Security

Data generated by OnePoll from April 28 to May 3 2022 on behalf of AT&T shows that the average person happens upon a suspicious online site or social media account 6.5 times a day. The recent survey of 2000 general population Americans also found that 54% of consumers said they were unaware of the difference between active and passive

by Paul Ducklin It’s prime vacation season in the Northern Hemipshere, and in some countries, July and August aren’t just months when some people take some days off, but a period of extended family holidays, often involving weeks away from home or on the road. The good news, of course, is that if you’ve had

The Virginia Commonwealth University Health System (VCU) has warned almost 4500 transplant participants about a privacy breach affecting their healthcare information. The company warned that some transplant recipients’ medical records contained their donor’s information, while recipient information also showed up in some donors’ records. It has been inappropriately exposing this information since 2006 in some

by Paul Ducklin LISTEN NOW 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 and anywhere that good podcasts are found.

Microsoft patched a zero-day bug in its latest Patch Tuesday update this week that allowed remote execution on Windows machines and which is already being exploited in the wild. CVE-2022-22047 is an elevation of privilege vulnerability in the Windows Client/Server Runtime Subsystem (CSRSS), which is responsible for Windows features, including console windows and the shutdown process.

by Paul Ducklin Have you ever come really close to clicking a phishing link simply through coincidence? We’ve had a few surprises, such as when we bought a mobile phone from a click-and-collect store a couple of years back. Having lived outside the UK for many years before that, this was our first-ever purchase from

Cyber insurance companies are looking for new ways to assess risk as they grow increasingly wary of rising claims, said a report from cybersecurity company Panaseer released this week. The 2022 Cyber Insurance Market Trends Report found a lack of confidence in underwriting processes. Only 44% of insurers said they were very confident in evaluating cyber risk, with 46.5% warning

by Paul Ducklin Paying money to ransomware criminals is a contentious issue. After all, ransomware demands boil down to one thing, whether you know it in everyday language as extortion, blackmail or standover, namely: demanding money with menaces. Usually, the attackers leave all your precious files where they are, so you can see them sitting

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced last Friday that a Florida resident named Ron Aksoy has been arrested and charged for allegedly selling thousands of fraudulent and counterfeit Cisco products over the course of 12 years. Also known as Dave Durden, Aksoy, 38, would have run at least 19 companies formed in New Jersey

by Paul Ducklin Remember 1999? Well, the Melissa virus just called, and it’s finding life tough in 2022. It’s demanding a return to the freewheeling days of the last millennium, when Office macro viruses didn’t face the trials and tribulations that they do today. In the 1990s, you could insert VBA (Visual Basic for Applications)

Disneyland’s Facebook and Instagram accounts were taken over on Thursday by a self-proclaimed “super hacker” who posted a series of racist and homophobic posts. Operating under the name “David Do,” the threat actor claimed he was seeking “revenge” on Disneyland employees after some of them had allegedly insulted him. “I am a super hacker that

Cybersecurity solutions provider Emsisoft has released a free decryption tool to enable AstraLocker and Yashma ransomware victims to recover their files without paying a ransom. The company made the announcement in a series of Twitter posts earlier today, providing a download link and related instructions for the tool. “The AstraLocker decryptor is for the Babuk-based one using .Astra or .babyk extension, and they

A fake LinkedIn job offer was the reason behind Axie Infinity’s $600m hack, according to a new investigation by The Block. The digital assets-focused outlet said on Wednesday that while the US government attributed the attack to the North Korean hacker group Lazarus, full details of how the exploit was executed had not been disclosed.  The Block said that according

by Paul Ducklin LISTEN NOW Click-and-drag on the soundwaves below to skip to any point. You can also 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 Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and anywhere that good podcasts are found.

Apple has announced a new set of iPhone features called “Lockdown Mode.” Unveiled in a blog post on Wednesday, Lockdown Mode will land on iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and macOS Ventura devices in the fall of this year, and offer a number of security features. Apple called the mode an “extreme, optional level of security

by Paul Ducklin Remember the Log4Shell bug that showed up in Apache Log4j late in 2021? Log4j is one of the Apache Software Foundation’s many software projects (more than 350 at current count), and it’s a programming library that Java coders can use to manage logfiles in their own products. Logfiles are a vital part

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released a new advisory suggesting North Korean state-sponsored cyber actors are using the Maui ransomware to target Healthcare and Public Health (HPH) Sector organizations in the US. According to the document – a joint effort between CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of

by Paul Ducklin Just over a week ago, the newswires were abuzz with news of a potentially serious bug in the widely-used cryptographic library OpenSSL. Some headlines went as far as describing the bug as a possibly “worse-than-Heartbleed flaw”, which was dramatic language indeed. Heartbleed, as you may remember, was an incredibly high-profile data leakage

The US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has selected the first-ever group of encryption tools that could potentially withstand the attack of a quantum computer. The four selected encryption algorithms will now reportedly become part of NIST’s post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) standard, which should be finalized in about two years. More specifically, for

by Paul Ducklin Google’s latest update to the Chrome browser fixes a varying number of bugs, depending on whether you’re on Android, Windows or Mac, and depending on whether you’re running the “stable channel” or the “extended stable channel“. Don’t worry if you find the the plethora of Google blog posts confusing… …we did too,

NATO has announced plans to develop virtual rapid response capabilities “to respond to significant malicious cyber activities.” The plans were unveiled in a declaration published following the NATO Summit in Madrid, Spain, last week. The latest summit took on extra significance in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine earlier this year, amid fears of the conflict

by Paul Ducklin If you’re a Naked Security Pocast listener, you may remember, back in March 2022, that we spoke about a convicted cybercriminal from Canada by the name of Sebastien Vachon-Desjardins. By all accounts, he was part of several so-called Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) gangs, such as REvil and NetWalker, where the actual ransomware attackers act

CloudSEK used its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered digital risk platform XVigil to identify a post on a cybercrime forum mentioning open source automation server platform Jenkins as one of the TTP (tactics, techniques, and procedures) used by a threat actor (TA) in attacks against IBM and Stanford University. The module reportedly has hidden desktop takeover capabilities that would be

Kaspersky security experts have discovered new malware targeting Microsoft Exchange servers belonging to several organizations worldwide. Dubbed “SessionManager” and first spotted by the company in early 2022, the backdoor enables threat actors to keep “persistent, update-resistant and rather stealth access to the IT infrastructure of a targeted organization.” According to Kaspersky, once propagated, SessionManager would enable

by Paul Ducklin The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) famously maintains a Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. Currently, nine of them are men, suspected of 22 different offences between them: Accessory After the Fact Aiding and Abetting Armed Robbery Cocaine Importation Conspiracy Conspiracy to Commit Murder-for-Hire Conspiracy to Commit Violent Crimes in Aid of

Microsoft’s Security Intelligence team has issued a new warning against a known cloud threat actor (TA) group. Tracked as 8220 and active since early 2017, the group would have now updated its malware toolset to breach Linux servers in order to install crypto miners as part of a long-running campaign. “The updates include the deployment

by Paul Ducklin We’ll tell this story primarily through the medium of images, because a picture is worth 1024 words. This cybercrime is a visual reminder of three things: It’s easy to fall for a phishing scam if you’re in a hurry. Cybercriminals don’t waste any time getting new scams going. 2FA isn’t a cybersecurity

An ex-Canadian government employee pleaded guilty in Florida court earlier this week to charges of involvement with the NetWalker ransomware group. Sebastien Vachon-Desjardins, 34, was accused of conspiracy to commit computer fraud and wire fraud, as well as intentional damage to a protected computer and transmitting a demand concerning damaging a protected computer. Vachon-Desjardins was extradited in March, following

by Paul Ducklin LISTEN NOW 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 and anywhere that good podcasts are found.

A group of security researchers from Abuse.ch and ThreatFox launched a new hub for scanning and hunting files. Dubbed YARAify, the defensive tool is designed to scan suspicious files against a large repository of YARA rules. “YARA is an open source tool for pattern matching,” Abuse.ch founder Roman Hüssy said in an interview with The Daily Swig. “It allows anyone […]