Security

A business magnate and major political donor has been indicted for masterminding a “massive” $2bn scheme to defraud regulators and thousands of insurance policyholders. Greg Lindberg, 53, of Durham, North Carolina, allegedly conspired with others between 2016 and 2019 to invest nearly $2bn in multiple insurance companies – many of which have since 2019 apparently

by Paul Ducklin Thanks to Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry of @mysk_co for the impetus and information behind this article. The duo describe themselves as “two iOS developers and occasional security researchers on two continents.” In other words, although cybersecurity isn’t their core business, they’re doing what we wish all programmers would do: not

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned nations’ defenders yesterday against disruptive and defacement attacks today. These, the agency said on Thursday, may spur from attempts to sow chaos and societal discord on the anniversary of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. “In response to the heightened geopolitical tensions resulting from Russia’s full-scale invasion

Google Play Store’s new Data Safety labels have been criticized for being inaccurate in nearly 80% of cases. The claims come from Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included researchers, who published a new study about them on Thursday. “[We] found that the labels were false or misleading based on discrepancies between the apps’ privacy policies and the

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has disrupted the vast cybercrime underground operating from the country, thanks to mobilization of some threat actors and the emigration of others, according to Recorded Future. The threat intelligence firm’s new report, Russia’s War Against Ukraine Disrupts the Cybercriminal Ecosystem, is compiled from analysis of dark web sources. The cybersecurity vendor

by Paul Ducklin LEARNING FROM OTHERS The first search warrant for computer storage. GoDaddy breach. Twitter surprise. Coinbase kerfuffle. The hidden cost of success. 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. You

The UK’s privacy regulator has called on accountants to play a key role in ensuring the country’s SMEs are compliant with rigorous data protection laws. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said that research from 2021 revealed that around a third (34%) of smaller businesses trust their accountants for advice, while a fifth (20%) use these

by Paul Ducklin Johnathan Swift is probably most famous for his novel Gulliver’s Travels, during which the narrator, Lemuel Gulliver, encounters a socio-political schism in Liiliputian society caused by unending arguments over whether you should open a boiled egg at the big end or the little end. This satirical observation has flowed diretly into modern

A suspected distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack downed several websites broadcasting President Putin’s state of the nation address on Tuesday, according to reports. Reuters said journalists based in multiple locations were unable to access the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK) website or the Smotrim live-streaming platform for periods during the speech.

by Paul Ducklin Popular cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is the latest well-known online brand name that’s admitted to getting breached. The company decided to turn its breach report into an interesting mix of partial mea culpa and handy advice for others. As in the recent case of Reddit, the company couldn’t resist throwing in the S-word

Three fund managers have been sentenced to 12 years and three months following a seven-year investigation into their fraudulent handling of the Libyan sovereign wealth fund. The UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) said it began its investigation after one of the trio, Frederic Marino, walked out of a London meeting with auditors and promptly fled

by Paul Ducklin Twitter has announced an intriguing change to its 2FA (two-factor authentication) system. The change will take effect in about a month’s time, and can be summarised very simply in the following short piece of doggerel: Using texts is insecure for doing 2FA, So if you want to keep it up you're going

The FBI has released a brief statement about a recent cyber-incident that occurred at one of its highest profile field offices, claiming it is now under control. Sources briefed on the matter told CNN that a malicious incident impacted part of its network used in investigations of images of child sexual exploitation. “The FBI is

by Paul Ducklin Late last week [2023-02-16], popular web hosting company GoDaddy filed its compulsory annual 10-K report with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Under the sub-heading Operational Risks, GoDaddy revealed that: In December 2022, an unauthorized third party gained access to and installed malware on our cPanel hosting servers. The malware intermittently

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The number of published industrial control system (ICS) vulnerabilities has grown by almost 70% in the past three years, with over a fifth still not patched by manufacturers, according to SynSaber. The security vendor analyzed advisories published by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) between January 1 2020 and December 31 2022 in