Signal Tests Upgraded Cryptography for Groups Function

Signal, the encrypted messaging platform, is planning to launch an upgraded secure group messaging and communities function. Signal’s groups are private, meaning that the service itself doesn’t keep a record of a user’s group memberships, group titles, group avatars or group attributes. But the w...

Austin Man Indicted for Stealing Unreleased Music from Artists

A 27-year-old man who allegedly impersonated a music producer in an effort to nab unreleased music from various artists has been indicted. If convicted, he faces 27 years in prison on charges of conspiring with others to commit wire fraud, computer intrusion and committing aggravated identity...

U.S. Universities Get Failing Grades for DMARC Adoption

The U.S. higher education system is lagging when it comes to implementing email security – even though the segment remains a top target for phishing and spam campaigns. According to an analysis from Red Sift shared with Threatpost, only 3 percent of the top 200 schools in the 2020 WSJ/THE College...

CISO and Security Vendor Relationships are Good for a Laugh in New Comic Videos

It’s not easy being a CISO. One could say “intense” might be the perfect descriptor for the CISO work environment. Tasked with the unenviable job of keeping the organization safe, carrying the burden of failed protection and taking hits for successful breaches, CISOs can never rest. They are...

France's 'Secure' Telegram Replacement Hacked in an Hour

The French Government last week launched a custom messaging application called Tchap, touting it as being “more secure than Telegram.” One small snag however: The platform has already – quelle dommage! – been hacked. French security researcher Robert Baptiste, a.k.a. Elliot Alderson, downloaded t...

Sizing Up The Scourge of Credential Stuffing

Last year, 2.3 billion credentials were stolen from 51 different organizations, including Ancestry.com, Imgur and Virgin America. Where do all those user names go? In Shape Security’s second annual Credential Spill Report, it found that billions of stolen digital IDs are contributing to an epidem...

Bad Microsoft Meltdown Patch Made Some Windows Systems Less Secure

UPDATE Researcher Ulf Frisk has created a proof-of-concept exploit demonstrating that Microsoft’s January Patch Tuesday update made security matters worse when it comes to memory vulnerabilities associated with Intel’s CPU bug Meltdown. Frisk, a Swedish IT security expert, reported on Tuesday tha...

Oracle MICROS POS Vulnerability Puts 300,000 Systems at Risk

Point-of-sale systems are rich targets for attackers, given their status as a gateway to credit card information, customer and back-office data and other goodies. A recently patched vulnerability in Oracle’s MICROS POS system software can lead to attackers gaining full access to the systems, say...

Chain of 11 Bugs Takes Down Galaxy S8 at Mobile Pwn2Own

The mobile version of the annual Pwn2Own contest wrapped up today in Tokyo with an unprecedented attack chain leveling the Samsung Galaxy S8. Researchers from MWR Labs used 11 vulnerabilities across six different mobile applications to execute code on Samsung’s flagship device and exfiltrate data...

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...

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...

Emergency Update Patches Zero Day in Microsoft Malware Protection Engine

Microsoft made quick work of what two prominent Google researchers called the worst Windows vulnerability in recent memory, releasing an emergency patch Monday night, 48 hours after Google’s private disclosure was made. The mystery Windows zero day CVE-2017-0290 was in the Microsoft Malware...

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...

FDA, DHS Investigating St. Jude Device Vulnerabilities

The U.S. government has entered into the St. Jude-MedSec-Muddy Waters fray with an investigation into claims St. Jude medical devices are vulnerable to cyberattacks. The Food and Drug Administration and Department of Homeland Security also apparently disapprove of the approach taken by MedSec 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...

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...

OPM Warned About Vulnerabilities, Governance Weaknesses

It’s hardly a surprise that the U.S. Office of Personnel Management OPM was targeted by nation-state hackers, given the sensitivity of the personal information the office stored. It’s also no shocker that OPM has been successfully infiltrated more than once given the state of its information...

Ryan Naraine on SAS 2015

Dennis Fisher talks with Ryan Naraine, the long lost co-founder of Threatpost, about the upcoming Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit in Cancun and how much the conference has grown in the last few years. Music by Chris Gonsalves Download: digitalunderground184.mp3...

1,800 Domains Overtaken by Flash Zero Day

When the Blackhole exploit kit went away after the arrest of its alleged creator and maintainer Paunch, there were questions about which kit would rise up as its successor. It seems that the Angler exploit kit has ascended to the throne. The most definitive evidence seems to be the constant...

June 2014 Microsoft Patch Tuesday security updates

As expected, Microsoft delivered a patch today for a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8 that was disclosed by HP’s Zero Day Initiative three weeks ago, six months after it was reported to the ZDI. The IE8 patch, MS14-035, is included in a cumulative Internet Explorer rollup that patche...

Google Fixes Four High-Risk Flaws in Chrome Before Pwn2Own

Google has fixed several serious security vulnerabilities in Chrome 33, just ahead of the Pwn2Own hacking competition at CanSecWest this week, which surely will reveal several more new bugs in the browser. The company’s Chrome browser is always at the top of the target list for contestants in...

OpenSSL Man-in-the-middle flaw fixed in Ruby

The maintainers of Ruby have fixed a serious flaw in its SSL client that could have allowed an attacker to conduct man-in-the-middle attacks by spoofing an SSL server. The vulnerability lies in the OpenSSL toolkit that’s built in to Ruby and is present in several versions of the software from 1.8...

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...

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...

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...

New PDF Attack Targets Aviation Defense Industry

FireEye reported today it had detected a new critical PDF attack targeting the aviation defense industry. Malware Page exploits a stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability in Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader. An attacker would be able to execute code remotely via a crafted argument to the getIcon...

Adobe Issues Emergency Fix For Flash Player Vulnerabilities

Adobe on Monday issued two emergency fixes for critical security vulnerabilities in its Flash Player product. The vulnerabilities, if left unpatched, could allow an attacker to take control of a system running a vulnerable version of Flash Player. Adobe on Monday issued two emergency fixes for...

U.S. Says Cybercrime a Major National Security Threat

A new report from the National Security Council warns that international cybercrime has reached the upper echelon of threats of to the security of the United States and is responsible for as much as $1 billion in losses in just one year in the U.S. The report, which focuses on a number of broad...

Experts Converge at RFIDsec to Discuss NFC Security Implications

RFID security problems have been biting at the ankles of users and companies that deploy the technology for several years now, but they’ve been mostly on the fringes of mainstream security concerns. But now, as the technology becomes more widespread and pervasive, that is beginning to change...

Yonggang "Gary" Min (DuPont)

Min worked at Delaware based chemicals giant DuPont for over a decade before he surreptitiously took a job at DuPont competitor, Victrex. Over a four month period after accepting that offer, and before informing DuPont of his decision, Min systematically copied thousands of pages of confidential...

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...

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...

Black Basta Ransomware Teams Up with Malware Stalwart Qbot

A newcomer on the ransomware scene has coopted a 14-year-old malware variant to help it maintain persistence on a targeted network in a recent attack, researchers have found. Black Basta, a ransomware group that emerged in April, leveraged Qbot, a.k.a. Quakbot, to move laterally on a compromised...

Unpatched DNS Bug Puts Millions of Routers, IoT Devices at Risk

An unpatched Domain Name System DNS bug in a popular standard C library can allow attackers to mount DNS poisoning attacks against millions of IoT devices and routers to potentially take control of them, researchers have found. Researchers at Nozomi Networks Labs discovered the flaw affecting the...

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...

That Toy You Got for Christmas Could Be Spying on You

Many adults found it charming when Mattel upgraded its classic Fisher-Price Chatter telephone for its 60th anniversary in October with actual Bluetooth capabilities, so grownups, too, can use it — and for actual mobile phone calls. But flaws in the way the toy pairs with Bluetooth means that othe...

Java Code Repository Riddled with Hidden Log4j Bugs; Here’s Where to Look

There’s an enormous amount of software vulnerable to the Log4j bug through Java software supply chains — and administrators and security pros likely don’t even know where to look for it. About 17,000 Java packages in the Maven Central repository, the most significant collection of Java packages...

Google Takes Down Glupteba Botnet; Files Lawsuit Against Operators

Google’s Threat Analysis Group TAG has disrupted the blockchain-enabled botnet known as Glupteba, which is made up of around 1 million compromised Windows and internet of things IoT devices. In tandem, Google also filed a lawsuit against the botnet’s operators. Glupteba, already a formidable...

Top 10 Cybersecurity Best Practices to Combat Ransomware

If you’re like most IT professionals, the threat of a ransomware attack might keep you up at night. And you have a valid reason to worry — ransomware doesn’t discriminate. Organizations across every industry, public or private, are potential victims, if they haven’t been victims already. In fact,...

Designing a Proactive Ransomware Playbook for Today’s Threat Landscape

By Paul Baird, Chief Technology Security Office, Qualys Ransomware attacks are among the most significant cyber-threats facing organizations today. According to research by Gartner, ransomware is the highest priority 78 percent and most important emerging risk to track. Yet, organizations are sti...

Gigabyte Allegedly Hit by AvosLocker Ransomware

The AvosLocker ransomware gang is claiming that it breached tech giant Gigabyte and has leaked a sample of what it claims are files stolen from the Taiwanese company’s network. It’s offering to sell the rest. On Wednesday, the gang posted a “press release” announcing that it had purportedly gutte...

Keep Attackers Out of VPNs: NSA, CISA Offer Guidance

Unsecured VPNs can be a hot mess: Just ask Colonial Pipeline which got pwned by the REvil ransomware crooks with an old VPN password or the 87,000 at least Fortinet customers whose credentials for unpatched SSL-VPNs were posted online earlier this month. Vulnerabilities in VPN servers are like...

FamousSparrow APT Spies on Hotels, Governments

A cyberespionage group dubbed “FamousSparrow” by researchers has taken flight, targeting hotels, governments and private organizations around the world with a custom backdoor called, appropriately, “SparrowDoor.” It’s one of the advanced persistent threats APTs that targeted the ProxyLogon...

Attackers Impersonate DoT in Two-Day Phishing Scam

Threat actors impersonated the U.S. Department of Transportation USDOT in a two-day phishing campaign that used a combination of tactics – including creating new domains that mimic federal sites so as to appear to be legitimate – to evade security detections. Between Aug. 16-18, researchers at...

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...

Ransomware Volumes Hit Record Highs as 2021 Wears On

Ransomware has seen a significant uptick so far in 2021, with global attack volume increasing by 151 percent for the first six months of the year as compared with the year-ago half. Meanwhile, the FBI has warned that there are now 100 different strains circulating around the world. From a...

Hacked Data for 69K LimeVPN Users Up for Sale on Dark Web

The VPN provider known as LimeVPN has been hit with a hack affecting 69,400 user records, according to researchers. A hacker claims to have stolen the company’s entire customer database before knocking its website offline Threatpost confirmed that as of press time, the website was down. The stole...

What’s Making Your Company a Ransomware Sitting Duck

They thought they were all set. They patched the Exchange Server. They ran Microsoft’s testing script to find out whether the server had been exploited. Nope, the test concluded, you’re clean as a whistle. So how did this unnamed organization wind up having been exploited via ProxyLogon? “It turn...