New research has highlighted the severe risks posed by forged certificate attacks, which can lead to unauthorized access to important company resources. These attacks, known as the Shadow Credentials technique, involve attackers exploiting certain parts of a system called Active Directory (AD) that manages user access to various services. Kaspersky cybersecurity expert Alexander Rodchenko conducted
Month: July 2023
Jul 29, 2023The Hacker NewsBrowser Security / Data Security Increasing cyber threats and attacks have made protecting organizational data a paramount concern for businesses of all sizes. A group of experts have recognized the pressing need for comprehensive browser security solutions and collaborated to develop “The Definitive Browser Security RFP Template.” This resource helps streamline
Nominations are open for the eighth annual Security Serious Unsung Heroes Awards to be held in London and run by Eskenzi PR. The awards are all about celebrating the UK’s cybersecurity professionals, teachers, lecturers, leaders and those working to make the industry not only more secure, but also more diverse and healthier for employees. Whether educating the
Jul 29, 2023THNAndroid / Malware A new Android malware strain called CherryBlos has been observed making use of optical character recognition (OCR) techniques to gather sensitive data stored in pictures. CherryBlos, per Trend Micro, is distributed via bogus posts on social media platforms and comes with capabilities to steal cryptocurrency wallet-related credentials and act as
The UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) is launching an investigation after a typing error reportedly led to classified emails being sent to a close ally of Russia instead of the intended recipients. The emails were meant for the US military, identifiable by the domain “.mil.” However, due to a simple mistake omitting the letter “i,” the messages
Jul 29, 2023THNVulnerability / Enterprise Security Ivanti has disclosed yet another security flaw impacting Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM), formerly known as MobileIron Core, that it said has been weaponized as part of an exploit chain by malicious actors in the wild. The new vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-35081 (CVSS score: 7.8), impacts supported versions 11.10, 11.9,
CardioComm Solutions, a Canadian medical provider of consumer heart monitoring and medical ECG software solutions, has disclosed a cybersecurity incident on Tuesday that occurred on the company’s servers. To address the situation, CardioComm said it is collaborating closely with KPMG-EGYDE, relevant authorities and third-party cybersecurity experts. The company assures its customers that there is no evidence
by Paul Ducklin ONE WEEK, TWO BWAINS Apple patches two zero-days, one for a second time. How a 30-year-old cryptosystem got cracked. All your secret are belong to Zenbleed. Remembering those dodgy PC/Mac ads. No audio player below? Listen directly on Soundcloud. With Doug Aamoth and Paul Ducklin. Intro and outro music by Edith Mudge.
Jul 27, 2023THNLinux / Endpoint Security Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed two high-severity security flaws in the Ubuntu kernel that could pave the way for local privilege escalation attacks. Cloud security firm Wiz, in a report shared with The Hacker News, said the easy-to-exploit shortcomings have the potential to impact 40% of Ubuntu users. “The impacted
The threat of vendor email compromise (VEC) attacks has escalated, with recent data showing a sharp increase in such cyber-threats. According to a new report published by cybersecurity firm Abnormal Security earlier today, VEC attacks – a variant of business email compromise (BEC) – pose a significant risk to organizations worldwide. These attacks impersonate trusted
by Paul Ducklin If you’d been quietly chasing down cryptographic bugs in a proprietary police radio system since 2021, but you’d had to wait until the second half of 2023 to go public with your research, how would you deal with the reveal? You’d probably do what researchers at boutique Dutch cybersecurity consultancy Midnight Blue
Jul 26, 2023THNMalware / Cyber Threat A deeper analysis of a recently discovered malware called Decoy Dog has revealed that it’s a significant upgrade over the Pupy RAT, an open-source remote access trojan it’s modeled on. “Decoy Dog has a full suite of powerful, previously unknown capabilities – including the ability to move victims to
Infoblox has unveiled crucial updates on the “Decoy Dog” remote access trojan (RAT) toolkit in a new threat report published today. Initially discovered and disclosed in April 2023, Decoy Dog has proven to be more sophisticated than previously thought, using DNS for command-and-control (C2) and is suspected to be employed in ongoing nation-state cyber-attacks. Following Infoblox’s
by Paul Ducklin Remember Heartbleed? That was the bug, back in 2014, that introduced the suffix -bleed for vulnerabilities that leak data in a haphazard way that neither the attacker nor the victim can reliably control. In other words, a crook can’t use a bleed-style bug for a precision attack, such as “Find the shadow
North Korean nation-state actors affiliated with the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB) have been attributed to the JumpCloud hack following an operational security (OPSEC) blunder that exposed their actual IP address. Google-owned threat intelligence firm Mandiant attributed the activity to a threat actor it tracks under the name UNC4899, which likely shares overlaps with clusters already
Tampa General Hospital (TGH) has revealed a data breach that may have affected the information of approximately 1.2 million patients. Writing in a notice on its website last week, TGH said it first detected unusual activity on its computer systems on May 31 2023. The hospital also explained that the cyber-criminals’ encryption attempts were foiled thanks to
by Paul Ducklin Two weeks ago, we urged Apple users with recent hardware to grab the company’s second-ever Rapid Response patch. As we pointed out at the time, this was an emergency bug fix to block off a web-browsing security hole that had apparently been used in real-world spyware attacks: Component: WebKit Impact: Processing web
Jul 24, 2023THNWindows Security / Zero-Day Zero-day vulnerabilities in Windows Installers for the Atera remote monitoring and management software could act as a springboard to launch privilege escalation attacks. The flaws, discovered by Mandiant on February 28, 2023, have been assigned the identifiers CVE-2023-26077 and CVE-2023-26078, with the issues remediated in versions 1.8.3.7 and 1.8.4.9
The Russian state prosecution asked the Moscow City Court to impose 18 years in a strict colony regime on Ilya Sachkov, the founder of cybersecurity and threat intelligence provider Group-IB, his lawyer Sergei Afanasyev told Russian press agency Interfax on July 21, 2023. This has been confirmed by the French press agency AFP. Sachkov was
Jul 21, 2023THNMalware / Software Security A new variant of AsyncRAT malware dubbed HotRat is being distributed via free, pirated versions of popular software and utilities such as video games, image and sound editing software, and Microsoft Office. “HotRat malware equips attackers with a wide array of capabilities, such as stealing login credentials, cryptocurrency wallets,
Generative AI tools have conquered the workplace, especially large language model-based (LLM) chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. These powerful tools are capable of performing a broad range of tasks, from helping to draft perfect emails to providing digestible summaries, freeing up the time-strapped worker to focus on more strategic activities. However, using LLMs
Jul 22, 2023THNEncryption / Privacy Apple has warned that it would rather stop offering iMessage and FaceTime services in the U.K. than bowing down to government pressure in response to new proposals that seek to expand digital surveillance powers available to state intelligence agencies. The development, first reported by BBC News, makes the iPhone maker
The US Department of Justice (DoJ) is doubling the size of the team investigating cryptocurrency crime, with the fight against ransomware “an urgent priority.” In a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Thursday, July 20, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri announced the merger of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement
by Paul Ducklin SING US A CYBERSECURITY SONG Why your Mac’s calendar app says it’s JUL 17. One patch, one line, one file. Careful with that {axe,file}, Eugene. Storm season for Microsoft. When typos make you sing for joy. No audio player below? Listen directly on Soundcloud. With Doug Aamoth and Paul Ducklin. Intro and
Jul 21, 2023THNEmail Security / Cyber Attack The recent attack against Microsoft’s email infrastructure by a Chinese nation-state actor referred to as Storm-0558 is said to have a broader scope than previously thought. According to cloud security company Wiz, the inactive Microsoft account (MSA) consumer signing key used to forge Azure Active Directory (Azure AD
The Chinese espionage group APT41 (AKA Double Dragon, BARIUM and Winnti) has been linked to the sophisticated Android surveillanceware known as WyrmSpy and DragonEgg. A new report published by cybersecurity firm Lookout on July 19, 2023, highlighted the findings, mentioning APT41’s history of targeting both government organizations and private enterprises for espionage and financial gain.
by Paul Ducklin At the tail-end of last week, Microsoft published a report entitled Analysis of Storm-0558 techniques for unauthorized email access. In this rather dramatic document, the company’s security team revealed the background to a previously unexplained hack in which data including email text, attachments and more were accessed: from approximately 25 organizations, including
Why is kids’ personal information in high demand, how do criminals steal it, and what can parents do to help prevent child identity theft? Total identity fraud losses in the US were estimated at a whopping $43bn last year. While many of us are getting savvier about how we protect our personal information online, can
Jul 20, 2023THNCloud Security / Cyber Espionage Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it’s expanding cloud logging capabilities to help organizations investigate cybersecurity incidents and gain more visibility after facing criticism in the wake of a recent espionage attack campaign aimed at its email infrastructure. The tech giant said it’s making the change in direct response
Security researchers from Rapid7 have found active exploitation of multiple vulnerabilities in Adobe ColdFusion, a web development computing platform. On July 11, 2023, Adobe released patches for several vulnerabilities affecting ColdFusion, including a Rapid7-discovered access control bypass vulnerability (CVE-2023-29298) and an insecure deserialization vulnerability allowing arbitrary code execution (CVE-2023-29300). However, Rapid7 has recently observed that