‘Malsmoke’ Exploits Microsoft’s E-Signature Verification

Threat actors are exploiting Microsoft’s digital signature verification to steal user credentials and other sensitive information by delivering the ZLoader malware, which previously has been used to distribute Ryuk and Conti ransomware, researchers have found. Researchers at Check Point Research...

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...

80K Retail WooCommerce Sites Exposed by Plugin XSS Bug

The plugin “Variation Swatches for WooCommerce,” installed across 80,000 WordPress-powered retail sites, contains a stored cross-site scripting XSS security vulnerability that could allow cyberattackers to inject malicious web scripts and take over sites. Variation Swatches is designed to allow...

Fake Ransomware Infection Hits WordPress Sites

Fake red-on-black warnings have been plastered to hundreds of WordPress sites, warning that they’ve been encrypted. The warnings have at least one ransomware accoutrement that might look convincing at first blush: a countdown clock tick-tick-ticking away, warning site owners that they’ve got seve...

Invest in These 3 Key Security Technologies to Fight Ransomware

A recent survey by Fortinet revealed that two-thirds of organizations had been the target of at least one ransomware attack – and 85 percent are more concerned about a ransomware attack than any other form of cyberattack. And, the evolving threat landscape is cited as one of the top challenges in...

Threat Actors Abuse Discord to Push Malware

Threat actors are abusing the core features of the popular Discord digital communication platform to persistently deliver various types of malware—in particular remote access trojans RATs that can take over systems–putting its 150 million users at risk, researchers have found. RiskIQ and CheckPoi...

Military’s RFID Tracking of Guns May Endanger Troops

Reports that the military has started outfitting firearms with RFID tags for tracking have raised security alarms. The concern: What if the enemy uses the tags to track soldiers on the battlefield? The Department of Defense, the Marines and the Navy have already rejected the RFID tagging tech for...

REvil’s Back; Coder Fat-Fingered Away Its Decryptor Key?

UPDATE The REvil ransomware gang’s tentacles shot out yet again last week, with the ransomware gang’s servers back online, a fresh victim listed on its site, ransomware payments back up and flowing, and an explanation of why it took a two-month hiatus. A purported REvil representative also...

The Overlooked Security Risks of The Cloud

Cloud networking has done more to change computing as we know it than any other innovation in the last 15 years. It’s enabled small companies to quickly deploy an online presence, large companies to scale as demand ebbs and flows, and in a post-COVID world, it provides the foundation for a remote...

Why Your Business Needs a Long-Term Remote Security Strategy

When COVID-19 first emerged, companies across all sectors of the economy were forced to rapidly transition to remote work. The goal was simple: Ensuring business continuity in the face of an unprecedented challenge — a challenge that most assumed would come and go in short order. As vaccines...

Microsoft Disrupts Large, Cloud-Based BEC Campaign

Threat hunters at Microsoft recently uncovered and disrupted infrastructure that powered a large-scale business email compromise BEC campaign. The infrastructure was hosted on multiple cloud platforms, which allowed it to stay under the radar for quite some time. “The attackers performed discrete...

A Tale of Two Hacks: From SolarWinds to Microsoft Exchange

The past four months have exposed two high-profile attacks, which both had pundits declaring them the “worst-ever” and “unprecedented.” They shared other similarities – both attacked businesses rather than individuals, and affected tens of thousands of organizations. But that is where the...

CopperStealer Malware Targets Facebook and Instagram Business Accounts

A malware that until now has gone undocumented has been quietly hijacking online accounts of advertisers and users of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google and other web giants since July 2019 and then using them for nefarious activity, researchers have found. Dubbed CopperStealer, the malware acts...

Ransomware Demands Spike 320%, Payments Rise

When it comes to paying the ransom in a ransomware attack, demands are on the rise. Yet, many companies that paid the ransom failed to receive a decryption key, in a survey issued Monday. In fact, pandemic-themed phishing scams, a sustained onslaught of ransomware attacks and the rise of a remote...

Fired Healthcare Exec Stalls Critical PPE Shipment for Months

The FBI has announced that Christopher Dobbins pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year in prison for breaching and temporarily disabling the Stradis Healthcare shipping system using a secret account, after being fired weeks earlier. Last March, as doctors reported having to ration and reuse...

Joker's Stash Carding Site Taken Down

Joker’s Stash, the carding site where cybercriminals hawk their payment-card wares, has suffered a blow after law enforcement apparently seized one of its domains. Joker’s Stash is a popular cybercriminal destination that specializes in trading in payment-card data, offering millions of stolen...

RubyGems Packages Laced with Bitcoin-Stealing Malware

RubyGems, an open-source package repository and manager for the Ruby web programming language, has taken two of its software packages offline after they were found to be laced with malware. RubyGems provides a standard format for distributing Ruby programs and libraries in the service of building...

Code42 Incydr Series: Bringing Shadow IT into the light with Code42 Incydr

Shadow IT is hardly a hidden threat to security professionals. Gartner was warning, way back in 2016, that 1 in 3 successful attacks experienced by enterprises would come from the use of unsanctioned apps by 2020. Code42’s Data Exposure Report just about proves Gartner’s prediction, showing that...

Healthcare 2021: Cyberattacks to Center on COVID-19 Spying, Patient Data

Sophisticated cybercriminals have been trying to steal COVID-19 vaccine research – and researchers say there’s more of that to come going into 2021. Intellectual property theft will join ransomware, cloud-stored patient data theft and advanced phishing efforts as the main hallmarks of...

Defining Security Policies to Manage Remote Insider Threats

Even as state and local governments begin to relax COVID-19-related stay-at-home orders, many businesses have adapted to having more people work from home. This trend is likely to continue: Among the top 20 percent of earners, the number of people that work from home is close to 70 percent,...

How the Pandemic is Reshaping the Bug Bounty Landscape

The pandemic has overhauled the bug-bounty landscape, both for companies looking to adopt such programs and the bounty hunters themselves. Casey Ellis, founder and CTO of Bugcrowd, said that COVID-19’s far-reaching implications — including increasing the acceptance of remote work, pushing more...

PoetRAT Resurfaces in Attacks in Azerbaijan Amid Escalating Conflict

A new iteration of the PoetRAT spyware, sporting improvements to operational security, code efficiency and obfuscation, is making the rounds in Azerbaijan, targeting the public sector and other key organizations as the country’s conflict with Armenia over disputed territory intensifies. Threat...

Office 365 Phishing Attack Leverages Real-Time Active Directory Validation

Researchers have uncovered a phishing attack using a new technique: Attackers are making use of authentication APIs to validate victims’ Office 365 credentials – in real time – as they enter them into the landing page. Authentication APIs are used by apps and services running on the users’ behalf...

News Wrap: Malicious Chrome Extensions Removed, CIA 'Woefully Lax' Security Policies Bashed

For the week ended June 19, Threatpost editors Lindsey O’Donnell Welch, Tom Spring and Tara Seals break down the top cybersecurity stories. This week’s top news stories include: Google removing 106 Chrome browser extensions from its Chrome Web Store in response to a report that they were being us...

Intel Adds Anti-Malware Protection in Tiger Lake CPUs

Intel’s upcoming class of mobile CPUs, code named “Tiger Lake,” will feature a long anticipated security layer, called Control-flow Enforcement Technology CET, which aims to protect against common malware attacks. CET protects against attacks on processors’ control flow, which refers to the order...

Chatbooks Confirms Breach After ‘Shiny Hunters’ Sell Data

Photo-print service Chatbooks has confirmed a data breach, a week after cybercriminals listed a database containing customer email addresses, passwords and more for sale on an underground forum. The Utah-based company allows users to create customized photo books. Nate Quigley, CEO of Chatbooks,...

The RSAC 2020 Trend Report

Each year, thousands of cybersecurity professionals submit proposals to be a speaker at RSA Conference. And each year, we mine these proposals for trends and commonalities. In The RSAC 2020 Trend Report, we examine the data from this year’s submissions to provide an interesting peek into what wil...

Gnip Banking Trojan Shows Ongoing, Aggressive Development

A new custom mobile banking malware for Android, dubbed Gnip, has emerged onto the scene, and its authors have taken an aggressive development track: Gnip appears to have been cobbled together in under five months, with four different variants already circulating — including a sample released in...

TrickBot Targets Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint Users to Siphon PINs

The TrickBot malware, known previously for targeting U.S. banks, is now setting a bullseye on users of U.S.-based mobile carriers, including Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile and Sprint, to launch SIM swapping attacks. Researchers with Dell’s Secureworks research team warned that they have observed the...

Critical Bug in Android Antivirus Exposes Address Books

A slew of popular free Android antivirus apps in recent testing proved to have security holes and privacy issues – including a critical vulnerability that exposes user’s address books, and another serious flaw that enables attackers to turn off antivirus protection entirely. According to an...

Is Privacy Really iPhone? Researchers Weigh in on Apple's Targeted Ad Tracking

Apple has a consistent track record of implementing privacy controls, which it has been touting via a series of saturating “Privacy? That’s iPhone” television ads. Yet, though it may be deservedly capitalizing on the increasing privacy-consciousness of consumers out there and the negative headlin...

Japan to Hunt Down Citizens' Insecure IoT Devices

The Japanese government is taking the problem of insecure IoT devices into its own hands, with what some say is an audacious plan to carry out wide-scale penetration testing on its citizens’ gadgets. The country’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology NICT has been taske...

Pentagon Draws Back the Veil on APT Malware with Sudden Embrace of VirusTotal

The Pentagon has suddenly started uploading malware samples from APTs and other nation-state sources to the website VirusTotal, which is essentially a malware zoo that’s used by security pros and antivirus/malware detection engines to gain a better understanding of the threat landscape. The Cyber...

Foscam Issues Patches For Vulnerabilities in IP Cameras

Foscam is urging customers to update their security cameras after researchers found three vulnerabilities in that could enable a bad actor to gain root access knowing only the camera’s IP address. The vulnerability trifecta includes an arbitrary file-deletion bug, a shell command-injection flaw a...

IoT Security Concerns Peaking – With No End In Sight

SAN FRANCISCO – With the massive influx of connected devices into our digital lives, it’s no surprise that IoT security was on the forefront of the 2018 RSA Conference this year. But despite numerous talks about IoT vulnerabilities this week, a clear resolution seems nowhere in sight. “A lot of t...

Google’s April Android Security Bulletin Warns of 9 Critical Bugs

Nine vulnerabilities rated critical were patched as part of Google’s Android Security Bulletin for April. Critical vulnerabilities ranged from two remote code execution vulnerabilities tied to the Android media framework, to a Qualcomm Wi-Fi component flaw that allowed a nearby attacker to use “a...

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...

Facebook Fallout Continues as Politicians Call For Legal Action

A legal backlash against Facebook’s latest controversy is starting to gain momentum. Lawmakers from around the country are calling for investigations into Facebook after the company revealed that the data of 50 million platform users had leaked through a third-party app. Both New York and...

Cisco Patches Critical VPN Vulnerability

Cisco Systems released a patch Monday to fix a critical security vulnerability in its Secure Sockets Layer VPN solution called Adaptive Security Appliance. The vulnerability, according to a Cisco Security Advisory, could allow an unauthenticated and remote attacker to execute remote code on...

Multiple Vulnerabilities in LibXL Library Open Door to RCE Attacks

Researchers have identified seven vulnerabilities in the LibXL C library, used to read Excel files. Each of the vulnerabilities are rated 8.8 in severity on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System scale. Attackers could exploit each of the vulnerabilities and perform remote code execution attacks...

Siemens Update Patches SIMATIC PCS 7 Bug in Some Versions

Siemens has made an update available for some of its SIMATIC PCS 7 distributed control systems that are impacted by a remotely exploitable input validation vulnerability. Siemens said version 8.2 and V8.1 prior to 8.1 SP1 with WinCC v7.3 Update 13 are affected. “Successful exploitation of this...

Adobe Fixes Six Vulnerabilities in Flash, Connect

Adobe fixed six vulnerabilities in two products, one of the company’s smallest security bulletins in recent memory, as part of its regularly scheduled round of updates on Tuesday. Included are fixes for the company’s Flash Player software platform, including a critical vulnerability CVE-2017-3099...

ISC Patches Critical Error Condition in BIND

The Internet Systems Consortium patched the BIND domain name system this week, addressing what it calls a critical error condition in the software. A security advisory on ISC’s Knowledge Base on Tuesday acknowledges an attacker can exploit the vulnerability remotely and likely for that reason,...

Inside the xDedic Hacked Server Marketplace

An underground market peddling hacked servers was a unique find, even for a seasoned researcher such as Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade of Kaspersky Lab. But there it was, xDedic.biz selling access to tens of thousands of servers for pennies on the dollar. A Russian-speaking hacker group was...

Google Patches Two High-Severity Flaws in Chrome

Google on Wednesday updated the Chrome browser for the third time since the start of May. Chrome 51.0.2704.79 for Windows, Mac, and Linux patched 15 vulnerabilities. It also paid out $14,000 in bounties to prolific bug hunters Mariusz Mlynski $7,500 and Rob Wu $6,500. The previous Chrome update o...

Emergency Adobe Flash Player Security Update

Adobe will release an emergency Flash Player update as soon as Thursday, patching a critical vulnerability that is being publicly attacked. Adobe said the vulnerability is in version 21.0.0.197 and earlier for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Chrome OS. “Successful exploitation could cause a crash an...

December 2015 Microsoft Patch Tuesday Security Bulletins

Forgive your local Windows admin if they’re a little shy on holiday cheer in the coming days. Blame instead Microsoft for foisting upon them on Tuesday 71 security patches, including two for vulnerabilities in Office and the Windows kernel currently under attack. Microsoft also issued a separate...

Apple Patches Vulnerabilities in OS X, iOS, Including Pangu Jailbreak

It was only three weeks ago that Apple patched its core line of products and pushed its latest version of OS X, El Capitan. Yet another wave of patches arrived Thursday however to address scores of vulnerabilities in OS X, iOS, Safari, iTunes, and even the company’s smart watch operating system,...

Google Chrome 45 Security Patches, Bug Bounty Awards

Tuesday turned out to be a busy day for browser makers. The three major vendors in the space—Google; Mozilla; and Microsoft—joined arms and announced their intent to stop support for the weakened RC4 encryption algorithm starting early next year. Google, having already announced it would pause...

Rig Exploit Kit 3.0 Claims 1 Million Malvertising Victims

LAS VEGAS – A rampant malvertising campaign fueled by a new version of the Rig Exploit Kit has claimed at least 950,000 victims worldwide and is doing so with an unprecedented success rate. Researchers at Trustwave said in advance of this week’s Black Hat conference that they have been watching...