Security

by Paul Ducklin Regular readers will know two things about our attitude to Apple’s security patches: We like to get them as soon as we can. Whether it’s a full version upgrade that also includes a bunch of security fixes, or a point release (one where the leftmost verion number doesn’t change) with the primary

A new cryptojacking campaign has been discovered targeting vulnerable Docker and Kubernetes infrastructure. Dubbed ‘Kiss-a-dog’ by CrowdStrike security researchers, the campaign has used several command-and-control (C2) servers to launch attacks aiming at mining cryptocurrency. The threat actors have also utilized user and kernel mode rootkits to hide the activity, backdoor compromised containers, move laterally in the

by Paul Ducklin WE’RE SCRAPING YOUR FACES FOR YOUR OWN GOOD! (ALLEGEDLY) 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 can listen to us on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher

The threat actor known as Vice Society has been conducting ransomware and extortion campaigns against the global education sector, particularly in the US. The findings come from Microsoft security researchers, who published an advisory about Vice Society (tracked by the tech giant as DEV-0832) on Tuesday. “Shifting ransomware payloads over time from BlackCat, QuantumLocker, and

by Paul Ducklin See Tickets is a major global player in the online event ticketing business: they’ll sell you tickets to festivals, theatre shows, concerts, clubs, gigs and much more. The company has just admitted to a major data breach that shares at least one characteristic with the amplifiers favoured by notorious rock performers Spinal

A total of 108.9 million accounts were breached in the third quarter of 2022, a 70% increase compared to the previous quarter. The top five countries and regions most affected by data breaches in Q3 2022 were Russia, France, Indonesia, the US and Spain. While Russia had the most breaches overall (22.3 million), France had

by Paul Ducklin Apple’s latest collection of security updates has arrived, including the just-launched macOS 13 Ventura, which was accompanied by its own security bulletin listing a whopping 112 CVE-numbered security holes. Of those, we counted 27 arbitrary code execution holes, of which 12 allow rogue code to be injected right into the kernel itself,

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released a new joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) warning organizations against the ransomware and data extortion group Daixin Team. Published in conjunction with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the CSA said Daixin Team is actively targeting US businesses, mainly in

by Paul Ducklin Cryptoguru Bruce Schneier (where crypto means cryptography, not the other thing!) just published an intriguing note on his blog entitled On the Randomness of Automatic Card Shufflers. If you’ve ever been to a casino, at least one in Nevada, you’ll know that the blackjack tables don’t take chances with customers known in

Thousands of publicly exposed, active application programming interface (API) tokens have been spotted across the web that could threaten software integrity and allow bad actors to access confidential information, data or private networks. The findings come from security researchers at JFrog, who recently made the discovery while testing a new feature in one of the company’s security

Google called for contributors on Thursday to a new open source project named Graph for Understanding Artifact Composition (GUAC) as part of its efforts to improve software supply chain security. According to the tech giant, GUAC is still in the early stages, but it is set to change how the industry perceives software supply chains.

by Paul Ducklin Java programmers love string interpolation features. If you’re not a coder, you’re probably confused by the word “interpolation” here, because it’s been borrowed as programming jargon where it’s not a very good linguistic fit… …but the idea is simple, very powerful, and sometimes spectacularly dangerous. In other programming ecosystems it’s often known

Multiple phishing domains impersonating Absher, the Saudi government service portal, have been set up to provide fake services to citizens and steal their credentials. The discovery comes from cybersecurity researchers at CloudSEK, who published an advisory about the threat on Thursday. “The threat actors are targeting individuals by sending an SMS, along with a link, urging

by Paul Ducklin Sadly, we’ve needed to cover the DEADBOLT ransomware several times before on Naked Security. For almost two years already, this niche player in the ransomware cybercrime scene has been preying mainly on home users and small businesses in a very different way from most contemporary ransomware attacks: If you were involved in

Ransomware has grown by 466% since 2019 and is increasingly being used as a precursor to physical war. The findings come from Ivanti’s Ransomware Index Report Q2–Q3 2022, which the company shared with Infosecurity earlier today. The data also shows ransomware groups continuing to grow in volume and sophistication, with 35 vulnerabilities becoming associated with ransomware

by Paul Ducklin WHAT DO YOU MEAN, “DOESN’T MEET THE BAR FOR SECURITY SERVICING”? 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 can listen to us on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,

From the warning banner ‘Be afraid and expect the worst’ that was shown on several Ukrainian government websites on January 13, 2022, after a cyber-attack took them down, the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) cybersecurity director, Rob Joyce, knew that something was going to be different, and very aggressive, between Ukraine and Russia, and that

by Paul Ducklin The US Postal Service just issued a commemorative stamp to remember the service of some 11,000 women cryptologists during World War 2. Like their Bletchley Park counterparts in the UK, these wartime heros didn’t finish the war with any sort of hero’s welcome back into civilian life. Indeed, they got no public

Video messaging platform Zoom released a new patch last week to a high-severity flaw in its client for macOS devices. The vulnerability (tracked CVE-2022-28762) refers to a debugging port misconfiguration affecting versions between 5.10.6 and 5.12.0 (excluded) and has a common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS) of 3.1 of 7.3 out of 10. “When camera mode

by Paul Ducklin Popular and ubiquitous (software isn’t always both of those things!) cloud meeting company Zoom recently announced an oops-that-wasn’t-supposed-to-happen bug in the Mac version of its software. The security bulletin is, forgivably, written in the typically staccato and jargon-soaked style of bug-hunters, but the meaning is fairly clear. The bug is denoted CVE-2022-28762,

A novel ransomware campaign has been spotted targeting organizations in the transportation and logistics industries in Ukraine and Poland using a previously unidentified ransomware payload. Dubbed “Prestige ranusomeware” by its creators, the malware was observed by the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC), targeting several organizations on October 11 in attacks occurring within an hour of

by Naked Security writer Chinese company Zoetop, former owner of the wildly popular SHEIN and ROMWE “fast fashion” brands, has been fined $1,900,000 by the State of New York. As Attorney General Letitia James put it in a statement last week: SHEIN and ROMWE’s weak digital security measures made it easy for hackers to shoplift

The education sector experienced a 44% increase in cyber-attacks when compared to 2021, with an average of 2297 attacks against organizations every week, according to Check Point’s 2022 Mid-Year Report. The research paper suggests that part of the appeal is the sheer number of personal details that threat actors can obtain by targeting organizations in this

by Paul Ducklin We use Apple’s Mail app all day, every day for handling work and personal email, including a plentiful supply of very welcome Naked Security comments, questions, article ideas, typo reports, podcast suggestions and much more. (Keep ’em coming – we get far more positive and useful messages that we get trolls, and

Zoetop, the holding company behind retailer giant Romwe and Shein, has been fined $1.9m after it failed to properly inform customers of a data breach that reportedly affected millions of users. According to a notice from New York’s attorney general’s office this week, the 2018 data breach saw Zoetop failing to secure customers’ data, not

Performance and security company Cloudflare reported that it stopped a 2.5Tbps distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in Q3 2022 launched by a Mirai botnet against Minecraft server Wynncraft. The data comes from the company’s latest DDoS Threat Report, which includes insights and trends about the DDoS threat landscape in the third quarter of 2022. “Multi-terabit strong

by Paul Ducklin We’re not quite sure what to call it right now, so we referred to it in the headline by the hybrid name Microsoft Office 365. (The name “Office” as the collective noun for Microsoft’s word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and collaboration apps is being killed off over the next month or two, to

A new threat cluster, tracked by SentinelLabs as WIP19, has been targeting telecommunications and IT service providers across the Middle East and Asia. According to the security experts, the group is characterized by the use of a legitimate, stolen digital certificate issued by DEEPSoft, a Korean company specializing in messaging solutions.  “Throughout this activity, the

by Paul Ducklin THREE DEEP QUESTIONS Should hospital ransomware attackers get life in prison? Who was the Countess of Computer Science, and just how close did we come to digital music in the 19th century? And could a weirdly wacky email brick your iPhone? With Doug Aamoth and Paul Ducklin. Intro and outro music by

FormBook is the most prevalent malware in the wild worldwide, and Vidar, an infostealer, has entered the top 10 list in eighth place for the first time following a fake Zoom campaign. The new data comes from Check Point Research (CPR), which shared with Infosecurity its September 2022’s Most Wanted Malware report earlier today. According to the new