Programming Interface API usage has exploded, and cybercriminals are increasingly taking advantage of API security flaws to commit fraud and steal data. APIs, which are used to create connections between software programs and perform integrations, make everything a bit easier — from...

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...

Enterprise Data Security: It’s Time to Flip the Established Approach

There’s an old saying when it comes to big undertakings: Don’t boil the ocean. Well, there’s hardly any bigger project in information security than trying to protect corporate data. But the reality is that too many organizations today are, in fact, “boiling the ocean” when it comes to their...

Report: Most Popular Home Routers Have ‘Critical’ Flaws

A security review of 127 popular home routers found most contained at least one critical security flaw, according to researchers. The “Home Router Security Report” PDF by Peter Weidenbach and Johannes vom Dorp—both from the German think tank Fraunhofer Institute–found that not only did all of the...

Microsoft Outlook Users Targeted By Gamaredon's New VBA Macro

The Gamaredon threat group has given its post-compromise toolset a facelift with the addition of a new Visual Basic for Applications VBA macro. The VBA macro leverages compromised victims’ Microsoft Outlook email accounts to send spear-phishing emails to their contacts – rapidly widening the...

Singapore’s Contact Tracing Wearable Causes Privacy Backlash

Singapore’s announcement that it is developing a wearable for contact tracing has caused citizens to voice concern for the technology’s impact on their data privacy, with more than 35,000 signing a petition against the devices. On Friday during a parliament session, Vivian Balakrishnan,...

DoubleGun Group Builds Massive Botnet Using Cloud Services

An operation from the China-based cybercrime gang known as DoubleGun Group has been disrupted, which had amassed hundreds of thousands of bots that were controlled via public cloud services, including Alibaba and Baidu Tieba. NetLab 360 researchers, in a recent posting, said that it noticed DNS...

Paying Ransomware Crooks Doubles Clean-up Costs, Report

New research bolsters the often ignored advice to organizations not to pay a ransomware demanded by attackers. The report found paying a ransom to unlock systems can actually cost companies more financially than recovering data themselves in the long run. Research conducted by Vanson Bourne and...

Texas Courts Won't Pay Up in Ransomware Attack

A ransomware attack has hit the information technology office that supports Texas appellate courts and judicial agencies, leading to their websites and computer servers being shut down. The office said that it will not pay the ransom requested by the cybercriminals. Specifically affected is the...

Microsoft Shells Out $100K for IoT Security

Microsoft has launched a bug-bounty program for its Azure Sphere offering, which is a security suite for the internet of things IoT that encompasses hardware, OS and cloud elements. The top reward will come in at $100,000. The Azure Sphere Security Research Challenge is an expansion of a program...

Top Email Protections Fail in Latest COVID-19 Phishing Campaign

Threat actors continue to capitalize on fears surrounding the spread of the COVID-19 virus through a surge in new phishing campaigns that use spoofing tactics to effectively evade Proofpoint and Microsoft Office 365 advanced threat protections ATPs, researchers have found. The Cofense Phishing...

Shlayer, No. 1 Threat for Mac, Targets YouTube, Wikipedia

The malvertising-focused trojan known as Shlayer has burbled to the top of the malware heap when it comes to targeting Mac users. It made up 29 percent of all attacks on macOS devices in Kaspersky’s telemetry for 2019, making it the No. 1 Mac malware threat for the year. To spread, it has been...

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...

Smominru Cryptominer Scrapes Credentials for Half-Million Machines

A commodity cryptomining botnet campaign that has infected a half-million computers is now tapping a lucrative secondary moneymaking opportunity in selling access to victim machines, according to researchers. An analysis of the known Smominru cryptomining campaign, which uses a modified version o...

DanaBot Adds Ransomware to its Arsenal

A new sample of the DanaBot trojan spotted in a recent campaign reveals that operators behind the malware have now included a ransomware component into its code, along with new string encryption and communications protocols. The update, wrote Check Point researchers on Thursday, represents a...

Preparing the Internet for the Next Mega DDoS Attack

When you think of a distributed denial-of-service DDoS attack at this point in the age of the internet, you might be thinking they’re old news. But when a multi-million-dollar business can be easily taken offline by an unskilled adversary and a $5 rent-a-DDoS service, I would argue that the issue...

How to Maximize the Value of Your Cybersecurity Investment

When it comes to developing a successful cybersecurity program in 2019, simply purchasing and deploying cybersecurity technology is only the first step in deriving value from the investment. Maximizing value and capitalizing on these efforts requires a series of defined processes and no shortage ...

RSAC 2019: For Domestic Abuse, IoT Devices Pose New Threat

SAN FRANCISCO – The influx of connected products in the home – from smart thermometers to connected locks – presents a disturbing new threat surface for victims of domestic abuse. That’s what Lisa Green, senior director of operations at Independent Security Evaluators, is warning conference-goers...

Ring Doorbell Flaw Opens Door to Spying

UPDATE A serious flaw in the popular Ring smart doorbell could allow an attacker on a shared WiFi network to spy on families’ video and audio footage, according to researchers. Ring Doorbell is a popular home security device acquired by Amazon. Researchers with BullGuard discovered a way to launc...

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...

Old WordPress Plugin Being Exploited in RCE Attacks

Researchers are warning that attackers are abusing a vulnerability in WordPress site admins’ outdated versions of a migration plugin called Duplicator – allowing them to execute remote code. Made by Snap Creek Software, all Duplicator plugins earlier than version 1.2.42 are vulnerable to the...

Adobe Patch Tuesday: Fixes for Critical Acrobat and Reader Flaws

Adobe has released 11 total fixes for an array of products during today’s Patch Tuesday release, including two critical patches for Acrobat and Reader. This month’s release comes on the heels of Adobe fixing a whopping 112 vulnerabilities in its July Patch Tuesday release last month, including...