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If you have already uninstalled Flash player, well done! But if you haven't, here's another great reason for ditching it. Adobe has released a security patch update for a critical vulnerability in its Flash Player software that is actively being exploited in the wild by hackers in targeted attacks against Windows users. Independently discovered last week by several security firms—including ICEBRG ,  Qihoo 360  and Tencent—the Adobe Flash player zero-day attacks have primarily been targeting users in the Middle East using a specially crafted Excel spreadsheet. "The hackers carefully constructed an Office document that remotely loaded Flash vulnerability. When the document was opened, all the exploit code and malicious payload were delivered through remote servers," Qihoo 360 published vulnerability analysis in a blog post. The stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-5002, impacts Adobe Flash Player 29.0.0.171 and earlier versions on ...

Marcus Hutchins , the British malware analyst who helped stop global Wannacry menace , is now facing four new charges related to malware he allegedly created and promoted it online to steal financial information. Hutchins, the 24-year-old better known as MalwareTech, was arrested by the FBI last year as he was headed home to England from the DefCon conference in Las Vegas for his alleged role in creating and distributing Kronos between 2014 and 2015. Kronos is a Banking Trojan designed to steal banking credentials and personal information from victims' computers, which was sold for $7,000 on Russian online forums, and the FBI accused Hutchins of writing and promoting it online, including via YouTube. Hutchins pleaded not guilty at a court hearing in August 2017 in Milwaukee and release on $30,000 bail. However, earlier this week, a revised superseding indictment [ PDF ] was filed with the Wisconsin Eastern District Court, under which Hutchins faces four new charges alo...

After the discovery of massive VPNFilter malware botnet , security researchers have now uncovered another giant botnet that has already compromised more than 40,000 servers, modems and internet-connected devices belonging to a wide number of organizations across the world. Dubbed Operation Prowli , the campaign has been spreading malware and injecting malicious code to take over servers and websites around the world using various attack techniques including use of exploits, password brute-forcing and abusing weak configurations. Discovered by researchers at the GuardiCore security team, Operation Prowli has already hit more than 40,000 victim machines from over 9,000 businesses in various domains, including finance, education and government organisations. Here's the list devices and services infected by the Prowli malware: Drupal and WordPress CMS servers hosting popular websites Joomla! servers running the K2 extension Backup servers running HP Data Protector softw...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

You must update your Google Chrome now. Security researcher Michał Bentkowski discovered and reported a high severity vulnerability in Google Chrome in late May, affecting the web browsing software for all major operating systems including Windows, Mac, and Linux. Without revealing any technical detail about the vulnerability, the Chrome security team described the issue as incorrect handling of CSP header ( CVE-2018-6148 ) in a blog post published today. "Access to bug details and links may be kept restricted until a majority of users are updated with a fix. We will also retain restrictions if the bug exists in a third party library that other projects similarly depend on, but haven't yet fixed," the Chrome security team notes. Content Security Policy (CSP) header allows website administrators to add an extra layer of security on a given web page by allowing them to control resources the browser is allowed to load. Mishandling of CSP headers by your web brow...

It turns out that the threat of the massive VPNFilter botnet malware that was discovered late last month is beyond what we initially thought. Security researchers from Cisco's Talos cyber intelligence have today uncovered more details about VPNFilter malware, an advanced piece of IoT botnet malware that infected more than 500,000 routers in at least 54 countries, allowing attackers to spy on users, as well as conduct destructive cyber operations. Initially, it was believed that the malware targets routers and network-attached storage from Linksys, MikroTik, NETGEAR, and TP-Link, but a more in-depth analysis conducted by researchers reveals that the VPNFilter also hacks devices manufactured by ASUS, D-Link, Huawei, Ubiquiti, QNAP, UPVEL, and ZTE. "First, we have determined that are being targeted by this actor, including some from vendors that are new to the target list. These new vendors are. New devices were also discovered from Linksys, MikroTik, Netgear, and TP-L...

Apple is making it easier for mobile developers to port their iOS apps to the next-generation macOS Mojave desktop platform—a major step in bringing the two platforms closer together. However, at the same time, the company straightforward denied the idea of merging the iPhone and Mac operating systems into one platform, which was being speculated for years. So, Apple made it clear that iOS and macOS will continue to be separate products. Rumors of iOS apps coming to the Mac have been around since 2017, and yesterday at Apple's WWDC 2018 event, Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi just confirmed this while concluding his keynote. Though iOS and macOS share similar underlying frameworks, both are separate operating systems with their own separate software libraries, called UIKit used by iOS and AppKit used by macOS, which have made porting iOS apps to Mac difficult, said Federighi. "iOS devices and macOS devices of course are different...

MyHeritage, the Israel-based DNA testing service designed to investigate family history, has disclosed that the company website was breached last year by unknown attackers, who stole login credentials of its more than 92 million customers. The company learned about the breach on June 4, 2018, after an unnamed security researcher discovered a database file named "myheritage" on a private server located outside of the company, and shared it with MyHeritage team. After analyzing the file, the company found that the database, which included the email addresses and hashed passwords of nearly 92.3 million users, are of those customers who signed up for the MyHeritage website before October 27, 2017. While the MyHeritage security team is still investigating the data breach to identify any potential exploitation of its system, the company confirmed that no other data such as credit card details and family trees, genetic data were ever breached and are stored on a separate sy...

Security researchers at British software firm Snyk have revealed details of a critical vulnerability that affects thousands of projects across many ecosystems and can be exploited by attackers to achieve code execution on the target systems. Dubbed " Zip Slip ," the issue is an arbitrary file overwrite vulnerability that triggers from a directory traversal attack while extracting files from an archive and affects numerous archive formats, including tar, jar, war, cpio, apk, rar, and 7z. Thousands of projects written in various programming languages including JavaScript, Ruby, Java, .NET and Go—from Google, Oracle, IBM, Apache, Amazon, Spring/Pivotal, Linkedin, Twitter, Alibaba, Eclipse, OWASP, ElasticSearch, JetBrains and more—contained vulnerable codes and libraries. Went undetected for years, the vulnerability can be exploited using a specially crafted archive file that holds directory traversal filenames, which if extracted by any vulnerable code or a library, wou...

At Worldwide Developer Conference 2018 on Monday, Apple announced the next version of its macOS operating system, and it's called Mojave . Besides introducing new features and improvements of macOS 10.14 Mojave—like Dark Mode, Group FaceTime, Dynamic Desktop, and Finder—at WWDC, Apple also revealed a bunch of new security and privacy features coming with the next major macOS update. Apple CEO Tim Cook said the new features included in Mojave are "inspired by pro users, but designed for everyone," helping you protect from various security threats. Here's a list of all macOS Mojave security and privacy features: Safari's Enhanced "Intelligent Tracking Prevention" It's no longer shocking that your online privacy is being invaded, and everything you search online is being tracked—thanks to third-party trackers present on the Internet in the form of social media like and sharing buttons that marketers and data brokers use to monitor web use...

Not following cybersecurity best practices could not only cost online users but also cost cybercriminals. Yes, sometimes hackers don't take best security measures to keep their infrastructure safe. A variant of IoT botnet, called Owari , that relies on default or weak credentials to hack insecure IoT devices was found itself using default credentials in its MySQL server integrated with command and control (C&C) server, allowing anyone to read/write their database. Ankit Anubhav, the principal security researcher at IoT security firm NewSky Security, who found the botnets, published a blog post about his findings earlier today, detailing how the botnet authors themselves kept an incredibly week username and password combination for their C&C server's database. Guess what the credentials could be? Username: root Password: root These login credentials helped Anubhav gain access to the botnet and fetch details about infected devices, the botnet authors who ...

Hundreds of thousands of websites running on the Drupal CMS—including those of major educational institutions and government organizations around the world—have been found vulnerable to a highly critical flaw for which security patches were released almost two months ago. Security researcher Troy Mursch scanned the whole Internet and found  over 115,000 Drupal websites are still vulnerable to the Drupalgeddon2 flaw despite repetitive warnings. Drupalgeddon2 (CVE-2018-7600) is a highly critical remote code execution vulnerability discovered late March in Drupal CMS software (versions < 7.58 / 8.x < 8.3.9 / 8.4.x < 8.4.6 / 8.5.x < 8.5.1) that could allow attackers to completely take over vulnerable websites. For those unaware, Drupalgeddon2 allows an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute malicious code on default or standard Drupal installations under the privileges of the user. Since Drupalgeddon2 had much potential to derive attention of motivated att...

Despite the continual emergence of new cyber attacks because of misconfigured servers and applications, people continue to ignore security warnings. A massive malware campaign designed to target open Redis servers, about which researchers warned almost two months ago, has now grown and already hijacked at least 75% of the total servers running publicly accessible Redis instances. Redis, or REmote DIctionary Server, is an open source, widely popular data structure tool that can be used as an in-memory distributed database, message broker or cache. Since it is designed to be accessed inside trusted environments, it should not be exposed on the Internet. Dubbed RedisWannaMine , a similar malware leveraging same loophole was discovered in late March by data center security vendor Imperva and designed to drop a cryptocurrency mining script on the targeted servers—both database and application. According to Imperva's March blog post , this cryptojacking threat was "more c...

After being embroiled into controversies over its data sharing practices , it turns out that Facebook had granted inappropriate access to its users' data to more than 60 device makers, including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry, and Samsung. According to a lengthy report published by The New York Times, the social network giant struck data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device manufacture companies so that they could offer Facebook messaging functions, "Like" buttons, address books, and other features without requiring their users to install a separate app. The agreements were reportedly made over the last 10 years, starting before Facebook apps were widely available on smartphones. Most notably, the publication suggests that the partnerships could be in breach of a 2011 consent decree by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which barred Facebook from granting other companies access to data of users' Facebook friends without their explicit consent...

Here's the biggest news of the week—Microsoft has reportedly acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion. For those unaware, GitHub is a popular code repository hosting service that allows developers to host their projects, documentation, and code in the cloud using the popular Git source management system, invented in 2005 by Linux founder Linus Torvalds. GitHub is used by many developers and big tech companies including Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and IBM to store their corporate code and privately collaborate on software, but Microsoft is one of the top contributors to the web-hosting service. Microsoft has uploaded several of its most important projects, including PowerShell , the .NET framework, and the Microsoft Edge JavaScript engine , to the website under open source licenses. Microsoft also partnered with Canonical to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10 . Citing sources familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports that GitHub opted to sell to Microsoft in part because it was impr...

Researchers have demonstrated how sonic and ultrasonic signals (inaudible to human) can be used to cause physical damage to hard drives just by playing ultrasonic sounds through a target computer's own built-in speaker or by exploiting a speaker near the targeted device. Similar research was conducted last year by a group of researchers from Princeton and Purdue University, who demonstrated a denial-of-service (DoS) attack against HDDs by exploiting a physical phenomenon called acoustic resonance. Since HDDs are exposed to external vibrations, researchers showed how specially crafted acoustic signals could cause significant vibrations in HDDs internal components, which eventually leads to the failure in systems that relies on the HDD. To prevent a head crash from acoustic resonance, modern HDDs use shock sensor-driven feedforward controllers that detect such movement and improve the head positioning accuracy while reading and writing the data. However, according to a ne...

The US-CERT has released a joint technical alert from the DHS and the FBI, warning about two newly identified malware being used by the prolific North Korean APT hacking group known as Hidden Cobra. Hidden Cobra, often known as Lazarus Group and Guardians of Peace, is believed to be backed by the North Korean government and known to launch attacks against media organizations, aerospace, financial and critical infrastructure sectors across the world. The group was even associated with the WannaCry ransomware menace that last year shut down hospitals and businesses worldwide. It is reportedly also linked to the 2014 Sony Pictures hack , as well as the SWIFT Banking attack in 2016. Now, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI have uncovered two new pieces of malware that Hidden Cobra has been using since at least 2009 to target companies working in the media, aerospace, financial, and critical infrastructure sectors across the world. The malware Hidden Cobra is...

Russia's communications regulator Roskomnadzor has threatened Apple to face the consequences if the company does not remove secure messaging app Telegram from its App Store. Back in April, the Russian government banned Telegram in the country for the company's refusal to hand over private encryption keys to Russian state security services to access messages sent using the secure service. However, so far, the Telegram app is still available in the Russian version of Apple's App Store. So in an effort to entirely ban Telegram, state watchdog Roskomnadzor reportedly sent a legally binding letter to Apple asking it to remove the app from its Russian App Store and block it from sending push notifications to local users who have already downloaded the app. Roskomnadzor's director Alexander Zharov said he is giving the company one month to remove the Telegram app from its App Store before the regulator enforces punishment for violations. For those unfamiliar with...

A 23-year-old Canadian man, who pleaded guilty last year for his role in helping Russian government spies hack into email accounts of Yahoo users and other services, has been sentenced to five years in prison. Karim Baratov (a.k.a Karim Taloverov, a.k.a Karim Akehmet Tokbergenov), a Kazakhstan-born Canadian citizen, was also ordered on Tuesday by United States Judge Vince Chhabria to pay a fine of $250,000. Baratov had previously admitted his role in the 2014 Yahoo data breach that compromised about 500 million Yahoo user accounts. His role was to "hack webmail accounts of individuals of interest to the FSB," Russia's spy agency. In November, Baratov pleaded guilty to a total of nine counts, including one count of conspiring to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and eight counts of aggravated identity theft. According to the US Justice Department, Baratov and his co-defendant hacker Alexsey Belan worked for two agents—Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushch...

Security researchers have discovered a series of new vulnerabilities in EOS blockchain platform, one of which could allow remote hackers to take complete control over the node servers running the critical blockchain-based applications. EOS is an open source smart contract platform, known as 'Blockchain 3.0,' that allows developers to build decentralized applications over blockchain infrastructure, just like Ethereum. Discovered by Chinese security researchers at Qihoo 360 —Yuki Chen of Vulcan team and Zhiniang Peng of Core security team—the vulnerability is a buffer out-of-bounds write issue which resides in the function used by nodes server to parse contracts. To achieve remote code execution on a targeted node, all an attacker needs to do is upload a maliciously crafted WASM file (a smart contract) written in WebAssembly to the server. As soon as the vulnerable process parser reads the WASM file, the malicious payload gets executed on the node, which could then al...

German security researchers claim to have found a new practical attack against virtual machines (VMs) protected using AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology that could allow attackers to recover plaintext memory data from guest VMs. AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology, which comes with EPYC line of processors, is a hardware feature that encrypts the memory of each VM in a way that only the guest itself can access the data, protecting it from other VMs/containers and even from an untrusted hypervisor. Discovered by researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security in Munich, the page-fault side channel attack, dubbed SEVered, takes advantage of lack in the integrity protection of the page-wise encryption of the main memory, allowing a malicious hypervisor to extract the full content of the main memory in plaintext from SEV-encrypted VMs. Here's the outline of the SEVered attack, as briefed in the paper :...