Office Sentinel

by Paul Ducklin It’s just under two weeks since Google rushed out a Chrome patch for the then-current version 107 to seal off a bug that was already being used in real-life attacks. The company said nothing more about that bug than to describe it as a “heap buffer overflow in GPU” [sic], and to

Threat actors have been spotted using criminal proxy networks to obfuscate their illegal activities by hiding behind hijacked IP addresses and using the same to create an appearance of legitimacy. The findings come from security researchers at DomainTools, who have said that while these networks were initially used as part of botnets, their lucrative nature

by Paul Ducklin Forget Sergeant Pepper and his Lonely Hearts Club Band, who taught the band to play a mere 20 years ago today. December 2022 sees the 35th anniversary of the first major self-spreading computer virus – the infamous CHRISTMA EXEC worm that temporarily crushed the major mainframe networks of the day… … not

The annual number of memory safety vulnerabilities in Android dropped from 223 in 2019 to 85 in 2022 as Google gradually transitioned towards memory-safe languages. The tech giant made the announcement in a blog post on Thursday, where it wrote that for over a decade, 65% of all vulnerabilities across products and the industry were

by Paul Ducklin It’s just under a month since iOS 16.1.1 came out for Apple iPhone users, fixing a pair of bugs that were listed with the worrying words “a remote user may be able to cause unexpected app termination or arbitrary code execution”. Both macOS 13 Ventura and iPadOS got updated at the same

Colombian healthcare provider Keralty reported a ransomware attack on Sunday, which affected its systems as well as two of its subsidiaries: EPS Sanitas and Colsanitas. The attack has been reported on by Colombian news outlet El Tiempo, and would have disrupted the companies’ IT operations, websites and scheduling of medical appointments. Keralty said on Monday

by Paul Ducklin Back in August 2022, popular password manager company LastPass admitted to a data breach. The company, which is owned by sofware-as-a-service business GoTo, which used to be LogMeIn, published a very brief but nevertheless useful report about that incident about a month later: Briefly put, LastPass concluded that the attackers managed to

Nearly nine in 10 (87%) of US defense contractors are failing to meet basic cybersecurity regulation requirements, according to research commissioned by CyberSheath. The survey of 300 US-based Department of Defense (DoD) contractors found that just 13% of respondents have a Supplier Risk Performance System (SPRS) score of 70 or above. Under the Defense Federal

by Paul Ducklin In a fascinating legal deliberation handed down by the French data protection regulator CNIL (Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés), the energy company Électricité de France, or EDF for short, has been fined EUR 600,000 (about $600,000). The legal declaration is, in the manner of such things, rather long and (to

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added a critical flaw affecting Oracle Fusion Middleware systems to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Catalog on Monday. The bug, which CISA confirmed has been exploited in the wild, allows unauthenticated attackers with network access via HTTP to compromise Oracle Access Manager. Successful attacks targeting this vulnerability

by Paul Ducklin Researchers at secure coding company Checkmarx have warned of porn-themed malware that’s been attracting and attacking sleazy internet users in droves. Unfortunately, the side-effects of this malware, dubbed Unfilter or Space Unfilter, apparently involve plundering data from the victim’s computer, including Discord passwords, thus indirectly exposing the victim’s contacts – such as

A phishing campaign discovered in July that saw threat actors impersonating the Ministry of Human Resources of the UAE government may be more significant in scale than previously believed. The findings come from security researchers at CloudSEK, who published a new advisory about the threat earlier today. The technical write-up says the company has discovered an

A series of exploits have been found in the wild targeting Windows Internet Key Exchange (IKE) Protocol Extensions. According to a new advisory recently shared by security company Cyfirma with Infosecurity, the discovered vulnerabilities could have been exploited to target almost 1000 systems. The attacks observed by the company would be part of a campaign

by Paul Ducklin Google has just patched Chrome’s eighth zero-day hole of the year so far. Zero-days are bugs for which there were zero days you could have updated proactively… …because cybercriminals not only found the bug first, but also figured out how to exploit it for nefarious purposes before a patch was prepared and