Online Pitstop

The threat of vendor email compromise (VEC) attacks has escalated, with recent data showing a sharp increase in such cyber-threats.  According to a new report published by cybersecurity firm Abnormal Security earlier today, VEC attacks – a variant of business email compromise (BEC) – pose a significant risk to organizations worldwide. These attacks impersonate trusted

by Paul Ducklin If you’d been quietly chasing down cryptographic bugs in a proprietary police radio system since 2021, but you’d had to wait until the second half of 2023 to go public with your research, how would you deal with the reveal? You’d probably do what researchers at boutique Dutch cybersecurity consultancy Midnight Blue

Infoblox has unveiled crucial updates on the “Decoy Dog” remote access trojan (RAT) toolkit in a new threat report published today.  Initially discovered and disclosed in April 2023, Decoy Dog has proven to be more sophisticated than previously thought, using DNS for command-and-control (C2) and is suspected to be employed in ongoing nation-state cyber-attacks. Following Infoblox’s

by Paul Ducklin Remember Heartbleed? That was the bug, back in 2014, that introduced the suffix -bleed for vulnerabilities that leak data in a haphazard way that neither the attacker nor the victim can reliably control. In other words, a crook can’t use a bleed-style bug for a precision attack, such as “Find the shadow

Tampa General Hospital (TGH) has revealed a data breach that may have affected the information of approximately 1.2 million patients. Writing in a notice on its website last week, TGH said it first detected unusual activity on its computer systems on May 31 2023. The hospital also explained that the cyber-criminals’ encryption attempts were foiled thanks to

by Paul Ducklin Two weeks ago, we urged Apple users with recent hardware to grab the company’s second-ever Rapid Response patch. As we pointed out at the time, this was an emergency bug fix to block off a web-browsing security hole that had apparently been used in real-world spyware attacks: Component: WebKit Impact: Processing web

The Russian state prosecution asked the Moscow City Court to impose 18 years in a strict colony regime on Ilya Sachkov, the founder of cybersecurity and threat intelligence provider Group-IB, his lawyer Sergei Afanasyev told Russian press agency Interfax on July 21, 2023. This has been confirmed by the French press agency AFP. Sachkov was

Generative AI tools have conquered the workplace, especially large language model-based (LLM) chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. These powerful tools are capable of performing a broad range of tasks, from helping to draft perfect emails to providing digestible summaries, freeing up the time-strapped worker to focus on more strategic activities. However, using LLMs

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) is doubling the size of the team investigating cryptocurrency crime, with the fight against ransomware “an urgent priority.” In a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Thursday, July 20, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri announced the merger of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement

Security behavior change firm Hoxhunt has published its latest research highlighting employees’ resilience in critical infrastructure, showing a higher engagement level in identifying and reporting phishing attempts. Titled Human Cyber-Risk Report: Critical Infrastructure, the document investigates the human risk factor within the critical infrastructure sector, analyzing data from over 15 million phishing simulations and actual email attacks

by Paul Ducklin SING US A CYBERSECURITY SONG Why your Mac’s calendar app says it’s JUL 17. One patch, one line, one file. Careful with that {axe,file}, Eugene. Storm season for Microsoft. When typos make you sing for joy. No audio player below? Listen directly on Soundcloud. With Doug Aamoth and Paul Ducklin. Intro and

The Chinese espionage group APT41 (AKA Double Dragon, BARIUM and Winnti) has been linked to the sophisticated Android surveillanceware known as WyrmSpy and DragonEgg. A new report published by cybersecurity firm Lookout on July 19, 2023, highlighted the findings, mentioning APT41’s history of targeting both government organizations and private enterprises for espionage and financial gain.

by Paul Ducklin At the tail-end of last week, Microsoft published a report entitled Analysis of Storm-0558 techniques for unauthorized email access. In this rather dramatic document, the company’s security team revealed the background to a previously unexplained hack in which data including email text, attachments and more were accessed: from approximately 25 organizations, including

Security researchers from Rapid7 have found active exploitation of multiple vulnerabilities in Adobe ColdFusion, a web development computing platform. On July 11, 2023, Adobe released patches for several vulnerabilities affecting ColdFusion, including a Rapid7-discovered access control bypass vulnerability (CVE-2023-29298) and an insecure deserialization vulnerability allowing arbitrary code execution (CVE-2023-29300). However, Rapid7 has recently observed that

by Paul Ducklin Early disclaimer: this isn’t quite the mother of all data breaches, nor even perhaps a younger cousin, so you can stand down from Blue Alert right away. As far as we can tell, only names, email addresses and employers were leaked in the wrongly shared document. But what names they were! The

Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, famously known as “Pompompurin,” has entered a guilty plea for hacking charges in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division.  This comes after the US government recently seized the surface web domains linked to the notorious cybercrime marketplace, BreachForums, even though Fitzpatrick had been arrested months

Windows users have been targeted again by the sophisticated malware known as LokiBot, which is spreading through malicious Office documents.  According to a new advisory by Fortinet security researcher Cara Lin, attackers are leveraging known vulnerabilities, such as CVE-2021-40444 and CVE-2022-30190, to embed malicious macros within Microsoft Office documents.  Once executed, these macros drop the