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The federal prosecutors in the United States have charged Uber's former chief security officer, Joe Sullivan , for covering up a massive data breach that the ride-hailing company suffered in 2016. According to the press release published by the U.S. Department of Justice, Sullivan "took deliberate steps to conceal, deflect, and mislead the Federal Trade Commission about the breach" that also involved paying hackers $100,000 ransom to keep the incident secret. "A criminal complaint was filed today in federal court charging Joseph Sullivan with obstruction of justice and misprision of a felony in connection with the attempted cover-up of the 2016 hack of Uber Technologies," it says. The 2016 Uber's data breach exposed names, email addresses, phone numbers of 57 million Uber riders and drivers, and driver license numbers of around 600,000 drivers. The company revealed this information to the public almost a year later in 2017, immediately after Su

The South African arm of one of the world's largest credit check companies Experian yesterday announced a data breach incident that exposed personal information of millions of its customers. While Experian itself didn't mention the number of affect customers, in a report , the South African Banking Risk Information Centre—an anti-fraud and banking non-profit organization who worked with Experian to investigate the breach—disclosed that the attacker had reportedly stolen data of 24 million South Africans and 793,749 business entities. Notably, according to the company, the suspected attacker behind this breach had already been identified, and the stolen data of its customers had successfully been deleted from his/her computing devices. "We have identified the suspect and confirm that Experian South Africa was successful in obtaining and executing an Anton Piller order which resulted in the individual's hardware being impounded and the misappropriated data being

Over the past two years, a shocking  51% of organizations surveyed in a leading industry report have been compromised by a cyberattack.  Yes, over half.  And this, in a world where enterprises deploy  an average of 53 different security solutions  to safeguard their digital domain.  Alarming? Absolutely. A recent survey of CISOs and CIOs, commissioned by Pentera and conducted by Global Surveyz Research, offers a quantifiable glimpse into this evolving battlefield, revealing a stark contrast between the growing risks and the tightening budget constraints under which cybersecurity professionals operate. With this report, Pentera has once again taken a magnifying glass to the state of pentesting to release its annual report about today's pentesting practices. Engaging with 450 security executives from North America, LATAM, APAC, and EMEA—all in VP or C-level positions at organizations with over 1,000 employees—the report paints a current picture of modern security validation prac

Microsoft has issued an emergency out-of-band software update for Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2 systems to patch two new recently disclosed security vulnerabilities. Tracked as CVE-2020-1530 and CVE-2020-1537 , both flaws reside in the Remote Access Service (RAS) in a way it manages memory and file operations and could let remote attackers gain elevated privileges after successful exploitation. In brief, the Remote Access Service functionality of the Windows operating system allows remote clients to connect to the server and access internal resources from anywhere via the Internet. A patch for both vulnerabilities was first released on August 11 with the batch of August Patch Tuesday updates, but it was for Windows 10, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008, 2012, 2016, 2019, and Windows Server versions 1903, 1909, and 2004 systems. A week later, yesterday, on August 19, the company announced that Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 systems are vulner

Cybersecurity researchers today disclosed details of a memory vulnerability in IBM's Db2 family of data management products that could potentially allow a local attacker to access sensitive data and even cause a denial of service attacks. The flaw ( CVE-2020-4414 ), which impacts IBM Db2 V9.7, V10.1, V10.5, V11.1, and V11.5 editions on all platforms , is caused by improper usage shared memory, thereby granting a bad actor to perform unauthorized actions on the system. By sending a specially crafted request, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability to obtain sensitive information or cause a denial of service, according to Trustwave SpiderLabs security and research team, which discovered the issue. "Developers forgot to put explicit memory protections around the shared memory used by the Db2 trace facility," SpiderLabs's Martin Rakhmanov said. "This allows any local users read and write access to that memory area. In turn, this allows accessing critic

Cybersecurity researchers today took the wraps off a sophisticated, multi-functional peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet written in Golang that has been actively targeting SSH servers since January 2020. Called " FritzFrog ," the modular, multi-threaded and file-less botnet has breached more than 500 servers to date, infecting well-known universities in the US and Europe, and a railway company, according to a report released by Guardicore Labs today. "With its decentralized infrastructure, it distributes control among all its nodes," Guardicore 's Ophir Harpaz said. "In this network with no single point-of-failure, peers constantly communicate with each other to keep the network alive, resilient and up-to-date." In addition to implementing a proprietary P2P protocol that's been written from scratch, the communications are done over an encrypted channel, with the malware capable of creating a backdoor on victim systems that grants continued access fo

Jenkins—a popular open-source automation server software—published an advisory on Monday concerning a critical vulnerability in the Jetty web server that could result in memory corruption and cause confidential information to be disclosed. Tracked as CVE-2019-17638 , the flaw has a CVSS rating of 9.4 and impacts Eclipse Jetty versions 9.4.27.v20200227 to 9.4.29.v20200521—a full-featured tool that provides a Java HTTP server and web container for use in software frameworks. "Jenkins bundles Winstone-Jetty, a wrapper around Jetty, to act as HTTP and servlet server when started using java -jar jenkins.war. This is how Jenkins is run when using any of the installers or packages, but not when run using servlet containers such as Tomcat," read the advisory. "The vulnerability may allow unauthenticated attackers to obtain HTTP response headers that may include sensitive data intended for another user." The flaw , which impacts Jetty and Jenkins Core, appears to

Web applications suffer continuously evolving attacks, where a web application firewall (WAF) is the first line of defense and a necessary part of organizations' cybersecurity strategies. WAFs are getting more sophisticated all the time, but as its core protection starts with efficient pattern matching, typically using Regular Expressions, and classifying malicious traffic to block cyber attacks. Evading pattern matching However, unfortunately, this technique is no silver bullet against determined attackers. Once it's known that there is a protection layer enabled, malicious actors find ways to bypass it, and most of the time, they even succeed. It usually can be achieved when the same attacking payload, blocked by WAF , can be disguised to make it 'invisible' to the pattern matching mechanism to evade security. Context-Specific Obfuscation The web uses many technologies, and they all have different rules for what comprises valid syntax in their grammar

Attention! If you use Amazon's voice assistant Alexa in you smart speakers, just opening an innocent-looking web-link could let attackers install hacking skills on it and spy on your activities remotely. Check Point cybersecurity researchers—Dikla Barda, Roman Zaikin and Yaara Shriki—today disclosed severe security vulnerabilities in Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant that could render it vulnerable to a number of malicious attacks. According to a new report released by Check Point Research and shared with The Hacker News, the "exploits could have allowed an attacker to remove/install skills on the targeted victim's Alexa account, access their voice history and acquire personal information through skill interaction when the user invokes the installed skill." "Smart speakers and virtual assistants are so commonplace that it's easy to overlook just how much personal data they hold, and their role in controlling other smart devices in our homes,"

Microsoft earlier today released its August 2020 batch of software security updates for all supported versions of its Windows operating systems and other products. This month's Patch Tuesday updates address a total of 120 newly discovered software vulnerabilities, of which 17 are critical, and the rest are important in severity. In a nutshell, your Windows computer can be hacked if you: Play a video file — thanks to flaws in Microsoft Media Foundation and Windows Codecs Listen to audio — thanks to bugs affecting Windows Media Audio Codec Browser a website — thanks to 'all time buggy' Internet Explorer Edit an HTML page — thanks to an MSHTML Engine flaw Read a PDF — thanks to a loophole in Microsoft Edge PDF Reader Receive an email message — thanks to yet another bug in Microsoft Outlook But don't worry, you don't need to stop using your computer or without Windows OS on it. All you need to do is click on the Start Menu → open Settings → click Security

New research disclosed a string of severe security vulnerabilities in the ' Find My Mobile '—an Android app that comes pre-installed on most Samsung smartphones—that could have allowed remote attackers to track victims' real-time location, monitor phone calls, and messages, and even delete data stored on the phone. Portugal-based cybersecurity services provider Char49 revealed its findings on Samsung's Find My Mobile Android app at the DEF CON conference last week and shared details with the Hacker News. "This flaw, after setup, can be easily exploited and with severe implications for the user and with a potentially catastrophic impact: permanent denial of service via phone lock, complete data loss with factory reset (SD card included), serious privacy implication via IMEI and location tracking as well as call and SMS log access," Char49's Pedro Umbelino said in technical analysis. The flaws, which work on unpatched Samsung Galaxy S7, S8, and S9+

Citrix today released patches for multiple new security vulnerabilities affecting its Citrix Endpoint Management (CEM) , also known as XenMobile, a product made for enterprises to help companies manage and secure their employees' mobile devices remotely. Citrix Endpoint Management offers businesses mobile device management (MDM) and mobile application management (MAM) capabilities. It allows companies to control which apps their employees can install while ensuring updates and security settings are applied to keep business information protected. According to Citrix, there are a total of 5 vulnerabilities that affect on-premise instances of XenMobile servers used in enterprises to manage all apps, devices, or platforms from one central location. "Remediations have already been applied to cloud versions, but hybrid rights users need to apply the upgrades to any on-premises instance," the company sai d in a post today. If left unpatched and exploited successfully,

If you haven't recently updated your Chrome, Opera, or Edge web browser to the latest available version, it would be an excellent idea to do so as quickly as possible. Cybersecurity researchers on Monday disclosed details about a zero-day flaw in Chromium-based web browsers for Windows, Mac and Android that could have allowed attackers to entirely bypass Content Security Policy (CSP) rules since Chrome 73. Tracked as CVE-2020-6519 (rated 6.5 on the CVSS scale), the issue stems from a CSP bypass that results in arbitrary execution of malicious code on target websites. According to PerimeterX, some of the most popular websites, including Facebook, Wells Fargo, Zoom, Gmail, WhatsApp, Investopedia, ESPN, Roblox, Indeed, TikTok, Instagram, Blogger, and Quora, were susceptible to the CSP bypass. Interestingly, it appears that the same flaw was also highlighted by Tencent Security Xuanwu Lab more than a year ago, just a month after the release of Chrome 73 in March 2019, but

A security researcher earlier today publicly revealed details and proof-of-concept exploit code for an unpatched, critical zero-day remote code execution vulnerability affecting the widely used internet forum software vBulletin that's already under active exploitation in the wild. vBulletin is a widely used proprietary Internet forum software package based on PHP and MySQL database server that powers over 100,000 websites on the Internet, including Fortune 500 and Alexa Top 1 million companies websites and forums. In September last year, a separate anonymous security researcher publicly disclosed a then-zero-day RCE vulnerability in vBulletin , identified as CVE-2019-16759 , and received a critical severity rating of 9.8, allowing attackers to execute malicious commands on the remote server without requiring any authentication to log into the forum. A day after the disclosure of CVE-2019-16759, the vBulletin team released security patches that resolved the issue, but it t

If you are using TeamViewer, then beware and make sure you're running the latest version of the popular remote desktop connection software for Windows. TeamViewer team recently released a new version of its software that includes a patch for a severe vulnerability ( CVE 2020-13699 ), which, if exploited, could let remote attackers steal your system password and eventually compromise it. What's more worrisome is that the attack can be executed almost automatically without requiring much interaction of the victims and just by convincing them to visit a malicious web page once. For those unaware, TeamViewer is a popular remote-support software that allows users to securely share their desktop or take full control of other's PC over the Internet from anywhere in the world. The remote access software is available for desktop and mobile operating systems, including Windows, macOS, Linux, Chrome OS, iOS, Android, Windows RT Windows Phone 8, and BlackBerry. Discovered b

Popular video conferencing app Zoom has addressed several security vulnerabilities, two of which affect its Linux client that could have allowed an attacker with access to a compromised system to read and exfiltrate Zoom user data—and even run stealthy malware as a sub-process of a trusted application. According to cybersecurity researcher Mazin Ahmed , who presented his findings at DEF CON 2020 yesterday, the company also left a misconfigured development instance exposed that wasn't updated since September 2019, indicating the server could be susceptible to flaws that were left unpatched. After Ahmed privately reported the issues to Zoom in April and subsequently in July, the company issued a fix on August 3 (version 5.2.4). It's worth noting that for some of these attacks to happen, an attacker would need to have already compromised the victim's device by other means. But that doesn't take away the significance of the flaws. In one scenario, Ahmed uncov

For much of this year, IT professionals all over the globe have had their hands full, finding ways to help businesses cope with the fallout of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. In many cases, it involved a rapid rollout of significant remote work infrastructure. That infrastructure was called into service with little to no warning and even less opportunity for testing. Needless to say, the situation wasn't ideal from a cybersecurity standpoint. And hackers all over the world knew it. Almost immediately, Google reported a significant increase in malicious activity, and Microsoft noted trends that appeared to back that up. The good news is that the wave of cyberattacks unleashed by the pandemic peaked in April and has since died down. Fortunately, that's allowing IT professionals and network administrators everywhere to take a deep breath and take stock of the new security environment they're now operating in. The trouble is, there's still so much uncertainty

Apple earlier this year fixed a security vulnerability in iOS and macOS that could have potentially allowed an attacker to gain unauthorized access to a user's iCloud account. Uncovered in February by Thijs Alkemade , a security specialist at IT security firm Computest, the flaw resided in Apple's implementation of TouchID (or FaceID) biometric feature that authenticated users to log in to websites on Safari, specifically those that use Apple ID logins. After the issue was reported to Apple through their responsible disclosure program, the iPhone maker addressed the vulnerability in a server-side update . An Authentication Flaw The central premise of the flaw is as follows. When users try to sign in to a website that requires an Apple ID, a prompt is displayed to authenticate the login using Touch ID. Doing so skips the two-factor authentication step since it already leverages a combination of factors for identification, such as the device (something you have) and