Mozilla Tests DNS over HTTPS: Meets Some Privacy Pushback

The Mozilla Foundation is testing a new mechanism for securing domain name server traffic that uses the encrypted HTTPS channel. It is an attempt to speed up the internet, reduce the threat of man-in-the-middle attacks and keep prying eyes from monitoring what users do online. Starting in the nex...

Microsoft Patches Critical Windows DNS Client Vulnerabilities

Three critical Windows DNS client vulnerabilities were patched today by Microsoft, closing off an avenue where an attacker could relatively simply respond to DNS queries with malicious code and gain arbitrary code execution on Windows clients or Windows Server installations. The flaws were...

Google Warns of DoS and RCE Bugs in Dnsmasq

Seven flaws in what is known as Dnsmasq can be exploited by attackers who can use the bugs to carry out remote code execution, information exposure or a denial of service attacks against affected devices. Google researchers identified the flaws in a research paper published Monday, the same day a...

Microsoft Programming Error is Behind Dangerous Kernel Bug, Researchers Claim

Researchers claim a programming error in the Microsoft Windows kernel cracks the door open for malicious executables to bypass security software. The flaw, according to security firm EnSilo, has been present on previous versions of Windows dating back to Windows 2000 and can be found on Windows 1...

Nigerian BEC Scams Hit 500 Companies in 50 Countries

Nigerian cybercriminals targeting industrial firms have stolen a slew of sensitive technical drawings, network diagrams, cost estimates, and project plans already this year. The data, exfiltrated by a cocktail of different spyware programs, wasn’t stolen from just executives, but also operators,...

Mozilla Fixes 32 Vulnerabilities in Firefox 54

Mozilla fixed 32 vulnerabilities, including a critical bug that could have resulted in a crash, with the release Tuesday of Firefox 54, the latest version of its flagship browser. The critical bug, a use-after-free vulnerability, was dug up by longtime bug hunter Nils. The vulnerability...

Firefox 51 Begins Warning Users of Insecure HTTP Connections

Mozilla Foundation took steps with the release of Firefox 51 on Tuesday to communicate more clearly to users when they land on a HTTP website collecting personal information such as passwords that the site may not be secure. Going forward, Firefox will display a gray lock icon with a red...

Outlook Web Access Two-Factor Authentication Bypass Exists

Enterprises running Exchange Server have been operating under a false sense of security with regard to two-factor authentication implementations on Outlook Web Access OWA adding an extra layer of protection. A design weakness has been exposed that can allow an attacker to easily bypass 2FA and...

Google Play Hit With Rash of Auto-Rooting Malware

Researchers have identified a recent wave of malware targeting the Google Play app marketplace that entices users to download utilities and games that when installed surreptitiously root devices. The exploit, which mobile security firm Lookout calls autorooting malware, gives attackers complete...

Google Chrome Security Update 50.0.2662.75

Google on Wednesday pushed its third Chrome update since the beginning of March, patching a pair of high-severity vulnerabilities in the browser. Yesterday’s update brings Chrome to version 50.0.2662.75 and patched 20 vulnerabilities, according to the Google Chrome Releases blog. Eight of the bug...

OpenSSH Implementations with X11Forwarding Enabled Should Heed Recent Security Update

Users who choose to enable X11Forwarding in OpenSSH, or those who use software products that re-enable it, should pay close attention to last Wednesday’s OpenSSH security update. The latest version of the open source implementation of the SSH protocol patches a flaw that exposes it to command...

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...

VMware vCenter Server Patch Reissue

VMware on Saturday reissued a patch from October that incompletely addressed a critically rated remote code execution vulnerability in vCenter Server. The original vulnerability, CVE-2015-2342, was a poorly configured JMX RMI service in vCenter Server that was remotely accessible. The flaw allowe...

13 Million MacKeeper Records Found in Public Database

A trove of MacKeeper user data—some 13 million records—has been locked down after a researcher found an exposed and accessible database using a simple Shodan query. Chris Vickery revealed his discovery on Monday on Reddit in more of an appeal to reach officials at Kromtech, the parent company tha...

German Government Audits TrueCrypt

TrueCrypt continues to fascinate even though it hasn’t been updated in more than a year and has been cleared of backdoors in more than one extensive audit. The German government’s Federal Office for Information Security BSI is the latest to inspect and analyze the security of the abandoned open...

Android Stagefright Exploit Code Released to Public

Joshua Drake, the researcher who found the so-called Stagefright vulnerability in Android, today released exploit code to the public, which he hopes will be used to test systems’ exposure to the flaw. The move comes more than a month after vulnerability details were released in August during...

Remotely Exploitable Vulnerabilities in SAP Compression Algorithms

The two primary compression algorithms used by SAP SE products, some of the most popular enterprise and business management software platforms on the market, contain multiple, remotely exploitable security vulnerabilities. Martin Gallo of Core Security Consulting Services found vulnerabilities in...

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,...

July 2014 Microsoft Patch Tuesday Security Bulletins Updates

Tomorrow’s regularly scheduled patch update from Microsoft includes – go figure – another cumulative rollup for Internet Explorer and a critical fix for a Windows remote code execution bug. More of the same for sure, but there’s another bug being patched that may merit moving up a rung on your li...

October 2013 Oracle Java Critical Patch Update

On Tuesday, for the first time, Java security updates were included with the quarterly Oracle Critical Patch Update – and just as quickly, Java wasted no time elevating itself as the top concern for Oracle admins and security experts. Of the 51 Java patches released, 50 allow for remote code...

Google Fixes Three High-Risk Flaws in Chrome

There is a trio of high-risk security vulnerabilities in Google Chrome that have been patched in a new version of the browser released on Tuesday. The vulnerabilities all are use-after-free bugs, and Google paid a total of $5,000 in rewards to researchers who discovered and reported them. Google...

Google Fixes More Than a Dozen Flaws in Chrome 27

Google has released Chrome 27, a new version of its browser that includes a long list of security fixes, many of which are for high-risk vulnerabilities. The company handed out more than $14,000 in rewards to researchers who reported bugs fixed in the latest iteration of Chrome. Google’s security...

Microsoft Patches IE Zero Day Used In Watering Hole Attack

Microsoft wasted no time today delivering a patch for the Internet Explorer 8 vulnerability being exploited in watering hole attacks carried out against the U.S. Department of Labor website and nine others worldwide. Today’s Patch Tuesday security updates also include a fix for IE vulnerabilities...

Hacked Media Sites Serving Fake AV Malware

Websites belonging to a number of Washington, D.C.-area media outlets have been compromised in a series of opportunistic attacks with criminals using a watering-hole tactic to spread scareware, or phony antivirus software. Popular D.C. radio station WTOP, sister station Federal News Radio, and th...

Microsoft Patches Critical IE Vulnerabilities

Internet Explorer continues to dominate Microsoft’s 2013 security updates. Among the 12 bulletins and 57 vulnerabilities patched in today’s release was a cumulative update for the maligned browser and another fix for a bug being exploited in the wild. Last month, an out-of-band fix for IE 6-8...

Password Cracker Targets Siemens S7 PLCs

Siemens S7 programmable logic controllers, the same PLC family exploited by the Stuxnet malware, are in the crosshairs of a password-cracking tool that is capable of stealing credentials from industrial control systems. PLCs are microprocessors that automate mechanical processes inside factories,...

Java 7u11 Update Addresses Only One of Two Zero-Day Vulnerabilities

Microsoft can take some solace that it is not alone in sending out security updates that don’t fully address a zero-day vulnerability. A researcher at Immunity Inc., put Oracle on a similar hot seat this week when he reported that a recent out-of-band Java update repaired only one of two Java fla...

ENISA Outlines Security Regulations for EU Smart Grid Expansion

The European Union has set a series of ambitious goals for itself: by 2020, the 27 member states expect to collectively use 20 percent renewable energy, reduce CO2 emissions by 20 percent, and increase energy efficiency by 20 percent. In order to accomplish these goals, Europe will need to perfor...

Researcher Charlie Miller Joins Twitter Security Team

Twitter quietly is assembling a serious security team, with the most recent addition being Charlie Miller, the security researcher known for finding a long line of bugs in the iPhone and other Apple products. Miller, a respected and prolific researcher, will join the social network’s security tea...

RuggedCom Devices Have Hard-Coded SSL Keys

Siemens subsidiary RuggedCom’s Rugged Operating System ROS contains a vulnerability that could give an attacker the ability to decrypt SSL traffic between RuggedCom networking equipment and end-users, according to an ICS-CERT alert. Justin W. Clarke, a security researcher at Cylance Inc., disclos...

Deep Packet Inspection Firm Cyberoam Issues Fix Following Private Key Leak

Network security firm Cyberoam issued an over the air update for all of its Deep Packet Inspection DPI devices today after a decrypted version of the company’s universal private key was leaked online over the weekend. The New Jersey-based company pushed the hotfix after an anonymous commenter...

Carberp: It's Not Over Yet

On 20 March, Russian law enforcement agencies announced the arrest of a cybercriminal gang involved in stealing money using the Carberp Trojan. This is very good news, but unfortunately does not mark the end of the Carberp story. Evidently, those arrested were just one of the criminal gangs using...

Microsoft Aims to Make Life Harder, More Expensive For Attackers

MIAMI BEACH–It’s been a decade now since Microsoft began focusing on product security as a top priority and there have been a lot of successes and some failures along the way. But in that time, one of the things that most definitely has changed as a result of the Trustworthy Computing program is...

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...

Adam Shostack on Privacy and the PETS '09 Workshop

Dennis Fisher talks with Microsoft’s Adam Shostack about the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, the definition of privacy in today’s world and the role of technology in helping to enhance and protect that privacy. Show notes: Adam’s blog post on “Understanding Privacy” by Dan Solove...

Charney plugs Microsoft end-to-end trust at RSA Conference

Scott Charney used his keynote speech at the RSA Conference on Tuesday to talk up a variety of hardware and software-based technologies meant to infuse the Internet with more trust. Charney, the head of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing team, talked about the need for greater adoption of TPMs, co...

Adobe under fire for poor security response

In the wake of the zero-day attacks against Adobe’s Acrobat and Reader product lines, the company is taking a lot of flack for its poor response to handling the issue — specifically around communicating the risks and providing migitation guidance for end users. Over on the ZDNet Zero Day blog, I...

USB-based Wormable Malware Targets Windows Installer

Credit: Red Canary Wormable malware dubbed Raspberry Robin has been active since last September and is wriggling its way through USB drives onto Windows machines to use Microsoft Standard Installer and other legitimate processes to install malicious files, researchers have found. Researchers at...

Nation-state Hackers Target Journalists with Goldbackdoor Malware

Sophisticated hackers believed to be tied to the North Korean government are actively targeting journalists with novel malware dubbed Goldbackdoor. Attacks have consisted of multistage infection campaign with the ultimate goal of stealing sensitive information from targets. The campaign is believ...

Thousands of Malicious npm Packages Threaten Web Apps

More than 1,300 malicious packages have been identified in the most oft-downloaded JavaScript package repository used by developers, npm, in the last six months — a rapid increase that showcases how npm has become a launchpad for a range of nefarious activities. New research from open-source...

Threat Advisory: E-commerce Bots Use Domain Registration Services for Mass Account Fraud

While researching a recent large-scale bot campaign with CQ Prime Threat Research team lead, Dean Lendrum, we found attackers using domain parking and monetization services to register multiple domains, creating a large number of fake eCommerce accounts per domain. TL; DR ------ Analysis of...

Sprawling Active Attack Aims to Take Over 1.6M WordPress Sites

An active attack against more than 1.6 million WordPress sites is underway, with researchers spotting tens of millions of attempts to exploit four different plugins and several Epsilon Framework themes. The goal, they said, is complete site takeover using administrative privileges. The scope of t...

Magecart Credit Card Skimmer Avoids VMs to Fly Under the Radar

A new Magecart threat actor is stealing people’s payment card info from their browsers using a digital skimmer that uses a unique form of evasion to bypass virtual machines VM so it targets only actual victims and not security researchers. The Malwarebytes team discovered the new campaign, which...

Google Report Spotlights Controversial ‘Geofence Warrants’ by Police

Newly released data by Google sheds light on a controversial practice called “geofence warrants”, which describes the practice of law enforcement requesting mobile phone data of users within close proximity of a crime. Google said, in an August report, the number of geofence warrants the company...

46% of On-Prem Databases Globally Contain Vulnerabilities: Is Yours Safe?

By Elad Erez, Chief Innovation Officer, Imperva Is there a day that goes by where you don’t read a news headline about a mega-breach impacting millions of people? It’s an unlikely scenario, particularly at a time when the volume of data breaches are rising by an astonishing 30 percent annually...

What Ragnar Locker Got Wrong About Ransomware Negotiators – Podcast

The Ragnar Locker ransomware gang just put its victims on notice: Call for help – be it from investigators, the FBI or ransomware negotiators – and the punishment will be the publication of encrypted files. Bryce Webster-Jacobsen, director of intelligence operations at digital risk...

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...

XSS Bug in SEOPress WordPress Plugin Allows Site Takeover

A stored cross-site scripting XSS vulnerability in the SEOPress WordPress plugin could allow attackers to inject arbitrary web scripts into websites, researchers said. SEOPress is a search engine optimization SEO tool that lets site owners manage SEO metadata, social-media cards, Google Ad settin...

AdLoad Malware 2021 Samples Evade Apple XProtect

A swelling wave of AdLoad malware infections in macOS devices is cresting its way past Apple’s on-device malware scanner, researchers said. The campaign is using around 150 unique samples, some of which are signed by Apple’s notarization service. AdLoad is a well-known Apple threat that’s been...

Ransomware Giant REvil Disappears

All of REvil’s Dark Web sites slipped offline as of early Tuesday morning, and it’s not clear whether it’s due to the ransomware gang getting busted or whether the threat actors did it on purpose. The REvil ransomware operation, a.k.a. Sodinokibi, uses both clear web and Dark Web sites to negotia...