UK postal service Royal Mail announced on January 18, 2022, that it has resumed some “limited” international shipping following the ransomware attack that hit the company on January 11. These limited services include “International Standard and International Economy letters which do not require a customs declaration” and “International Business Standard (untracked) and International Business Economy
Month: January 2023
by Paul Ducklin US mobile phone provider T-Mobile has just admitted to getting hacked, in a filing known as an 8-K that was submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) yesterday, 2023-01-19. The 8-K form is described by the SEC itself as “the ‘current report’ companies must file […] to announce major events that
Ransomware revenue plunges to $456 million in 2022 as more victims refuse to pay up. Here’s what to make of the trend. Ransomware gangs extorted at least $456 million from victims in 2022, which represents a drop of 40 percent from$765 million the year prior, according to research by Chainalysis. Couple this with a fall
Jan 20, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyber War / Cyber Attack The Russian state-sponsored cyber espionage group known as Gamaredon has continued its digital onslaught against Ukraine, with recent attacks leveraging the popular messaging app Telegram to strike military and law enforcement sectors in the country. “The Gamaredon group’s network infrastructure relies on multi-stage Telegram accounts for victim
WhatsApp has been hit with a €5.5m ($5.9m) fine for GDPR violations by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC). In addition to the fine, WhatsApp Ireland has been directed to bring its data processing operations into compliance within six months. The case showcased significant disagreements between European data protection authorities about the extent of WhatsApp’s liability.
by Paul Ducklin GUESS YOUR PASSWORD? NO NEED IF IT’S STOLEN ALREADY! Guess your password? Crack your password? Steal your password? What if the crooks already have one of your passwords, and can use it to figure out all your others as well? Click-and-drag on the soundwaves below to skip to any point. You can
It’s common practice to pull down the window shades at night. Homeowners invest in high fences. You may even cover the PIN pad when you type in your secret four-digit code at ATMs. Privacy is key to going about your daily life comfortably in your surroundings. Why shouldn’t privacy also extend to your digital surroundings?
Hello, is it me you’re looking for? Fraudsters still want to help you fix a computer problem you never had in the first place. Tech support scammers have been offering bogus technical support services and “resolving” people’s non-existent problems with their devices or software for years. Using a range of tried-and-tested social engineering tricks, they’ve
Jan 20, 2023Ravie LakshmananNetwork Security / Mobile Hacking Threat actors associated with the Roaming Mantis attack campaign have been observed delivering an updated variant of their patent mobile malware known as Wroba to infiltrate Wi-Fi routers and undertake Domain Name System (DNS) hijacking. Kaspersky, which carried out an analysis of the malicious artifact, said the
Industrial control system (ICS) operators are being let down by their vendors, after new research revealed that 35% of CVEs published in the second half of 2022 still have no available patch. SynSaber’s ICS Vulnerabilities report for H2 2022 analyzed the 926 CVEs reported via Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) ICS Advisories in the
Written by James Schmidt Editor’s Note: We often speak of online scams in our blogs, ones that cost victims hundreds if not thousands of dollars. This account puts a face on one of those scams—along with the personal, financial, and emotional pain that they can leave in their wake. This is the story of “Meredith,”
It is now acceptable to find a job on a dating app! As we observed last week, many enterprises and small and medium businesses (SMBs) take advantage of solutions such as Slack, Zoom or Microsoft Teams for collaborative work. At the same time, these platforms are still trying to figure out better ways to create
An organization’s sensitive information is under constant threat. Identifying those security risks is critical to protecting that information. But some risks are bigger than others. Some mitigation options are more expensive than others. How do you make the right decision? Adopting a formal risk assessment process gives you the information you need to set priorities.
Critical manufacturing organizations must prioritize patching as high severity vulnerabilities continue to increase within the sector. Nearly half (48%) of critical manufacturing organizations are vulnerable to a breach according to a SecurityScorecards report titled Addressing the Trust Deficit In Critical Infrastructure, published on 18 January 2023. The report analyzed the current state of cyber resilience
by Paul Ducklin Earlier this month, the NortonLifeLock online identity protection service, owned by Arizona-based technology company Gen Digital, sent a security warning to many of its customers. The warning letter can be viewed online, for example on the website of the Office of the Vermont Attorney General, where it appears under the title NortonLifeLock
Summary In August 2022, Secureworks® Counter Threat Unit™ (CTU) researchers discovered a vulnerability in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) that allowed a user to retain access to a targeted Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) application after the user assignment was removed. Using a backdoor application that was given consent to access the SAML application, a
Authored by Dennis Pang Online protection software. Antivirus. The two words get used interchangeably often enough. But sure enough, they’re different. And yet directly related when you take a closer look. The term “antivirus” has been with us for decades now, dating back to the first software that was designed to prevent computers from getting
Don’t be the next victim – here’s what to know about some of the most common tricks that scammers use on the payment app Today’s consumers have a wealth of choice when it comes to paying and sending money online. A range of slick digital payment apps have emerged over recent years to make the
Jan 18, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyber Espionage / Cyber Risk The threat actor known as BackdoorDiplomacy has been linked to a new wave of attacks targeting Iranian government entities between July and late December 2022. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, which is tracking the activity under its constellation-themed moniker Playful Taurus, said it observed the government domains
The US Department of Defense (DoD) has confirmed it will soon launch the third part of its ‘Hack the Pentagon’ bug bounty program, first unveiled in 2016. According to a dedicated page on the Sam.Gov website, the initiative will rely on cybersecurity researchers to find vulnerabilities in the government’s Facility Related Controls System (FRCS) network.
by Paul Ducklin Another day, another series of cryptocurrency scams… …these, fortunately, brought to a halt, though sadly not before they’d defrauded “investors” around the globe to the tune of millions of dollars. According to Europol, 216 people were questioned in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Germany and Serbia; 15 have already been arrested; 22 searches were conducted,
ESET researchers identified an active StrongPity campaign distributing a trojanized version of the Android Telegram app, presented as the Shagle app – a video-chat service that has no app version ESET researchers identified an active campaign that we have attributed to the StrongPity APT group. Active since November 2021, the campaign has distributed a malicious
Jan 16, 2023Ravie LakshmananData Security / Cyber Threat A “large and resilient infrastructure” comprising over 250 domains is being used to distribute information-stealing malware such as Raccoon and Vidar since early 2020. The infection chain “uses about a hundred of fake cracked software catalogue websites that redirect to several links before downloading the payload hosted
Russian cyber-criminals have been observed on dark web forums trying to bypass OpenAI’s API restrictions to gain access to the ChatGPT chatbot for nefarious purposes. Various individuals have been observed, for instance, discussing how to use stolen payment cards to pay for upgraded users on OpenAI (thus circumventing the limitations of free accounts). Others have
by Paul Ducklin Even though it’s already Day 4 of Year 2023, some of the important IT/sysadmin/X-Ops security stories of the holiday season are only popping up in mainstream news now. So we though we’d take a quick look back at some of the major issues we covered over the last couple of weeks, and
ESET Research announces IPyIDA 2.0, a Python plugin integrating IPython and Jupyter Notebook into IDA IDA Pro from Hex-Rays is probably the most popular tool today for reverse-engineering software. For ESET researchers, this tool is a favorite disassembler and has inspired the development of the IPyIDA plugin that embeds an IPython kernel into IDA Pro. Under
Jan 14, 2023Ravie LakshmananDevOps / Data Security DevOps platform CircleCI on Friday disclosed that unidentified threat actors compromised an employee’s laptop and leveraged malware to steal their two-factor authentication-backed credentials to breach the company’s systems and data last month. The CI/CD service CircleCI said the “sophisticated attack” took place on December 16, 2022, and that
The pro-Russia hacktivist group known as NoName057(16) has recently started new attacks against organizations and businesses across Poland, Lithuania and other countries. Most recently, the group began targeting the websites of the Czech presidential election candidates. According to SentinelOne, who discovered the new campaigns, the group conducted these campaigns by using public Telegram channels, a distributed
by Paul Ducklin THE CRYPTO CRISIS THAT WASN’T 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
StrongPity’s backdoor is fitted with various spying features and can record phone calls, collect texts, and gather call logs and contact lists This week, the ESET research team published their findings about an espionage campaign by the StrongPity APT group that spreads a fully functional, but trojanized version of the legitimate Telegram app for Android.