Security

by Paul Ducklin WEIRD BUT TRUE No audio player below? Listen directly on Soundcloud. With Doug Aamoth and Paul Ducklin. Intro and outro music by Edith Mudge. You can listen to us on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify and anywhere that good podcasts are found. Or just drop the URL of our RSS feed

The enormous global costs of ransomware attacks on the manufacturing sector have been laid bare in a new analysis by Comparitech. The firm reviewed 478 confirmed ransomware attacks on the manufacturing companies from 2018 to July 2023, using its worldwide tracker to understand the true cost of such incidents. This includes the amount of downtime

by Paul Ducklin Another week, another BWAIN! As you’ll know if you listened to last week’s podcast (hint, hint!), BWAIN is short for Bug With An Impressive Name: It’s a nickname we apply when the finders of a new cybersecurity attack get so excited about their discovery that they give it a PR-friendly moniker, register

A new and sophisticated malware campaign named “P2Pinfect” has been observed targeting publicly-accessible deployments of the Redis data store. According to a technical write-up published on Monday by Cado Security Labs, the malware is written in Rust, making it challenging to analyze due to the programming language’s complexities. For context, in the time between Cado Security

by Paul Ducklin The latest full new version of Firefox is out, marking the first of two “monthly” upgrades you’ll see this month. Just as there will be a blue moon in August 2023 (that’s the name applied to a second full moon in the same calendar month, rather than reference to an atmospheric phenomenon

The Android spyware known as SpyNote has been targeting financial institutions since late 2022 while expanding its capabilities to carry out bank fraud.  Security researchers at Cleafy have recently shared new findings about SpyNote, saying the malware exploits Accessibility services and various Android permissions to conduct multiple malicious activities.  SpyNote distribution occurs through email phishing

by Paul Ducklin Last week, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced new and fairly strict rules about cybersecurity breach disclosures for any people or companies that fall under its regulatory remit. The SEC, by the way, was founded at the height of the US Great Depression in the 1930s, with the aim of

New research has highlighted the severe risks posed by forged certificate attacks, which can lead to unauthorized access to important company resources. These attacks, known as the Shadow Credentials technique, involve attackers exploiting certain parts of a system called Active Directory (AD) that manages user access to various services. Kaspersky cybersecurity expert Alexander Rodchenko conducted

Nominations are open for the eighth annual Security Serious Unsung Heroes Awards to be held in London and run by Eskenzi PR. The awards are all about celebrating the UK’s cybersecurity professionals, teachers, lecturers, leaders and those working to make the industry not only more secure, but also more diverse and healthier for employees. Whether educating the

The UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) is launching an investigation after a typing error reportedly led to classified emails being sent to a close ally of Russia instead of the intended recipients. The emails were meant for the US military, identifiable by the domain “.mil.” However, due to a simple mistake omitting the letter “i,” the messages

CardioComm Solutions, a Canadian medical provider of consumer heart monitoring and medical ECG software solutions, has disclosed a cybersecurity incident on Tuesday that occurred on the company’s servers. To address the situation, CardioComm said it is collaborating closely with KPMG-EGYDE, relevant authorities and third-party cybersecurity experts.  The company assures its customers that there is no evidence

by Paul Ducklin ONE WEEK, TWO BWAINS Apple patches two zero-days, one for a second time. How a 30-year-old cryptosystem got cracked. All your secret are belong to Zenbleed. Remembering those dodgy PC/Mac ads. No audio player below? Listen directly on Soundcloud. With Doug Aamoth and Paul Ducklin. Intro and outro music by Edith Mudge.

The threat of vendor email compromise (VEC) attacks has escalated, with recent data showing a sharp increase in such cyber-threats.  According to a new report published by cybersecurity firm Abnormal Security earlier today, VEC attacks – a variant of business email compromise (BEC) – pose a significant risk to organizations worldwide. These attacks impersonate trusted

by Paul Ducklin If you’d been quietly chasing down cryptographic bugs in a proprietary police radio system since 2021, but you’d had to wait until the second half of 2023 to go public with your research, how would you deal with the reveal? You’d probably do what researchers at boutique Dutch cybersecurity consultancy Midnight Blue

Infoblox has unveiled crucial updates on the “Decoy Dog” remote access trojan (RAT) toolkit in a new threat report published today.  Initially discovered and disclosed in April 2023, Decoy Dog has proven to be more sophisticated than previously thought, using DNS for command-and-control (C2) and is suspected to be employed in ongoing nation-state cyber-attacks. Following Infoblox’s

by Paul Ducklin Remember Heartbleed? That was the bug, back in 2014, that introduced the suffix -bleed for vulnerabilities that leak data in a haphazard way that neither the attacker nor the victim can reliably control. In other words, a crook can’t use a bleed-style bug for a precision attack, such as “Find the shadow

Tampa General Hospital (TGH) has revealed a data breach that may have affected the information of approximately 1.2 million patients. Writing in a notice on its website last week, TGH said it first detected unusual activity on its computer systems on May 31 2023. The hospital also explained that the cyber-criminals’ encryption attempts were foiled thanks to

by Paul Ducklin Two weeks ago, we urged Apple users with recent hardware to grab the company’s second-ever Rapid Response patch. As we pointed out at the time, this was an emergency bug fix to block off a web-browsing security hole that had apparently been used in real-world spyware attacks: Component: WebKit Impact: Processing web

The Russian state prosecution asked the Moscow City Court to impose 18 years in a strict colony regime on Ilya Sachkov, the founder of cybersecurity and threat intelligence provider Group-IB, his lawyer Sergei Afanasyev told Russian press agency Interfax on July 21, 2023. This has been confirmed by the French press agency AFP. Sachkov was

Generative AI tools have conquered the workplace, especially large language model-based (LLM) chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. These powerful tools are capable of performing a broad range of tasks, from helping to draft perfect emails to providing digestible summaries, freeing up the time-strapped worker to focus on more strategic activities. However, using LLMs

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) is doubling the size of the team investigating cryptocurrency crime, with the fight against ransomware “an urgent priority.” In a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Thursday, July 20, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri announced the merger of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement

Security behavior change firm Hoxhunt has published its latest research highlighting employees’ resilience in critical infrastructure, showing a higher engagement level in identifying and reporting phishing attempts. Titled Human Cyber-Risk Report: Critical Infrastructure, the document investigates the human risk factor within the critical infrastructure sector, analyzing data from over 15 million phishing simulations and actual email attacks

by Paul Ducklin SING US A CYBERSECURITY SONG Why your Mac’s calendar app says it’s JUL 17. One patch, one line, one file. Careful with that {axe,file}, Eugene. Storm season for Microsoft. When typos make you sing for joy. No audio player below? Listen directly on Soundcloud. With Doug Aamoth and Paul Ducklin. Intro and

The Chinese espionage group APT41 (AKA Double Dragon, BARIUM and Winnti) has been linked to the sophisticated Android surveillanceware known as WyrmSpy and DragonEgg. A new report published by cybersecurity firm Lookout on July 19, 2023, highlighted the findings, mentioning APT41’s history of targeting both government organizations and private enterprises for espionage and financial gain.

by Paul Ducklin At the tail-end of last week, Microsoft published a report entitled Analysis of Storm-0558 techniques for unauthorized email access. In this rather dramatic document, the company’s security team revealed the background to a previously unexplained hack in which data including email text, attachments and more were accessed: from approximately 25 organizations, including

by Paul Ducklin Early disclaimer: this isn’t quite the mother of all data breaches, nor even perhaps a younger cousin, so you can stand down from Blue Alert right away. As far as we can tell, only names, email addresses and employers were leaked in the wrongly shared document. But what names they were! The

Security researchers from Rapid7 have found active exploitation of multiple vulnerabilities in Adobe ColdFusion, a web development computing platform. On July 11, 2023, Adobe released patches for several vulnerabilities affecting ColdFusion, including a Rapid7-discovered access control bypass vulnerability (CVE-2023-29298) and an insecure deserialization vulnerability allowing arbitrary code execution (CVE-2023-29300). However, Rapid7 has recently observed that

Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, famously known as “Pompompurin,” has entered a guilty plea for hacking charges in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division.  This comes after the US government recently seized the surface web domains linked to the notorious cybercrime marketplace, BreachForums, even though Fitzpatrick had been arrested months

Windows users have been targeted again by the sophisticated malware known as LokiBot, which is spreading through malicious Office documents.  According to a new advisory by Fortinet security researcher Cara Lin, attackers are leveraging known vulnerabilities, such as CVE-2021-40444 and CVE-2022-30190, to embed malicious macros within Microsoft Office documents.  Once executed, these macros drop the

by Paul Ducklin You’re probably familiar with the word gaslighting, used to refer to people with the odious habit of lying not merely to cover up their own wrongdoing, but also to make it look as though someone else is at fault, even to the point of getting the other person to doubt their own