Security

by Paul Ducklin Given that we’re getting into peak retail season, you’ll find cybersecurity warnings with a “Black Friday” theme all over the internet… …including, of course, right here on Naked Security! As regular readers will know, however, we’re not terribly keen on online tips that are specific to Black Friday, because cybersecurity matters 365-and-a-quarter

Swiss authorities have apprehended a Ukrainian national wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for 12 years for connections with a cyber-criminal group that stole millions of dollars from bank accounts using malware called Zeus. Vyacheslav Igorevich Penchukov was arrested in Geneva on October 23, 2022, and is now pending extradition to the US,

by Paul Ducklin DON’T LET ONE LOUSY EMAIL PASSWORD SINK THE COMPANY Microsoft’s tilt at the MP3 marketplace. Apple’s not-a-zero-day emergency. Cracking the lock on Android phones. Browser-in-the-Browser revisited. The Emmenthal cheese attack. Business Email Compromise and how to prevent it. Click-and-drag on the soundwaves below to skip to any point. You can also listen

Google has announced plans to roll out the initial Privacy Sandbox Beta to Android 13 mobile devices earlier next year. Initially unveiled in February, the project aims to bring new and more private advertising solutions to mobile. “Over the course of 2022, we’ve published design proposals and released a number of Developer Previews,” Android product

by Paul Ducklin Firefox’s latest once-every-four-weeks security update is out, bringing the popular alternative browser to version 107.0, or Extended Support Release (ESR) 102.5 if you prefer not to get new feature releases every month. (As we’ve explained before, the ESR version number tells you which feature set you have, plus the number of times

State-sponsored actors in the Billbug group (aka Lotus Blossom and Thrip) have tried to compromise a digital certificate authority in an Asian country during a campaign targeting multiple government agencies. Security researchers from Symantec have made the discovery and shared the findings in an advisory published earlier today. “In activity documented by Symantec in 2019,

by Paul Ducklin Researchers at cloud coding security company Oxeye have written up a critical bug that they recently discovered in the popular cloud development toolkit Backstage. Their report includes an explanation of how the bug works, plus proof-of-concept (PoC) code showing how to exploit it. Backstage is what’s known as a cloud developer portal

Code hosting company GitHub has unveiled a new direct channel for security researchers to report vulnerabilities in public repositories. The feature needs to be manually enabled by repository maintainers and, once active, enables security researchers to report any vulnerabilities identified in their code. “Owners and administrators of public repositories can allow security researchers to report

by Naked Security writer He was sentenced under his real-life name of Ramon, but in back in his boastful days of pretending to be a seriously successful real estate agent based in Dubai, you may have seen and heard of him as Ray, or, to give him his full nickname, Ray Hushpuppi. To be clear,

Several of Twitter’s C-level security and privacy executives have resigned following the chaos that ensued from the Elon Musk acquisition of the social media platform. “I’ve made the hard decision to leave Twitter,” said the company’s now-former chief information security officer Lea Kissner in a tweet on Thursday. “I’ve had the opportunity to work with

A Russian and Canadian national has been charged with conspiracy to intentionally damage protected computers and to transmit ransom demands in connection with the LockBit global campaign. Mikhail Vasiliev, 33, was apprehended in Bradford, Ontario yesterday and is currently in custody in Canada, awaiting extradition to the US. “This arrest is the result of over

by Paul Ducklin No sooner had we stopped to catch our breath after reviewing the latest 62 patches (or 64, depending on how you count) dropped by Microsoft on Patch Tuesday… …than Apple’s latest security bulletins landed in our inbox. This time there were just two reported fixes: for mobile devices running the latest iOS

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has published a new guide on Stakeholder-Specific Vulnerability Categorization (SSVC). This vulnerability management methodology is designed to assess vulnerabilities and prioritizes remediation efforts based on exploitation status, impacts on safety and prevalence of the affected product in a singular system. SSVC was first created by CISA in collaboration

by Paul Ducklin A bug bounty hunter called David Schütz has just published a detailed report describing how he crossed swords with Google for several months over what he considered a dangerous Android security hole. According to Schütz, he stumbled on a total Android lockscreen bypass bug entirely by accident in June 2022, under real-life

by Paul Ducklin THREE BILLION DOLLARS IN A POPCORN TIN? Radio waves so mysterious they’re known only as X-Rays. Were there six 0-days or only four? The cops who found $3 billion in a popcorn tin. Blue badge confusion. When URL scanning goes wrong. Tracking down every last unpatched file. Why even unlikely exploits can

Three vulnerabilities have been discovered in the UEFI firmware of several Lenovo notebooks. Tracked CVE-2022-3430, CVE-2022-3431 and CVE-2022-3432, the flaws have been found by security researchers at ESET and affect various Lenovo Yoga, IdeaPad and ThinkBook devices. The first of the vulnerabilities is a flaw in the WMI Setup driver, which may allow an attacker with elevated privileges to modify

A path-traversal vulnerability has been discovered in ABB Totalflow flow computers and controllers that could lead to code injection and arbitrary code execution (ACE). The high-risk vulnerability (tracked CVE-2022-0902) has a CVSS v3 of 8.1 and affected several ABB G5 products. It has been discovered by security experts at Team82, Claroty’s research arm. “Attackers can exploit this

by Paul Ducklin Remember those Exchange zero-days that emerged in a blaze of publicity back in September 2022? Those flaws, and attacks based on them, were wittily but misleadingly dubbed ProxyNotShell because the vulnerabilities involved were reminiscent of the ProxyShell security flaw in Exchange that hit the news in August 2021. Fortunately, unlike ProxyShell, the

Twelve percent of all employees take sensitive intellectual property (IP) with them when they leave an organization. The data comes from workforce cyber intelligence and security company Dtex, which published a report about top insider risk trends for 2022 earlier today. “Customer data, employee data, health records, sales contacts, and the list goes on,” reads

by Paul Ducklin Here’s an important thing to remember about jurisprudential arithmetic, where two negatives definitely don’t make a positive: stealing money from someone who originally acquired it through criminal means doesn’t “cancel out” the criminality. You can still go to prison for a very lengthy stretch, and here’s one way. Remember Silk Road? Not

Australia’s largest health insurer Medibank has announced it will not pay a ransom to the threat actors behind the October data breach affecting 9.7 million customers. Writing on LinkedIn over the weekend, Medibank CEO David Koczkar said that, based on the advice the company has received from cybercrime experts, they believe that there is only a

by Paul Ducklin Well-known cybersecurity researcher Fabian Bräunlein has featured not once but twice before on Naked Security for his work in researching the pros and cons of Apple’s AirTag products. In 2021, he dug into the protocol devised by Apple for keeping tags on tags and found that the cryprography was good, making it

A business email compromise (BEC) group dubbed ‘Crimson Kingsnake’ has recently been spotted impersonating well-known international law firms to trick recipients into approving overdue invoice payments. As outlined in a technical write-up by cloud email security platform Abnormal, 92 malicious domains of 19 law firms and debt collection agencies across the US, UK and Australia have been

The LockBit hacking group has claimed responsibility for the August cyber-attack against the multinational automotive group Continental. The ransomware gang made the announcement on its leak site on Wednesday and is threatening to publish the company’s data unless the ransom is paid over the next few hours of today (Friday). On the dark web blog

by Paul Ducklin Yesterday, we wrote about the waited-for-with-bated-breath OpenSSL update that attracted many column-kilometres of media attention last week. The OpenSSL team announced in advance, as it usually does, that a new version of its popular cryptographic library would soon be released. This notification stated that the update would patch against a security hole

The individuals behind the Black Basta ransomware have been linked to hacking operations conducted by the FIN7 threat actors. According to a new advisory by SentinelLabs, Black Basta actors have used a custom defense impairment tool (found exclusively in incidents by this specific threat actor) in several instances. “Our investigation led us to a further

by Naked Security writer It’s only a week since Elon Musk’s take-private of Twitter on 28 October 2022… …but if you take into account the number of news stories about it (and, perhaps ironically under the circumstances, the volume of Twitter threadspace devoted to it), it probably feels a lot longer. There’s been plenty to

The European Cybersecurity Agency (ENISA)’s threat landscape annual report 2022 is heavily influenced by the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the cyber landscape. Covering the period from July 2021 up to July 2022, the report was presented under the title Volatile Geopolitics Shake the Trends of the 2022 Cybersecurity Threat Landscape during

by Paul Ducklin WE DON’T KNOW HOW BAD WE WERE, BUT PERHAPS THE CROOKS WEREN’T ANY GOOD? 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

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has published a document highlighting charges against eight individuals for their participation in a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) conspiracy that involved hacking and tax fraud. US attorney Roger B. Handberg announced the partial unsealing of the indictment on Tuesday, charging Andi Jacques, Monika Shauntel Jenkins, Louis Noel