Month: January 2023

Russian hacktivists appear to have been busy again after reports suggested several hospital websites across the US and the Netherlands were downed by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. University of Michigan Hospital and Stanford Health Care Center were among the targeted facilities in the current campaign, which hit a handful of hospitals in the

by Paul Ducklin Samba, simply put, is a super-useful, mega-popular, open-source reimplementation of the networking protocols used in Microsoft Windows, and its historical importance in internetworking (connecting two different sorts of network together) cannot be underestimated. In the late 1990s, Microsoft networking shed its opaque, proprietary nature and became an open standard known as CIFS,

Security experts have warned of several new apps available on Google Play which purport to help the user develop healthy habits in return for rewards, but in reality just bombard them with irritating ads. Lucky Habit: health tracker, Lucky Step-Walking Tracker and WalkingJoy have garnered over 20 million downloads for what appears to be the same

An operation responding to a Black Basta ransomware compromise has revealed the use of a new PlugX malware variant that can automatically infect any attached removable USB media devices. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 shared the findings with Infosecurity earlier today, adding that the new PlugX variant is “wormable” and can infect USB devices in

by Paul Ducklin BREACHES, PATCHES, LEAKS AND TWEAKS Latest epidode – listen now. Click-and-drag on the soundwaves below to skip to any point. You can also listen directly on Soundcloud. With Doug Aamoth and Paul Ducklin Intro and outro music by Edith Mudge. You can listen to us on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify,

Researchers have found three separate vulnerabilities in OpenEMR, an open-source software for electronic health records and medical practice management. Clean code experts at Sonar published an advisory Wednesday about the discovered flaws by security researcher Dennis Brinkrolf. “During our security research of popular web applications, we discovered several code vulnerabilities in OpenEMR,” Brinkrolf wrote. “A combination of

by Naked Security writer Six months ago, according to the US Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) infiltrated the Hive ransomware gang and started “stealing back” the decryption keys for victims whose files had been scrambled. As you are almost certainly, and sadly, aware, ransomware attacks these days typically involve two

Global law enforcers celebrated this week after revealing a coordinated operation to disrupt the Hive ransomware variant. The ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) outfit has targeted more than 1500 victims in over 80 countries since June 2021, making an estimated $100m in the process, according to the Department of Justice (DoJ). Victims included hospitals, schools, financial firms and critical infrastructure

by Paul Ducklin The Public Prosecution Service in the Netherlands [Dutch: Openbaar Ministerie] has just released information about an unnamed suspect arrested back in December 2022 for allegedly stealing and selling personal data about tens of millions of people. The victims are said to live in countries as far apart as Austria, China, Columbia, the

The volume of publicly reported data breaches and leaks remained at a near-record level in 2022, although consumers and businesses are being let down by the paucity of information provided by breached companies, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC). The non-profit’s 2022 Data Breach Report is compiled from company announcements, mainstream news media,

by Paul Ducklin Over the years, we’ve written and spoken on Naked Security many times about the thorny problem of DNS hijacking. DNS, as you probably know, is short for domain name system, and you’ll often hear it described as the internet’s “telephone directory” or “gazetteer”. If you’re not familiar with the word gazeteer, it

A new string of attacks against East Asian organizations has been spotted by security researchers and attributed to the threat actor known as DragonSpark. The campaign, discovered by SentinelLabs, uses the little-known open-source SparkRAT alongside malware tools to evade detection via source code interpretation techniques based on the Go programming language. “The DragonSpark attacks represent

by Paul Ducklin GoTo is a well-known brand that owns a range of products, including technologies for teleconferencing and webinars, remote access, and password management. If you’ve ever used GoTo Webinar (online meetings and seminars), GoToMyPC (connect and control someone else’s computer for management and support), or LastPass (a password manangement service), you’ve used a

The UK’s data protection regulator has shared seven tips for SMBs, designed to save them time and money and boost customer confidence. The UK’s SMB community numbers over 5.5 million firms – amounting to over 99% of all businesses in the country. Yet many don’t have the in-house knowledge and resources to ensure they stay

by Paul Ducklin Last year, on the last day of August 2022, we wrote with mild astonishment, and perhaps even a tiny touch of excitement, about an unexpected but rather important update for iPhones stuck back on iOS 12. As we remarked at the time, we’d already decided that iOS 12 had slipped (or perhaps

Security researchers have spotted another innovative technique phishing actors are using to bypass traditional security filters – this time using blank images. The email in question was detected by Check Point business Avanan, and arrived as a legitimate-looking DocuSign message. Although the link in the email body will take the user directly to a regular