Caution Urged over Patched Windows USB Driver Flaw

USB-related vulnerabilities make people nervous; you need look no further than Stuxnet and BadUSB to see the dangers associated with infected portable storage devices and peripherals. Yesterday, Microsoft patched a flaw in the Windows USB Mass Storage Class Driver that could put some people on...

December 2015 Android Over-the-Air Nexus Security Update

Google has patched another critical Android vulnerability in Mediaserver, which has been maligned since this summer’s barrage of patches for the Stagefright vulnerability, along with a critical rooting vulnerability in the mobile operating system’s kernel. In all, 19 vulnerabilities were patched ...

VUPEN Launches New Zero-Day Acquisition Firm Zerodium

UPDATE–In the weeks since the Hacking Team breach, the spotlight has shone squarely on the small and often shadowy companies that are in the business of buying and selling exploits and vulnerabilities. One such company, Netragard, this week decided to get out of that business after its dealings...

Google Fixes Handful of Bugs in Chrome

Google has fixed several vulnerabilities in Chrome, including a pair of cross-origin bypasses and a high-risk scheme validation error. The new release updates Chrome to version 43.0.2357.130 and there are patches for other security flaws as well, though Google has only published information on fo...

PHP Patches Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities

UPDATE Developers at PHP recently pushed out a series of patches to fix a handful of vulnerabilities, including one that can lead to a heap-based buffer overflow. Researchers at the Swiss firm High-Tech Bridge dug up the vulnerabilities in versions 5.6.1, 5.5.17, and 5.4.33 of the framework. The...

Microsoft Expands TLS, Forward Secrecy Support

Microsoft is no exception when it comes to large technology providers committing to encrypting the services its users depend on. Today, the company announced an update on the progress it has made in engineering those changes, including the news that Outlook.com, its web-based email service,...

Mozilla Patches Seven Flaws in Firefox 30

Mozilla has fixed seven security vulnerabilities in Firefox 30, including five critical flaws that could enable remote code execution. Firefox 30 is a relatively minor release of the popular browser, with the most notable change being the addition of a sidebar button that allows users to quickly...

Chrome 35 Fixes 23 Security Flaws

Google has fixed 23 security vulnerabilities in Chrome, including three high-risk flaws, and handed out $9,500 in rewards to researchers. Among the vulnerabilities that the company fixed in Chrome 35 are use-after-free flaws and an integer overflow, all of which are rated high. Google didn’t...

Chrome 25 Fixes Nine High-Risk Vulnerabilities

Google has fixed nine high-severity vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser, as well as a dozen other flaws with the release of Chrome 25. This release is one of the few for which the company did not pay out much in the way of bug bounties, only giving out $3,500. In Chrome 25 Google also disabled...

What Have We Learned: Flame Malware

When the news about the Flame malware first broke several weeks ago, people from all parts of the security community, political world and elsewhere quickly began trying to figure out what the significance of the tool was and whether it represented anything new. That was difficult at the time, giv...

Google Patches 12 Flaws in Chrome

Google has 12 vulnerabilities in Chrome, including seven high-risk flaws. The new release of Chrome also includes an updated version of the Adobe Flash player. This is the second update for Chrome in the last few days from Google. The company updates its browser on a rolling basis, pushing out a...

Six High-Risk Flaws Fixed in Google Chrome

Google has fixed nine new vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser, including six high-risk flaws. The most serious of the bugs include three separate use-after-free vulnerabilities in various parts of the browser. As part of its researcher reward program, Google paid out $5,500 in bounties for...

New Flaw in BIND Causing Server Crashes

There’s a new vulnerability in the popular BIND name server software that is causing various versions of the application to crash unexpectedly after logging a certain kind of error. The Internet Software Consortium, which maintains BIND, is investigating the issue and trying to determine the...

Apple Releases New Java Updates, Fix 17 Flaws

Apple pushed out a new batch of Java updates for Mac OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard and 10.7 Lion yesterday, bringing the two operating systems up to date with Oracle’s Java SE 6 Update 29. In its update summary, Apple claims multiple vulnerabilities exist in Java’s previous build 1.6.026, including on...

Microsoft: 25,000 Computers Attacked With Latest Windows Zero Day

The Windows Help and Support Center vulnerability that was patched with yesterday’s MS10-042 bulletin was under active attack by malware miscreants, especially in Europe where Microsoft tracked about 25,000 attempts to exploit the vulnerability. According to Microsoft’s Holly Stewart, the attacks...

MS Patch Tuesday: 13 Bulletins, 26 Vulnerabilities

Microsoft today released 13 security bulletins with fixes for 26 vulnerabilities affecting Windows and Office users and warned customers to pay special attention to a slew of flaws that can be trivially exploited by malware miscreants. The company urged customers to prioritize and deploy four...

Adobe PDF Reader Gets Another Security Makeover

Adobe has released a mega-update for its Reader and Acrobat software products to fix a total of eight documented security vulnerabilities. The update comes with significant security improvements, including the on-by-default addition “Enhanced Security,” a feature that provides a set of default...

Feds: Zeppelin Ransomware Resurfaces with New Compromise, Encryption Tactics

Zeppelin ransomware is back and employing new compromise and encryption tactics in its recent campaigns against various vertical industries—particularly healthcare—as well as critical infrastructure organizations, the feds are warning. Threat actors deploying the ransomware as a service RaaS are...

Why Physical Security Maintenance Should Never Be an Afterthought

Infosec Insiders author Roy Dagan, CEO, SecuriThings A crime occurs, police go to access video of the scene and then discover that crucial views are not available due to an outage or malfunction. This is precisely what the NYPD encountered in the recent subway shooting in New York City this past...

Journalists Emerge as Favored Attack Target for APTs

Targeted phishing attacks are traced to multiple threat actors who have each independently focused on stealing credentials and sensitive data and tracking the geolocation of journalists. In a Thursday report by Proofpoint, researchers outline individual efforts by advance persistent threat APT...

U.S. Healthcare Orgs Targeted with Maui Ransomware

Several federal agencies are warning healthcare organizations that they are under threat of attacks from North Korean state-sponsored actors employing a unique ransomware that targets files with surgical precision, according to U.S. federal authorities. Threat actors from North Korea have been...

Discovery of 56 OT Device Flaws Blamed on Lackluster Security Culture

Researchers discovered 56 vulnerabilities affecting devices from 10 operational technology OT vendors, most of which they’ve attributed to inherent design flaws in equipment and a lax approach to security and risk management that have been plaguing the industry for decades, they said. The...

Pervasive Apple Safari Bug Exposes Web-Browsing Data, Google IDs

A security vulnerability in Apple’s browsers for macOS, iOS and iPadOS can lead to information disclosure, researchers have warned. Apple has just marked the issue as “resolved,” but it will take some time for the fixes to roll out, they said, so users should implement mitigations. According to...

Cisco SD-WAN Security Bug Allows Root Code Execution

Cisco SD-WAN implementations are vulnerable to a high-severity privilege-escalation vulnerability in the IOS IE operating system that could lead to arbitrary code execution. Cisco’s SD-WAN portfolio allows businesses of all sizes to connect disparate office locations via the cloud using various...

Encrypted & Fileless Malware Sees Big Growth

A full 91.5 percent of malware was delivered using HTTPS-encrypted connections in the second quarter, researchers said, making attacks more evasive. That’s according to WatchGuard Technologies’ latest report on findings within its telemetry, which also found that these detections come primarily...

Authorities Arrest Another TrickBot Gang Member in South Korea

Another alleged member of the TrickBot gang has been apprehended, this time when trying to leave South Korea, according to published reports. The Russian national, who is an alleged developer of the notorious crimeware, reportedly had been trapped in South Korea since February 2020 due to COVID-1...

Faux ‘DarkSide’ Gang Takes Aim at Global Energy, Food Sectors

Several organizations in the oil, gas and food sectors have received threatening emails from cybercriminals posing as DarkSide – the ransomware gang behind the Colonial Pipeline hack. According to researchers at Trend Micro, threat actors are taking advantage of the notoriety around the pipeline...

SaaS Attacks: Lessons from Real-Life Misconfiguration Exploits

It’s unfortunate but true: SaaS attacks continue to increase. You can’t get around it, COVID-19 accelerated the already exploding SaaS market and caused industries not planning on making a switch to embrace SaaS. With SaaS apps becoming the default system of record for organizations, it has left...

Child Tweets Gibberish from U.S. Nuke Account

A nonsense tweet sent out from the official account of U.S. Strategic Command is no reason for alarm, according to the department. The social media manager’s kid found an open laptop, pounded on a few random keys and sent the tweet, which read, “;l;;gmlxzssaw” last Sunday. The tweets were met wit...

Trojanized Xcode Project Slips MacOS Malware to Apple Developers

Cybercriminals are targeting Apple developers with a trojanized Xcode project, which once launched installs a backdoor that has spying and data exfiltration capabilities. Xcode is comprised of a suite of free, open software development tools developed by Apple for creating software for macOS, iOS...

Magecart Attackers Save Stolen Credit-Card Data in .JPG File

Magecart attackers have found a new way to hide their nefarious online activity by saving data they’ve skimmed from credit cards online in a .JPG file on a website they’ve injected with malicious code. Researchers at website security firm Sucuri discovered the elusive tactic recently during an...

Health Website Leaks 8 Million COVID-19 Test Results

Yet another human-related error — this time a flaw in a health department website in the state of Bengal, India — has exposed the confidential results of COVID-19 tests as well as personally identifying information PII for an entire geographic region’s population. Test results related to more tha...

Let’s Encrypt to Replace 200M Certificates a Day

Let’s Encrypt just announced an infrastructure makeover which means the open certificate authority CA is able to re-issue up to 200 million certificates in a 24-hour period, something the service said could be necessary in “some of the worst scenarios.” The upgrade comes a year after Let’s Encryp...

Google Play Boots Barcode Scanner App After Ad Explosion

A barcode scanner app, with over 10 million downloads, was booted from the Google Play marketplace after users began to complain of mobile-ad overload. The makers of the app, called Barcode Scanner, intentionally altered the code of the app via an update turning it from a benign app to adware,...

Spotify Suffers Second Credential-Stuffing Cyberattack

Spotify streaming music aficionados are in the crosshairs of yet another credential-stuffing cyberattack, just three months after the last one. The service has forced password resets for impacted users. Cybercriminals carrying out credential-stuffing take advantage of people who reuse the same...

Magento Web Skimmers Piggyback in Ongoing Costway Website Compromise

Two web skimmers have been discovered on the payment webpages of Costway, one of the top retailers in North America and Europe, which sells appliances, furniture and more. The skimmers are targeting consumers’ credit-card payment details. In a twist, researchers say one of these web skimmers is...

Millions of Social Profiles Leaked by Chinese Data-Scrapers

More than 400GB of public and private profile data for 214 million social-media users from around the world has been exposed to the internet – including details for celebrities and social-media influencers in the U.S. and elsewhere. The leak stems from a misconfigured ElasticSearch database owned...

Ryuk Rakes in $150M in Ransom Payments

The Ryuk ransomware has earned its operators an estimated $150 million, according to an examination of the malware’s money-laundering operations. Joint research released this week from Brian Carter, principal researcher at HYAS, and Vitali Kremez, CEO at Advanced Intelligence, took a the look und...

The SolarWinds Perfect Storm: Default Password, Access Sales and More

SECOND UPDATE A perfect storm may have come together to make SolarWinds such a successful attack vector for the global supply-chain cyberattack discovered this week. Researchers said that includes its use of a default password “SolarWinds123” that gave attackers an open door into its...

New Windows Trojan Steals Browser Credentials, Outlook Files

Researchers have discovered a new information-stealing trojan, which targets Microsoft Windows systems with an onslaught of data-exfiltration capabilities– from collecting browser credentials to targeting Outlook files. The trojan, called PyMicropsia due to it being built with Python has been...

2020 Reader Survey: Share Your Feedback to Help Us Improve

Dear Threatpost Reader, Thank you for taking the time to participate in our anonymous Reader Survey. With your help, we intend to continue bringing you timely and relevant news and information to keep you in touch with the cybersecurity industry. This survey will only take a few minutes of your...

Scalper-Bots Shake Down Desperate PS5, Xbox Series X Shoppers

It’s a big week for gamers across the globe, with imminent, dueling releases of Xbox Series X and PlayStation PS5. However, an army of retail bots threaten to drive prices up as much as three times the retail price, putting the coveted holiday gifts well out of reach of everyday fans. Retailers...

COVID-19 Clinical Trials Slowed After Ransomware Attack

A ransomware attack has hit eResearchTechnology, a medical software company that supplies pharma companies with tools for conducting clinical trials – including trials for COVID-19 vaccines. The attackers could be financially motivated — or could be backed by a nation-state looking to gain...

NFL, NBA Players Hacked in Would-Be Cyber-Slam-Dunk

NFL and NBA athletes whose social-media accounts were taken over have been thrown the ball of justice. Multiple professional and semi-pro athletes were victimized by two men who infiltrated their personal accounts, according to testimony in federal court on Wednesday. Trevontae Washington of...

APT28 Mounts Rapid, Large-Scale Theft of Office 365 Logins

The Russia-linked threat group known as APT28 has changed up its tactics to include Office 365 password-cracking and credential-harvesting. Microsoft researchers have tied APT28 a.k.a. Strontium, Sofacy or Fancy Bear to this newly uncovered pattern of O365 activity, which began in April and is...

High-Severity TinyMCE Cross-Site Scripting Flaw Fixed

A high-severity flaw has been disclosed in TinyMCE, an open-source text editor used in the content management systems CMS of websites. The recently patched flaw could have been potentially exploited remotely by attackers to gain administrative privileges to websites. TinyMCE, developed by Tiny...

Emotet Returns in Malspam Attacks Dropping TrickBot, QakBot

Emotet has returned after a five-month hiatus. Researchers first spotted the malware in a campaign that has spammed Microsoft Office users with hundreds of thousands of malicious emails since Friday. The malware first emerged in 2014, but has since then evolved into a full fledged botnet that’s...

Kubernetes Falls to Cryptomining via Machine-Learning Framework

A unique cyberattack campaign that targets Kubeflow, a machine-learning toolkit for Kubernetes, has affected large swathes of container clusters, according to Microsoft. The Kubeflow open-source project is a popular framework for running machine-learning ML tasks in Kubernetes. According to an...

News Wrap: Fake Minneapolis Police Breach, Zoom End-To-End Encryption Debate

Threatpost editors Lindsey O’Donnell-Welch and Tara Seals discuss the top security news stories of the week, including: Reports emerged earlier this week that the Minneapolis police department had been breached by hacktivist group Anonymous. Security expert Troy Hunt debunked the reports, however...

Login with Facebook Bug Earns $20K Bounty

Facebook has awarded a security researcher $20,000 for discovering a cross-site scripting XSS vulnerability in the Facebook Login SDK, which is used by developers to add a “Continue with Facebook” button to a page as an authentication method. Exploitation could allow threat actors to hijack...