Adobe Plugs Critical PDF Code Execution Flaw

Adobe today released an out-of-band security update to patch a pair of gaping holes that expose hundreds of millions of computer users to remote code execution attacks. The vulnerabilities are rated “critical” and affect Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat on all platforms — Windows, Mac and Linux. Th...

Serious Mac OS X Java vulnerability disclosed

There is an easily exploitable vulnerability in the Java implementation in Apple’s Mac OS X which could allow an attacker to run arbitrary code on a remote machine. The flaw, which is similar to a vulnerability that has been public for five months and affect other vendors’ products, affects even...

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...

Low-rent RAT Worries Researchers

For about the price of a cup of Starbucks latte, a hacker is renting out a remote access trojan designed to backdoor targeted networks. Dubbed as Dark Crystal RAT or DCRat, the malware is being peddled online to hackers in Russian by a lone rookie malware writer with a penchant for cut-rate...

Lapsus$ Hackers Target T-Mobile

T-Mobile confirmed that the extortion group Lapsus$ gains access to their system “several weeks ago”. The telecom giant responded to a report by a journalist Brian Krebs, who accessed the internal chats from the private Telegram channel of the core Lapsus$ gang members. The company added that it...

Destructive Wiper Targeting Ukraine Aimed at Eroding Trust

Russia is positioned for a hot-war attack on Ukraine that the Biden administration warned could come “at any point” — but the country is already suffering an attack of a different kind. A sweeping malware campaign remains ongoing, which experts agree is intended to permanently disrupt organizatio...

How to Buy Precious Patching Time as Log4j Exploits Fly

Sure, Apache got a patch out fast when the Log4j logging library vulnerability – aka Javageddon or “up there with Shellshock” – exploded last week. But emergency patches take days best-case scenario or weeks to install: plenty of time for attackers to do their worst. Which they lickety-split did,...

Kronos Ransomware Outage Drives Widespread Payroll Chaos

Kronos, the workforce management platform, has been hit with a ransomware attack that it says will leave its cloud-based services unavailable for several weeks – and it’s suggesting that customers seek other ways to get payroll and other HR tasks accomplished. The outage has left cataclysmic issu...

How to Build an Incident-Response Plan, Before Security Disaster Strikes

In a startling discovery, a recent report found that 98 percent of companies have experienced at least one cloud data breach in the past 18 months, compared to 79 percent last year. The same report disclosed that nearly 60 percent of the 200 CISOs and security decision-makers surveyed considered...

Bring Your APIs Out of the Shadows to Protect Your Business

Pankaj Gupta, Senior Director, Citrix APIs are immensely more complex to secure. What was previously one request to one server has become dozens or hundreds of requests to dozens or hundreds of entities. In the past, you defended one large application with a single front door. Now you must defend...

Poly Network Recoups $610M Stolen from DeFi Platform

A threat actor called “Mr. White Hat” has returned the $610 million they stole from the decentralized finance platform Poly Network. The breached company did everything from threaten to sic law enforcement on the attacker on up to its ultimate offer: the position of chief security officer in...

COVID-19 Contact-Tracing Data Exposed, Fake Vax Cards Circulate

This week, the Indiana Department of Health issued a notice that the state’s COVID-19 contact-tracing system had been exposed via a cloud misconfiguration, revealing names, emails, gender, ethnicity, race and dates of birth of more than 750,000 people. The incident shows that COVID-19 data could ...

Application Layer is Still the Front Door for Data Breaches

By Terry Ray, SVP and Fellow, Imperva Each year, the number of data breaches grows by 30% while the number of records compromised increases by an average of 224%. 2021 is far from over, but we’re already on pace for another record-setting year. In fact, Imperva research finds that more records we...

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...

Hobby Lobby Exposes Customer Data in Cloud Misconfiguration

Arts-and-crafts retailer Hobby Lobby has suffered a cloud-bucket misconfiguration, exposing a raft of customer information, according to a report. An independent security researcher who goes by the handle “Boogeyman” uncovered the issue and reported it to Motherboard in an online chat, according ...

Podcast: Ransomware Attacks Exploded in Q4 2020

Ransomware attacks continue to plague companies, with researchers from Fortinet’s Fortiguard Labs saying they saw an explosion in ransomware activity towards the end of the fourth quarter of 2020. Derek Manky According to Fortinet’s new “FortiGuard Labs Threat Report: Disruption Key Threat Trend ...

WestRock Ransomware Attack Hinders Packaging Production

WestRock – the second-largest packaging company in the U.S. – continues to restore its systems, two weeks after it discovered it was the victim of a ransomware attack. WestRock, which has more than 320 manufacturing facilities globally, creates packaging supplies for a bevy of high-profile client...

ADT Tech Hacks Home-Security Cameras to Spy on Women

Former ADT employee Telesforo Aviles took note when there were attractive women at a home he serviced in the Dallas area. Then he would add his personal email address to their accounts so he could have around-the-clock access to their most private moments, according to the U.S. Attorneys’ Office...

New Year, New Ransomware: Babuk Locker Targets Large Corporations

Only a few days into the new year, one of the first new ransomware strains of 2021 has been discovered. Dubbed Babuk Locker, the ransomware appears to have successfully compromised five companies thus far, according to new research. The research author, Chuong Dong, a computer science student at...

Nuclear Weapons Agency Hacked in Widening Cyberattack

The Energy Department and its National Nuclear Security Administration NNSA, which is the agency that maintains the U.S. nuclear stockpile, have been compromised as part of the widespread cyberattack uncovered this week stemming from the massive SolarWinds hack. An exclusive report by Politico...

RansomExx Ransomware Gang Dumps Stolen Embraer Data: Report

Hackers have dumped sensitive company data that was stolen during a ransomware attack last month on aircraft manufacturer Embraer. The compromised data appeared on a new dark web site created to publish leaked information, according to a published report. The move appears to be a revenge for the...

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...

Office 365 OAuth Attack Targets Coinbase Users

Office 365 users are receiving emails purporting to come from cryptocurrency platform Coinbase, which ask them to download updated Terms of Service via an OAuth consent app. But when they agree to do so, users are unknowingly giving attackers full access to their email. OAuth is an open standard...

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...

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...

DDoS Attacks Skyrocket as Pandemic Bites

The first half of 2020 saw a significant uptick in the number of distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks compared to the same period last year — a phenomenon that appears to be directly correlated to the global coronavirus pandemic. Neustar’s Security Operations Center SOC saw a 151 percent...

Revamped Qbot Trojan Packs New Punch: Hijacks Email Threads

Attacks attributed to the Qbot trojan, known as the “Swiss Army knife” of malware, are on the uptick with a reported 100,000 recent infections, according to researchers. Qbot, an ever-evolving information-stealing trojan that’s been around since 2008, has shifted tactics again and adopted a bevy ...

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...

Microsoft Revamps Windows Insider Preview Bug Bounty Program

Microsoft has revamped its Windows Insider Preview bug bounty program with higher rewards and an improved portal for bounty hunters to report flaws, in an effort to help sniff out more vulnerabilities on its platform. The Microsoft Windows Insider Preview bounty program is part of the Microsoft...

Encryption Under ‘Full-Frontal Nuclear Assault’ By U.S. Bills

Encryption expert Riana Pfefferkorn believes new proposed laws – the EARN IT Act and the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act – pose dire threats to cybersecurity and privacy. In this Threatpost interview, Pfefferkorn, who is associate director of Surveillance and Cybersecurity at the Stanford...

Apple Security Research Device Program Draws Mixed Reactions

Apple’s long anticipated Security Research Device program has launched, giving select security researchers access to testable iPhones that will make it easier for them to find iOS vulnerabilities. The program offers security researchers specially configured iPhones with shell access, and special...

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...

Secret Service Creates Cyber Fraud Task Forces

The U.S. Secret Service has created the Cyber Fraud Task Forces CFTFs, aimed at preventing, detecting and mitigating complex cyber-enabled financial crime – including making arrests and convictions. The CFTF is the result of a formal merging of two of the Secret Service’s existing units into a...

The Enemy Within: How Insider Threats Are Changing

Insider threats are ramping up – with new kinds of concerns in this category beginning to emerge. This is happening against a heady backdrop: Makeshift home offices, a cavalcade of new distractions and a tectonic shift to the cloud have recently collided to create an entirely new world for...

Report: ‘BlueLeaks’ Exposes Sensitive Data From Police Departments

Thousands of sensitive police department files – including police and FBI reports – were published on Friday by DDoSecrets Distributed Denial of Secrets, a self-proclaimed “transparency collective” that publishes covert data. The almost 270 gigabytes of data, dubbed “BlueLeaks,” is reportedly fro...

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...

RATicate Group Hits Industrial Firms With Revolving Payloads

Researchers have unearthed a new cybercrime group, RATicate, which is behind several waves of malspam attacks targeting industrial companies with various information-stealing payloads – from LokiBot to Agent Tesla. At least six separate campaigns have been tied to RATicate, with the first wave...

New Android Malware Targets PayPal, CapitalOne App Users

An Android mobile malware has been uncovered that steals payment data from users of popular financial apps like PayPal, Barclays, CapitalOne and more. The infostealer, called EventBot, has targeted users of more than 200 different banking, money-transfer services and general cryptocurrency wallet...

'Unbreakable' Smart Lock Draws FTC Ire for Deceptive Security Claims

The Federal Trade Commission has slapped Tapplock, the maker of smart padlocks that it bills as “unbreakable,” with an official complaint that could lead to fines down the road. The agency alleges that the company engaged in false and deceptive claims about its security practices, after the lock...

Covid-19 Privacy Poll: Phone Tracking, Public Health and Surveillance

As the coronavirus pandemic accelerates, authorities worldwide are plotting ways to flatten the curve of infection rates using potentially privacy-busting measures such as phone tracking, facial recognition and other tech. In this Threatpost poll, we want your take on whether sacrificing personal...

Firefox Bug Opens iPhone AirPods to Third-Party Snooping

Five high-severity bugs were fixed in the Firefox web browser with the release of version 74 by the Mozilla Foundation on Tuesday. In addition, Mozilla reported a quirky moderate-severity flaw that allows hackers to target iPhone users and collect data tied to connected AirPods, if in use. In...

Spread of Coronavirus-Themed Cyberattacks Persists with New Attacks

As the coronavirus blows up into a worldwide pandemic, threat actors continue to exploit the disease to spread malware. Just this week, cybersecurity professionals identified a bevy of new threats ranging from coronavirus-themed malware attacks, booby-trapped URLs and credential stuffing scams. O...

Google Sets Record High in Bug-Bounty Payouts

Google paid out $6.5 million in bug-bounty rewards in 2019, which doubles the internet behemoth’s previous annual top total. It has also highlighted additional bonuses that are now in effect for Chrome and Android. Last year saw some notable changes for Google’s Vulnerability Reward Programs VRPs...

Amazon's Blink Smart Security Cameras Open to Hijack

Multiple high-severity vulnerabilities have been discovered in Amazon-owned Blink XT2 security camera systems, which if exploited could give attackers complete control over them. The internet of things IoT cameras not to be confused with the Blink open-source browser engine, consist of a wireless...

ThreatList: Admin Rights for Third Parties is the Norm

Organizations are continuing to fall down on the job when it comes to addressing cybersecurity risk around third parties; in fact, 61 percent of respondents in a recent survey said they’re unsure if partners, contractors, suppliers and others are accessing or attempting to access unauthorized dat...

Pwn2Own Expands Into Industrial Control Systems Hacking

Industrial control systems ICS used to manage critical infrastructure and manufacturing will be the main target in next year’s popular Pwn2Own’s annual hacking competition. Over the past few years, Pwn2Own – a hacking contest that draws in white-hat hackers looking for fame and fortune through...

Rules-Based Policy Approaches Need to Go

Enterprises are making tremendous investments in their digital transformations, and no wonder: Increasingly, those who can more rapidly part from old, manual and antiquated ways of managing technology and shift to new ways of thinking will come out on top. That’s especially true when it comes to...