Office Sentinel

by Paul Ducklin Earlier this month, the NortonLifeLock online identity protection service, owned by Arizona-based technology company Gen Digital, sent a security warning to many of its customers. The warning letter can be viewed online, for example on the website of the Office of the Vermont Attorney General, where it appears under the title NortonLifeLock

The US Department of Defense (DoD) has confirmed it will soon launch the third part of its ‘Hack the Pentagon’ bug bounty program, first unveiled in 2016. According to a dedicated page on the Sam.Gov website, the initiative will rely on cybersecurity researchers to find vulnerabilities in the government’s Facility Related Controls System (FRCS) network.

by Paul Ducklin Another day, another series of cryptocurrency scams… …these, fortunately, brought to a halt, though sadly not before they’d defrauded “investors” around the globe to the tune of millions of dollars. According to Europol, 216 people were questioned in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Germany and Serbia; 15 have already been arrested; 22 searches were conducted,

Cisco has warned customers of a critical authentication bypass vulnerability with public exploit code affecting multiple end-of-life (EoL) VPN routers. The security flaw (tracked CVE-2023-20025) has been found in the web-based management interface of Cisco Small Business (SMB) RV016, RV042, RV042G and RV082 routers provided by Hou Liuyang of Qihoo 360 Netlab. “[These vulnerabilities] could allow a remote

Russian cyber-criminals have been observed on dark web forums trying to bypass OpenAI’s API restrictions to gain access to the ChatGPT chatbot for nefarious purposes. Various individuals have been observed, for instance, discussing how to use stolen payment cards to pay for upgraded users on OpenAI (thus circumventing the limitations of free accounts). Others have

The pro-Russia hacktivist group known as NoName057(16) has recently started new attacks against organizations and businesses across Poland, Lithuania and other countries. Most recently, the group began targeting the websites of the Czech presidential election candidates. According to SentinelOne, who discovered the new campaigns, the group conducted these campaigns by using public Telegram channels, a distributed

The Guardian has confirmed that threat actors stole the personal data of UK staff members during the ransomware attack that affected its systems on December 20, 2022. The updates come from The Guardian Media Group’s chief executive, Anna Bateson, and The Guardian‘s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, who emailed staff members on Wednesday. The executives have described

by Paul Ducklin THE CRYPTO CRISIS THAT WASN’T 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 and anywhere that good

A new advanced persistent threat (APT) group dubbed ‘Dark Pink’ by Group-IB (and ‘Saaiwc Group’ by Chinese cybersecurity researchers) has been spotted targeting various entities across Asia-Pacific and Europe, mainly with spear phishing techniques. According to a new advisory published by Group-IB earlier today, Dark Pink began operations as early as mid-2021, although the group’s

by Paul Ducklin JWT is short for JSON Web Token, where JSON itself is short for JavaScript Object Notation. JSON is a modernish way of representing structured data; its format is a bit like XML, and can often be used instead, but without all the opening-and-closing angle brackets to get in the way of legibility.

The US Supreme Court gave the green light on Monday for WhatsApp to pursue a lawsuit against NSO Group, the Israeli surveillance company, for installing the Pegasus spyware on roughly 1400 devices where WhatsApp was also installed. More specifically, the court has ruled that WhatsApp is allowed to sue for damages ensued by the malicious installation

by Paul Ducklin As far as we can tell, there are a whopping 2874 items in this month’s Patch Tuesday update list from Microsoft, based on the CSV download we just grabbed from Redmond’s Security Update Guide web page. (The website itself says 2283, but the CSV export contained 2875 lines, where the first line

The South African threat actors known as “Automated Libra” have been improving their techniques to exploit cloud platform resources for cryptocurrency mining. According to Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, the threat actors have used a new Captcha-solving system alongside a more aggressive use of CPU resources for mining and the mix of “freejacking” with the

by Paul Ducklin If you’re a programmer, whether you code for a hobby or professionally, you’ll know that creating a new version of your project – an official “release” version that you yourself, or your friends, or your customers, will actually install and use – is always a bit of a white-knuckle ride. After all,