Cyber Security

The botnet behind the largest HTTPS distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in June 2022 has been linked to a spate of attacks aimed at nearly 1,000 Cloudflare customers. Calling the powerful botnet Mantis, the web performance and security company attributed it to more than 3,000 HTTP DDoS attacks against its users. The most attacked industry verticals

Nation-state hacking groups aligned with China, Iran, North Korea, and Turkey have been targeting journalists to conduct espionage and spread malware as part of a series of campaigns since early 2021. “Most commonly, phishing attacks targeting journalists are used for espionage or to gain key insights into the inner workings of another government, company, or

Joshua Schulte, a former programmer with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has been found guilty of leaking a trove of classified hacking tools and exploits dubbed Vault 7 to WikiLeaks. The 33-year-old engineer had been charged in June 2018 with unauthorized disclosure of classified information and theft of classified material. Schulte also faces a

Consumer electronics maker Lenovo on Tuesday rolled out fixes to contain three security flaws in its UEFI firmware affecting over 70 product models. “The vulnerabilities can be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution in the early phases of the platform boot, possibly allowing the attackers to hijack the OS execution flow and disable some important

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) warned this week that it will crack down on tech companies’ illegal use and sharing of highly sensitive data and false claims about data anonymization. “While many consumers may happily offer their location data in exchange for real-time crowd-sourced advice on the fastest route home, they likely think differently

Security researchers have uncovered yet another vulnerability affecting numerous older AMD and Intel microprocessors that could bypass current defenses and result in Spectre-based speculative-execution attacks. Dubbed Retbleed by ETH Zurich researchers Johannes Wikner and Kaveh Razavi, the issues are tracked as CVE-2022-29900 (AMD) and CVE-2022-29901 (Intel), with the chipmakers releasing software mitigations as part of

The operators behind the Qakbot malware are transforming their delivery vectors in an attempt to sidestep detection. “Most recently, threat actors have transformed their techniques to evade detection by using ZIP file extensions, enticing file names with common formats, and Excel (XLM) 4.0 to trick victims into downloading malicious attachments that install Qakbot,” Zscaler Threatlabz

Businesses know they need to secure their client-side scripts. Content security policies (CSPs) are a great way to do that. But CSPs are cumbersome. One mistake and you have a potentially significant client-side security gap. Finding those gaps means long and tedious hours (or days) in manual code reviews through thousands of lines of script

Popular video-sharing platform TikTok on Tuesday agreed to pause a controversial privacy policy update that could have allowed it to serve targeted ads based on users’ activity on the social video platform without their permission to do so. The reversal, reported by TechCrunch, comes a day after the Italian data protection authority — the Garante

Microsoft on Monday announced the general availability of a feature called Autopatch that automatically keeps Windows and Office software up-to-date on enrolled endpoints. The launch, which comes a day before Microsoft is expected to release its monthly round of security patches, is available for customers with Windows Enterprise E3 and E5 licenses. It, however, doesn’t

GitHub Actions and Azure virtual machines (VMs) are being leveraged for cloud-based cryptocurrency mining, indicating sustained attempts on the part of malicious actors to target cloud resources for illicit purposes. “Attackers can abuse the runners or servers provided by GitHub to run an organization’s pipelines and automation by maliciously downloading and installing their own cryptocurrency

It’s not a new concept that Office 365, Salesforce, Slack, Google Workspace or Zoom, etc., are amazing for enabling the hybrid workforce and hyper-productivity in businesses today. However, there are three main challenges that have arisen stemming from this evolution: (1) While SaaS apps include a host of native security settings, they need to be

The $540 million hack of Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge in late March 2022 was the consequence of one of its former employees getting tricked by a fraudulent job offer on LinkedIn, it has emerged. According to a report from The Block published last week citing two people familiar with the matter, a senior engineer at

Apple on Wednesday announced it plans to introduce an enhanced security setting called Lockdown Mode in iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and macOS Ventura to safeguard high-risk users against “highly targeted cyberattacks.” The “extreme, optional protection” feature, now available for preview in beta versions of its upcoming software, is designed to counter a surge in threats

A malicious browser extension with 350 variants is masquerading as a Google Translate add-on as part of an adware campaign targeting Russian users of Google Chrome, Opera, and Mozilla Firefox browsers. Mobile security firm Zimperium dubbed the malware family ABCsoup, stating the “extensions are installed onto a victim’s machine via a Windows-based executable, bypassing most

Progress powers technology forward. But progress also has a cost: by adding new capabilities and features, the developer community is constantly adjusting the building blocks. That includes the fundamental languages used to code technology solutions. When the building blocks change, the code behind the technology solution must change too. It’s a challenging and time-consuming exercise

A newly observed phishing campaign is leveraging the recently disclosed Follina security vulnerability to distribute a previously undocumented backdoor on Windows systems. “Rozena is a backdoor malware that is capable of injecting a remote shell connection back to the attacker’s machine,” Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin said in a report this week. Tracked as

Five months after announcing plans to disable Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros by default in the Office productivity suite, Microsoft appears to have rolled back its plans. “Based on feedback received, a rollback has started,” Microsoft employee Angela Robertson said in a July 6 comment. “An update about the rollback is in progress. I

Cybersecurity researchers are drawing attention to an ongoing wave of attacks linked to a threat cluster tracked as Raspberry Robin that’s behind a Windows malware with worm-like capabilities. Describing it as a “persistent” and “spreading” threat, Cybereason said it observed a number of victims in Europe. The infections involve a worm that propagates over removable

LockBit ransomware attacks are constantly evolving by making use of a wide range of techniques to infect targets while also taking steps to disable endpoint security solutions. “The affiliates that use LockBit’s services conduct their attacks according to their preference and use different tools and techniques to achieve their goal,” Cybereason security analysts Loïc Castel

In what’s being described as an “unprecedented” twist, the operators of the TrickBot malware have resorted to systematically targeting Ukraine since the onset of the war in late February 2022. The group is believed to have orchestrated at least six phishing campaigns aimed at targets that align with Russian state interests, with the emails acting