Cyber Security

Jan 05, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyber Attack / Malware A financially motivated threat actor tracked as Blind Eagle has resurfaced with a refined toolset and an elaborate infection chain as part of its attacks targeting organizations in Colombia and Ecuador. Check Point’s latest research offers new insights into the Spanish-speaking group’s tactics and techniques, including the use

Jan 05, 2023Ravie LakshmananCybercrime / Banking Security A cybercrime group dubbed Bluebottle has been linked to a set of targeted attacks against the financial sector in Francophone countries located in Africa from at least July 2022 to September 2022. “The group makes extensive use of living-off-the-land, dual use tools, and commodity malware, with no custom

Jan 05, 2023Ravie LakshmananPrivacy / Data Protection The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has fined Meta Platforms €390 million (roughly $414 million) over its handling of user data for serving personalized ads in what could be a major blow to its ad-fueled business model. To that end, the privacy regulator has ordered Meta Ireland to

Ransomware: contemporary threats, how to prevent them and how the FBI can help In April 2021, Dutch supermarkets faced a food shortage. The cause wasn’t a drought or a sudden surge in the demand for avocados. Rather, the reason was a ransomware attack. In the past years, companies, universities, schools, medical facilities and other organizations

Jan 04, 2023Ravie LakshmananFirmware Security Qualcomm on Tuesday released patches to address multiple security flaws in its chipsets, some of which could be exploited to cause information disclosure and memory corruption. The five vulnerabilities — tracked from CVE-2022-40516 through CVE-2022-40520 — also impact Lenovo ThinkPad X13s laptops, prompting the Chinese PC maker to issue BIOS

Jan 04, 2023Ravie LakshmananVPN / Server Security Synology has released security updates to address a critical flaw impacting VPN Plus Server that could be exploited to take over affected systems. Tracked as CVE-2022-43931, the vulnerability carries a maximum severity rating of 10 on the CVSS scale and has been described as an out-of-bounds write bug

Jan 03, 2023The Hacker NewsSecurity Automation / Cybersecurity Challenges with an enforcement-based approach An enforcement-based approach to security begins with a security policy backed by security controls, often heavy-handed and designed to prevent employees from engaging in risky behavior or inadvertently expanding the potential attack surface of an organization. Most organizations exclusively use enforcement-based security

Jan 03, 2023Ravie LakshmananUnited States A new malware campaign has been observed using sensitive information stolen from a bank as a lure in phishing emails to drop a remote access trojan called BitRAT. The unknown adversary is believed to have hijacked the IT infrastructure of a Colombian cooperative bank, using the information to craft convincing

Jan 02, 2023Ravie LakshmananSupply Chain / Machine Learning The maintainers of the PyTorch package have warned users who have installed the nightly builds of the library between December 25, 2022, and December 30, 2022, to uninstall and download the latest versions following a dependency confusion attack. “PyTorch-nightly Linux packages installed via pip during that time

Jan 02, 2023Ravie LakshmananOnline Scam / Cybersecurity Chinese international students in the U.K. have been targeted by persistent Chinese-speaking scammers for over a year as part of an activity dubbed RedZei (aka RedThief). “The RedZei fraudsters have chosen their targets carefully, researched them and realized it was a rich victim group that is ripe for

Jan 02, 2023Ravie LakshmananWeb Security / Linux WordPress sites are being targeted by a previously unknown strain of Linux malware that exploits flaws in over two dozen plugins and themes to compromise vulnerable systems. “If sites use outdated versions of such add-ons, lacking crucial fixes, the targeted web pages are injected with malicious JavaScripts,” Russian

Dec 30, 2022Ravie LakshmananPatch Management The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added two years-old security flaws impacting TIBCO Software’s JasperReports product to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The flaws, tracked as CVE-2018-5430 (CVSS score: 7.7) and CVE-2018-18809 (CVSS score: 9.9), were addressed by TIBCO in April

Dec 30, 2022Ravie LakshmananBug Bounty / Privacy A security researcher was awarded a bug bounty of $107,500 for identifying security issues in Google Home smart speakers that could be exploited to install backdoors and turn them into wiretapping devices. The flaws “allowed an attacker within wireless proximity to install a ‘backdoor’ account on the device,

Dec 29, 2022Ravie LakshmananOnline Security / Malvertising Users searching for popular software are being targeted by a new malvertising campaign that abuses Google Ads to serve trojanized variants that deploy malware, such as Raccoon Stealer and Vidar. The activity makes use of seemingly credible websites with typosquatted domain names that are surfaced on top of

Dec 29, 2022Ravie LakshmananServer Security / Citrix Thousands of Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and Gateway endpoints remain vulnerable to two critical security flaws disclosed by the company over the last few months. The issues in question are CVE-2022-27510 and CVE-2022-27518 (CVSS scores: 9.8), which were addressed by the virtualization services provider on November 8

Dec 28, 2022Ravie LakshmananMalware / Windows Security Microsoft’s decision to block Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros by default for Office files downloaded from the internet has led many threat actors to improvise their attack chains in recent months. Now according to Cisco Talos, advanced persistent threat (APT) actors and commodity malware families alike are

Dec 28, 2022Ravie LakshmananBlockchain / Android Malware Decentralized multi-chain crypto wallet BitKeep on Wednesday confirmed a cyberattack that allowed threat actors to distribute fraudulent versions of its Android app with the goal of stealing users’ digital currencies. “With maliciously implanted code, the altered APK led to the leak of user’s private keys and enabled the

Dec 26, 2022Ravie LakshmananCyber Crime / Data Security The pay-per-install (PPI) malware downloader service known as PrivateLoader is being used to distribute a previously documented information-stealing malware dubbed RisePro. Flashpoint spotted the newly identified stealer on December 13, 2022, after it discovered “several sets of logs” exfiltrated using the malware on an illicit cybercrime marketplace