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Simple Mail Transfer Protocol or SMTP has easily exploitable security loopholes. Email routing protocols were designed in a time when cryptographic technology was at a nascent stage (e.g., the de-facto protocol for email transfer, SMTP, is nearly 40 years old now), and therefore security was not an important consideration. As a result, in most email

Not all heroes wear capes. Cybersecurity professionals are digital warriors who use their knowledge and skill to battle malicious hackers. Sounds like an exciting career, right? If the comic-book comparisons aren’t working for you, perhaps some figures will. According to ZipRecruiter, the average salary of a cybersecurity professional is just over $100,000 a year. The

U.S. technology firm Kaseya has released security patches to address two zero-day vulnerabilities affecting its Unitrends enterprise backup and continuity solution that could result in privilege escalation and authenticated remote code execution. The two weaknesses are part of a trio of vulnerabilities discovered and reported by researchers at the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD)

Google and Microsoft said they are pledging to invest a total of $30 billion in cybersecurity advancements over the next five years, as the U.S. government partners with private sector companies to address threats facing the country in the wake of a string of sophisticated malicious cyber activity targeting critical infrastructure, laying bare the risks

Today I discuss an attack vector conducive to cross-organizational spread, in-home local propagation. Though often overlooked, this vector is especially relevant today, as many corporate employees remain working from home. In this post, I contrast in-home local propagation with traditional vectors through which a threat (ransomware in particular) spreads throughout an organization. I discuss the

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed five previously unreported security vulnerabilities affecting B. Braun’s Infusomat Space Large Volume Pump and SpaceStation that could be abused by malicious parties to tamper with medication doses without any prior authentication. McAfee, which discovered and reported the flaws to the German medical and pharmaceutical device company on January 11, 2021, said

Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday took the wraps off four up-and-coming ransomware groups that could pose a serious threat to enterprises and critical infrastructure, as the ripple effect of a recent spurt in ransomware incidents show that attackers are growing more sophisticated and more profitable in extracting payouts from victims. “While the ransomware crisis appears poised

ShadowPad, an infamous Windows backdoor that allows attackers to download further malicious modules or steal data, has been put to use by five different Chinese threat clusters since 2017. “The adoption of ShadowPad significantly reduces the costs of development and maintenance for threat actors,” SentinelOne researchers Yi-Jhen Hsieh and Joey Chen said in a detailed

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is warning of active exploitation attempts that leverage the latest line of “ProxyShell” Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities that were patched earlier this May, including deploying LockFile ransomware on compromised systems. Tracked as CVE-2021-34473, CVE-2021-34523, and CVE-2021-31207, the vulnerabilities enable adversaries to bypass ACL controls, elevate privileges on the Exchange

Web infrastructure and website security company Cloudflare on Thursday disclosed that it mitigated the largest ever volumetric distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack recorded to date. The attack, launched via a Mirai botnet, is said to have targeted an unnamed customer in the financial industry last month. “Within seconds, the botnet bombarded the Cloudflare edge

A Nigerian threat actor has been observed attempting to recruit employees by offering them to pay $1 million in bitcoins to deploy Black Kingdom ransomware on companies’ networks as part of an insider threat scheme. “The sender tells the employee that if they’re able to deploy ransomware on a company computer or Windows server, then

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details about an early development version of a nascent ransomware strain called Diavol that has been linked to threat actors behind the infamous TrickBot syndicate. The latest findings from IBM X-Force show that the ransomware sample shares similarities to other malware that has been attributed to the cybercrime gang, thus establishing

IT and communication companies in Israel were at the center of a supply chain attack campaign spearheaded by an Iranian threat actor that involved impersonating the firms and their HR personnel to target victims with fake job offers in an attempt to penetrate their computers and gain access to the company’s clients. The attacks, which

The Incident Response (IR) services market is in accelerated growth due to the rise in cyberattacks that result in breaches. More and more organizations, across all sizes and verticals, choose to outsource IR to 3rd party service providers over handling security incidents in-house. Cynet is now launching a first-of-its-kind offering, enabling any Managed Security Provider

A novel technique leverages optical emanations from a device’s power indicator LED to recover sounds from connected peripherals and spy on electronic conversations from a distance of as much as 35 meters. Dubbed the “Glowworm attack,” the findings were published by a group of academics from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev earlier this week,

A new wave of attacks involving a notorious macOS adware family has evolved to leverage around 150 unique samples in the wild in 2021 alone, some of which have slipped past Apple’s on-device malware scanner and even signed by its own notarization service, highlighting the malicious software ongoing attempts to adapt and evade detection. “AdLoad,”

Microsoft has disclosed details of an evasive year-long social engineering campaign wherein the operators kept changing their obfuscation and encryption mechanisms every 37 days on average, including relying on Morse code, in an attempt to cover their tracks and surreptitiously harvest user credentials. The phishing attacks take the form of invoice-themed lures mimicking financial-related business

Ransomware operators such as Magniber and Vice Society are actively exploiting vulnerabilities in Windows Print Spooler to compromise victims and spread laterally across a victim’s network to deploy file-encrypting payloads on targeted systems. “Multiple, distinct threat actors view this vulnerability as attractive to use during their attacks and may indicate that this vulnerability will continue

Global IT consultancy giant Accenture has become the latest company to be hit by the LockBit ransomware gang, according to a post made by the operators on their dark web portal, likely filling a void left in the wake of DarkSide and REvil shutdown. “These people are beyond privacy and security. I really hope that

Adobe on Tuesday shipped security updates to remediate multiple critical vulnerabilities in its Magento e-commerce platform that could be abused by an attacker to execute arbitrary code and take control of a vulnerable system. The issues affect 2.3.7, 2.4.2-p1, 2.4.2, and earlier versions of Magento Commerce, and 2.3.7, 2.4.2-p1, and all prior versions of Magento

A critical vulnerability has been disclosed in hardware random number generators used in billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices whereby it fails to properly generate random numbers, thus undermining their security and putting them at risk of attacks. “It turns out that these ‘randomly’ chosen numbers aren’t always as random as you’d like when

Koo, India’s homegrown Twitter clone, recently patched a serious security vulnerability that could have been exploited to execute arbitrary JavaScript code against hundreds of thousands of its users, spreading the attack across the platform. The vulnerability involves a stored cross-site scripting flaw (also known as persistent XSS) in Koo’s web application that allows malicious scripts

Amazon earlier this April addressed a critical vulnerability in its Kindle e-book reader platform that could have been potentially exploited to take full control over a user’s device, resulting in the theft of sensitive information by just deploying a malicious e-book. “By sending Kindle users a single malicious e-book, a threat actor could have stolen

Apple on Thursday said it’s introducing new child safety features in iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS as part of its efforts to limit the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) in the U.S. To that effect, the iPhone maker said it intends to begin client-side scanning of images shared via every Apple device for

VMware has released security updates for multiple products to address a critical vulnerability that could be exploited to gain access to confidential information. Tracked as CVE-2021-22002 (CVSS score: 8.6) and CVE-2021-22003 (CVSS score: 3.7), the flaws affect VMware Workspace One Access (Access), VMware Identity Manager (vIDM), VMware vRealize Automation (vRA), VMware Cloud Foundation, and vRealize

Networking equipment major Cisco has rolled out patches to address critical vulnerabilities impacting its Small Business VPN routers that could be abused by a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code and even cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. The issues, tracked as CVE-2021-1609 (CVSS score: 9.8) and CVE-2021-1610 (CVSS score: 7.2), reside in the web-based management

Cybersecurity researchers on Wednesday disclosed 14 vulnerabilities affecting a commonly-used TCP/IP stack used in millions of Operational Technology (OT) devices manufactured by no fewer than 200 vendors and deployed in manufacturing plants, power generation, water treatment, and critical infrastructure sectors. The shortcomings, collectively dubbed “INFRA:HALT,” target NicheStack, potentially enabling an attacker to achieve remote code

Cybersecurity researchers on Monday disclosed a set of nine vulnerabilities known as “PwnedPiper” that left a widely-used pneumatic tube system (PTS) vulnerable to critical attacks, including a possibility of complete takeover. The security weaknesses, disclosed by American cybersecurity firm Armis, impact the Translogic PTS system by Swisslog Healthcare, which is installed in about 80% of

A cyber attack that derailed websites of Iran’s transport ministry and its national railway system earlier this month, causing widespread disruptions in train services, was the result of a never-before-seen reusable wiper malware called “Meteor.” The campaign — dubbed “MeteorExpress” — has not been linked to any previously identified threat group or to additional attacks,

As many as eight Python packages that were downloaded more than 30,000 times have been removed from the PyPI portal for containing malicious code, once again highlighting how software package repositories are evolving into a popular target for supply chain attacks. “Lack of moderation and automated security controls in public software repositories allow even inexperienced