Cisco Warns of Critical Flaw in Teleconferencing Gear

Cisco Systems is warning customers of a critical vulnerability affecting three of its TelePresence MCU platform models. The flaw could give attackers the ability to remotely execute code on impacted systems or create conditions favorable to a denial-of-service DoS attack. According to an advisory...

Nagios Core Patches Root, RCE Vulnerabilities

Nagios Core has been updated to take care of two critical vulnerabilities that can be pinned together to attack servers hosting the open source IT infrastructure monitoring software. The flaws were privately disclosed by researcher Dawid Golunski of Legal Hackers, who said the vulnerabilities can...

Adobe Patches 31 Vulnerabilities, Flash Zero-Day Under Attack

Adobe patched 31 vulnerabilities across nine different product lines Tuesday morning, including a zero-day vulnerability in Flash Player the company claims is being used in targeted attacks against Internet Explorer users on Windows. That vulnerability CVE-2016-7892 is one of 16 bugs in Flash tha...

Exploit Code Released for NTP Vulnerability

A researcher has released a proof-of-concept exploit for a vulnerability in the Network Time Protocol daemon that could crash a server with a single, malformed packet. The Network Time Foundation’s NTP Project on Monday patched the bug and nine others with the release of NTP 4.2.8p9. The...

Adobe Patches Nine Code Execution Flaws in Flash Player

Two weeks after rushing out an emergency patch for a zero-day vulnerability, Adobe today released another Flash Player security update. The new release patched nine vulnerabilities, all of which expose the host system to remote code execution. Adobe said it is not aware of public exploits against...

Apple Squashes 68 Security Bugs With Sierra Release

With the release of macOS Sierra 10.12 Tuesday, Apple snuffed out dozens of lingering security vulnerabilities in OS X El Capitan and Yosemite. Along with updates to its OS, Apple addressed security bugs in its Safari web browser and macOS Server in separate security bulletins, also released...

Patched libarchive Vulnerabilities Have Big Reach

The libarchive programming library was recently patched against three critical memory-related vulnerabilities that could be abused to execute code on computers running the vulnerable software. As is the case with most open source software packages, patching the core library is only half the battl...

CryptXXX Jumps From Angler to Neutrino Exploit Kit

Crooks behind the revamped CryptXXX 3.100 ransomware have switched its distribution from the Angler Exploit Kit to the Neutrino Exploit Kit. The sudden change in distribution was spotted on Monday by researchers at the SANS Internet Storm Center. “This is not the first time we’ve seen campaigns...

Researcher Pockets $30,000 in Chrome Bounties

Security researcher Mariusz Mlynski is having a good month. Having cashed in earlier in May to the tune of $15,500, Mlynski pocketed another $30,000 courtesy of Google’s bug bounty program after four high-severity vulnerabilities were patched in the Chrome browser, each worth $7,500 to the...

Juniper ScreenOS Backdoor Password

Researchers from two security firms have uncovered the password guarding one of the backdoors discovered in Juniper Networks’ ScreenOS, the operating system behind its NetScreen enterprise-grade firewalls. Fox-IT and Rapid7 found the secret code, which was disguised to look like debug code, said...

VMware Patches Pesky XXE Bug in Flex BlazeDS

VMware has patched an information disclosure vulnerability affecting a number of its products that use Flex BlazeDS. The original vulnerability was discovered and disclosed in August by Matthias Kaiser of Code White GmbH. Researchers there found a XML External Entity flaw in Apache Flex BlazeDS...

Emergency Adobe Flash Zero Day Patch Arrives Ahead of Schedule

Adobe has decided to patch the zero day vulnerability that was disclosed in Flash Player earlier this week today — instead of next week as originally scheduled. According to a security bulletin Adobe posted this morning the update actually fixes three vulnerabilities in the software, but the most...

Control Flow Guard Mitigation Bypass

Introduced in Windows 8.1 Update 3 and Windows 10, Control Flow Guard was Microsoft’s latest antidote to memory-corruption attacks. The technology was meant to stand up to attacks that had long ago figured out how to bypass previous-generation protections such as Address Space Layout Randomizatio...

June 2015 Microsoft Patch Tuesday Security Bulletins

IT administrators today were granted a relatively light month of security bulletins from Microsoft, which is likely to be welcomed given that Windows Server 2003 security support ends in little more than a month. Microsoft today released eight bulletins, two of them rated critical, including a...

December 2014 Adobe Reader, Acrobat Security Patches

Adobe is expected to update its Reader and Acrobat software next Tuesday as part of its scheduled security updates, and the updates will, according to an Adobe spokesperson, include patches for a Reader vulnerability disclosed this week by Google’s Project Zero. Researcher James Forshaw, a...

VMware Patches Apache Struts Flaws in vCOPS

VMware has patched several serious security vulnerabilities in its vCenter Operations Center Management suite, one of which could lead to remote code execution on vulnerable machines. All of the vulnerabilities that the company patched lie in the Apache Struts Java application framework, and the...

Crowdsourcing a Tool for Application Vulnerability Research

Pulling in security help on a project has traditionally meant either hiring more full-time help, or bringing in an outside consultant. Enterprises and vendors alike, however, are starting to really go outside the perimeter these days and are taking advantage of crowdsourcing. Given the paranoia i...

AskMen Purportedly Compromised by Nuclear Pack Kit

Users who visit AskMen.com, a men’s entertainment and lifestyle portal, are being hit with malicious code, potentially stemming from the Nuclear Pack exploit kit, researchers announced today. When a user stumbles across the site – or a localized version aus.askmen.com, etc. of it – malicious code...

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...

PHP Updated to Fix Heartbleed, Other Bugs

The maintainers of PHP have released two new versions of the scripting language that fix a number of bugs, including a pair of vulnerabilities related to OpenSSL. Versions 5.4.28 and 5.5.12 both contain that important patch, as well as fixes for more than a dozen other vulnerabilities. The fix fo...

Apache Update Resolves Security Vulnerabilities

Apache has released version 2.4.9 of its ubiquitous HTTP web server HTTPD, resolving two security vulnerabilities and a number of other bugs in the process. The Apache Software Foundation is recommending HTTPD 2.4.9 over all previous versions. The first patch fixes CVE-2014-0098. It aims to...

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...

Google Fixes 28 Security Flaws in Chrome 33

Google Chrome 33 is out, and the new version of the browser includes fixes for 28 security vulnerabilities, including a number of high-severity bugs. The company paid out more than $13,000 in rewards to researchers who reported vulnerabilities that were fixed in this release. One of the...

NTP Amplification Flaw To Blame For Gaming DDoS Attacks

US-CERT has issued an advisory that warns enterprises about distributed denial of service attacks flooding networks with massive amounts of UDP traffic using publicly available network time protocol NTP servers. Known as NTP amplification attacks, hackers are exploiting something known as the...

Exploit Kit Adds Vector for Silverlight Vulnerability

Developers behind the Angler Exploit Kit have apparently added a new exploit over the last week that leverages a known vulnerability in Microsoft’s Silverlight browser framework. Silverlight, similar to Adobe Flash, is Microsoft’s plug-in for streaming media on browsers and is perhaps most known...

Google Fixes Five Bugs in Chrome 18

Google has fixed five security vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser, including three high-severity flaws. One of the less-severe vulnerabilities fixed in Chrome 18 is a race condition in the browser’s sandbox. This round of patches in Chrome is one of the rare occasions when the company didn’t...

Google Releases Chrome 18, Fixes Nine Security Flaws

Google has released version 18 of its Chrome browser and has fixed a number of serious security vulnerabilities in the process. The latest version of Chrome also includes an updated release of the Flash player that now includes the background updated that enables users to set the software to upda...

Mobile, Android Threats Continued Sharp Growth in 2011

The occurrence of mobile malware increased by 155 percent across all platforms in 2011, and, according to Juniper Network’s 2011 Mobile Threat Report, malware specifically targeting the Android operating system saw its own increase of more than 3,000 percent. Juniper Networks attributes Android’s...

Adobe Issues Huge Patch for Reader and Acrobat

UPDATE: After announcing that it was accelerating a critical patch of its Reader program last week, Adobe pushed out a large patch on Tuesday, fixing 23 separate vulnerabilities in its Reader and Acrobat applications. The huge quarterly security update included company issued Security Bulletin...

Adobe to Release Critical Reader Patch Early

Adobe is moving up the release date for the patch for the critical bug in Reader and Acrobat and will now push the fix out on Oct. 5 instead of the following week. The flaw was disclosed last month and has been the target of attacks for several weeks now. The company said on Thursday that it has...

New Adobe PDF Zero-Day Flaw Under Attack

Adobe today sounded an alarm for a new zero-day flaw in its PDF Reader/Acrobat software, warning that hackers are actively exploiting the vulnerability in-the-wild. Details on the vulnerability are not yet public but the sudden warning from Adobe is a sure sign that rigged PDF documents are being...

Security Risks Abound in Virtualized Environments

Through 2012, 60 percent of virtualized servers will be less secure than the physical servers they replace, according to Gartner. Although they expect this figure to fall to 30 percent by the end of 2015, analysts warned that many virtualization deployment projects are being undertaken without...

Taming the Digital Asset Tsunami

Internet Protocol IP addresses and the devices, web services and cloud assets behind them are the lifeblood of modern businesses. But too often companies amass thousands of digital assets, creating an unmanageable mess for IT and security teams. Left unchecked, a single forgotten, abandoned or...

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...

Cyberattacks Rage in Ukraine, Support Military Operations

Cyberattacks against Ukraine have been used strategically to support ground campaigns, with five state-sponsored advanced persistent threat APT groups behind attacks that began in February. According to research published by Microsoft on Wednesday, the APTs involved in the campaigns are...

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...

Large-Scale Phishing-as-a-Service Operation Exposed

Microsoft uncovered a large-scale, well-organization and sophisticated phishing-as-a-service PhaaS operation. The turnkey platform allows users to customize campaigns and develop their own phishing ploys so they can then use the PhaaS platform to help with phishing kits, email templates and hosti...

HP Omen Hub Exposes Millions of Gamers to Cyberattack

Millions of devices running the HP Omen Gaming Hub were using on a driver with a bug that could give attackers kernel-mode access without administrator privileges. HP has since released a patch, but a new report on the flaw CVE-2021-3437 from researchers from SentinelLabs details how the gaming...

Apple: Image-Detection Backdoor ‘Narrow’ in Scope

Apple provided additional design and security details this week about the planned rollout of a feature aimed at detecting child sexual abuse material CSAM images stored in iCloud Photos. Privacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned that the process of flagging CSAM images...

Ransomware Payments Explode Amid ‘Quadruple Extortion’

Two reports slap hard figures on what’s already crystal clear: Ransomware attacks have skyrocketed, and ransomware payments are the comet trails that have followed them skyward. The average ransomware payment spiked 82 percent year over year: It’s now over half a million dollars, according to the...

Bad Apple: App Store Rife with Fraud, Fleeceware

A new analysis from the Washington Post reveals just how widespread fraud is across the Apple App Store, while also offering glimpse into the revenue flowing into Cupertino generated by those malicious activities. The Apple App Store has been under heightened scrutiny for maintaining its iron gri...

Fake Chrome App Anchors Rapidly Worming ‘Smish’ Cyberattack

A new Android malware that impersonates the Google Chrome app has spread to hundreds of thousands of people in the last few weeks, according to researchers. The fake app is being used as part of a sophisticated hybrid cyberattack campaign that also uses mobile phishing to steal credentials. Join...

Microsoft Offers Up To $30K For Teams Bugs

Microsoft wants to send the message the company is serious about the security of its popular Teams desktop application and it’s willing to put some cash behind the talk. A new bug-bounty program offers up to $30,000 for security vulnerabilities, with top payouts going to those with the most...

Home-Office Photos: A Ripe Cyberattack Vector

That photo that appears when someone disables his or her Zoom video, or those photos of a remote worker’s home office shared on Instagram may seem innocuous and playful. However, they could become ammunition for threat actors to launch targeted scams and put personal and critical data at risk, a...

Emotet's Takedown: Have We Seen the Last of the Malware?

Sherrod DeGrippo, senior director of threat research and detection with Proofpoint, shares insights on the global law enforcement and private-sector takedown of the major cybercrime tools such as Emotet. Last fall, agencies targeted TrickBot’s infrastructure to disrupt the prolific malware, and...

Joe Biden Campaign Subdomain Down After Hacktivist Defacement

A subdomain used by President-elect Joe Biden’s official campaign website was defaced last week by a self-proclaimed Turkish hacktivist and still remains out of commission. The subdomain, vote.joebiden.com, was part of the official campaign website JoeBiden.com used by the Biden campaign leading ...

Firing of CISA Chief Christopher Krebs Widely Condemned

Government officials and cybersecurity experts alike condemned President Trump’s firing of Christopher Krebs by tweet Tuesday, as the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA became the latest victim of the president’s housecleaning efforts after his failed bid at a...

Toymaker Mattel Hit by Ransomware Attack

Top toymaker Mattel revealed it was a victim of a ransomware attack that successfully encrypted some data and temporarily crippled a limited number of business functions. The disclosure was part of a U.S. Securities Exchange Commission SEC disclosure filed in late October. Mattel reported the...

Rapper Scams $1.2M in COVID-19 Relief, Gloats with 'EDD' Video

Rapper Fontrell Antonio Baines, who goes by the stage name “Nuke Bizzle,” made his first appearance in U.S. District Court in downtown Los Angeles on Friday after being charged with fraudulently applying for more than $1.2 million in jobless benefits under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic...

Feds Sound Alarm Over Emotet Attacks on State, Local Govs

A dramatic uptick in Emotet phishing attacks since July has led the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA to issue a warning that state and local governments need to fortify their systems against the trojan. “This increase has rendered Emotet one of the most prevalent ongoing...