Security

by Paul Ducklin Even if you’ve never used one, you probably know what a VCR is (or was). Short for video cassette recorder, it was how we recorded and watched back videos at home in the days when digital video stored on hard disks was the absurdly expensive privilege of huge companies, typically TV stations.

Twenty different spam campaigns relying on the Mispadu banking Trojan were discovered targeting victims in Chile, Mexico, Peru and Portugal. The findings, which show 90,518 credentials stolen from a total of 17,595 unique websites, come from the Ocelot Team of Latin American cybersecurity firm Metabase Q. These included a number of government websites: 105 in

by Paul Ducklin There are plenty of military puns in operating system history. Unix famously has a whole raft of personnel known as Major Number, who organise the batallions of devices such as disk drives, keyboards and webcams in your system. Microsoft once struggled with the apparently incompetent General Failure, who was regularly spotted trying

The Russia-aligned advanced persistent threat (APT) known as Winter Vivern has been observed conducting espionage campaigns targeting government organizations and a private telecommunication organization. Security researchers at SentinelOne shared details about the new campaign in an advisory published on Thursday. The APT activity was first identified by DomainTools in early 2021 and then further described

The Project Zero team at Google published a new advisory on Thursday, confirming it reported 18 zero-day vulnerabilities in Exynos Modems made by Samsung between late 2022 and early 2023. Written by Project Zero head, Tim Willis, the blog post states that four of the vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-24033 and three others that have yet to be

by Paul Ducklin Google has just revealed a fourfecta of critical zero-day bugs affecting a wide range of Android phones, including some of its own Pixel models. These bugs are a bit different from your usual Android vulnerabilities, which typically affect the Android operating system (which is Linux-based) or the applications that come along with

Dozens of websites set up to deliver trojanized versions of WhatsApp and Telegram apps have been spotted targeting Android and Windows users. As discovered by security researchers at ESET, most of these apps rely on clipper malware designed to steal or modify the contents of the Android clipboard. Read more on clipper malware here: Shein

by Paul Ducklin THE PRICE OF FAST FASHION Lucky Thirteen! The price of fast fashion. Firefox fixes. Feature creep fail curtailed in Patch Tuesday. No audio player below? Listen directly on Soundcloud. With Paul Ducklin and Chester Wisniewski. Intro and outro music by Edith Mudge. You can listen to us on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has disclosed information regarding a .NET deserialization vulnerability (CVE-2019-18935) in the Progress Telerik user interface (UI) for ASP.NET AJAX. CISA described the findings in an advisory on Wednesday, saying multiple cyber-threat actors were able to exploit the flaw, which also affected the Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) web server

by Paul Ducklin Heard of cricket (the sport, not the insect)? It’s much like baseball, except that batters can hit the ball wherever they like, including backwards or sideways; bowlers can hit the batter with the ball on purpose (within certain safety limits, of course – it just wouldn’t be cricket otherwise) without kicking off

A new malware campaign targeting an East Asian company that develops data-loss prevention (DLP) software for government and military entities has been attributed to the advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as Tick. According to an advisory published by ESET on Tuesday, the threat actor breached the DLP company’s internal update servers to deliver malware

by Paul Ducklin Thanks to the precise four-week length of February this year, last month’s coincidence of Firefox and Microsoft updates has happened once again. Last month, Microsoft dealt with three zero-days, by which we mean security holes that cybercriminals found first, and figured out how to abuse in real-life attacks before any patches were

A previously unknown threat actor has been observed conducting espionage campaigns against CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) entities. Dubbed YoroTrooper by the Cisco Talos team, the threat actors mainly targeted government and energy organizations across Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. “We also observed YoroTrooper compromise accounts from at least two international organizations: a critical European Union

by Paul Ducklin Linux has never suffered from the infamous BSoD, short for blue screen of death, the name given to the dreaded “something went terribly wrong” message associated with a Windows system crash. Microsoft has tried many things over the years to shake that nickname “BSoD”, including changing the background colour used when crash

A total of 13 vulnerabilities have been found in the E11 smart intercom devices made by Chinese manufacturer Akuvox, allowing remote code execution (RCE), network access and more. Writing in an advisory published last week, Vera Mens, a security researcher at Claroty’s Team82, said the flaws could be exploited via three different attack vectors: RCE

New Linux versions of the IceFire ransomware were deployed in February, against enterprise networks of several media and entertainment sector organizations worldwide. According to security researchers at SentinelOne, the campaign leveraged the exploitation of CVE-2022-47986, a recently patched deserialization vulnerability in IBM Aspera Faspex file-sharing software. “The operators of the IceFire malware, who previously focused only

A new variant of the Xenomorph Android banking trojan has been spotted by ThreatFabric security researchers and classified as Xenomorph.C. The variant, developed by the threat actor known as Hadoken Security Group, represents a substantial upgrade from the malware previously observed by ThreatFabric, according to an advisory published by the company earlier today. “This new

by Paul Ducklin Chinese “fast fashion” brand SHEIN is no stranger to controversy, not least because of a 2018 data breach that its then-parent company Zoetop failed to spot, let alone to stop, and then handled dishonestly. As Letitia James, Attorney General of the State of New York, said in a statement at the end

The White House has allocated a total of $3.1bn to cybersecurity infrastructure in its latest budget report. Published on Thursday, the document shows $145m of this figure will go toward making the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) “more resilient and defensible.” Of the remaining funds, $98m will be invested in implementing the Cyber Incident Reporting

by Paul Ducklin YOU MUST HAVE THIS CHIP! EVEN IF IT HAS BUGS! Memories of Michelangelo (the virus, not the artist). Data leakage bugs in TPM 2.0. Ransomware bust, ransomware warning, and anti-ransomware advice. No audio player below? Listen directly on Soundcloud. With Doug Aamoth and Paul Ducklin. Intro and outro music by Edith Mudge.

The threat actor known as “8220 Gang” has been associated with a new payload targeting an exploitable Oracle Weblogic Server in a specific Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). The payload, analyzed by Fortinet security researchers, is characterized by the extraction of ScrubCrypt, a type of malware designed to obfuscate and encrypt applications with the goal of

The North Korean threat actor known as Lazarus Group has been spotted exploiting flaws in unnamed software to gain access to a South Korean finance firm twice last year. The news comes from security researchers at Asec, who published an advisory about the attacks on Tuesday. The company recorded the first of the attacks in

by Paul Ducklin Even if you’re not entirely sure what a TPM is, you’ll probably know that if you want to run Windows 11, you need one. More precisely, you need a TPM 2.0 (although there’s an official Microsoft workaround to get by with TPM 1.2, the previous, incompatible version of the technology). TPM is

A ransomware cyber-attack has targeted one of Barcelona’s leading hospitals, shutting down its computer system and forcing the cancellation of 150 non-urgent operations and up to 3000 patient checkups. Reported Monday on Twitter, the attack against Hospital Clinic de Barcelona occurred on Sunday. At the time, the institution said it was working to determine the

by Naked Security writer You’ve almost certainly heard of the ransomware family known as DoppelPaymer, if only because the name itself is a reminder of the double-barrelled blackmail technique used by many contemporary ransomware gangs. To increase the pressure on you to pay up, so-called double-extortionists not only scramble all your data files so your

German and Ukrainian police forces have apprehended suspected key members of the DoppelPaymer ransomware gang, Europol announced today. The operation, carried out on February 28, was supported by Europol, the Dutch Police and the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and resulted in the capture of a suspect in Germany and one in Ukraine.

Two separate vulnerabilities have been found in the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 that could lead to information disclosure or escalation of privilege. At a basic level, TPM is a hardware-based technology providing secure cryptographic functions to the operating systems on modern computers, making them resistant to tampering. Affecting Revisions 1.59, 1.38 and 1.16 of the

by Paul Ducklin The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which dubs itself “America’s Cyber Defense Agency”, has just put out a public service annoucement under its #StopRansomware banner. This report is numbered AA23-061a, and if you’ve slipped into the habit of assuming that ransomware is yesterday’s threat, or that other specific cyberattacks should

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has published a new advisory warning system defenders against the Royal Ransomware group. Part of the Agency’s #StopRansomware campaign, the document was released on Thursday in collaboration with the FBI and describes tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) alongside indicators of compromise (IOCs) associated with Royal ransomware variants. The

Security researchers from ESET have discovered a new custom backdoor they dubbed MQsTTang and attributed it to the advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as Mustang Panda. Writing in an advisory published on March 2, 2023, ESET malware researcher, Alexandre Côté Cyr explained the new backdoor is part of an ongoing campaign the company traced back to early January.