The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: cybersecurity

You are a cybersecurity professional with the responsibility to keep your organization secured, you know your job chapter and verse, from high level reporting duties to the bits and bytes of what malware targeted your endpoints a week ago. But it's a lot to hold in one's mind, so to make your life easier, The Ultimate Security Pros' Checklist , created by Cynet, provides you with a concise and actionable checklist enabling you to keep track of all your operational, management and reporting tasks. 'We are constantly interacting with the security managers of our customers,' says Eyal Gruner, founder, and CEO of Cynet, 'and this gives us a unique perspective on what are the core duties they all care about. So, you can think of the checklist templates as an aggregated crowd-sourcing from the numerous CISOs, security directors, architects, and SOC managers we have worked with across the years.' The Ultimate Security Pros' Checklist fully maps the co

Phishing attacks have become one of the business world's top cybersecurity concerns. These social engineering attacks have been rising over the years, with the most recent report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group coalition identifying over 266,000 active spoofed websites, which is nearly double the number detected during Q4 2018. Hackers have evolved their methods, from regular phishing attacks to spear phishing, where they use email messages disguised as coming from legitimate sources to dupe specific individuals. This is why the global spear phishing protection software market is estimated to reach $1.8 billion by 2025. However, conventional defenses can still fall short due to one particular weakness in the security perimeter – the human factor. Indeed, some 33 percent of 2019's data breaches involved humans falling victim to social engineering attacks. And given how sophisticated and creative the phishing perpetrators have been getting, it's easy to see h

Visibility into an environment attack surface is the fundamental cornerstone to sound security decision making. However, the standard process of 3rd party threat assessment as practiced today is both time consuming and expensive. Cynet changes the rules of the game with a free threat assessment offering ( click here to learn more ) based on more than 72 hours of data collection, enabling organizations to benchmark their security posture against their vertical industry peers and take actions accordingly. Cynet Free Threat Assessment (available for organizations with 250 endpoints and above, from North America and Europe) spotlights critical, exposed attack surfaces and provides actionable knowledge of attacks that are currently alive and active in the environment. 1.) Indication of live attacks — active malware, connection to C&C, data exfiltration, access to phishing links, user credential theft attempts, and others: 2.) Host and app attack surfaces — unpatched vulnera

Here's excellent news for sysadmins. You can now use a physical security key as hardware-based two-factor authentication to securely log into a remote system via SSH protocol. OpenSSH, one of the most widely used open-source implementations of the Secure Shell (SSH) Protocol, yesterday announced the 8.2 version of the software that primarily includes two new significant security enhancements. First, OpenSSH 8.2 added support for FIDO/U2F hardware authenticators , and the second, it has deprecated SSH-RSA public key signature algorithm and planned to disable it by default in the future versions of the software. FIDO (Fast Identity Online) protocol based hardware security devices are stronger and fool-proof mechanisms for authentication because it enables public-key cryptography to protect against advanced malware, phishing, and man-in-the-middle attacks. "In OpenSSH, FIDO devices are supported by new public key types' ecdsa-sk' and 'ed25519-sk', along

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) charged Huawei with racketeering and conspiring to steal trade secrets from six US firms, in a significant escalation of a lawsuit against the Chinese telecom giant that began last year. Accusing Huawei and its affiliates of "using fraud and deception to misappropriate sophisticated technology from US counterparts," the new charges allege the company of offering bonuses to employees who obtained "confidential information" from its competitors. The indictment adds to a list of two other charges filed by the US government last year, including violating US sanctions on Iran and stealing technology from T-Mobile — called Tappy — that's used to test smartphone durability. The development is the latest salvo fired by the Trump administration in its year-long fight against the networking equipment maker, which it deems a threat to national security. "The misappropriated

Google removed 500 malicious Chrome extensions from its Web Store after they found to inject malicious ads and siphon off user browsing data to servers under the control of attackers. These extensions were part of a malvertising and ad-fraud campaign that's been operating at least since January 2019, although evidence points out the possibility that the actor behind the scheme may have been active since 2017. The findings come as part of a joint investigation by security researcher Jamila Kaya and Cisco-owned Duo Security, which unearthed 70 Chrome Extensions with over 1.7 million installations. Upon sharing the discovery privately with Google, the company went on to identify 430 more problematic browser extensions, all of which have since been deactivated. "The prominence of malvertising as an attack vector will continue to rise as long as tracking-based advertising remains ubiquitous, and particularly if users remain underserved by protection mechanisms," sa

The realistic approach to security is that incidents occur. While ideally, the CISO would want to prevent all of them, in practice, some will succeed to a certain degree—making the ability to efficiently manage an incident response process a mandatory skill for any CISO. Moreover, apart from the management of the actual response process, the CISO must also be able to efficiently communicate the ongoing activities and status to the executive level. While the IR process is mostly technical, reporting to the organization's management should take place on a much higher level in order for the non-security -savvy executives to understand. To assist CISOs with these tasks, Cynet created the IR Management and Reporting PowerPoint template ( download here ), which apart from providing an actionable response framework, is also clear and intuitive for the executive level. Let's drill down on the two aspects of the template: IR Management The template was built on the SANS\

Emotet, the notorious trojan behind a number of botnet-driven spam campaigns and ransomware attacks, has found a new attack vector: using already infected devices to identify new victims that are connected to nearby Wi-Fi networks. According to researchers at Binary Defense , the newly discovered Emotet sample leverages a "Wi-Fi spreader" module to scan Wi-Fi networks, and then attempts to infect devices that are connected to them. The cybersecurity firm said the Wi-Fi spreader has a timestamp of April 16, 2018, indicating the spreading behavior has been running "unnoticed" for close to two years until it was detected for the first time last month. The development marks an escalation of Emotet's capabilities, as networks in close physical proximity to the original victim are now susceptible to infection. How Does Emotet's Wi-Fi Spreader Module Work? The updated version of the malware works by leveraging an already compromised host to list all

An election campaigning website operated by Likud―the ruling political party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu―inadvertently exposed personal information of all 6.5 million eligible Israeli voters on the Internet, just three weeks before the country is going to have a legislative election. In Israel, all political parties receive personal details of voters before the election, which they can't share with any third party and are responsible for protecting the privacy of their citizens and erasing it after the elections are over. Reportedly, Likud shared the entire voter registry with Feed-b, a software development company, who then uploaded it a website (elector.co.il) designed to promote the voting management app called 'Elector.' According to Ran Bar-Zik , a web security researcher who disclosed the issue, the voters' data was not leaked using any security vulnerability in the Elector app; instead, the incident occurred due to negligence by the softw

It may sound creepy and unreal, but hackers can also exfiltrate sensitive data from your computer by simply changing the brightness of the screen, new cybersecurity research shared with The Hacker News revealed. In recent years, several cybersecurity researchers demonstrated innovative ways to covertly exfiltrate data from a physically isolated air-gapped computer that can't connect wirelessly or physically with other computers or network devices. These clever ideas rely on exploiting little-noticed emissions of a computer's components, such as light, sound , heat , radio frequencies , or ultrasonic waves , and even using the current fluctuations in the power lines. For instance, potential attackers could sabotage supply chains to infect an air-gapped computer, but they can't always count on an insider to unknowingly carry a USB with the data back out of a targeted facility. When it comes to high-value targets, these unusual techniques, which may sound theoretica

Exams are pretty important in professional IT. You can have all the practical knowledge in the world, but technical recruiters want to see certificates. If you want to improve your resume, the Complete 2020 IT Certification Exam Prep Mega Bundle will help you ace nine of the most important exams. You can pick up the training now for only $39 via THN Deals. Over the next few years, the areas of greatest demand in IT will be networking, cloud computing, and cybersecurity. This bundle covers all three topics, with over 100 hours of training. The courses on cloud computing focus on AWS and Microsoft Azure, which are the two biggest platforms right now. You get full prep for four Azure exams and one AWS exam. The bundle also helps you pass three Cisco CCNA exams. If you plan to work with networks at any time, these certifications will serve you well. The final course works towards CompTIA Security+, which covers all the fundamentals of cybersecurity. Many companies now expect

Google might have mistakenly shared your private videos saved on the company's servers with other users, the tech giant admitted yesterday in a security notification sent quietly to an undisclosed number of affected users. The latest privacy mishap is the result of a "technical issue" in Google's Takeout , a service that backs up all your Google account data into a single file and then lets you download it straight away. According to a screenshot Jon Oberheide of Duo Security shared on Twitter, the issue reportedly remained active between 21st November and 25th November last year, during which "some videos in Google Photos [service] were incorrectly exported to unrelated user's archives." Vice versa, if you had also requested for your account backup during the same 5-day period, you might have even received unrelated videos from other Google accounts. So, the data leak incident potentially affects only those who used Google Takeout service

The cybersecurity of a company is heavily reliant upon the skills and knowledge of the people who install, manage, and operate its security products. This means that recruiting and nurturing the best security team possible should be a CISO's top priority. Cynet's Ultimate Cybersecurity Job Posting Templates ( download here ) provide a list of the main responsibilities and skills for typical security positions, built upon research and providing IT and security managers with pre-set template job descriptions so that there is no need to create them from scratch. Because of the fact that there are many different cybersecurity job titles, with much overlap between job descriptions and responsibilities, the creation of the inclusion criteria for these positions required significant review and consideration. Six positions are included in the following job templates, including all integral aspects of the responsibility cycle in product deployment, integration, and operation, p

Besides rewarding ethical hackers from its pocket for responsibly reporting vulnerabilities in third-party open-source projects, Google today announced financial support for open source developers to help them arrange additional resources, prioritizing the security of their products. The initiative, called " Patch Rewards Program ," was launched nearly 6 years ago, under which Google rewards hackers for reporting severe flaws in many widely used open source software, including OpenSSH, OpenSSL, Linux kernel, Apache, Nginx, jQuery, and OpenVPN. So far, Google has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars as bounty to hackers across the world who helped improve the overall security of many crucial open source software and technologies that power the Internet, operating systems, and networks. The company has now also decided to motivate volunteer work done by the open source community by providing upfront financial help to project teams, using which they can acquire addition

The 2020 Cybersecurity Salary Survey was an online survey published in The Hacker News and created to provide insight into the details related to cybersecurity compensation. There were over 1,500 security professionals who completed the survey. Today you can access the aggregated and analyzed 2020 Cybersecurity Salary Survey Results and gain insight to the main ranges and factors of current cybersecurity salaries. The received data enabled the conductors of the survey to form a detailed salary profile for five security positions: Security Analyst/Threat Intelligence Specialist, Security/Cloud Security Architect, Penetration Tester and Security Director/Manager. This profile includes both the range and composition of salaries for these positions, as well as the relative impacts of organizational (geolocation, industry, etc.) and individual (gender, experience, certification) factors. Using the survey results ( download here ), any individual can go to the section relevant for

It appears that Facebook at the center of yet another issue involving privacy. Reportedly, multiple iPhone users have come forward on social media complaining that the Facebook app secretly activates their smartphone's camera in the background while they scroll through their Facebook feeds or looking at the photos on the social network. As shown in the Twitter videos below, when users click on an image or video on the social media to full screen and then return it back to normal, an issue with the Facebook app for iOS slightly shifts the app to the right. It opens a space on the left from where users can see the iPhone's camera activated in the background. However, at this moment, it's not clear if it's just an UI bug where Facebook app incorrectly but only accesses the camera interface, or if it also records or uploads something, which, if proven right, would be the most disastrous moment in Facebook's history. Found a @facebook #security & #pri

Another day, another massive data breach—this time affecting a leading web technology company, as well as both of its subsidiaries, from where millions of customers around the world have purchased domain names for their websites. The world's top domain registrars Web.com, Network Solutions, and Register.com disclosed a security breach that may have resulted in the theft of customers' account information. Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, Web.com is a leading web technology company that owns both Network Solutions and Register.com. The companies offer web services like web hosting, website design, and online marketing to help people build their own websites. What happened? — In late August 2019, a third-party gained unauthorized access to a "limited number" of the company's computer systems and reportedly accessed millions of records for accounts of current and former customers with Web.com, Network Solutions, and Register.com.

Skyrocketing data breaches bring incalculable losses to organizations and can cost cybersecurity executives their jobs. Here we examine the top five places in 2019 where cybercriminals are stealing corporate and government data without ever getting noticed and then learn how to avoid falling victim to unscrupulous attackers. 1. Misconfigured Cloud Storage 48% of all corporate data is stored in the cloud compared to 35% three years ago, according to a 2019 Global Cloud Security Study by cybersecurity company Thales that surveyed over 3,000 professionals across the globe. Contrastingly, only 32% of the organizations believe that protecting data in the cloud is their own responsibility, counting on cloud and IaaS providers to safeguard the data. Worse, 51% of the organizations do not use encryption or tokenization in the cloud. (ISC)² Cloud Security Report 2019 assets that 64% of cybersecurity professionals perceive data loss and leakage as the biggest risk associated with the