Wisc. GOP's $2.3M MAGA Hat Debacle Showcases Fraud Concerns

The Wisconsin Republican party’s war chest is lighter by $2.3 million after scammers posing as MAGA-hat vendors were able to spoof invoices in what appears to be a basic business email compromise BEC attack. It’s just the latest in a litany of attacks related to the upcoming election, and it...

Google Boots 21 Bogus Gaming Apps from Play Marketplace

Researchers have discovered a raft of malicious gaming apps on Google Play that come loaded with adware, signaling that the tech giant continues to struggle with keeping bad apps off its online marketplace. Twenty-one gaming ads discovered on Google packed with adware from the HiddenAds family we...

Georgia Election Data Hit in Ransomware Attack

Ransomware gangs have officially entered the 2020 election fray, with reports of one of the first breaches of the voting season, on Hall County, Ga. The county’s database of voter signatures was impacted in the attack along with other government systems. Although the county said the voting proces...

Unpatched Apple T2 Chip Flaw Plagues Macs

A researcher is claiming that Apple devices – with a macOS operating system and a T2 security chip – are open to an exploit that could give bad actors root access. A fix has not been issued by Apple. The flaw stems from the T2 chip, which is the second-generation version of Apple’s chip that...

Spammers Smuggle LokiBot Via URL Obfuscation Tactic

Spammers have started using a tricky URL obfuscation technique that sidesteps detection – and ultimately infects victims with the LokiBot trojan. The tactic was uncovered in recent spear-phishing emails with PowerPoint attachments, which contain a malicious macro. When the PowerPoint file is...

QR Codes Serve Up a Menu of Security Concerns

Quick Response QR codes are booming in popularity and hackers are flocking to exploit the trend. Worse, according to a new study, people are mostly ignorant to how QR codes can be easily abused to launch digital attacks. The reason QR code use is skyrocketing is tied to more brick-and-mortar...

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...

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...

Credit-Card Skimmer Has Unlikely Target: Microsoft ASP.NET Sites

Researchers have identified a credit-card skimming campaign that’s been active since mid-April that has a rather specific and unusual target: ASP.NET-based websites running on Microsoft Internet Information Services IIS servers. New research from Malwarebytes Labs recently uncovered the campaign,...

TrickBot Adds BazarBackdoor to Malware Arsenal

A new module for the infamous trojan known as TrickBot has been deployed: A stealthy backdoor that researchers call “BazarBackdoor.” The binary was first spotted being delivered as part of a phishing campaign that began in March, according to an analysis from Panda Security this week. The campaig...

Steganography Anchors Pinpoint Attacks on Industrial Targets

A targeted series of attacks on suppliers of equipment and software for industrial enterprises is playing out globally, researchers said, hinging on phishing and a steganography tactic to hide malware on public, legitimate image resources. According to Kaspersky ICS CERT, the attacks seem bent on...

ThreatList: People Know Reusing Passwords Is Dumb, But Still Do It

More than half of people haven’t changed their password in the last year – even after they’ve heard about a data breach in the news. That’s according to a recent survey, “Psychology of Passwords: The Online Behavior That’s Putting You At Risk,” that examined the online security and password...

Utah Says No to Apple/Google COVID-19 Tracing; Debuts Startup App

The state of Utah has settled on a contact-tracing mobile app that collects detailed user location information to track the spread of COVID-19 among citizens – eschewing the API model proposed by Apple and Google in April. The app is called “Healthy Together” and it was created by a startup calle...

Rethinking Responsibilities and Remedies in Social-Engineering Attacks

In the pantheon of catchy cybersecurity slogans that should never have caught on, two about social engineering spring to mind almost immediately: “End users are the weakest link” and “attackers only have to be lucky once; defenders have to be lucky all the time.” Both of those statements have bee...

Emotet Returns from Summer Vacation, Ramps Up Stolen Email Tactic

Emotet, the banking trojan that has evolved into so much more, is back after a summer hiatus, dropping other banking trojans, information stealers, email harvesters, self-propagation mechanisms and ransomware. According to researchers at Cisco Talos, Emotet took a breather at the beginning of Jun...

Back-to-School Scams Target Students with Library-Themed Emails

College students settling back into school might want to think twice before clicking on an email prompting them to renew their school library account. Researchers warn that students at hundreds of universities worldwide are being targeted with fake emails this week, which tout attachments or link...

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...

Nation-State APTs Target U.S. Utilities With Dangerous Malware

Researchers believe that nation-state actors are behind several spearphishing campaigns targeting U.S. utility companies with a newly-identified malware, which has the capabilities to view system data and reboot machines. Lure emails were sent to three U.S. utilities companies between July 19 and...

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...

Ukrainian Charged With Launching 100 Million Malicious Ads

A Ukrainian national has been extradited to the U.S. for allegedly operating a five-year-long malvertising scheme – reaching victims with more than 100 million malicious ads worldwide. Oleksii Petrovich Ivanov, 31, appeared in Newark, N.J. federal court on Friday after being extradited to the U.S...

Avengers: Endgame Sites Promise Digital Downloads, Deliver Info-Harvesting

Marvel Studio’s long-awaited superhero juggernaut Avengers: Endgame, represents the second-largest worldwide box-office haul for any film, ever – raking in $2.2 billion in its first two weekends. With demand like that, perhaps it’s not surprising that enterprising scammers are already luring in...

Tor Security Add-On Abruptly Killed by Mozilla Bug

Thanks to Mozilla letting an intermediate signing certificate expire, the Tor community was thrown into disarray over the weekend when the NoScript security add-on was suddenly killed for both Firefox and the Tor browser. A fix is available for Firefox, but the Tor issue continues. NoScript is a...

Ladders, SkyMed Leak Employment, Medical Data for Millions

Cloud storage misconfigurations continue to plague the data-privacy space, as evidenced by the new discovery of employment and health information for millions exposed on the web, wide open to any internet passerby. Two misconfigured cloud databases inadvertently leaked personally identifiable...

SAS 2019: Gaza Cybergang Blends Sophistication Levels in Highly Effective Spy Effort

SINGAPORE — Around 240 high-profile victims in 39 countries worldwide have become victims of an APT cyber-espionage attack, led by an organization dubbed the Gaza Cybergang that comprises several groups of varying sophistication. The victims, who were all targeted last year, include political,...

Microsoft IE Zero Day Gets Emergency Patch

Microsoft patched a zero-day vulnerability in its Internet Explorer browser that is actively being exploited by attackers. The bug, reported by Google, is a remote code execution vulnerability that allowed attackers to infiltrate vulnerable systems via a booby trapped website that could have...

Adobe Patches Critical Flash Player Bug With Active Exploit

Adobe has patched two critical and two important vulnerabilities in its Flash Player on Thursday, including one that is being exploited in the wild in targeted attacks against Windows users. The critical vulnerability with an existing exploit CVE-2018-5002 is a stack-based buffer overflow bug tha...

Intel Patches CPU Bugs Impacting Millions of Devices

Intel released patches on Monday to protect millions of PCs and servers from vulnerabilities found in its Management Engine, Trusted Execution Engine and Server Platform Services that could allow local attackers elevate privileges, run arbitrary code, crash systems and eavesdrop on communications...

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...

Novel Attack Tricks Servers to Cache And Expose Personal Data

LAS VEGAS—Researcher Omer Gil has devised a way to trick a web server into caching pages and exposing personal data. The so-called web caching attack targets sites that use content delivery network CDN services such as Akamai and Cloudflare. These services act as traffic load balancers and revers...

Apple Patches iTunes, iCloud for Windows, Xcode Server

Apple’s iTunes and iCloud software for Windows PCs received updates on Thursday for vulnerabilities that could allow for the disclosure of personal information and arbitrary code execution. In addition to the Windows fixes, Apple also alerted Mac and iOS app developers to nearly a dozen security...

OpenSSL Patches Padding Oracle Attack Bug

The latest batch of OpenSSL security patches were released today, with a pair of high-severity flaws and four low-severity issues addressed in OpenSSL 1.0.1t and OpenSSL 1.0.2h. One of the high-severity flaws, CVE-2016-2107, opens the door to a padding oracle attack that can allow for the...

Reddit Removes NSL Warrant Canary from Transparency Report

Reddit’s latest transparency report is missing a nugget of information that was present in a previous report. Last year’s report included a warrant canary which stated that as of Jan. 29, 2015, Reddit had never received a National Security Letter, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order or...

October 2015 Microsoft Patch Tuesday Security Bulletins

Microsoft’s monthly release of security bulletins today is a relatively light load of patches to be tested and deployed. The real news, however, could be in a separate advisory in which it continues to deprecate the outdated RC4 encryption algorithm. Following its initial advisory in May that...

VMware Fixes Java Information Disclosure Vulnerability

Virtual Machine maker VMware has updated a slew of its offerings in order to address a critical information disclosure vulnerability in the Oracle’s Java runtime environment JRE. The update essentially installs the latest version of JRE into VMware systems where the old version of JRE was affecte...

Hanjuan Exploit Kit, Malvertising Dangers in Flash Zero Days

The recent trio of Flash zero days has not only caused a lot of scrambling at Adobe—which yesterday released a patch for the last in that line of vulnerabilities—but also shined light on a fairly unknown exploit kit, exposed the evolving danger associated with malvertising, and made clear the pai...

December 2014 Microsoft Patch Tuesday Advance Notification

Microsoft made patch news on two fronts last month with an unusual emergency patch for a critical vulnerability in Kerberos, and for a missing fix for an Exchange bug that was promised in its November advanced notification. In the December advance notification, released today, an elevation...

Adobe Patches 18 Vulnerabilities in Flash

Adobe pushed out security updates for Flash Player this afternoon, addressing 18 different vulnerabilities, all critical, that could allow an attacker to take control of an affected system running the multimedia platform according to a security bulletin posted today. The Patch Tuesday updates,...

Emergency IE Zero Day Patch Fixes XP Systems Too

UPDATE – Microsoft announced it will release an out-of-band security update today to patch a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer, and that the patch will also be made available for Windows XP machines through Automatic Update. At the same time, researchers said they are now seeing attacks...

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...

Linux Kernel Update Fixes DoS, Leakage Bugs

Debian developers alerted Linux users late last week of a new Linux kernel build, linux-2.6, that fixes 11 separate vulnerabilities that could open the kernel to a denial of service attack, information leak or privilege escalation. Dann Frazier, an administrator with Debian announced the security...

Flaws in Emergency Alert System Hardware Allow Remote Login, Zombie Alert Insertion

There are a set of easily exploited vulnerabilities in the appliances used in the emergency alert system EAS that could be used by attackers to log in to these boxes remotely and send fake emergency alerts like the one that interrupted a TV broadcast in Montana on Monday. The vulnerabilities...

Java Exploit Linked to Red October Espionage Malware Campaign

Red October, the espionage campaign uncovered by Kaspersky Lab this week after attackers spent five years actively spying on diplomats, scientists, and governments worldwide, is using a Java exploit to infect its victims, bringing the exploit count to four in this campaign. Seculert, an Israeli...

Google Releases Chrome 22 and Pays Out Nearly $30K in Rewards

Google has released Chrome 22, a major new version of its browser that includes a huge number of security fixes, many of them high-priority vulnerabilities. The company also handed out nearly $30,000 in rewards to security researchers, more than half of it to Sergey Glazunov, who discovered two...

Mass WordPress Compromise Fuels CRIDEX Worm Outbreak

There are a number of compromised sites on the popular blogging platform, WordPress, which, according to a Trend Labs report, are actively infecting users with the CRIDEX worm. The infections are part of a social engineering campaign that lures users with emails purporting to come from trusted...

Microsoft, Security Experts Warn 'Wormable' RDP Exploit Will Come Sooner Than Later

As a follow-up to its usual Patch Tuesday release this week, officials at Microsoft are warning users that an exploit against the recently disclosed Remote Desktop Protocol RDP vulnerability for Windows is likely to come in the next 30 days. According to a supplementary entry on its Security...

Apache Fixes Range Header DoS Flaw

There is a new version of the Apache Web Server available that fixes the recently disclosed range header denial-of-service vulnerability. Apache 2.2.20 is was released Tuesday and the new content mostly comprises the bug fix. The Apache Software Foundation, which maintains the Web server, said th...

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...

State-Sponsored Phishing Attack Targeted Israeli Military Officials

An advanced persistent threat group, with ties to Iran, is believed behind a phishing campaign targeting high-profile government and military Israeli personnel, according to a report by Check Point Software. Targets of the campaign included a senior leadership in the Israeli defense industry, the...

Closing the Gap Between Application Security and Observability

Infosec Insiders columnist Daniel Kaar, global director application security engineering at Dynatrace. When it’s all said and done, application security pros may come to look upon the Log4Shell vulnerability as a gift. Potentially one of the most devastating software flaws ever found, Log4Shell...