News

Aug 29, 2024Ravie LakshmananOnline Crime / Privacy French prosecutors on Wednesday formally charged CEO Pavel Durov with facilitating a litany of criminal activity on the popular messaging platform and placed him under formal investigation following his arrest Saturday. Russian-born Durov, who is also a French citizen, has been charged with being complicit in the spread

Aug 28, 2024Ravie LakshmananSoftware Security / Vulnerability The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added a critical security flaw affecting the Apache OFBiz open-source enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, known as CVE-2024-38856, carries a CVSS

Aug 27, 2024Ravie LakshmananAI Security / Vulnerability Details have emerged about a now-patched vulnerability in Microsoft 365 Copilot that could enable the theft of sensitive user information using a technique called ASCII smuggling. “ASCII Smuggling is a novel technique that uses special Unicode characters that mirror ASCII but are actually not visible in the user

Aug 26, 2024Ravie LakshmananFinancial Fraud / Mobile Security Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered new Android malware that can relay victims’ contactless payment data from physical credit and debit cards to an attacker-controlled device with the goal of conducting fraudulent operations. The Slovak cybersecurity company is tracking the novel malware as NGate, stating it observed the crimeware

Aug 25, 2024Ravie LakshmananLaw Enforcement / Digital Privacy Pavel Durov, founder and chief executive of the popular messaging app Telegram, was arrested in France on Saturday, according to French television network TF1. Durov is believed to have been apprehended pursuant to a warrant issued in connection with a preliminary police investigation. TF1 said the probe

Aug 23, 2024Ravie LakshmananMalware / Threat Intelligence Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a never-before-seen dropper that serves as a conduit to launch next-stage malware with the ultimate goal of infecting Windows systems with information stealers and loaders. “This memory-only dropper decrypts and executes a PowerShell-based downloader,” Google-owned Mandiant said. “This PowerShell-based downloader is being tracked as

Aug 23, 2024Ravie LakshmananEndpoint Security / Data Privacy Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new information stealer that’s designed to target Apple macOS hosts and harvest a wide range of information, underscoring how threat actors are increasingly setting their sights on the operating system. Dubbed Cthulhu Stealer, the malware has been available under a malware-as-a-service (MaaS)

Aug 22, 2024Ravie LakshmananBrowser Security / Vulnerability Google has rolled out security fixes to address a high-severity security flaw in its Chrome browser that it said has come under active exploitation in the wild. Tracked as CVE-2024-7971, the vulnerability has been described as a type confusion bug in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine. “Type

Aug 21, 2024Ravie LakshmananWordPress / Cybersecurity A maximum-severity security flaw has been disclosed in the WordPress GiveWP donation and fundraising plugin that exposes more than 100,000 websites to remote code execution attacks. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-5932 (CVSS score: 10.0), impacts all versions of the plugin prior to version 3.14.2, which was released on August

Aug 20, 2024Ravie LakshmananMalware / Cyber Espionage Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a threat actor known as Blind Eagle that has persistently targeted entities and individuals in Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Panama, and other Latin American nations. Targets of these attacks span several sectors, including governmental institutions, financial companies, energy and oil and gas companies.

Aug 19, 2024Ravie LakshmananCybercrime / Network Security Cybersecurity researchers have discovered new infrastructure linked to a financially motivated threat actor known as FIN7. The two clusters of potential FIN7 activity “indicate communications inbound to FIN7 infrastructure from IP addresses assigned to Post Ltd (Russia) and SmartApe (Estonia), respectively,” Team Cymru said in a report published

OpenAI on Friday said it banned a set of accounts linked to what it said was an Iranian covert influence operation that leveraged ChatGPT to generate content that, among other things, focused on the upcoming U.S. presidential election. “This week we identified and took down a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that were generating content for

Aug 16, 2024Ravie LakshmananCloud Security / Application Security A large-scale extortion campaign has compromised various organizations by taking advantage of publicly accessible environment variable files (.env) that contain credentials associated with cloud and social media applications. “Multiple security missteps were present in the course of this campaign, including the following: Exposing environment variables, using long-lived

Aug 15, 2024Ravie LakshmananEnterprise Security / Vulnerability SolarWinds has released patches to address a critical security vulnerability in its Web Help Desk software that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code on susceptible instances. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-28986 (CVSS score: 9.8), has been described as a deserialization bug. “SolarWinds Web Help Desk was found

Aug 15, 2024Ravie LakshmananNetwork Security / Cybercrime Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new variant of the Gafgyt botnet that’s targeting machines with weak SSH passwords to ultimately mine cryptocurrency on compromised instances using their GPU computational power. This indicates that the “IoT botnet is targeting more robust servers running on cloud native environments,” Aqua Security

Aug 14, 2024Ravie LakshmananWindows Security / Vulnerability Microsoft on Tuesday shipped fixes to address a total of 90 security flaws, including 10 zero-days, of which six have come under active exploitation in the wild. Of the 90 bugs, seven are rated Critical, 79 are rated Important, and one is rated Moderate in severity. This is

Aug 13, 2024Ravie LakshmananThreat Intelligence / Malware The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of a new phishing campaign that masquerades as the Security Service of Ukraine to distribute malware capable of remote desktop access. The agency is tracking the activity under the name UAC-0198. More than 100 computers are estimated to

Aug 12, 2024Ravie LakshmananCloud Security / Malware The Russian government and IT organizations are the target of a new campaign that delivers a number of backdoors and trojans as part of a spear-phishing campaign codenamed EastWind. The attack chains are characterized by the use of RAR archive attachments containing a Windows shortcut (LNK) file that,

Aug 10, 2024Ravie LakshmananVulnerability / Mobile Security As many as 10 security flaws have been uncovered in Google’s Quick Share data transfer utility for Android and Windows that could be assembled to trigger remote code execution (RCE) chain on systems that have the software installed. “The Quick Share application implements its own specific application-layer communication

Aug 09, 2024Ravie LakshmananCloud Security / Data Protection Cybersecurity researchers have discovered multiple critical flaws in Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings that, if successfully exploited, could result in serious consequences. “The impact of these vulnerabilities range between remote code execution (RCE), full-service user takeover (which might provide powerful administrative access), manipulation of AI modules, exposing

Aug 08, 2024Ravie LakshmananCyber Attack / Cyber Espionage The North Korea-linked threat actor known as Kimsuky has been linked to a new set of attacks targeting university staff, researchers, and professors for intelligence gathering purposes. Cybersecurity firm Resilience said it identified the activity in late July 2024 after it observed an operation security (OPSEC) error

Aug 07, 2024Ravie LakshmananLinux / Vulnerability Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a novel Linux kernel exploitation technique dubbed SLUBStick that could be exploited to elevate a limited heap vulnerability to an arbitrary memory read-and-write primitive. “Initially, it exploits a timing side-channel of the allocator to perform a cross-cache attack reliably,” a group of academics

Aug 06, 2024Ravie LakshmananEmail Security / Financial Fraud INTERPOL said it devised a “global stop-payment mechanism” that helped facilitate the largest-ever recovery of funds defrauded in a business email compromise (BEC) scam. The development comes after an unnamed commodity firm based in Singapore fell victim to a BEC scam in mid-July 2024. It refers to

Aug 05, 2024Ravie LakshmananThreat Intelligence / Vulnerability Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered design weaknesses in Microsoft’s Windows Smart App Control and SmartScreen that could enable threat actors to gain initial access to target environments without raising any warnings. Smart App Control (SAC) is a cloud-powered security feature introduced by Microsoft in Windows 11 to block malicious,

Aug 03, 2024Ravie LakshmananDDoS Attack / Server Security Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack campaign targeting misconfigured Jupyter Notebooks. The activity, codenamed Panamorfi by cloud security firm Aqua, utilizes a Java-based tool called mineping to launch a TCP flood DDoS attack. Mineping is a DDoS package designed for Minecraft

Aug 03, 2024Ravie LakshmananPrivacy / Data Protection The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), along with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), filed a lawsuit against popular video-sharing platform TikTok for “flagrantly violating” children’s privacy laws in the country. The agencies claimed the company knowingly permitted children to create TikTok accounts and to view and share short-form

Aug 02, 2024Ravie LakshmananCyber Espionage / Malware A Taiwanese government-affiliated research institute that specializes in computing and associated technologies was breached by nation-state threat actors with ties to China, according to new findings from Cisco Talos. The unnamed organization was targeted as early as mid-July 2023 to deliver a variety of backdoors and post-compromise tools

Aug 01, 2024Ravie LakshmananVulnerability / Threat Intelligence Over a million domains are susceptible to takeover by malicious actors by means of what has been called a Sitting Ducks attack. The powerful attack vector, which exploits weaknesses in the domain name system (DNS), is being exploited by over a dozen Russian-nexus cybercriminal actors to stealthily hijack

Jul 31, 2024Ravie LakshmananWeb Security / Compliance Certificate authority (CA) DigiCert has warned that it will be revoking a subset of SSL/TLS certificates within 24 hours due to an oversight with how it verified if a digital certificate is issued to the rightful owner of a domain. The company said it will be taking the

Jul 30, 2024Ravie LakshmananMobile Security / Spyware A new iteration of a sophisticated Android spyware called Mandrake has been discovered in five applications that were available for download from the Google Play Store and remained undetected for two years. The applications attracted a total of more than 32,000 installations before being pulled from the app