New Java Vulnerability Coming Bundled With Exploit Kits

A recently discovered Java vulnerability that’s been circulating throughout the hacking underground has begun to show up alongside the BlackHole exploit kit, according to a post on Brian Krebs’ KrebsonSecurity blog. The National Vulnerability Database claims the vulnerability is found in the Java...

Adobe to Release Flash Patch June 10

Adobe said on Monday that it will have a patch available for the newly discovered critical vulnerability in Flash ready by June 10 for most platforms. The patches for Adobe Reader and Acrobat, which also are affected by the flaw, won’t be released until June 29. The new flaw was discovered late...

Adobe Warns of Flash, PDF Zero Day Attack

Adobe issued an alert late Friday night to warn about zero-day attacks against an unpatched vulnerability in its Reader and Flash Player software products. The vulnerability, described as critical, affects Adobe Flash Player 10.0.45.2 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris...

Recently Patched Adobe PDF Flaw Being 'Actively Exploited'

Malicious hackers have pounced on a newly patched Adobe PDF Reader vulnerability to plant Trojan downloaders on tardy Windows users. According to researchers in Microsoft’s malware protection center, the vulnerability CVE-2010-0188 was patched less than a month ago, proving that malicious hackers...

'High Risk' Flaw Fixed in Google Chrome

Google has pushed out a new version of its Chrome browser to fix a high-severity security hole that could lead to malicious code execution attacks. The vulnerability could be exploited to run arbitrary code within the Google Chrome sandbox, the company said in an advisory. The raw details: The v8...

Experts call for better measurement of security

If there’s one key message coming through all of the noise at the RSA Conference this week it’s the fact that there’s a pressing need for more data. Data on attacks, data on vulnerabilities, data on data breaches, data on software security, data on everything having to do with security. The...

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...

GoDaddy Breach Widens to Include Reseller Subsidiaries

The GoDaddy breach affecting 1.2 million customers has widened – it turns out that various subsidiaries that resell GoDaddy Managed WordPress were also affected. The additional affected companies are 123Reg, Domain Factory, Heart Internet, Host Europe, Media Temple and tsoHost. The world’s larges...

LockBit Jumps Its Own Countdown, Publishes Bangkok Air Files

After Bangkok Airways disclosed that it had been clobbered by a cyberattack last week, the LockBit 2.0 ransomware gang tossed its own countdown clock in the trash and went ahead and published what it claims are the airline’s encrypted files on its leak site. BleepingComputer posted an image shown...

Memory Bugs in BlackBerry’s QNX Embedded OS Open Devices to Attacks

The potential danger from a raft of memory-allocation bugs discovered by Microsoft in April has now spread to older versions of multiple BlackBerry QNX products. The Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency CISA and BlackBerry warned in separate alerts Tuesday that threat actors can take...

Fuzz Off: How to Shake Up Code to Get It Right – Podcast

LAS VEGAS – In 2014, two teams of security researchers independently started fuzz testing OpenSSL. Within days, the advanced black-box software technique led to an exploitable vulnerability in OpenSSL: namely, the Heartbleed vulnerability. What is fuzzing? That’s what the FuzzCon event is all...

Suspected ‘Dr HeX’ Hacker Busted for 9 Years of Phishing

A Moroccan man suspected of being “Dr HeX” – the prolific threat actor behind a nine-year cyber-blitz on thousands of victims through phishing, website defacing, malware development, fraud and carding – has been arrested. Interpol announced the bust – which took place in Morocco in May – on...

Why MTTR is Bad for SecOps

Mean time to resolution MTTR is a commonly used metric in the security industry. While it has utility to a business’s risk function, it does not belong in security operations SecOps. First, let us level-set on what reporting is versus metrics. Reporting measures activity and does not drive specif...

Wegmans Exposes Customer Data in Misconfigured Databases

Wegmans Food Markets, the U.S. supermarket chain, has notified customers that some of their data was exposed because two of its cloud-based databases were misconfigured, making them publicly accessible online. In a publicly posted breach notification letter, Wegmans said that the issue was first...

Supreme Court Limits Scope of Controversial Hacking Law

The United States Supreme Court has ruled that a police officer who received money for obtaining data from a law-enforcement database for an associate did not violate a controversial federal hacking law, marking a victory for the ethical hacking community by limiting the law’s scope. In a landmar...

Effective Adoption of SASE in 2021

Think back to mid-2019: People had already been moving to the cloud, having talked about digital transformation for years. Then, March 2020 shoved transformation into hyperdrive: Suddenly, there was a mass exodus from the office, and everybody was working from home. That’s when the old ways of...

American Express Fined Over Millions of Spam Messages

American Express Services Europe has been fined £90,000 $127,377 by a U.K. regulator, which found the company illegally blasted out 4 million marketing emails to customers who had opted out of receiving them. Critics said the fine, which is nominal for the multi-national financial brand, isn’t...

It’s Time to Prepare for a Rise in Insider Threats

Earlier this year, Tesla discovered that an employee had stolen more than 6,000 files containing sensitive code. The software engineer, who was only employed for two weeks, had been hired as one of the few people who could access these files. This incident highlights the danger that insider threa...

Why Retailers Fail to Stop Shopping Bots

In the 1970s the United States encountered an “oil embargo” that dramatically curtailed people from being able to purchase gasoline for their vehicles. “No Gas Today” signs were everywhere. Gas rationing was imposed by only allowing car owners to buy gas based on whether the final numbers on thei...

Facebook Disrupts Spy Effort Aimed at Uyghurs

Facebook has taken on a group of hackers in China that target the Uyghur ethnic group with cyberespionage activity. The hacking group, known as Earth Empusa or Evil Eye, was targeting activists, dissidents and journalists involved in the Uyghur community, primarily those living abroad in Australi...

Office 365 Cyberattack Lands Disgruntled IT Contractor in Jail

A former IT contractor has been sentenced to two years in prison after hacking into a company’s server and deleting the majority of its employees’ Microsoft Office 365 O365 accounts. The incident resulted in the company completely shutting down for two days. The 32-year-old contractor, Deepanshu...

Passwords, Private Posts Exposed in Hack of Gab Social Network

Distributed Denial of Secrets DDoSecrets, a self-proclaimed “transparency collective,” claim they have received more than 70 gigabytes of data exfiltrated from social media network Gab. Gab, which touts itself as “a social network that champions free speech, individual liberty and the free flow o...

6 Questions Attackers Ask Before Choosing an Asset to Exploit

In the past decade or so, we’ve seen a massive shift toward the cloud. The COVID-19 pandemic and associated pivot to remote work has only accelerated this cloud trend, forcing blue-teamers to be more agile to protect their attack surfaces. While defenders are adapting to support cloud-based...

Misery of Ransomware Hits Hospitals the Hardest

Despite hospitals being on the front lines during the pandemic, bad actors have continued to target them with ransomware. In addition to wreaking havoc on operational processes in medical facilities at the worst possible time, the attacks have evolved to threaten patient safety. In September,...

Cayman Islands Bank Records Exposed in Open Azure Blob

A Cayman Island investment firm has removed years of backups, which up until recently were easily available online thanks to a misconfigured Microsoft Azure blob. The blob’s single URL led to vast stores of files including personal banking information, passport data and even online banking PINs —...

Widespread Scans Underway for RCE Bugs in WordPress Websites

Millions of malicious scans are rolling across the internet, looking for known vulnerabilities in the Epsilon Framework for building WordPress themes, according to researchers. According to the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team, more than 7.5 million probes targeting these vulnerabilities have...

Ticketmaster Scores Hefty Fine Over 2018 Data Breach

Ticketmaster’s UK division has been slapped with a $1.65 million fine by the Information Commissioner’s Office ICO in the UK, over its 2018 data breach that impacted 9.4 million customers. The fine £1.25million has been levied after the ICO found that the company “failed to put appropriate securi...

Minecraft Apps on Google Play Fleece Players Out of Big Money

Fans of the popular Minecraft video game are in the crosshairs of cybercriminals, who have loaded up Google Play with scam apps bent on fleecing players out of cash. According to researchers, the mobile apps for Android fool users into spending hundreds of dollars per month, by offering skins,...

APT Groups Finding Success with Mix of Old and New Tools

Advanced persistent threat APT groups continue to use the fog of intense geopolitics to supercharge their campaigns, but beyond these themes, actors are developing individual signature tactics for success. That’s according to Kaspersky’s most recent APT trends report for Q3 2020, which found that...

Adobe Warns Windows, MacOS Users of Critical Acrobat and Reader Flaws

Adobe has fixed critical-severity flaws tied to four CVEs in the Windows and macOS versions of its Acrobat and Reader family of application software services. The vulnerabilities could be exploited to execute arbitrary code on affected products. These critical flaws include a heap-based buffer...

Xfinity, McAfee Brands Abused by Parked Domains in Active Campaigns

Parked domains, which act as aliases and redirect to other websites, can send visitors to malicious or unwanted landing pages or turn entirely malicious at any point in time – as evidenced by a recent Emotet campaign, a separate effort abusing Comcast and McAfee brands, and an election-themed...

Google’s Waze Can Allow Hackers to Identify and Track Users

A security researcher has discovered a vulnerability in Google’s Waze app that can allow hackers to identify people using the popular navigation app and track them by their location. Security DevOps engineer Peter Gasper discovered an API flaw in the navigation software that allowed him to track...

Office 365: A Favorite for Cyberattack Persistence

Threat actors are consistently leveraging legitimate services and tools from within Microsoft Office 365 to pilfer sensitive data and launch phishing, ransomware, and other attacks across corporate networks from a persistent position inside the cloud-based suite, new research has found. Office 36...

Grindr's Bug Bounty Pledge Doesn't Translate to Security

SAS@Home 2020– After a Grindr security flaw was disclosed this week, the dating site promised it would launch a bug-bounty program in an effort to “keep its service secure.” But Katie Moussouris, CEO of Luta Security and a bug bounty program expert, warned at this week’s SAS@home virtual event th...

Why Web Browser Padlocks Shouldn't Be Trusted

For years, Apple, Firefox, Google and Microsoft relentlessly made the point that in order to avoid rogue sites you must make sure your browser “padlock” is either locked, green or is otherwise indicating a site as being “secure.” Now, cybersecurity firms are stressing that those padlocks are not...

Free Apple iPhone 12? Chatbot Phish Spreads Via Texts

A mobile phishing campaign is spreading via text messages purporting to come from an Apple chatbot – and offering “free trials” of iPhone 12. The iPhone 12 is due to be released in October, and the buzz is high for Appleheads who are anxiously awaiting the launch. Cybercriminals are taking...

Hackers Continue Cyberattacks Against Vatican, Catholic Orgs

A state-sponsored threat group linked to China has been engaged in a five-month long cyberattack against the Vatican and other Catholic Church-related organizations. Attacks have come in the form of spear phishing emails laced with the PlugX remote access tool RAT as the payload. Researchers with...

The Sounds a Key Make Can Produce 3D-Printed Replica

Security researchers have given a whole new meaning to “picking a lock,” demonstrating that they can use audio and signal-processing technology to listen to the sounds a key makes when it opens a lock and then 3D-print a duplicate from a recording. The attack, called SpiKey, leverages any basic...

Jack Daniels, Ritz London Face Cyberattacks

A pair of cyberattacks on high-profile targets – the owner of the Jack Daniels distillery and the iconic Ritz London hotel – have resulted in the exposure of sensitive information. The maker behind Jack Daniels and other alcoholic beverages, Brown-Forman Corp., has suffered a recent cyberattack b...

Going Down the Spyware Rabbit Hole with SilkBean Mobile Malware

In this in-depth Threatpost podcast Christoph Hebeisen, who leads the Security Intelligence Research Division at Lookout, shares a behind-the-scenes look at how his team discovered and tracked three never-before-seen surveillanceware tools, dubbed SilkBean, GoldenEagle and CarbonSteal. Hebeisen...

DMARC Adoption Spikes, Higher Ed Remains Behind

Adoption of the email security protocol DMARC has continued to tick upwards, with the number of domains deploying DMARC records surpassing 1 million in the last two years — a 2.5 times greater total than in 2018. That’s according to Valimail’s Email Fraud Landscape 2020 report, which also found...

Smartwatch Hack Could Trick Dementia Patients into Overdosing

Researchers are warning vulnerabilities in a smartwatch application for dementia patients could allow an attacker to convince patients to overdose. The vulnerabilities stem from the SETracker application, which is developed by Chinese developer 3G Electronics based out of Shenzhen City. The app,...

Email Sender Identity is Key to Solving the Phishing Crisis

Email is in crisis. Despite massive advancements in perimeter and endpoint defenses, email remains a cybersecurity weak link for many companies. Why? Email is at the heart of everything we do online. It’s an essential line of communication for one-on-one and group conversations, both...

Email Sender Identity is Key to Solving the Phishing Crisis

Email is in crisis. Despite massive advancements in perimeter and endpoint defenses, email remains a cybersecurity weak link for many companies. Why? Email is at the heart of everything we do online. It’s an essential line of communication for one-on-one and group conversations, both...

Theft of CIA's 'Vault 7' Secrets Tied to 'Woefully Lax" Security

A just-released report on the 2016 Central Intelligence Agency CIA data breach, which led to the Vault 7 document dump on WikiLeaks, blames “woefully lax” security by the nation’s top spy agency. The conclusions were part of an internal 2017 Department of Justice DoJ report on the CIA breach. On...

Phishing Attack Hits German Coronavirus Task Force

Researchers are warning of an ongoing phishing attack that’s targeting the credentials of more than 100 high-profile executives at a German multinational corporation that’s tasked with procuring coronavirus medical gear for Germany. The company, left unnamed by researchers, is part of a task forc...

New iOS Jailbreak Tool Works on iPhone Models iOS 11 to iOS 13.5

A hacker team has released a new method to jailbreak iPhones that they claim uses a zero-day exploit that allows them to jailbreak iPhones running iOS 11 through Apple’s most recent version of its mobile operating system – iOS 13.5. Calling it a “big milestone for jailbreaking,” one of its...

EasyJet Hackers Take Off with Travel Details for 9M Customers

European budget airline EasyJet has been hacked, with attackers making off with personal details for 9 million customers. It was, the airline said, a “highly sophisticated attack” that exposed the email addresses and travel itineraries of the victims, along with payment-card information for 2,208...

WordPress Page Builder Plugin Bugs Threaten 1 Million Sites with Full Takeover

Page Builder by SiteOrigin, a WordPress plugin with a million active installs that’s used to build websites via a drag-and-drop function, harbors two flaws that can allow full site takeover. According to researchers at WordPress, both security bugs can lead to cross-site request forgery CSRF and...

‘Black Rose Lucy’ is Back, Now Pushing Ransomware

Cybercriminals behind the Android-based dropper malware Black Rose Lucy have shifted attacks from info-stealing to ransomware – with a sextortion twist. The malware family, operated by the Lucy Gang, encrypts targeted Android devices and delivers a spoofed FBI message. The ransom note claims the...