Security

A hacking group dubbed ‘Witchetty’ has been observed using a steganographic technique to hide a backdoor in a Windows logo and target Middle Eastern governments. According to a new advisory by Broadcom, Witchetty (aka LookingFrog) is believed to have connections to the state–backed Chinese threat actor APT10 as well as with TA410 operatives, a group

by Paul Ducklin Just when you hoped the week would quieten down and yield you some SecOps downtime over the weekend… …and along comes a brand new zero-day hole in Microsoft Exchange! More precisely, two zero-days that can apparently be chained together, with the first bug used remotely to open enough of a hole to

A new multifunctional malware written in the Go programming language has been spotted in the wild, targeting both Windows and Linux systems. The discovery has been made by Black Lotus Labs, the threat intelligence team at Lumen Technologies, who published an advisory about the new threat on Wednesday. The team reportedly discovered and analyzed roughly

by Paul Ducklin CUTTING THROUGH CYBERSECURITY NEWS HYPE With Paul Ducklin and Chester Wisniewski Intro and outro music by Edith Mudge. Click-and-drag on the soundwaves below to skip to any point. You can also listen directly on Soundcloud. You can listen to us on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and anywhere that good

Overall malware detections from the peaks seen in the first half of 2021 have decreased in the second quarter of 2022, but there was an increase in encrypted malware and threats targeting Chrome and Microsoft Office. The figures come from a report published by WatchGuard earlier today and shared with Infosecurity Magazine. “While overall malware attacks

by Paul Ducklin Last week’s cyberintrusion at Australian telco Optus, which has about 10 million customers, has drawn the ire of the country’s government over how the breached company should deal with stolen ID details. Darkweb screenshots surfaced quickly after the attack, with an underground BreachForums user going by the plain-speaking name of optusdata offering

Security researchers at SentinelOne have uncovered a variant of the Operation In(ter)ception campaign using lures for job vacancies at cryptocurrency exchange platform Crypto.com to infect macOS users with malware. According to an advisory published on Monday, the new attacks would represent a further instance of a campaign spotted by ESET and Malwarebytes in August and

by Paul Ducklin For the last day or two, our news feed has been buzzing with warnings about WhatsApp. We saw many reports linking to two tweets that claimed the existence of two zero-day security holes in WhatsApp, giving their bug IDs as CVE-2022-36934 and CVE-2022-27492. One article, apparently based on those tweets, breathlessly insisted

A large–scale operation that reportedly stole millions of dollars from credit cards from 2019 to earlier this year has been exposed by cybersecurity company ReasonLabs. The scammers, defined by ReasonLabs as a “crime syndicate with origins in Russia,” would have used Amazon Web Services, GoDaddy and eNom to carry out the scheme.  According to the

The cyber mercenary group, Void Balaur, continues expanding its hack–for–hire campaigns despite disruptions to its online advertising personas. The new information comes from cybersecurity experts at SentinelLabs, who recently published an advisory detailing Void Balaur’s latest campaigns. Written by senior threat researcher Tom Hegel, the document discusses the findings that SentinelLabs first unveiled at its

by Paul Ducklin The curious name LAPSUS$ made huge headlines in March 2022 as the nickname of a hacking gang, or, in unvarnished words, as the label for a notorious and active collective of cybercriminals: The name was somewhat unusual for a cybercrime crew, who commonly adopt handles that sound edgy and destructive, such as

The Department of Air Force (DAF) Enterprise IT as a Service’s (EITaaS) Base Infrastructure Modernization (BIM) procurement said it will evolve its digital modernization strategy to an “as a Service” model that will integrate network, end–user services and computing platforms. According to an announcement by technology company Lumen, which will collaborate with the DAF on the

by Paul Ducklin LISTEN NOW With Doug Aamoth and Paul Ducklin. Intro and outro music by Edith Mudge. Click-and-drag on the soundwaves below to skip to any point. You can also listen directly on Soundcloud. You can listen to us on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and anywhere that good podcasts are found.

Threat actors deployed OAuth applications on compromised cloud tenants and then used them to control Exchange servers and spread spam. The news is the result of an investigation by Microsoft researchers. It revealed the threat actors launched credential–stuffing attacks (which use lists of compromised user credentials) against high–risk, unsecured administrator accounts that didn’t have multi–factor authentication (MFA)

by Paul Ducklin Morgan Stanley, which bills itself in its website title tag as the “global leader in financial services”, and states in the opening sentence of its main page that “clients come first”, has been fined $35,000,000 by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)… …for selling off old hardware devices online, including thousands

American financial services giant Morgan Stanley agreed to pay the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) a $35m penalty on Tuesday over data security lapses. According to the SEC’s complaint, the firm would have allowed roughly 1000 unencrypted hard drives (HDDs) and about 8000 backup tapes from decommissioned data centers to be resold on auction sites without

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of GCHQ, has launched two pieces of guidance on September 21, 2022 to help organizations protect themselves and their customers online. The two guides, respectively called ‘Authentication methods: choosing the right type’ and ‘Removing malicious content to protect your brand,’ are specifically suited to companies with online

by Paul Ducklin Sophos Security SOS Week is back by popular demand, from 26-29 September 2022! Four top security experts are once again stepping up to share their expertise in a series of daily 30-minute interviews. This year, for the first time, we’re filming the interviews, giving you the option to watch our experts in

Threat actor Lapsus$ is now seemingly responsible for hacking gaming giant Rockstar Games after targeting mega-brands like Microsoft, Cisco, Samsung, Nvidia, Okta and probably Uber. An account operating name ‘teapotuberhacker’ posted on GTAForums around 90 videos of what appeared to be in-development footage of the upcoming Rockstar Games installment, Grand Theft Auto 6 – that

by Paul Ducklin If the big story of this month looks set to be Uber’s data breach, where a hacker was allegedly able to roam widely through the ride-sharing company’s network… ..the big story from last month was the LastPass breach, in which an attacker apparently got access to just one part of the LastPass

Uber appears to have been breached again, after a threat actor reportedly accessed its email and cloud systems, code repositories, internal Slack account and HackerOne tickets. The ride-hailing giant released a terse message on Twitter yesterday saying it is “currently responding to a cybersecurity incident” and is in touch with law enforcement. Meanwhile, the alleged hacker

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added six known flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog on September 15, 2022. “These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose a significant risk to the federal enterprise,” the Agency wrote. The six issues include three that affect the

by Paul Ducklin CYBERSECURITY: “THEY DIDN’T BUT YOU CAN!” With Paul Ducklin and Chester Wisniewski Intro and outro music by Edith Mudge. Click-and-drag on the soundwaves below to skip to any point. You can also listen directly on Soundcloud. You can listen to us on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and anywhere that

Hackers associated with North Korea are using trojanized versions of the PuTTY SSH open-source terminal emulator to install backdoors on victims’ devices. Discovered by Mandiant, the threat actor responsible for this campaign would be ‘UNC4034’ (also known as Temp.Hermit or Labyrinth Chollima). “Mandiant identified several overlaps between UNC4034 and threat clusters we suspect have a North

by Paul Ducklin By all accounts, and sadly there are many of them, a hacker – in the break-and-enter-your-network-illegally sense, not in a solve-super-hard-coding-problems-in-a-funky-way sense – has broken into ride-sharing company Uber. According to a report from the BBC, the hacker is said to be just 18 years old, and seems to have pulled off

Cybersecurity agencies in the US, UK, Australia and Canada have warned that Iranian state-sponsored hackers are exploiting Log4j vulnerabilities in ransomware campaigns. An alert published this week said Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was behind multiple attacks exploiting VMware Horizon Log4j bugs on unprotected networks to enable disk encryption and data extortion. These include

by Paul Ducklin LISTEN NOW With Doug Aamoth and Paul Ducklin. Intro and outro music by Edith Mudge. Click-and-drag on the soundwaves below to skip to any point. You can also listen directly on Soundcloud. You can listen to us on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and anywhere that good podcasts are found.

Threat actors are using the death of Queen Elizabeth II as a lure to phish for users’ Microsoft credentials, experts have warned. A screenshot posted by Proofpoint yesterday revealed an email spoofed to appear as if sent from the tech giant. With the headline “In Memory of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II,” it claimed that

Some 80% of organizations suffered a “severe” cloud security incident over the past year, while a quarter worry they’ve suffered a cloud data breach and aren’t aware of it, according to new research from Snyk. The developer security specialist polled 400 cloud engineering and security practitioners from organizations of various sizes and sectors, to compile

by Paul Ducklin Researchers at threat intelligence company Group-IB just wrote an intriguing real-life story about an annoyingly simple but surprisingly effective phishing trick known as BitB, short for browser-in-the-browser. You’ve probably heard of several types of X-in-the-Y attack before, notably MitM and MitB, short for manipulator-in-the-middle and manipulator-in-the-browser. In a MitM attack, the attackers