Security

China–Taiwan tensions have led to a significant increase in cyber-attacks targeting Taiwan, according to a new report by security experts at Trellix. In particular, the company spotted a surge in cyber-attacks aimed at Taiwanese industries, with the primary goal of deploying malware and stealing sensitive information. “Trellix has observed a surge in malicious emails targeted

by Naked Security writer He goes by many names, according to the US Department of Justice. Mikhail Pavlovich Matveev, or just plain Matveev as he’s repeatedly referred to in his indictment, as well as Wazawaka, m1x, Boriselcin and Uhodiransomwar. From that last alias, you can guess what he’s wanted for. In the words of the

Several new ways of effectively abusing Microsoft Teams via social engineering have been discovered by security researchers at Proofpoint. “[We] recently analyzed over 450 million malicious sessions, detected throughout the second half of 2022 and targeting Microsoft 365 cloud tenants,” reads a report published by the company earlier today. “According to our findings, Microsoft Teams is

by Paul Ducklin Researchers at IoT security company Sternum dug into a popular home automation mains plug from well-known device brand Belkin. The model they looked at, the Wemo Mini Smart Plug (F7C063) is apparently getting towards the end of its shelf life, but we found plenty of them for sale online, along with detailed

A Chinese state-sponsored APT group known as Camaro Dragon has been observed exploiting TP-Link routers via a malicious firmware implant. The findings come from security experts at Check Point Research (CPR) and were described in an advisory published by the company earlier today. “The implant features several malicious components, including a custom backdoor named ‘Horse

New information has emerged regarding the Qilin ransomware group’s operations and Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) program. In their latest research study, Group-IB’s threat intelligence team said it infiltrated and analyzed Qilin’s inner workings, revealing insights into its targeting of critical sectors and the sophisticated techniques they employed. Qilin, also known as Agenda ransomware, has emerged as a

by Paul Ducklin Here’s how the French data protection regulator describes controversial facial recognition service Clearview AI, in its own words, in clear and plain English: CLEARVIEW AI collects photographs from a wide range of websites, including social networks, and sells access to its database of images of people through a search engine in which

A newly discovered vulnerability in the Essential Addons for Elementor plugin has put over one million WordPress websites at risk of attacks aimed at gaining unauthorized access to user accounts with elevated privileges. Cybersecurity experts at Patchstack described the new vulnerability (CVE-2023-32243) in an advisory published on Thursday. “This plugin suffers from an unauthenticated privilege

Toyota Motor Corp acknowledged earlier today that the vehicle data of approximately 2.15 million users was publicly accessible in Japan for nearly a decade, from November 2013 to mid-April 2023. Reuters first reported the news, specifying that according to Toyota spokesperson Hideaki Homma, the issue with Toyota’s cloud-based Connected service affects only vehicles in Japan. The

by Naked Security writer This wasn’t your typical cyberextortion situation. More precisely, it followed what you might think of as a well-worn path, so in that sense it came across as “typical” (if you will pardon the use of the word typical in the context of a serious cybercrime), but it didn’t happen in the

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has warned against a critical flaw discovered in PaperCut software, which has now been linked to a series of ransomware attacks. The vulnerability (CVE-2023-27350) in PaperCut, a widely adopted print management solution, has allowed cyber-criminals to remotely execute malicious code without requiring any authentication credentials.  Consequently, these

by Paul Ducklin “PRIVATE KEY”: THE HINT IS IN THE NAME No audio player below? 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, Stitcher and anywhere that good podcasts are found. Or just drop

An increasing number of threat actors have been observed using the leaked Babuk code from 2021 to create a new form of ransomware targeting VMware ESXi hypervisor environments. According to an advisory published by SentinelOne earlier today, these novel variants emerged between 2022 and 2023, showing an increasing trend of Babuk source code adoption. The

Joseph James O’Connor, a 23-year-old British man, has admitted his involvement in hacking schemes targeting high-profile Twitter accounts, including those of Barack Obama and Elon Musk.  O’Connor was extradited from Spain on April 26 after being arrested nearly two years ago. He pleaded guilty in a New York court earlier this week.  Read more on

by Paul Ducklin Microsoft’s May 2023 Patch Tuesday updates comprise just the sort of mixture you probably expected. If you go by numbers, there are 38 vulnerabilities, of which seven are considered critical: six in Windows itself, and one in SharePoint. Apparently, three of the 38 holes are zero-days, because they’re already publicly known, and

by Paul Ducklin About a month ago, we wrote about a data breach notification issued by major motherboard manufacturer MSI. The company said: MSI recently suffered a cyberattack on part of its information systems. […] Currently, the affected systems have gradually resumed normal operations, with no significant impact on financial business. […] MSI urges users

A critical vulnerability has been discovered in the Linux-based Ruckus access points (AP) that allows remote attackers to take control of vulnerable systems. Tracked CVE-2023-25717 and first discovered in February, the flaw has been recently exploited by a new botnet named AndoryuBot, according to a new advisory by Fortinet. “[AndoryuBot] contains DDoS attack modules for

European police have arrested scores of suspects and seized thousands of stolen artefacts after a joint physical and cyber operation last year, according to Europol. Operation Pandora VII involved police from Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden and Bosnia and Herzegovina. As with previous iterations, the

Several harmful Python .whl files containing a new type of malware called “Kekw” have been discovered on PyPI (Python Package Index). According to new data by Cyble Research and Intelligence Labs (CRIL), Kekw malware can steal sensitive information from infected systems and perform clipper activities that can hijack cryptocurrency transactions. “Following our investigation, we found that

by Paul Ducklin World Password Day is always hard to write tips for, because the primary advice you’ll hear has been the same for many years. That’s because the “passwordless future” that we’ve all been promised is still some time away, even if some services already support it. Simply put, we’re stuck with the old,

The North Korean state-sponsored APT group known as Kimsuky has been observed using a new malware component called ReconShark. According to an advisory published by SentinelOne security researchers on Thursday, ReconShark is distributed through targeted spear-phishing emails, which contain OneDrive links that lead to downloading documents and activating harmful macros. “The spear-phishing emails are made

by Paul Ducklin We’ve written about PHP’s Packagist ecosystem before. Like PyPI for Pythonistas, Gems for Ruby fans, NPM for JavaScript programmers, or LuaRocks for Luaphiles, Packagist is a repository where community contributors can publish details of PHP packages they’ve created. This makes it easy for fellow PHP coders to get hold of library code

The City of Dallas in Texas, US, has confirmed a ransomware attack took down essential services, including some 911 dispatch systems.  “Wednesday morning, the City’s security monitoring tools notified our Security Operations Center (SOC) that a likely ransomware attack had been launched within our environment,” the City wrote in a press release. “Subsequently, the City has

by Paul Ducklin SILENT SECURITY! (IS THAT A GOOD THING?) No audio player below? 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, Stitcher and anywhere that good podcasts are found. Or just drop the

Pediatric mental health provider Brightline has warned patients that it suffered a data breach on January 30, impacting 783,606 people. Writing in a notice on its website earlier this week, Brightline said the breach was related to a zero-day vulnerability in its Fortra GoAnywhere MFT secure file-sharing platform. “Through its investigation, Fortra states that it

by Paul Ducklin Apple’s AirTag system has famously been subjected to firmware hacking, used as a free low-bandwidth community radio network, and involved in a stalking incident that tragically ended in a murder charge. To be fair to Apple, the company has introduced various tricks and techniques to make AirTags harder for stalkers and criminals

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has urged organizations to incorporate the Covered List created by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) into their risk management plans. The list encompasses a number of communications equipment and service providers that have been determined by the US government to pose a potential national security risk according

German IT service provider Bitmarck has confirmed bringing all of its customer and internal systems offline due to a cyber-attack discovered over the weekend. Writing on a temporary website on Sunday (and then on Monday), the company said the cyber-attack was detected by its early warning systems. “In compliance with our security protocol, we have

by Paul Ducklin We’ve written about the uncertainty of Apple’s security update process many times before. We’ve had urgent updates accompanied by email notifications that warned us of zero-day bugs that needed fixing right away, because crooks were already onto them… …but without even the vaguest description of what sort of criminals, and what they

An Ohio man has been sentenced to four years and three months behind bars after stealing 712 bitcoin ($21m), which were seized by investigators following the arrest of his brother. Gary James Harmon, 31, of Cleveland, stole the cryptocurrency, which was the subject of “pending criminal forfeiture proceedings” in the case of his sibling, Larry