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...

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...

GoDaddy Hack Breaches Hosting Account Credentials

UPDATE GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain name registrar, is warning customers that attackers may have obtained their web hosting account credentials. An “unauthorized individual” was able to access users’ login details in an intrusion that the company said took place back in October — the compa...

$100K Paid Out for Google Cloud Shell Root Compromise

Google has awarded its inaugural annual top prize for the Google Cloud Platform GCP, for vulnerabilities found in the Google Cloud Shell. The find — a container escape that leads to host root access and the ability to use privileged containers — has earned $100,000 for Dutch researcher Wouter ter...

Zynga Faces Lawsuit Over Massive Words with Friends Breach

Mobile game developer Zynga could face a class-action lawsuit stemming from a massive data breach last September, which impacted 218 million users of the Words with Friends mobile app. The news comes as other big names face security incidents: T-Mobile and Carnival Cruise Lines have admitted this...

Forrester: Keeping Smart Cities Safe From Hacks

SAN FRANCISCO – Municipalities today are dealing with an unanticipated number of cyberthreats, Merritt Maxim, an analyst at Forrester, said last week at the RSA Conference 2020. Local and state governments are increasingly being targeted by ransomware attacks, phishing emails and business email...

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...

Podcast: The Roadblocks and Opportunities For Women in Cybersecurity

In 2019, diversity in the cybersecurity was thrust to the forefront with recognition from both vendors and experts. The tech industry is facing challenges around diversity in general, but women are particularly underrepresented. And with an estimated 3.5 million jobs are expected to remain unfill...

China-Linked Hackers Spy on Texts With MessageTap Malware

Researchers have discovered a new malware used for cyber-espionage efforts by China-linked threat group APT41. The malware intercepts telecom SMS server traffic and sniffs out certain phone numbers and SMS messages – particularly those with keywords relating to Chinese political dissidents. The...

U.S. Sanctions North Korean Group Behind WannaCry, Sony Hacks

The U.S. has slapped sanctions on three well-known North Korean state-sponsored hacker groups – including the group that was tied to the 2017 WannaCry ransomware attacks and the 2014 cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment. The three that were sanctioned are the infamous Lazarus Group, as well...

Cryptolocking WordPress Plugin Locks Up Blog Posts

A malicious WordPress plugin ironically called WP Security has been spotted in the wild encrypting blog posts and rendering the content unreadable. It’s capable of targeting individual posts — an unusual behavior, according to researchers. According to analysis from Sucuri, the plugin obtains a...

SAS 2019: Fake News Peddlers Adopt Clever New Trick to Fool Facebook, Twitter

Fake news peddlers have devised a cunning new way to stump Facebook, Twitter and others cracking down on lies and half-truths spreading on social media. Instead of linking to fake news, bad actors are now linking to posts promoting older news articles that may no longer be accurate – but won’t be...

Mozilla Firefox 65 Ups the Ante on Privacy with Anti-Tracking Efforts

Mozilla has unveiled new anti-tracking policies and redesigned privacy controls in tandem with the release of Firefox 65 on Tuesday. The company announced a new set of redesigned controls for the Content Blocking section, where users can choose their desired level of privacy protection. These are...

Recently-Patched Adobe ColdFusion Flaw Exploited By APT

An Adobe ColdFusion vulnerability, patched two months ago, was being exploited in the wild by a China-linked APT group, researchers found. The vulnerability, CVE-2018-15961, is a critical unrestricted file upload bug that could also lead to arbitrary code-execution, researchers at Volexity, who...

Threatpost News Wrap Podcast For Oct. 12

Threatpost editors Lindsey O’Donnell and Tara Seals discuss the top news of the week ended Oct. 12. The week started with a bang with a report that Google did not disclose a potential data breach in Google+, likely contributing to the tech giant’s decision to shut down the social networking...

ThreatList: Credential Theft Spikes by Triple Digits in U.S.

Credential theft was substantially up in the United States during the third quarter – even as declines were charted in Europe and Asia. What credentials go for on the Dark Web. Periodic analysis from Blueliv shows a whopping 141 percent increase in compromised credentials from North American...

FBI’s BEC Crackdown Leads To 74 Arrests Globally

The FBI announced Monday the results of a major crackdown on scammers behind business email compromise BEC campaigns that resulted in 74 arrests and the retrieval of millions of dollars. Several U.S. federal authorities and police from other countries were involved in Operation WireWire, a...

Google Awards Record $112,500 Bounty for Android Exploit Chain

Prolific bug hunter Guang Gong has earned the highest-ever payout for a vulnerability in the history of Google’s Android Security Rewards program, which began in 2015. He earned a combined $112,500 for the disclosure of an Android exploit chain impacting Google’s Pixel handset that could allow an...

Oracle Issues Emergency Patches for ‘JoltandBleed’ Vulnerabilities

Oracle pushed out an emergency update for vulnerabilities affecting several of its products that rely on its proprietary Jolt protocol. The bugs were discovered by researchers at ERPScan who named the series of five vulnerabilities JoltandBleed. The vulnerabilities are severe, with two of the bug...

Macs Not Receiving EFI Firmware Security Updates as Expected

Since the Thunderstrike bootkit attacks targeting Apple firmware were disclosed in 2015, Apple has bundled subsequent EFI updates with its regular macOS security and software updates in an attempt to improve protection around its hardware. Researchers at Duo Security, however, have uncovered that...

Microsoft Extends Edge Bug Bounty Program Indefinitely

Microsoft said Wednesday it would no longer impose a time limit for its Edge bug bounty program. The Redmond, Wash. based company announced the Edge on Windows Insider Preview WIP program in August 2016 as a means to incentivize researchers to find and report vulnerabilities in the browser...

Ubuntu Update Includes OpenSSL Fixes

Ubuntu users are being urged to update their operating systems to address a handful of recently patched OpenSSL vulnerabilities which affect Ubuntu and its derivatives. Developers with Canonical, the company that oversees the Linux distribution, announced the updates on Tuesday, encouraging users...

Apple Patches Critical Kernel Vulnerabilities

Apple today released new versions of iOS and macOS Sierra and addressed some overlapping code execution vulnerabilities in both its mobile and desktop operating systems. The updates were part of a bigger release of security updates from Apple that also included Safari, iCloud for Windows, and...

Google Patches Quadrooter Vulnerabilities in Android

The Quadrooter vulnerabilities made a lot of people take notice because the scale of affected Android devices more than 900,000 put it on a level with Stagefright and other bugs that impact a large majority of the Android ecosystem. Some details on the four vulnerabilities were publicly disclosed...

Obihai Patches Memory Corruption, DoS, CSRF Vulnerabilities

Obihai Technology recently patched vulnerabilities in its ObiPhone IP phones that could have led to memory corruption, buffer overflow, and denial of service conditions, among other outcomes. The California-based company manufactures IP-enabled phones and VOIP telephone adapters it calls OBi...

Adobe Emergency Update Patches Flash Zero Day

As promised earlier this week, Adobe today released an updated version of Flash Player that includes a patch for a zero-day vulnerability. Adobe said it is aware of the existence of a public exploit for CVE-2016-4117, but said the flaw has not been publicly attacked. The vulnerability affects Fla...

3.2 Million Servers Vulnerable to JBoss Attack

Cisco Talos said on Friday that 3.2 million servers are vulnerable to the JBoss flaw used as the initial point of compromise in the recent SamSam ransomware attacks. Worse, researchers said that thousands of servers have already been backdoored. Hardest hit have been K-12 schools running library...

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...

Microsoft Brings Perfect Forward Secrecy to Windows

Microsoft yesterday added four cryptographic cipher suites to its default priority ordering list in Windows, a move that brings Perfect Forward Secrecy to the operating system. Update 3042058 is available for now only on the Microsoft Download Center, affording users the opportunity to test the...

Seagate Business NAS Firmware Vulnerabilities Disclosed

Firmware running on certain Seagate network-attached storage devices that are popular with small businesses and home offices, are vulnerable to remote attacks. Researchers at Beyond Binary, a security consulting firm in Australia, on Sunday went public with their disclosure after a nearly...

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...

Fake AV Defru Puts New Spin on Rogue AV

Rogue antivirus was once the scourge of the Internet, and while this sort of malware is not entirely extinct, it’s fallen out of favor among criminals as users have become more aware and security products have gotten better at blocking the threat. Image via TechNet However, Daniel Chipiristeanu, ...

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...

Nearly 2000 Sites Vulnerable to Ruby on Rails Cookie Problem

A lingering security issue in Ruby on Rails that stems from a setting in the framework’s cookie-based storage mechanism is still present in almost 2,000 websites. Sites using an old version of Ruby on Rails that relies on CookieStore, the framework’s default cookie storage mechanism, are at risk...

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...

TrueType Font Flaws in July 2013 Microsoft Patch Tuesday

Going all the way back to the Duqu attacks, font-parsing vulnerabilities and exploits have been symptomatic of some high-end espionage attacks targeting the Windows kernel. As a result, with hackers paying more attention to the core of the Windows OS, this year Microsoft has had to address a numb...

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...

Attackers Target Older Java Bugs

It’s no secret that Java has moved to the top of the target list for many attackers. It has all the ingredients they love: ubiquity, cross-platform support and, best of all, lots of vulnerabilities. Malware targeting Java flaws has become a major problem, and new statistics show that this epidemi...

Ruby on Rails Patches DoS, XSS Vulnerabilities

The developers of Ruby on Rails, the popular web app framework, released four new versions of the product yesterday, complete with fixes for a series of vulnerabilities that could have lead to denial of service attacks and XSS injections. Four vulnerabilities in total are addressed in versions...

New Attacks Leverage Adobe Sandbox Bypass Against Uyghur Activists

Attackers with a control infrastructure based in China are leveraging the same vulnerability exploited by Miniduke to attack Uyghur and Tibetan activists with new exploits. Researchers at Kaspersky Lab and AlienVault discovered a spear phishing campaign targeting non-governmental activists with P...

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,...

Adobe Patches Four ColdFusion Flaws Exploited in Wild

Adobe delivered a security hotfix for its ColdFusion application server today, repairing a host of vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild. The company had recommended a series of mitigations in a Jan. 7 advisory as a stopgap until today’s hotfix was released. Two of the vulnerabilities affec...

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...

New Version of Stoned Bootkit Said to Bypass Windows 8 Secure Boot

A security researcher who has in the past has created low-level rootkits capable of staying resident on an infected machine after reboots, said he has now accomplished the same feat on Windows 8, which hasn’t even hit the shelves yet. Peter Kleissner said he has created a new version of his Stone...

April Patch Tuesday Fixes Critical IE, SMB Bugs

Microsoft has released its April Patch Tuesday fixes, a large group of patches that includes updates for several critical holes in Internet Explorer as well as a patch that finally fixes the SMB client bug that disclosed publicly in February. The most critical of the 17 bulletins that Microsoft...

Microsoft Releases Huge Patch Tuesday Update For 49 Bugs

Microsoft has released its largest-ever bundle of patches, pushing out 16 updates that fix a total of 49 individual vulnerabilities. The patches include updates for six critical vulnerabilities, most notably a huge fix for some remote code-execution bugs in various versions of Internet Explorer...

Microsoft Warns of New IE Code Execution Flaw

Microsoft’s security response team is investigating reports of a potentially dangerous code execution vulnerability in its flagship Internet Explorer browser. The company warned that an attacker could host a maliciously crafted web page and run arbitrary code if they could convince a user to visi...

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...

The Root of the Botnet Epidemic

Over the course of a few days in February 2000, a lone hacker was able to bring some of the Web’s larger sites to their knees, using just a few dozen machines and some relatively primitive software to cripple Yahoo, eBay, Etrade, Amazon, ZDnet and others for hours at a time. No one knew it at the...

The Berkeley breach: Is SaaS the answer?

One recent Friday afternoon I took time off to visit two new health providers: a new dentist nearer my home and an orthopedic to look at my lateral epicondylitis. In both cases, as a new patient, I filled in page after page of medical history and personal information, including my Social Security...