Cyber Security

New research into the infrastructure behind an emerging DDoS botnet named Abcbot has uncovered links with a cryptocurrency-mining botnet attack that came to light in December 2020. Attacks involving Abcbot, first disclosed by Qihoo 360’s Netlab security team in November 2021, are triggered via a malicious shell script that targets insecure cloud instances operated by

A study of 16 different Uniform Resource Locator (URL) parsing libraries has unearthed inconsistencies and confusions that could be exploited to bypass validations and open the door to a wide range of attack vectors. In a deep-dive analysis jointly conducted by cybersecurity firms Claroty and Synk, eight security vulnerabilities were identified in as many third-party

Threat hunters have shed light on the tactics, techniques, and procedures embraced by an Indian-origin hacking group called Patchwork as part of a renewed campaign that commenced in late November 2021, targeting Pakistani government entities and individuals with a research focus on molecular medicine and biological science. “Ironically, all the information we gathered was possible

Google has rolled out the first round of updates to its Chrome web browser for 2022 to fix 37 security issues, one of which is rated Critical in severity and could be exploited to pass arbitrary code and gain control over a victim’s system. Tracked as CVE-2022-0096, the flaw relates to a use-after-free bug in

The digital security team at the U.K. National Health Service (NHS) has raised the alarm on active exploitation of Log4Shell vulnerabilities in unpatched VMware Horizon servers by an unknown threat actor to drop malicious web shells and establish persistence on affected networks for follow-on attacks. “The attack likely consists of a reconnaissance phase, where the

Meta Platforms, the company formerly known as Facebook, on Friday announced the launch of a centralized Privacy Center that aims to “educate people” about its approach with regards to how it collects and processes personal information across its family of social media apps. “Privacy Center provides helpful information about five common privacy topics: sharing, security,

The Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL), France’s data protection watchdog, has slapped Facebook (now Meta Platforms) and Google with fines of €150 million ($170 million) and €60 million ($68 million) for violating E.U. privacy rules by failing to provide users with an easy option to reject cookie tracking technology. “The websites facebook.com,

Researchers have disclosed a security flaw affecting H2 database consoles that could result in remote code execution in a manner that echoes the Log4j “Log4Shell” vulnerability that came to light last month. The issue, tracked as CVE-2021-42392, is the ” first critical issue published since Log4Shell, on a component other than Log4j, that exploits the

Researchers have disclosed a novel technique by which malware on iOS can achieve persistence on an infected device by faking its shutdown process, making it impossible to physically determine if an iPhone is off or otherwise. The discovery — dubbed “NoReboot” — comes courtesy of mobile security firm ZecOps, which found that it’s possible to

A North Korean cyberespionage group named Konni has been linked to a series of targeted attacks aimed at the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) with New Year lures to compromise Windows systems with malware. “This activity cluster demonstrates the patient and persistent nature of advanced actors in waging multi-phased campaigns against perceived high-value

When I want to know the most recently published best practices in cyber security, I visit The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). From the latest password requirements (NIST 800-63) to IoT security for manufacturers (NISTIR 8259), NIST is always the starting point. NIST plays a key role as a US standard-setter, due to

VMWare has shipped updates to Workstation, Fusion, and ESXi products to address an “important” security vulnerability that could be weaponized by a threat actor to take control of affected systems. The issue relates to a heap-overflow vulnerability — tracked as CVE-2021-22045 (CVSS score: 7.7) — that, if successfully exploited, results in the execution of arbitrary

An ongoing ZLoader malware campaign has been uncovered exploiting remote monitoring tools and a nine-year-old flaw concerning Microsoft’s digital signature verification to siphon user credentials and sensitive information. Israeli cybersecurity company Check Point Research, which has been tracking the sophisticated infection chain since November 2021, attributed it to a cybercriminal group dubbed Malsmoke, citing similarities

Cybersecurity researchers have taken the wraps of an organized financial-theft operation undertaken by a discreet actor to target transaction processing systems and siphon funds from entities primarily located in Latin America for at least four years. The malicious hacking group has been codenamed Elephant Beetle by Israeli incident response firm Sygnia, with the intrusions aimed

Microsoft is warning of continuing attempts by nation-state adversaries and commodity attackers to take advantage of security vulnerabilities uncovered in the Log4j open-source logging framework to deploy malware on vulnerable systems. “Exploitation attempts and testing have remained high during the last weeks of December,” Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) said in revised guidance published earlier

A persistent denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability has been discovered in Apple’s iOS mobile operating system that’s capable of sending affected devices into a crash or reboot loop upon connecting to an Apple Home-compatible appliance. The behavior, dubbed “doorLock,” is trivial in that it can be triggered by simply changing the name of a HomeKit device to

A group of academics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, has demonstrated what it calls a “scalable technique” to vet smart contracts and mitigate state-inconsistency bugs, discovering 47 zero-day vulnerabilities on the Ethereum blockchain in the process. Smart contracts are programs stored on the blockchain that are automatically executed when predetermined conditions are met

In May 2017, the first documented ransomware assault on networked medical equipment happened. The worldwide ransomware assault WannaCry compromised radiological and other instruments in several hospitals during its height, after a software failure caused by a cyberattack on its third-party vendor’s oncology cloud service, cancer patients having radiation therapy at four healthcare institutions had to

Cybersecurity researchers have proposed a novel approach that leverages electromagnetic field emanations from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices as a side-channel to glean precise knowledge about the different kinds of malware targeting the embedded systems, even in scenarios where obfuscation techniques have been applied to hinder analysis. With the rapid adoption of IoT appliances

Microsoft, over the weekend, rolled out a fix to address an issue that caused email messages to get stuck on its Exchange Server platforms due to what it blamed on a date validation error at around the turn of the year. “The problem relates to a date check failure with the change of the new