Lenovo Quietly Patches Massive Bug Impacting Its Android Tablets and Zuk, Vibe Phones

Security experts are urging Lenovo customers to update their Android tablets and handsets to protect themselves against a handful of critical vulnerabilities impacting tens of millions of vulnerable Lenovo devices. On Oct. 5, Lenovo quietly rolled out four patches impacting all of its Android...

Revamped Nukebot Malware Changes Targets, Adds Functions

A revamped version of the Nukebot banking trojan dubbed Jimmy Nukebot has shifted focus from stealing bankcard data and now acts as a conduit for quietly downloading malicious payloads for web-injects, cryptocurrency mining, and taking screenshots of targeted systems. The code is a modification o...

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...

Instagram Adds Two-Factor Authentication

Instagram became the latest in a long line of services over the years to offer users two-factor authentication this week. Kevin Systrom, co-founder and CEO of the Facebook-owned mobile photo-sharing app announced the feature on its blog Thursday afternoon. With the feature – accessible via Settin...

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...

New Cerber Variant Leverages Tor2Web Proxies, Google Redirects

Criminals behind the latest Cerber ransomware variant are leveraging Google redirects and Tor2Web proxies in a new and novel way to evade detection. Researchers with Cisco Talos spotted the shifting tactic last week when it began tracking the latest Cerber 5.0.1 ransomware variant. The technique...

Chrome 53 Fixes Address Spoofing Vulnerability, 32 Other Bugs

Google continued its onslaught of summer Chrome patches Wednesday when it pushed out version 53 of the browser, fixing 33 bugs, half of which were rated “high” severity by the company. Google paid at least $56,500 in rewards to researchers who discovered vulnerabilities in the browser this time...

March 2016 Microsoft Patch Tuesday Security Bulletins

Microsoft released a baker’s dozen worth of security bulletins on Tuesday, including five rated critical and two rated important that could result in remote code execution attacks against compromised machines. Two of the bulletins rated critical address flaws in Internet Explorer and Microsoft...

Five-Year 'Dust Storm' APT Campaign Seen Targeting Japanese Critical Infrastructure

A five-year campaign primarily focused on extracting sensitive information from Japanese oil, gas, and electric utilities was outlined by researchers on Tuesday. Referred to as Operation Dust Storm .PDF by researchers at Cylance, the campaign has managed to stay persistent over the years, and...

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,...

Emergency Adobe Flash Player Security Update

The latest version of Adobe Flash Player, which was made available on Tuesday, will have a short shelf life. Adobe will release an emergency Flash update next week after public attacks were carried out against a zero day vulnerability in the latest version of the software, 19.0.0.207, for Windows...

Stagefright Patch Incomplete Leaving Android Devices Still Exposed

Google today released to open source a new patch for the infamous Stagefright vulnerability found in 950 million Android devices after researchers at Exodus Intelligence discovered the original patch was incomplete and Android devices remain exposed to attack. “We’ve already sent the fix to our...

Google Fixes 159 Flaws in Chrome

Google updates its Chrome browser on a very aggressive timeline, often a couple of times a month. Usually, each update includes a handful of security fixes, maybe 12 or 15. On Tuesday, the company released Chrome 38, which patched a staggering 159 vulnerabilities. The huge majority of those...

VMware Begins to Patch Bash Issues Across Product Line

Much like Heartbleed triggered vendors to issue out of band patches to remedy vulnerabilities that popped up earlier this year, Shellshock, the Bash vulnerability, has forced vendors’ hands in a similar fashion. Virtualization firm VMware issued a progress report on fixes for four different types...

Xsser Trojan Spies on Jailbroken iOS Devices in Hong Kong

An iOS version of an Android espionage Trojan targeting activists and protestors in Hong Kong has been discovered on the command and control server hosting the Android malware. The iOS version, a mobile remote access Trojan dubbed Xsser by Lacoon Mobile Security, affects only jailbroken iOS...

Pinkie Pie Linux Kernel Patch Available

Several vulnerabilities have been patched in the Linux kernel that could have led to a denial of service or privilege escalation. Debian, which distributes versions of Linux for personal computers and network servers, warned about the vulnerabilities yesterday in a security update. The most...

May 2014 Microsoft Patch Tuesday Security Updates

As expected, Microsoft today pushed its largest batch of Patch Tuesday updates so far this year today – eight bulletins, two critical – addressing 13 issues in Internet Explorer and Sharepoint Server, along with Windows, Office and its .NET Framework. The first critical issue that involves IE...

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...

FBI Shuts Down Online Drug, Hacking Market Silk Road

The FBI has taken down the infamous Silk Road underground drug market, arresting Ross William Ulbricht in San Francisco yesterday and charging him not only with the distribution of illegal drugs including heroin and LSD, but also with a number of computer hacking crimes. Ulbricht, who was known a...

Some Versions of Ruby on Rails Vulnerable to New Parsing Attack

A vulnerability exists in Ruby on Rails’ JavaScript Object Notation JSON code that could open the Web framework up to a slew of security problems. Patches were published yesterday, but if left unpatched, the vulnerability could let attackers bypass authentication systems, inject arbitrary SQL cod...

Leaders from China, U.S. Meet, Agree to Rally Against Cyber Threats

In an attempt to clear the cybersecurity air, the United States and the People’s Republic of China agreed Monday to work in tandem to prevent future cyber threats. Meeting at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and General Liang Guanglie, China’s Minister of National Defense, insisted th...

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...

SpyEye and Zeus Malware: Married Or Living Separately?

Everyone knows that the first year of marriage can be a tough one -around three percent of them end in the first 12 months. Looks like the same can be true of malware marriages, with the union of the Zeus and SpyEye Trojan now in question. Just one year after news broke that the Zeus and SpyEye...

Facebook Announces Hacker's Cup

Social networking Web site Facebook has announced that they will begin accepting registrations for the 2011 Hacker Cup, the first annual programming and puzzle solving contest open to software engineers, programmers, puzzle solvers and assorted hackers from around the world.Facebook said this wee...

Bouncing RPC

In the early years of Core Security Technologies, the company not only offered security consulting services, but often was sub-contracted to do R+D for several security vendors. The first and most intellectually rewarding of such contracts came from Secure Networks Inc. SNI, a Canadian start-up...

Securing Your Move to the Hybrid Cloud

Infosec Insider contributor Rani Osnat is SVP Strategy at Aqua Security The combination of private and public cloud infrastructure, which most organizations are already using, poses unique security challenges. There are many reasons why organizations adopt the public cloud — from enabling rapid...

Google Boots Multiple Malware-laced Android Apps from Marketplace

Google has removed eight apps from its Google Play store that were propagating a new variant of the Joker spyware, but not before they already had garnered more than 3 million downloads. French security researcher Maxime Ingrao of cybersecurity firm Evina discovered a malware that he dubbed...

12 New Flaws Used in Ransomware Attacks in Q3

A dozen new vulnerabilities were used in ransomware attacks this quarter, bringing the total number of bugs associated with ransomware to 278. That’s a 4.5 percent increase over Q2, according to researchers. Five of the newbies can be used to achieve remote code execution RCE, while two can be us...

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...

Critical Cisco Bugs Allow Code Execution on Wireless, SD-WAN

Cisco is warning three critical security vulnerabilities affect its flagship IOS XE software, the operating system for most of its enterprise networking portfolio. The flaws impact Cisco’s wireless controllers, SD-WAN offering and configuration mechanisms in use for scads of products. The...

‘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...

Feds Warn of Ransomware Attacks Ahead of Labor Day

Though lots of people might be taking some time off over the Labor Day weekend, threat actors likely won’t — which means organizations should remain particularly vigilante about the potential for ransomware attacks, the federal government has warned. Citing historical precedence, the FBI and CISA...

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 ...

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...

Pipeline Update: Biden Executive Order, DarkSide Detailed and Gas Bags

Colonial Pipeline Co. may have turned off the tap following Friday’s ransomware attack, but the news about the devastating assault keeps gushing. In the wake of the DarkSide cyberattack, President Biden signed an executive order Wednesday aimed at bolstering the federal government’s cyber defense...

Telegram Fraudsters Ramp Up Forged COVID-19 Vaccine Card Sales

Telegram groups are being abused by fraudsters peddling fake COVID-19 vaccination cards to the unvaccinated and anti-vaxxer communities, according to researchers. Brittany Allen, trust and safety architect at Sift, noticed the illicit sales on the encrypted messaging platform as the COVID-19...

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...

Top MSPs challenges in 2021

If one searches for ‘the top MSP challenges’ between 2017 and 2020, there are mainly five things that are more likely to emerge from the search results: adopting cloud-based solutions, sales margins, satisfying complex client’s needs, employee turnover, and the scalability of the IT security...

Malicious Mozilla Firefox Extension Allows Gmail Takeover

A newly uncovered cyberattack is taking control of victims’ Gmail accounts, by using a customized, malicious Mozilla Firefox browser extension called FriarFox. Researchers say the threat campaign, observed in January and February, targeted Tibetan organizations and was tied to TA413, a known...

Microsoft Office 365 Attacks Sparked from Google Firebase

A phishing campaign bent on stealing Microsoft login credentials is using Google Firebase to bypass email security measures in Microsoft Office 365, researchers said. Researchers at Armorblox uncovered invoice-themed emails sent to at least 20,000 mailboxes that purport to share information about...

WordPress Pop-Up Builder Plugin Flaw Plagues 200K Sites

Developers of a plugin, used by WordPress websites for building pop-up ads for newsletter subscriptions, have issued a patch for a serious flaw. The vulnerability could be exploited by attackers to send out newsletters with custom content, or to delete or import newsletter subscribers. The plugin...

Android Spyware Variant Snoops on WhatsApp, Telegram Messages

Researchers say they have uncovered a new Android spyware variant with an updated command-and-control communication strategy and extended surveillance capabilities that snoops on social media apps WhatsApp and Telegram. The malware, Android/SpyC32.A, is currently being used in active campaigns...

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...

Popular TP-Link Family of Kasa Security Cams Vulnerable to Attack

A popular consumer-grade security camera made by TP-Link and sold under the Kasa brand has bevy of bugs that open the hardware to remote attacks, such as giving hackers access to private video feeds and the ability to change device settings. The researcher Jason Kent, with Cequence Security,...

Microsoft Seizes Malicious Domains Used in Mass Office 365 Attacks

Microsoft has seized several domains associated with a massive hacking campaign, which has targeted Office 365 accounts with phishing and business email compromise BEC emails. The sophisticated phishing attacks, which first began in December, have since compromised Office 365 accounts in 62...

Zoom Bombing Attack Hits U.S. Government Meeting

A U.S. House Oversight Committee meeting was the most recent victim of a Zoom bombing attack, after the meeting was disrupted at least three different times by uninvited attendees. The incident was disclosed in a recent internal letter from Jim Jordan R-Ohio to Carolyn Maloney R-NY, chairwoman fo...

Tencent Ups Top Bug-Bounty Award to $15K

The Tencent Security Response Center TSRC is launching an expanded bug-bounty program, via the HackerOne white-hat platform – and the company has increased its top reward to $15,000. Tencent, a China-based global internet service provider, is opening up its existing bug-bounty program to...

ThreatList: Data Breaches Batter Stock Prices at Public Companies, For Months

Much has been made of the fallout that companies face after a data breach. But for public companies, shaken investor confidence adds a whole new dimension to recovery concerns. A recent study from Comparitech shows that share prices for large breached companies will hit a low point approximately ...