Don’t worry, elections are safe. Our Security Researcher Cameron Camp provide us highlights from the DEF CON 30 conference. Scattered around a bevy of tables in the election hacking village here at DEF CON 30 are all the devices – opened wide – that are supposed to keep elections safe. Oh, the irony. It’s unclear
Month: August 2022
More than 1.31 million users attempted to install malicious or unwanted web browser extensions at least once, new findings from cybersecurity firm Kaspersky show. “From January 2020 to June 2022, more than 4.3 million unique users were attacked by adware hiding in browser extensions, which is approximately 70% of all users affected by malicious and
Microsoft claims to have disrupted a prolific Russian state-backed threat group known for conducting long-running cyber-espionage campaigns against mainly NATO countries. In an update on August 15, the tech giant said it had disabled accounts used by the “Seaborgium” group for reconnaissance, phishing, and email collection, and updated detections against its phishing domains in Microsoft
by Paul Ducklin At the well-known DEF CON security shindig in Las Vegas, Nevada, last week, Mac cybersecurity researcher Patrick Wardle revealed a “get-root” elevation of privilege (EoP) bug in Zoom for Mac: Mahalo to everybody who came to my @defcon talk “You’re M̶u̶t̶e̶d̶ Rooted” 🙏🏽 Was stoked to talk about (& live-demo 😅) a
The digital skills gap, especially in cybersecurity, is not a new phenomenon. This problematic is now exacerbate by the prevalence of burnout, which was presented at Black Hat USA 2022 Discussion of the resourcing issues within the cybersecurity sector is not a new phenomenon; according to a recent article in Fortune Education, the number of
Russian state-sponsored actors are continuing to strike Ukrainian entities with information-stealing malware as part of what’s suspected to be an espionage operation. Symantec, a division of Broadcom Software, attributed the malicious campaign to a threat actor tracked Shuckworm, also known as Actinium, Armageddon, Gamaredon, Primitive Bear, and Trident Ursa. The findings have been corroborated by
Only a fifth of North American organizations have cyber-insurance coverage over $600,000, leaving a potentially significant shortfall in funds if they are compromised by ransomware, according to BlackBerry. The security software developer teamed up with Corvus Insurance to produce its BlackBerry Cyber Insurance Coverage study, compiled from interviews with 450 IT decision makers in the
Tinder, Bumble or Grindr – popular dating apps depend heavily on your location, personal data, and loose privacy settings. Find out how to put yourself out there safely by following our suggested settings tweaks. We get it! Most of us already forgot how to find a date offline. And that’s fine; times have changed and
A now-removed rogue package pushed to the official third-party software repository for Python has been found to deploy cryptominers on Linux systems. The module, named “secretslib” and downloaded 93 times prior to its deletion, was released to the Python Package Index (PyPI) on August 6, 2022 and is described as “secrets matching and verification made
Vulnerabilities in Xiaomi’s mobile payment could lead to an attacker stealing private keys used to sign Wechat Pay control and payment packages. The flaws were found by Check Point Research (CPR) in Xiaomi’s trusted execution environment (TEE), the system element responsible for storing and managing sensitive information such as keys and passwords. “We discovered a
Our Security evangelist’s take on this first day of Black Hat 2022, where cyberdefense was on every mind. As day one at Black Hat USA 2022 came to an end someone asked me, ”What is your takeaway from today’s conference?” There have been several interesting presentations, and as expected a number of them detailed the
Dutch authorities on Friday announced the arrest of a software developer in Amsterdam who is alleged to be working for Tornado Cash, days after the U.S. sanctioned the decentralized crypto mixing service. The 29-year-old individual is “suspected of involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering” through the service, the Dutch Fiscal Information
The first day of school is right around the corner. The whole family is gearing up for a return to the routine: waking up to alarm clocks at dawn, rushed mornings, learning all day, and after-school activities and homework all night. Even though everyone is in a frenzied state, now is a great time to
Social media giant Meta has announced it will start testing end-to-end encryption (E2EE) as the default option on its Facebook Messenger platform. The company made the announcement in a blog post on August 11, where it explained the feature will be initially available only to selected users. “If you’re in the test group, some of
The NHS was victim of a potential cyberattack, which raises the question of the impact of those data breach for the public. This week, the NHS was potentially affected by a ransomware attack, which raise the question: Why should you care if your data my have been stolen during a breach? Also, if you are
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
The World Wide Web, invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, has undoubtedly made our lives more convenient in so many ways. For example, family road trips looked a lot different than they do today. Preteens were designated backseat navigators, with huge atlases spread across their laps, yelling “Turn left here! No wait, right!” Then, when
A key NHS IT partner that was hit by a ransomware attack last week has said it could take three to four weeks before all systems are back to normal. Advanced runs several key systems for the health service, including clinical patient management software (Adastra) and financial management software (eFinancials). One of its most important
by Paul Ducklin 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. Schroedinger’s cat outlines in featured image via Dhatfield under CC BY-SA 3.0. You can listen to us on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google
A deep-dive in Zero-trust, to help you navigate in a zero-trust world and further secure your organization. Last week, at ChannelCon in Chicago, I participated on a panel titled ‘Building trust in a Zero Trust world’ with several other industry experts. The core concept of Zero Trust is ‘trust nothing, verify everything’ and for many
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added two flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The two high-severity issues relate to weaknesses in Zimbra Collaboration, both of which could be chained to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution on affected email servers – CVE-2022-27925 (CVSS score: 7.2)
Earlier this year, our global Connected Family Study revealed the online habits of parents and their children. What we found called for a closer look. One finding that leaped out, in particular, is—cyberbullying occurs far more often than parents think. And in many cases, children are keeping it from their parents. Now with our follow-on research,
The threat actor known as DeathStalker has continued to target and disrupt foreign and cryptocurrency exchanges around the world throughout 2022 using the VileRAT malware, according to security researchers from Kaspersky. The findings are detailed in an advisory published on August 10 2022, which mentions a number of VileRAT-focussed campaigns supposedly perpetrated by DeathStalker, starting
by Paul Ducklin Here’s this week’s BWAIN, our jocular term for a Bug With An Impressive Name. BWAIN is an accolade that we hand out when a new cybersecurity flaw not only turns out to be interesting and important, but also turns up with its own logo, domain name and website. This one is dubbed
Cloud-based code hosting platform GitHub has announced that it will now start sending Dependabot alerts for vulnerable GitHub Actions to help developers fix security issues in CI/CD workflows. “When a security vulnerability is reported in an action, our team of security researchers will create an advisory to document the vulnerability, which will trigger an alert
Our personal and professional lives are becoming increasingly intertwined with the online world. Regular internet usage has made us all prone to cyber-security risks. You leave a digital footprint every time you use the internet, which is a trace of all your online activities. When you create new accounts or subscribe to different websites, you
Security researchers from Check Point have spotted 10 malicious packages on Python Package Index (PyPI), the primary Python package index used by Python developers. The first of them was Ascii2text, a malicious package that mimicked the popular art package by name and description. “Interestingly, [threat actors] were smart enough to copy the entire project description without
Has your PC been hacked? Whatever happens, don’t panic. Read on for ten signs your PC has been hacked and handy tips on how to fix it. Global cybercriminals make trillions of dollars each year. Much of their success comes from exploiting the mistakes that we make—by clicking on phishing links, forgetting to update critical
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
Authored by Oliver Devane Technical Support Scams have been targeting computer users for many years. Their goal is to make victims believe they have issues needing to be fixed, and then charge exorbitant fees, which unfortunately some victims pay. This blog post covers a number of example actions, that scammers will go through when they