AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon Blasted For Data Privacy Policies

A U.S. senator has put telecommunication companies – AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon – on notice for their data-collection and retention policies. Last week, U.S. senator Ron Wyden D-Ore. sent an open letter to the CEOs of the four major telecom providers urging them to limit the data they...

4 Dating Apps Pinpoint Users' Precise Locations – and Leak the Data

Four popular dating apps that together can claim 10 million users have been found to leak precise locations of their members. “By simply knowing a person’s username we can track them from home, to work,” explained Alex Lomas, researcher at Pen Test Partners, in a blog on Sunday. “We can find out...

Tips for Successful Zero-Trust Implementation

The zero-trust concept is often and pithily summarized as “trust no one, verify everything.” No enterprise can stave off the myriad of cyberthreats as long as they assume that any individual element can be trusted as secure. No traffic, whether internal or external, can automatically be deemed...

Black Hat 2019 News Wrap: The Best and Worst of the Show

LAS VEGAS – Black Hat and DEF CON 2019 may be wrapping up, but the dual conferences last week in Las Vegas left the security industry with a flurry of new security flaws, topics and announcements to discuss for the weeks to come. Threatpost editors Tara Seals and Lindsey O’Donnell get together to...

Gamers Beware: Zero-Day in Steam Client Affects All Windows Users

UPDATE A researcher has dropped a zero-day vulnerability that affects the Steam game client for Windows, after Valve said it wouldn’t fix it. Valve then published a patch, that the same researcher said can be bypassed. The bug is a privilege-escalation vulnerability that can allow an attacker to...

DEF CON 2019: Picture Perfect Hack of a Canon EOS 80D DSLR

LAS VEGAS – Multiple vulnerabilities in Canon’s DSLR camera firmware could allow an attacker to plant malware on devices and ransom images from users. The bugs, outlined in a session here at DEF CON, open the door to a range of hacks via a Wi-Fi network or a PC’s USB connection to a camera. Eyal...

Driver Disaster: Over 40 Signed Drivers Can’t Pass Security Muster

LAS VEGAS – An insecure driver can be just what a hacker needs to get its foot in the door to a Windows environment. Compromised drivers are at the heart of massive security headaches ranging from recent Slingshot APT campaigns and LoJax malware. That’s why researchers at Eclypsium are sounding t...

DEF CON 2019: New Class of SQLite Exploits Open Door to iPhone Hack

LAS VEGAS – Researchers at Check Point have identified a new class of vulnerabilities targeting SQLite, outside the context of a browser for the first time. The new attack techniques exploit memory-corruption issues in the SQLite engine itself — leading to a host of new hacks, including code...

DEF CON 2019: MacOS Gets a Malware Beatdown in Attack Demo

LAS VEGAS – On Friday, Mac security researcher Patrick Wardle showed how an attacker can repurpose someone else’s Mac malware, create false attribution flags and sidestep Mac anti-malware defenses with ease. The attack scenarios were his own and meant to serve as cautionary examples and reasons w...

Hack of High-End Hotel Smart Locks Shows IoT Security Fail

LAS VEGAS – A vulnerability in a popular IoT lock key – used chiefly by a high-end hotel in Europe – allowed researchers to break into hotel rooms. The locks in question are dubbed “mobile keys” because of their reliance on mobile phones as opposed to card-based access such as those based on...

DEF CON 2019: Delta ICS Flaw Allows Total Industrial Takeover

A serious vulnerability in a commonly used Delta industrial control system has been found that could allow malicious actors on the same network complete control of the operating system. The Delta enteliBUS Manager centralizes control for various pieces of hardware often found in corporate or...

DEF CON 2019: Researchers Demo Hacking Google Home for RCE

LAS VEGAS – The Tencent Blade Team of researchers demonstrated several ways they have developed to hack and run remote code on Google Home smart speakers. The hacks center around what is known as a Magellan vulnerability, which can be used to exploit the massively popular SQLite database engine...

Election Security Threats: From Misinformation to Voting Machine

Election security continues to be a top concern – from social media misinformation campaigns, to vulnerabilities in the actual voting machines themselves. At Black Hat USA 2019, Threatpost caught up with Matt Olney, director of threat intelligence at Cisco Talos, to discuss the challenges that...

Apple Upgrades Bug Bounty Program: Adds Macs, $1M Reward

LAS VEGAS – Apple is giving its bug bounty program a much-needed makeover. The device manufacturer in a Thursday Black Hat USA 2019 session said it will open the historically private program to all researchers in the fall. In addition, it plans to drastically boost some rewards for vulnerabilitie...

State Farm Falls Victim to Credential-Stuffing Attack

State Farm Insurance is notifying customers that accounts have been compromised by hackers in a credential-stuffing attack. Credential-stuffing is accomplished by hackers who take advantage of users who often reuse the same passwords across multiple online accounts. The cyberattackers use stolen...

Black Hat 2019: Addressing Supply-Chain Risk Starts with People, Microsoft Says

LAS VEGAS – Supply-chain attacks have nabbed headlines lately thanks to high-profile incidents like the Wipro news last April, where attackers were able to compromise the staffing agency’s network and pivot to their customers. That incident pointed out that supply-chain risk should be thought of ...

Critical RCE Bug Found Lurking in Avaya VoIP Phones

A decade-old remote code-execution RCE bug has been found, unpatched, in an Avaya desk phone that’s used at 90 percent of Fortune 100 companies. If exploited, attackers could remotely take over the operation of the phone, exfiltrate audio and potentially even “bug” the phone to listen in...

Researchers Bypass Apple FaceID Using Biometrics 'Achilles Heel'

LAS VEGAS – Vulnerabilities have been uncovered in the authentication process of biometrics technology that could allow bad actors to bypass various facial recognition applications – including Apple’s FaceID. But there is a catch. Doing so requires the victim to be out cold. Researchers on...

Ransomware Sees Triple-Digit Spike in Corporate Detections

LAS VEGAS — As cybercriminals continue to chase the most lucrative attack vectors they can find, ransomware attacks are migrating from consumer targets to organizations, businesses, municipalities and beyond. For the first time, consumer detections have fallen below organizational infections, as ...

Phishing Attacks Enlist Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure in Ploys

Recent phishing campaigns have been spotted boosting their anti-detection efforts by using Amazon Web Services to host their landing pages. It’s a sign of a nascent trend towards using public cloud storage, according to researchers. The attackers are also layering on various obfuscation technique...

Black Hat 2019: WhatsApp Users Still Open to Message Manipulation

LAS VEGAS – Researchers at Black Hat USA 2019 demoed how known vulnerabilities in WhatsApp could still be exploited in several attacks that manipulate chats. Facebook-owned WhatsApp is a popular end-to-end encrypted messaging platform with at least 1.5 billion users. Researchers with Check Point...

DEF CON 2019: 35 Bugs in Office Printers Offer Hackers an Open Door

LAS VEGAS — At least 35 significant vulnerabilities in six commonly used enterprise printers have been uncovered, manufactured by HP, Ricoh, Xerox, Lexmark, Kyocera and Brother. The bugs will be presented by NCC Group at a DEF CON session entitled “Why You Should Fear Your Mundane Office Equipmen...

Black Hat 2019: Microsoft Protocol Flaw Leaves Azure Users Open to Attack

LAS VEGAS – A path-traversal vulnerability in Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol RDP leaves unpatched Azure customers open to attack. The flaw could allow for a virtual machine VM escape in Microsoft’s Hyper-V Manager, part of its Azure cloud platform. Researchers with Check Point at a Wednesday...

Black Hat 2019: 5G Security Flaw Allows MiTM, Targeted Attacks

LAS VEGAS — 5G commercial networks are starting to roll out, promising exciting new use cases like automated cars, and smart sensor networks where the nodes have 10-year battery lives. To go along with these possibilities are new security requirements; notably, improvements in device...

Black Hat 2019: Ethical Hackers Must Protect Digital Human Rights

LAS VEGAS – At a time when technology is being utilized for human-rights abuses, the security space needs to turn its focus to public interest defense technology, security stalwarts urged during Black Hat USA 2019. Security has long focused on protecting company data and providing cyber-defense f...

Black Hat 2019: Security's Powerful Cultural Transformation

LAS VEGAS — “Start with yes.'” That’s the advice to security teams from Dino Dai Zovi, mobile security lead at Square, giving the keynote on Wednesday at the 23rd annual Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. Taking as a first principle the idea that security teams now have the ear of company boards...

Smominru Cryptominer Scrapes Credentials for Half-Million Machines

A commodity cryptomining botnet campaign that has infected a half-million computers is now tapping a lucrative secondary moneymaking opportunity in selling access to victim machines, according to researchers. An analysis of the known Smominru cryptomining campaign, which uses a modified version o...

New SWAPGS Side-Channel Attack Bypasses Spectre and Meltdown Defenses

Millions of newer Intel microprocessors manufactured after 2012 are vulnerable to a new type of side-channel attack dubbed SWAPGS. SWAPGS is similar to existing side-channel attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown and similarly could allow a hacker to gain access to sensitive data such as passwords...

Sponsored Podcast: The Operationalization of Data With a Purpose

Security, intel and fraud teams are swimming in data. Data is not the problem, but operationalizing and making use of the data we have is. This podcast is sponsored by SpyCloud Taking this one step further is making use of the data with a purpose, specifically, to interrupt the criminal lifecycle...

Security Vulnerabilities Are Increasingly Putting Kids at Risk

LAS VEGAS – IoT devices are increasingly coming into the hands of children – from connected watches, to Amazon Echo smart speakers – but security experts worry that these are opening up children’s data to future privacy breaches. The latest example of this fear was seen at Black Hat 2019, where...

Black Hat: LeapFrog Tablet Flaws Let Attackers Track, Message Kids

LAS VEGAS – Serious vulnerabilities have been disclosed in LeapFrog’s tablet for kids, the LeapPad Ultimate, once again throwing child data privacy into the spotlight. The LeapPad Ultimate is a rugged tablet made by LeapFrog that targets children with an array of education, game and eBook apps...

Democrats and Doctors Behind Latest Wave of Leaked Data

Data leakage via misconfigured Amazon storage buckets struck twice in the past few weeks. In July, almost 14,000 documents detailing patient social security numbers and medical data – such as mental illness or cancer – was exposed in a misconfigured storage bucket owned by healthcare vendor Medic...

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...

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...

Mass Spoofing Campaign Abuses Walmart Brand

An ongoing domain name spoofing campaign is taking aim at retail giant Walmart and other big fish, with more than 540 malicious domains being used to harvest consumer information. The scam domains are mimicking legitimate sites in name and appearance, in hopes of fooling visitors into entering...

Millions of Android Smartphones Vulnerable to Trio of Qualcomm Bugs

UPDATE Security researchers from Tencent’s Blade Team are warning Android smartphone and tablet users of flaws in Qualcomm chipsets, called QualPwn. The bugs collectively allow hackers to compromise Android devices remotely simply by sending malicious packets over-the-air – no user interaction...

E3 Website Leaks Private Addresses for Thousands of Journalists

A YouTube content creator said that she has found a spreadsheet with the names and addresses – including private residences – of more than 2,000 journalists and content creators on the popular Electronic Entertainment Expo E3 trade show’s website. E3 2019, which took place this year June 11 to 13...

Puzzling Gwmndy Botnet Focuses on Low-Volume Proxy Connections

An odd botnet has been spotted targeting Fiberhome routers, in a quest to add 200 of them per day to its botnet web. That’s a low number in the world of botnets, according to 360 Netlab researchers, which observed a previously unknown malware strain called Gwmndy after the attackers’ domain name...

Microsoft Lab Offers $300K For Working Azure Exploits

Las Vegas – In an attempt to sniff out bugs in its Azure cloud platform, Microsoft announced at Black Hat USA 2019 on Monday that it will offer rewards of up to $300,000 for researchers who launch successful test exploits for the platform. Microsoft has launched a dedicated Azure cloud host testi...

Google and ARM Tackle Android Bugs with Memory-Tagging

Aiming at improving the security of the Android ecosystem, Google has partnered up with mobile silicon-maker ARM to implement a hardware-based bug detection tool specifically for memory-safety vulnerabilities. Dubbed the memory-tagging extension MTE, the feature helps mitigate these kinds of bugs...

MegaCortex Ransomware Revamps for Mass Distribution

A dangerous enterprise-focused ransomware, MegaCortex, has been retooled to become a weapon for wide-scale attacks. Previously used only in manual, post-network-exploitation, targeted campaigns on carefully selected targets, MegaCortex now has a second variant that adds automation to the kill...

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...

Nation-State APTs Target U.S. Utilities With Dangerous Malware

Researchers believe that nation-state actors are behind several spearphishing campaigns targeting U.S. utility companies with a newly-identified malware, which has the capabilities to view system data and reboot machines. Lure emails were sent to three U.S. utilities companies between July 19 and...

90% of Enterprise iPhone Users Open to iMessage Spy Attack

Over 90 percent of Apple iPhone users — consumer and enterprise — are still vulnerable to bugs in iOS that can be remotely exploited without any user interaction via the iMessage client. These could reveal pictures, videos, notes, PDFs and so on stored on the phone. Though Apple has fully patched...

Apple Suspends Siri Program After Privacy Backlash

Apple is suspending a program that lets contractors listen in on Siri voice recordings after facing a rain of backlash regarding the privacy implications of the program. The suspension comes after a report in The Guardian last week outlining how contractors regularly listen to intimate voice...

Brand-New SystemBC Proxy Malware Spotted Using SOCKS5 for Stealth

A previously undocumented proxy malware, dubbed “SystemBC,” is upping the stealth game by using SOCKS5 to evade detection. It’s being distributed by the Fallout and RIG exploit kits EKs, according to researchers. Proofpoint researchers said on Thursday that in the most recently tracked example, t...

Unpatched Flaws in IoT Smart Deadbolt Open Homes to Danger

UPDATE Researchers have uncovered vulnerabilities in a popular smart deadbolt could allow attackers to remotely unlock doors and break into homes. The manufacturer behind the smart lock, Hickory Hardware, has deployed patches to the affected apps on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. The...

For $8.6M, Cisco Settles Suit Over Bug-Riddled Video Surveillance Software

Cisco Systems has agreed to pay $8.6 million to settle a lawsuit that alleged it sold video security software with known security vulnerabilities to U.S. federal and state governments. The litigation, originally brought in 2011, was filed under the False Claims Act, claiming that the software...

Malvertising Campaigns Skirt Ad Blockers, Serve Up Mac Malware

Two fresh malvertising campaigns are making the scene that are abusing the convoluted underpinnings of the internet economy to find malware victims. One is a large-scale exploit kit EK campaign designed to circumvent traditional safeguards, such as ad blockers, and the other uses web redirects to...

Honda's Security 'Soft Spots' Exposed in Unsecured Database

An unsecured database belonging to Honda Motor Company was found leaking crucial information about its global systems, including which devices aren’t up-to-date or protected by security solutions. The exposed ElasticSearch database contained approximately 134 million documents, and amounted to...