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New vulnerabilities have been discovered in Fortress S03 Wi-Fi Home Security System that could be potentially abused by a malicious party to gain unauthorized access with an aim to alter system behavior, including disarming the devices without the victim's knowledge. The two unpatched issues, tracked under the identifiers CVE-2021-39276 (CVSS score: 5.3) and CVE-2021-39277 (CVSS score: 5.7), were discovered and reported by cybersecurity firm Rapid7 in May 2021 with a 60-day deadline to fix the weaknesses. The Fortress S03 Wi-Fi Home Security System is a do-it-yourself (DIY) alarm system that enables users to secure their homes and small businesses from burglars, fires, gas leaks, and water leaks by leveraging Wi-Fi and RFID technology for keyless entry. The company's security and surveillance systems are used by "thousands of clients and continued customers,"  according  to its website. Calling the vulnerabilities "trivially easy to exploit," Rapid7 re

A group of academics has proposed a machine learning approach that uses authentic interactions between devices in Bluetooth networks as a foundation to handle device-to-device authentication reliably. Called " Verification of Interaction Authenticity " (aka VIA), the recurring authentication scheme aims to solve the problem of passive, continuous authentication and automatic deauthentication once two devices are paired with one another, which remain authenticated until an explicit deauthentication action is taken, or the authenticated session expires. "Consider devices that pair via Bluetooth, which commonly follow the pattern of pair once, trust indefinitely. After two devices connect, those devices are bonded until a user explicitly removes the bond. This bond is likely to remain intact as long as the devices exist, or until they transfer ownership," Travis Peters, one of the co-authors of the study,  said . "The increased adoption of (Bluetooth-enabled)

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday  added  single-factor authentication to the short list of "exceptionally risky" cybersecurity practices that could expose critical infrastructure as well as government and the private sector entities to devastating cyberattacks. Single-factor authentication is a  method  of signing in users to websites and remote systems by using only one way of verifying their identity, typically a combination of username and password. It's considered to be of low-security, since it heavily relies on "matching one factor — such as a password — to a username to gain access to a system." But with weak, reused, and common passwords posing a grave threat and emerging a lucrative attack vector, the use of single-factor authentication can lead to unnecessary risk of compromise and increase the possibility of account takeover by cybercriminals. With the latest development, the  list of bad practices  now e

Staying Sharp: Cybersecurity CPEs Explained Perhaps even more so than in other professional domains, cybersecurity professionals constantly face new threats. To ensure you stay on top of your game, many certification programs require earning Continuing Professional Education (CPE) credits. CPEs are essentially units of measurement used to quantify the time and effort professionals spend on maintaining and enhancing skills and knowledge in the field of cybersecurity, and they act as points that demonstrate a commitment to staying current. CPEs are best understood in terms of other professions: just like medical, legal and even CPA certifications require continuing education to stay up-to-date on advancements and industry changes, cybersecurity professionals need CPEs to stay informed about the latest hacking tactics and defense strategies. CPE credits are crucial for maintaining certifications issued by various cybersecurity credentialing organizations, such as (ISC)², ISACA, and C

Details have emerged about a now-patched security vulnerability impacting Microsoft Exchange Server that could be weaponized by an unauthenticated attacker to modify server configurations, thus leading to the disclosure of Personally Identifiable Information (PII). The issue, tracked as  CVE-2021-33766  (CVSS score: 7.3) and coined " ProxyToken ," was discovered by Le Xuan Tuyen, a researcher at the Information Security Center of Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group (VNPT-ISC), and reported through the Zero-Day Initiative (ZDI) program in March 2021. "With this vulnerability, an unauthenticated attacker can perform configuration actions on mailboxes belonging to arbitrary users," the ZDI  said  Monday. "As an illustration of the impact, this can be used to copy all emails addressed to a target and account and forward them to an account controlled by the attacker." Microsoft addressed the issue as part of its  Patch Tuesday updates  for July 2021

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol or SMTP has easily exploitable security loopholes. Email routing protocols were designed in a time when cryptographic technology was at a nascent stage (e.g., the de-facto protocol for email transfer, SMTP, is nearly 40 years old now), and therefore security was not an important consideration.  As a result, in most email systems encryption is still opportunistic, which implies that if the opposite connection does not support TLS, it gets rolled back to an unencrypted one delivering messages in plaintext.  To mitigate SMTP security problems,  MTA-STS  (Mail Transfer Agent Strict Transport Security) is the recommended email authentication standard. It enforces TLS in order to allow MTAs to send emails securely. This means that it will only allow mail from MTAs that support TLS encryption, and it will only allow mail to go to MX hosts that support TLS encryption. In case an encrypted connection cannot be negotiated between communicating SMTP servers, the

Not all heroes wear capes. Cybersecurity professionals are digital warriors who use their knowledge and skill to battle malicious hackers.  Sounds like an exciting career, right?  If the comic-book comparisons aren't working for you, perhaps some figures will. According to ZipRecruiter, the average salary of a cybersecurity professional is just over $100,000 a year. The Complete 2021 CyberSecurity Super Bundle  can help you get started in this niche, with 24 courses working towards top certification exams.  If you went and bought these courses separately, you would pay a total of $7,080.  To bring the price down, The Hacker News has teamed up with iCollege to offer  all the training for just $69.99 . That is 99% off the full value! You don't need a college education to get a job in cybersecurity, but you do need to pass some exams.  This bundle gives you full prep for important tests, including CISSP, and CompTIA Security+, PenTest+, CySA+, and CASP+. Picking up these certifica

A new ransomware family that emerged last month comes with its own bag of tricks to bypass ransomware protection by leveraging a novel technique called "intermittent encryption." Called  LockFile , the operators of the ransomware have been found exploiting recently disclosed flaws such as  ProxyShell  and  PetitPotam  to compromise Windows servers and deploy file-encrypting malware that scrambles only every alternate 16 bytes of a file, thereby giving it the ability to evade ransomware defences. "Partial encryption is generally used by ransomware operators to speed up the encryption process and we've seen it implemented by BlackMatter, DarkSide and LockBit 2.0 ransomware," Mark Loman, Sophos director of engineering, said in a statement. "What sets LockFile apart is that, unlike the others, it doesn't encrypt the first few blocks. Instead, LockFile encrypts every other 16 bytes of a document." "This means that a file such as a text documen