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Remember the " Big bitcoin heist " we reported last month when a group of thieves stole around 600 powerful bitcoin mining devices from Icelandic data centers? Icelandic Police had arrested 11 suspects as part of the investigation, one of which has escaped from prison and fled to Sweden on a passenger plane reportedly also carrying the Icelandic prime minister Katrin Jakobsdottir. Sindri Thor Stefansson , who is suspected of masterminding the whole theft of almost $2 million worth of cryptocurrency-mining equipment, traveled under a passport of someone else but identified through surveillance footage. Stefansson had recently been transferred to a low-security Sogn prison, located in rural southern Iceland (just 59 miles away from Iceland's international airport in Keflavik), from where he escaped through a window early Tuesday and boarded the flight to Sweden. Prime minister Jakobsdottir was on her way to Sweden to take part in India-Nordic Summit and meet Indi...

The Drupal vulnerability (CVE-2018-7600), dubbed Drupalgeddon2 that could allow attackers to completely take over vulnerable websites has now been exploited in the wild to deliver malware backdoors and cryptocurrency miners. Drupalgeddon2, a highly critical remote code execution vulnerability discovered two weeks ago in Drupal content management system software, was recently patched by the company without releasing its technical details. However, just a day after security researchers at Check Point and Dofinity published complete details, a Drupalgeddon2 proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code was made widely available, and large-scale Internet scanning and exploitation attempts followed. At the time, no incident of targets being hacked was reported, but over the weekend, several security firms noticed that attackers have now started exploiting the vulnerability to install cryptocurrency miner and other malware on vulnerable websites. The SANS Internet Storm Center spotted so...

Last year, the popular system cleanup software CCleaner suffered a massive supply-chain malware attack of all times, wherein hackers compromised the company's servers for more than a month and replaced the original version of the software with the malicious one. The malware attack infected over 2.3 million users who downloaded or updated their CCleaner app between August and September last year from the official website with the backdoored version of the software. Now, it turns out that the hackers managed to infiltrate the company's network almost five months before they first replaced the official CCleaner build with the backdoored version, revealed Avast executive VP and CTO Ondrej Vlcek at the RSA security conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. 6-Months Timeline of CCleaner Supply Chain Attack Vlcek shared a brief timeline of the last year's incident that came out to be the worst nightmare for the company, detailing how and when unknown hackers breached Pi...

Global chip-maker Intel on Tuesday announced two new technologies—Threat Detection Technology (TDT) and Security Essentials—that not only offer hardware-based built-in security features across Intel processors but also improve threat detection without compromising system performance. Intel's Threat Detection Technology (TDT) offers a new set of features that leverage hardware-level telemetry to help security products detect new classes of threats and exploits. It includes two main capabilities—Accelerated Memory Scanning and Advanced Platform Telemetry. Accelerated Memory Scanning allows antivirus programs to use Intel's integrated GPU to scan and detect memory-based malware attacks while reducing the impact on performance and power consumption. "Current scanning technologies can detect system memory-based cyber-attacks, but at the cost of CPU performance," says Rick Echevarria, Intel security division Vice President. "With Accelerated Memory Scanni...

Finally, it's happening. Microsoft has built its own custom Linux kernel to power " Azure Sphere ," a newly launched technology that aims to better secure billions of " Internet of things " devices by combining the custom Linux kernel with new chip design, and its cloud security service. Project Azure Sphere focuses on protecting microcontroller-based IoT devices, including smart appliances, connected toys, and other smart gadgets, Microsoft announced during the security-focused RSA Conference in San Francisco Monday. It is basically a security package consists of three main components: Azure Sphere-certified microcontrollers (MCUs) Azure Sphere OS Azure Sphere Security Service "Azure Sphere provides security that starts in the hardware and extends to the cloud, delivering holistic security that protects, detects, and responds to threats—so they're always prepared," Microsoft said. Internet of Things (IoT) devices are 'ridicu...

Security researchers have been warning about an ongoing malware campaign hijacking Internet routers to distribute Android banking malware that steals users' sensitive information, login credentials and the secret code for two-factor authentication. In order to trick victims into installing the Android malware, dubbed Roaming Mantis , hackers have been hijacking DNS settings on vulnerable and poorly secured routers . DNS hijacking attack allows hackers to intercept traffic, inject rogue ads on web-pages and redirect users to phishing pages designed to trick them into sharing their sensitive information like login credentials, bank account details, and more. Hijacking routers' DNS for a malicious purpose is not new. Previously we reported about widespread DNSChanger and Switcher —both the malware worked by changing the DNS settings of the wireless routers to redirect traffic to malicious websites controlled by attackers. Discovered by security researchers at Kaspersk...

Internet-connected technology, also known as the Internet of Things (IoT), is now part of daily life, with smart assistants like Siri and Alexa to cars, watches, toasters, fridges, thermostats, lights, and the list goes on and on. But of much greater concern, enterprises are unable to secure each and every device on their network, giving cybercriminals hold on their network hostage with just one insecure device. Since IoT is a double-edged sword, it not only poses huge risks to enterprises worldwide but also has the potential to severely disrupt other organisations, or the Internet itself . There's no better example than Mirai , the botnet malware that knocked the world's biggest and most popular websites offline for few hours over a year ago. We have another great example that showcases how one innocent looking insecure IoT device connected to your network can cause security nightmares. Nicole Eagan, the CEO of cybersecurity company Darktrace, told attendees at...

Hackers have started exploiting a recently disclosed critical vulnerability in Drupal shortly after the public release of working exploit code. Two weeks ago, Drupal security team discovered a highly critical remote code execution vulnerability, dubbed Drupalgeddon2 , in its content management system software that could allow attackers to completely take over vulnerable websites. To address this vulnerability the company immediately released updated versions of Drupal CMS without releasing any technical details of the vulnerability, giving more than a million sites enough time to patch the issue. Two days ago, security researchers at Check Point and Dofinity published complete technical details about this vulnerability (CVE-2018-7600), using which, a Russian security researcher published a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code for Drupalgeddon2 on GitHub. The Drupalgeddon2 vulnerability that affects all versions of Drupal from 6 to 8 allows an unauthenticated, remote attack...

While performing in-depth analysis of various malware samples, security researchers at Cyberbit found a new code injection technique, dubbed Early Bird , being used by at least three different sophisticated malware that helped attackers evade detection. As its name suggests, Early Bird is a "simple yet powerful" technique that allows attackers to inject malicious code into a legitimate process before its main thread starts, and thereby avoids detection by Windows hook engines used by most anti-malware products. The Early Bird code injection technique "loads the malicious code in a very early stage of thread initialization, before many security products place their hooks—which allows the malware to perform its malicious actions without being detected," the researchers said. The technique is similar to the AtomBombing code injection technique that does not rely on easy-to-detect API calls, allowing malware to inject code into processes in a manner that no a...

Android ecosystem is highly broken when it comes to security, and device manufacturers (better known as OEMs) make it even worse by not providing critical patches in time. According to a new study, most Android vendors have been lying to users about security updates and telling customers that their smartphones are running the latest updates. In other words, most smartphone manufacturers including big players like Samsung, Xiaomi, OnePlus, Sony, HTC, LG, and Huawei are not delivering you every critical security patch they're supposed to, a study by Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell of German security firm Security Research Labs (SRL) revealed. Nohl and Lell examined the firmware of 1,200 smartphones from over a dozen vendors, for every Android patch released last year, and found that many devices have a "patch gap," leaving parts of the Android ecosystem exposed to hackers. "Sometimes these guys just change the date without installing any patches. Probably for m...

Do you think it is possible to extract data from a computer using its power cables? If no, then you should definitely read about this technique. Researchers from Israel's Ben Gurion University of the Negev—who majorly focus on finding clever ways to exfiltrate data from an isolated or air-gapped computer—have now shown how fluctuations in the current flow "propagated through the power lines" could be used to covertly steal highly sensitive data. Sound something like a James Bond movie? Well, the same group of researchers has previously demonstrated various out-of-band communication methods to steal data from a compromised air-gapped computer via light , sound , heat , electromagnetic , magnetic and ultrasonic waves . Air-gapped computers are those that are isolated from the Internet and local networks and therefore, are believed to be the most secure devices that are difficult to infiltrate or exfiltrate data. "As a part of the targeted attack, the adve...

A security researcher has disclosed details of an important vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook for which the company released an incomplete patch this month —almost 18 months after receiving the responsible disclosure report. The Microsoft Outlook vulnerability (CVE-2018-0950) could allow attackers to steal sensitive information, including users' Windows login credentials, just by convincing victims to preview an email with Microsoft Outlook, without requiring any additional user interaction. The vulnerability, discovered by Will Dormann of the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC), resides in the way Microsoft Outlook renders remotely-hosted OLE content when an RTF (Rich Text Format) email message is previewed and automatically initiates SMB connections. A remote attacker can exploit this vulnerability by sending an RTF email to a target victim, containing a remotely-hosted image file (OLE object), loading from the attacker-controlled SMB server. Since Microsoft Outlook a...