Norwegian police agency Økokrim has announced the seizure of 60 million NOK (about $5.84 million) worth of cryptocurrency stolen by the Lazarus Group in March 2022 following the Axie Infinity Ronin Bridge hack. “This case shows that we also have a great capacity to follow the money on the blockchain, even if the criminals use
Month: February 2023
Several Chinese state-sponsored threat groups have been observed targeting businesses and governments in the European Union. The claims come from a joint publication by the EU Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) and the Computer Emergency Response Team for the EU institutions, bodies and agencies (CERT-EU). Published on Wednesday, the document directly mentions particular advanced persistent threats (APTs): APT27,
ESET researchers have identified a campaign using trojanized installers to deliver the FatalRAT malware, distributed via malicious websites linked in ads that appear in Google search results ESET researchers identified a malware campaign that targets Chinese-speaking people in Southeast and East Asia by buying misleading advertisements to appear in Google search results that lead to
Feb 19, 2023Ravie LakshmananNetwork Security / Firewall Fortinet has released security updates to address 40 vulnerabilities in its software lineup, including FortiWeb, FortiOS, FortiNAS, and FortiProxy, among others. Two of the 40 flaws are rated Critical, 15 are rated High, 22 are rated Medium, and one is rated Low in severity. Top of the list
A new malicious actor dubbed “WIP26” by SentinelOne has been observed targeting telecommunication providers in the Middle East. Describing the threat in a Thursday advisory, the security researchers said the team has been monitoring WIP26 with colleagues from QGroup GmbH. “WIP26 is characterized by the abuse of public Cloud infrastructure – Microsoft 365 Mail, Microsoft
Threat actors used search engine ads to impersonate makers of popular software and direct internet users to malicious websites This week, the ESET research team has published a report describing a malware campaign that took aim at Chinese-speaking people in Southeast and East Asia. The campaign involved malicious advertisements that appeared in Google search and
Feb 18, 2023Ravie LakshmananAuthentication / Online Security Twitter has announced that it’s limiting the use of SMS-based two-factor authentication (2FA) to its Blue subscribers. “While historically a popular form of 2FA, unfortunately we have seen phone-number based 2FA be used – and abused – by bad actors,” the company said. “We will no longer allow
The recent rise in supply chain attacks has placed supply chain security high on the agenda of decision-makers across all industries. The UK National Cybersecurity Centre (NCSC) launched a list of recommendations on 16 February to help medium and large enterprises ‘map’ their supply chain dependencies in order to better anticipate the cyber risks coming
by Paul Ducklin CAN WE STOP WITH THE “SOPHISTICATED” ALREADY? The birth of ENIAC. A “sophisticated attack” (someone got phished). A cryptographic hack enabled by a security warning. Valentine’s Day Patch Tuesday. Apple closes spyware-sized 0-day hole. Click-and-drag on the soundwaves below to skip to any point. You can also listen directly on Soundcloud. With
No longer relegated to a side-show, tech is embedded into virtually every new piece of gear entering the battlefield As military and tech gather to address the frosty world defense conditions and what the intersection of technology’s role is with attendees at AFCEA West, it’s clear that the global warfighting world has changed. No longer
Feb 17, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyber Threat / Surveillanceware Entities in Armenia have come under a cyber attack using an updated version of a backdoor called OxtaRAT that allows remote access and desktop surveillance. “The tool capabilities include searching for and exfiltrating files from the infected machine, recording the video from the web camera and desktop, remotely
Security researchers have warned that a growing number of versatile malware variants are capable of performing multiple malicious actions across the cyber-kill chain. Picus Security compiled its Red Report 2023 by analyzing over 500,000 malware samples last year, identifying their tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) and extracting over 5.3 million “actions.” The vendor then mapped these
by Paul Ducklin Last week, we wrote about a bunch of memory management bugs that were fixed in the latest security update of the popular OpenSSL encryption library. Along with those memory bugs, we also reported on a bug dubbed CVE-2022-4304: Timing Oracle in RSA Decryption. In this bug, firing the same encrypted message over
Don’t be their next victim – here’s a handy round-up of some the most common signs that should set your alarm bells ringing We all spend so much of our time online these days. It’s estimated that the average adult spends the best part of seven hours per day glued to their screens. When we’re
Feb 16, 2023Ravie LakshmananCritical Infrastructure / Cybersecurity Security researchers have disclosed two new vulnerabilities affecting Schneider Electric Modicon programmable logic controllers (PLCs) that could allow for authentication bypass and remote code execution. The flaws, tracked as CVE-2022-45788 (CVSS score: 7.5) and CVE-2022-45789 (CVSS score: 8.1), are part of a broader collection of security defects tracked
The ESXiArgs ransomware attack that started infecting servers of VMware ESXi hypervisors from February 2, 2023, is the latest of a long list of malicious campaigns exploiting ESXi vulnerabilities. Threat intelligence firm Recorded Future has tracked ESXi-focused ransomware since 2020. In a threat analysis report published on February 13, 2023, the company said it believes
by Paul Ducklin Deciphering Microsoft’s official Update Guide web pages is not for the faint-hearted. Most of the information you need, if not everything you’d really like to know, is there, but there’s such a dizzing number of ways to view it, and so many generated-on-the-fly pages are needed to display it, that it can
Spoiler alert: it turned me down. But that’s far from the only thing I learned while playing around with the bot that the world has fallen in love with so badly. When it was unleashed into an astonished world on November 30th 2022, ChatGPT became the fastest-growing web app ever, reaching a million users in the
Feb 15, 2023The Hacker NewsSecOps / DevOps In an ideal world, security and development teams would be working together in perfect harmony. But we live in a world of competing priorities, where DevOps and security departments often butt heads with each other. Agility and security are often at odds with each other— if a new
Spain’s Policia Nacional has teamed up with the US Secret Service to dismantle a cybercrime gang that stole millions of dollars from US citizens and companies. Nine suspected members of the group have been arrested – eight in Madrid and one in Miami – after receiving close to €5m ($5.4m) from their victims, which they
by Paul Ducklin Apple has just released updates for all supported Macs, and for any mobile devices running the very latest versions of their respective operating systems. In version number terms: iPhones and iPads on version 16 go to iOS 16.3.1 and iPadOS 16.3.1 respectively (see HT213635). Apple Watches on version 9 go to watchOS
Small and medium-sized businesses have good reason to be concerned about the loss of data and financial impacts While tech advancements have enabled small and medium businesses (SMBs) to grow their business and allowed them to evolve their operational models, cybersecurity risks and threats can cancel any progress that has been made so far. Underlying
Feb 14, 2023Ravie LakshmananCryptocurrency / Software Security Malicious actors have published more than 451 unique Python packages on the official Python Package Index (PyPI) repository in an attempt to infect developer systems with clipper malware. Software supply chain security company Phylum, which spotted the libraries, said the ongoing activity is a follow-up to a campaign
Security researchers have discovered another sizeable haul of malicious packages on the npm and PyPI open source registries, which could cause issues if unwittingly downloaded by developers. In January, Sonatype said it found 691 malicious npm packages and 49 malicious PyPI components containing crypto-miners, remote access Trojans (RATs) and more. The discoveries by the firm’s
There have been a number of reports of attacks on industrial control systems (ICS) in the past few years. Looking a bit closer, most of the attacks seem to have spilt over from traditional IT. That’s to be expected, as production systems are commonly connected to ordinary corporate networks at this point. Though our data
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a new Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) on Thursday warning critical infrastructure sector entities against ongoing North Korean state-sponsored ransomware activity. Part of the #StopRansomware campaign, the new advisory is a result of a collaboration between CISA, the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department
by Naked Security writer In October 2022, we asked you to imagine being stuck in the following awful situation: Imagine that you’d spoken in what you thought was total confidence to a psychotherapist, but the contents of your sessions had been saved for posterity, along with precise personal identification details such as your unique national
Feb 11, 2023Ravie LakshmananRansomware / Endpoint Security After the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a decryptor for affected victims to recover from ESXiArgs ransomware attacks, the threat actors have bounced back with an updated version that encrypts more data. The emergence of the new variant was reported by a system administrator on
Reddit suffered a cyber-attack after its internal systems were breached on February 05 due to a “sophisticated” and “highly-targeted” phishing attack that led to employee credential compromise. “The attacker sent out plausible-sounding prompts pointing employees to a website that cloned the behavior of our intranet gateway in an attempt to steal credentials and second-factor tokens,”
by Paul Ducklin Popular social media site Reddit – “orange Usenet with ads”, as we’ve somewhat ungraciously heard it described – is the latest well-known web property to suffer a data breach in which its own source code was stolen. In recent weeks, LastPass and GitHub have confessed to similar experiences, with cyercriminals apparently breaking