Security

by Paul Ducklin Well-known cybersecurity researcher Fabian Bräunlein has featured not once but twice before on Naked Security for his work in researching the pros and cons of Apple’s AirTag products. In 2021, he dug into the protocol devised by Apple for keeping tags on tags and found that the cryprography was good, making it

A business email compromise (BEC) group dubbed ‘Crimson Kingsnake’ has recently been spotted impersonating well-known international law firms to trick recipients into approving overdue invoice payments. As outlined in a technical write-up by cloud email security platform Abnormal, 92 malicious domains of 19 law firms and debt collection agencies across the US, UK and Australia have been

The LockBit hacking group has claimed responsibility for the August cyber-attack against the multinational automotive group Continental. The ransomware gang made the announcement on its leak site on Wednesday and is threatening to publish the company’s data unless the ransom is paid over the next few hours of today (Friday). On the dark web blog

by Paul Ducklin You’ve probably seen story after story in the media in the past week about a critical bug in OpenSSL, though at the time of writing this article[2022-11-01T11:30:00Z], no one covering OpenSSL actually knows what to tell you about the bug, because the news is about an update that is scheduled to come

The individuals behind the Black Basta ransomware have been linked to hacking operations conducted by the FIN7 threat actors. According to a new advisory by SentinelLabs, Black Basta actors have used a custom defense impairment tool (found exclusively in incidents by this specific threat actor) in several instances. “Our investigation led us to a further

by Naked Security writer It’s only a week since Elon Musk’s take-private of Twitter on 28 October 2022… …but if you take into account the number of news stories about it (and, perhaps ironically under the circumstances, the volume of Twitter threadspace devoted to it), it probably feels a lot longer. There’s been plenty to

The European Cybersecurity Agency (ENISA)’s threat landscape annual report 2022 is heavily influenced by the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the cyber landscape. Covering the period from July 2021 up to July 2022, the report was presented under the title Volatile Geopolitics Shake the Trends of the 2022 Cybersecurity Threat Landscape during

by Paul Ducklin WE DON’T KNOW HOW BAD WE WERE, BUT PERHAPS THE CROOKS WEREN’T ANY GOOD? 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

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has published a document highlighting charges against eight individuals for their participation in a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) conspiracy that involved hacking and tax fraud. US attorney Roger B. Handberg announced the partial unsealing of the indictment on Tuesday, charging Andi Jacques, Monika Shauntel Jenkins, Louis Noel

by Paul Ducklin Yesterday, we wrote about the waited-for-with-bated-breath OpenSSL update that attracted many column-kilometres of media attention last week. The OpenSSL team announced in advance, as it usually does, that a new version of its popular cryptographic library would soon be released. This notification stated that the update would patch against a security hole

A major hospital in Osaka, Japan, has suspended routine medical services following a ransomware cyber-attack that disrupted its electronic medical record systems. Emergency operations are continuing, but Osaka General Medical Center officials told reporters on Monday that the hospital system failed earlier today and could not be accessed. They have also reported that a contractor

by Paul Ducklin We’ll start with the important stuff: the widely awaited OpenSSL bugfixes announced last week are out. OpenSSL 1.1.1 goes to version 1.1.1s, and patches one listed security-related bug, but this bug doesn’t have a security rating or an official CVE number. We strongly recommend that you update, but the CRITICAL update that

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has published a new series of guidelines to help federal agencies defend against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The Capacity Enhancement Guide has been published in collaboration with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC). It provides organizations with proactive steps

by Paul Ducklin Imagine that you’d spoken in what you thought was total confidence to a psychotherapist, but the contents of your sessions had been saved for posterity, along with precise personal identification details such as your unique national ID number, and perhaps including additional information such as notes about your relationship with your family…

The threat actors behind the Raspberry Robin worm have been associated with a complex and interconnected malware ecosystem comprising the Clop and LockBit ransomware groups. The findings come from Microsoft, which has said the worm had alternate infection methods beyond its original USB drive spread. “These infections lead to follow-on hands-on-keyboard attacks and human-operated ransomware

by Paul Ducklin The Clearview AI saga continues! If you haven’t heard of this company before, here’s a very clear and concise recap from the French privacy regulator, CNIL (Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés), which has very handily been publishing its findings and rulings in this long-running story in both French and English:

A previously undocumented dropper has been spotted installing backdoors and other tools using the new technique of reading commands from apparently innocuous Internet Information Services (IIS) logs. The dropper has been discovered by cybersecurity researchers at Symantec, who said an actor is using the piece of malware dubbed Cranefly (aka UNC3524) to install another piece

by Paul Ducklin Google pushed out a bunch of security fixes for the Chrome and Chromium browser code earlier this week… …only to receive a vulnerability report from researchers at cybersecurity company Avast on the very same day. Google’s response was to push out another update as soon as it could: a one-bug fix dealing

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a new report outlining baseline cybersecurity performance goals (CPGs) for all critical infrastructure sectors. The document is the result of a July 2021 security memorandum signed by President Biden. It has tasked CISA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) with creating fundamental cybersecurity

by Paul Ducklin Regular readers will know two things about our attitude to Apple’s security patches: We like to get them as soon as we can. Whether it’s a full version upgrade that also includes a bunch of security fixes, or a point release (one where the leftmost verion number doesn’t change) with the primary

A new cryptojacking campaign has been discovered targeting vulnerable Docker and Kubernetes infrastructure. Dubbed ‘Kiss-a-dog’ by CrowdStrike security researchers, the campaign has used several command-and-control (C2) servers to launch attacks aiming at mining cryptocurrency. The threat actors have also utilized user and kernel mode rootkits to hide the activity, backdoor compromised containers, move laterally in the

by Paul Ducklin WE’RE SCRAPING YOUR FACES FOR YOUR OWN GOOD! (ALLEGEDLY) 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, Stitcher

The threat actor known as Vice Society has been conducting ransomware and extortion campaigns against the global education sector, particularly in the US. The findings come from Microsoft security researchers, who published an advisory about Vice Society (tracked by the tech giant as DEV-0832) on Tuesday. “Shifting ransomware payloads over time from BlackCat, QuantumLocker, and

by Paul Ducklin See Tickets is a major global player in the online event ticketing business: they’ll sell you tickets to festivals, theatre shows, concerts, clubs, gigs and much more. The company has just admitted to a major data breach that shares at least one characteristic with the amplifiers favoured by notorious rock performers Spinal

A total of 108.9 million accounts were breached in the third quarter of 2022, a 70% increase compared to the previous quarter. The top five countries and regions most affected by data breaches in Q3 2022 were Russia, France, Indonesia, the US and Spain. While Russia had the most breaches overall (22.3 million), France had

by Paul Ducklin Cryptoguru Bruce Schneier (where crypto means cryptography, not the other thing!) just published an intriguing note on his blog entitled On the Randomness of Automatic Card Shufflers. If you’ve ever been to a casino, at least one in Nevada, you’ll know that the blackjack tables don’t take chances with customers known in

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released a new joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) warning organizations against the ransomware and data extortion group Daixin Team. Published in conjunction with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the CSA said Daixin Team is actively targeting US businesses, mainly in

by Paul Ducklin Apple’s latest collection of security updates has arrived, including the just-launched macOS 13 Ventura, which was accompanied by its own security bulletin listing a whopping 112 CVE-numbered security holes. Of those, we counted 27 arbitrary code execution holes, of which 12 allow rogue code to be injected right into the kernel itself,

Thousands of publicly exposed, active application programming interface (API) tokens have been spotted across the web that could threaten software integrity and allow bad actors to access confidential information, data or private networks. The findings come from security researchers at JFrog, who recently made the discovery while testing a new feature in one of the company’s security

Google called for contributors on Thursday to a new open source project named Graph for Understanding Artifact Composition (GUAC) as part of its efforts to improve software supply chain security. According to the tech giant, GUAC is still in the early stages, but it is set to change how the industry perceives software supply chains.