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A security researcher has demonstrated that sensitive data could be exfiltrated from air-gapped computers via a novel technique that leverages Wi-Fi signals as a covert channel—surprisingly, without requiring the presence of Wi-Fi hardware on the targeted systems. Dubbed " AIR-FI ," the attack hinges on deploying a specially designed malware in a compromised system that exploits "DDR SDRAM buses to generate electromagnetic emissions in the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi bands" and transmitting information atop these frequencies that can then be intercepted and decoded by nearby Wi-Fi capable devices such as smartphones, laptops, and IoT devices before sending the data to remote servers controlled by an attacker. The findings were published today in a paper titled "AIR-FI: Generating Covert Wi-Fi Signals from Air-Gapped Computers" by Dr. Mordechai Guri , the head of R&D at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev's Cyber-Security Research Center, Israel. "The AI

Remember rowhammer vulnerability? A critical issue affecting modern DRAM (dynamic random access memory) chips that could allow attackers to obtain higher kernel privileges on a targeted system by repeatedly accessing memory cells and induce bit flips. To mitigate Rowhammer vulnerability on the latest DDR4 DRAM, many memory chip manufacturers added some defenses under the umbrella term Target Row Refresh (TRR) that refreshes adjacent rows when a victim row is accessed more than a threshold. But it turns out 'Target Row Refresh,' promoted as a silver bullet to mitigate rowhammer attacks, is also insufficient and could let attackers execute new hammering patterns and re-enable the bit-flip attacks on the latest hardware as well. TRRespass: The Rowhammer Fuzzing Tool Tracked as CVE-2020-10255 , the newly reported vulnerability was discovered by researchers at VUSec Lab, who today also released ' TRRespass ,' an open source black box many-sided RowHammer fuzzin

As a vCISO, you are responsible for your client's cybersecurity strategy and risk governance. This incorporates multiple disciplines, from research to execution to reporting. Recently, we published a comprehensive playbook for vCISOs, "Your First 100 Days as a vCISO – 5 Steps to Success" , which covers all the phases entailed in launching a successful vCISO engagement, along with recommended actions to take, and step-by-step examples.  Following the success of the playbook and the requests that have come in from the MSP/MSSP community, we decided to drill down into specific parts of vCISO reporting and provide more color and examples. In this article, we focus on how to create compelling narratives within a report, which has a significant impact on the overall MSP/MSSP value proposition.  This article brings the highlights of a recent guided workshop we held, covering what makes a successful report and how it can be used to enhance engagement with your cyber security clients.

A team of cybersecurity researchers yesterday revealed details of a new side-channel attack on dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) that could allow malicious programs installed on a modern system to read sensitive memory data from other processes running on the same hardware. Dubbed RAMBleed and identified as CVE-2019-0174 , the new attack is based on a well-known class of DRAM side channel attack called Rowhammer , various variants [ GLitch , RAMpage , Throwhammer ,  Nethammer , Drammer ] of which have been demonstrated by researchers in recent years. Known since 2012, Rowhammer bug is a hardware reliability issue that was found in the new generation of DRAM chips. It turned out that repeatedly and rapidly accessing (hammering) a row of memory can cause bit flips in adjacent rows, i.e., changing their bit values from 0 to 1 or vice-versa. In the following years, researchers also demonstrated successful exploits to achieve privilege escalation on the vulnerable computers by

Security researchers have revealed a new attack to steal passwords, encryption keys and other sensitive information stored on most modern computers, even those with full disk encryption. The attack is a new variation of a traditional Cold Boot Attack , which is around since 2008 and lets attackers steal information that briefly remains in the memory (RAM) after the computer is shut down. However, to make the cold boot attacks less effective, most modern computers come bundled with a safeguard, created by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG), that overwrites the contents of the RAM when the power on the device is restored, preventing the data from being read. Now, researchers from Finnish cyber-security firm F-Secure figured out a new way to disable this overwrite security measure by physically manipulating the computer's firmware, potentially allowing attackers to recover sensitive data stored on the computer after a cold reboot in a matter of few minutes. "Cold boot

More than a hundred banks and financial institutions across the world have been infected with a dangerous sophisticated, memory-based malware that's almost undetectable, researchers warned. Newly published report by the Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab indicates that hackers are targeting banks, telecommunication companies, and government organizations in 40 countries, including the US, South America, Europe and Africa, with Fileless malware that resides solely in the memory of the compromised computers. Fileless malware was first discovered by the same security firm in 2014, has never been mainstream until now. Fileless malware is a piece of nasty software that does not copy any files or folder to the hard drive in order to get executed. Instead, payloads are directly injected into the memory of running processes, and the malware executes in the system's RAM. Since the malware runs in the memory, the memory acquisition becomes useless once the system gets reboot

Security researchers have find out ways to hijack the Intel-compatible PCs running Linux by exploiting the physical weaknesses in certain varieties of DDR DRAM (double data rate dynamic random-access memory) chips and gaining higher kernel privileges on the system. The technique, dubbed " rowhammer ", was outlined in a blog post published Monday by Google's Project Zero security initiative, a team of top security researchers dedicatedly identifies severe zero-day vulnerabilities in different software. Rowhammer is a problem with recent generation DRAM chips in which repeatedly accessing a row of memory can cause " bit flipping " in an adjacent row which could allow anyone to change the value of contents stored in computer memory. WHAT IS ROWHAMMER BUG DDR memory is arranged in an array of rows and columns, which are assigned to various services, applications and OS resources in large blocks. In order to prevent each application from access