Cyber Security

The U.S. State Department on Thursday announced a $10 million reward for information related to five individuals associated with the Conti ransomware group. The reward offer is also notable for the fact that it marks the first time the face of a Conti associate, known as “Target,” has been unmasked. The four other alleged members

A security feature bypass vulnerability has been uncovered in three signed third-party Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) boot loaders that allow bypass of the UEFI Secure Boot feature. “These vulnerabilities can be exploited by mounting the EFI System Partition and replacing the existing bootloader with the vulnerable one, or modifying a UEFI variable to load

Security flaws have been identified in Xiaomi Redmi Note 9T and Redmi Note 11 models, which could be exploited to disable the mobile payment mechanism and even forge transactions via a rogue Android app installed on the devices. Check Point said it found the flaws in devices powered by MediaTek chipsets during a security analysis

Social media company Meta said it will begin testing end-to-end encryption (E2EE) on its Messenger platform this week for select users as the default option, as the company continues to slowly add security layers to its various chat services. “If you’re in the test group, some of your most frequent chats may be automatically end-to-end

Networking equipment major Cisco on Wednesday confirmed it was the victim of a cyberattack on May 24, 2022 after the attackers got hold of an employee’s personal Google account that contained passwords synced from their web browser. “Initial access to the Cisco VPN was achieved via the successful compromise of a Cisco employee’s personal Google

Three different offshoots of the notorious Conti cybercrime cartel have resorted to the technique of call-back phishing as an initial access vector to breach targeted networks. “Three autonomous threat groups have since adopted and independently developed their own targeted phishing tactics derived from the call back phishing methodology,” cybersecurity firm AdvIntel said in a Wednesday

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed multiple severe security vulnerabilities asset management platform Device42 that, if successfully exploited, could enable a malicious actor to seize control of affected systems. “By exploiting these issues, an attacker could impersonate other users, obtain admin-level access in the application (by leaking session with an LFI) or obtain full access to the

The first ever incident possibly involving the ransomware family known as Maui occurred on April 15, 2021, aimed at an unnamed Japanese housing company. The disclosure from Kaspersky arrives a month after U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies issued an advisory about the use of the ransomware strain by North Korean government-backed hackers to target the

A former Twitter employee has been pronounced guilty for his role in digging up private information pertaining to certain Twitter users and turning over that data to Saudi Arabia. Ahmad Abouammo, 44, was convicted by a jury after a two-week trial in San Francisco federal court, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. He faces up to 20 years

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added a recently disclosed security flaw in the UnRAR utility to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. Tracked as CVE-2022-30333 (CVSS score: 7.5), the issue concerns a path traversal vulnerability in the Unix versions of UnRAR that can be triggered

The U.S. Treasury Department on Monday placed sanctions against crypto mixing service Tornado Cash, citing its use by the North Korea-backed Lazarus Group in the high-profile hacks of Ethereum bridges to launder and cash out the ill-gotten money. Tornado Cash, which allows users to move cryptocurrency assets between accounts by obfuscating their origin and destination,

Customer engagement platform Twilio on Monday disclosed that a “sophisticated” threat actor gained “unauthorized access” using an SMS-based phishing campaign aimed at its staff to gain information on a “limited number” of accounts. The social-engineering attack was bent on stealing employee credentials, the company said, calling the as-yet-unidentified adversary “well-organized” and “methodical in their actions.”

Over a dozen military-industrial complex enterprises and public institutions in Afghanistan and Europe have come under a wave of targeted attacks since January 2022 to steal confidential data by simultaneously making use of six different backdoors. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky attributed the attacks “with a high degree of confidence” to a China-linked threat actor tracked

A few days ago, a friend and I were having a rather engaging conversation that sparked my excitement. We were discussing my prospects of becoming a red teamer as a natural career progression. The reason I got stirred up is not that I want to change either my job or my position, as I am

A new botnet named Orchard has been observed using Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto’s account transaction information to generate domain names to conceal its command-and-control (C2) infrastructure. “Because of the uncertainty of Bitcoin transactions, this technique is more unpredictable than using the common time-generated [domain generation algorithms], and thus more difficult to defend against,” researchers from

Facebook parent company Meta disclosed that it took action against two espionage operations in South Asia that leveraged its social media platforms to distribute malware to potential targets. The first set of activities is what the company described as “persistent and well-resourced” and undertaken by a hacking group tracked under the moniker Bitter APT (aka

A nascent service called Dark Utilities has already attracted 3,000 users for its ability to provide command-and-control (C2) services with the goal of commandeering compromised systems. “It is marketed as a means to enable remote access, command execution, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and cryptocurrency mining operations on infected systems,” Cisco Talos said in a report

A new IoT botnet malware dubbed RapperBot has been observed rapidly evolving its capabilities since it was first discovered in mid-June 2022. “This family borrows heavily from the original Mirai source code, but what separates it from other IoT malware families is its built-in capability to brute force credentials and gain access to SSH servers