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Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered an espionage campaign that has targeted a national data center of an unnamed central Asian country in order to conduct watering hole attacks. The campaign is believed to be active covertly since fall 2017 but was spotted in March by security researchers from Kaspersky Labs, who have attributed these attacks to a Chinese-speaking threat actor group called LuckyMouse . LuckyMouse, also known as Iron Tiger, EmissaryPanda, APT 27 and Threat Group-3390, is the same group of Chinese hackers who was found targeting Asian countries with Bitcoin mining malware early this year. The group has been active since at least 2010 and was behind many previous attack campaigns resulting in the theft of massive amounts of data from the directors and managers of US-based defense contractors. This time the group chose a national data center as its target from an unnamed country in Central Asia in an attempt to gain "access to a wide range of government ...

Hell Yeah! Another security vulnerability has been discovered in Intel chips that affects the processor's speculative execution technology—like Specter and Meltdown —and could potentially be exploited to access sensitive information, including encryption related data. Dubbed Lazy FP State Restore , the vulnerability (CVE-2018-3665) within Intel Core and Xeon processors has just been confirmed by Intel, and vendors are now rushing to roll out security updates in order to fix the flaw and keep their customers protected. The company has not yet released technical details about the vulnerability, but since the vulnerability resides in the CPU, the flaw affects all devices running Intel Core-based microprocessors regardless of the installed operating systems, except some modern versions of Windows and Linux distributions. As the name suggests, the flaw leverages a system performance optimization feature, called Lazy FP state restore, embedded in modern processors, which is resp...

Cortana, an artificial intelligence-based smart assistant that Microsoft has built into every version of Windows 10, could help attackers unlock your system password. With its latest patch Tuesday release , Microsoft has pushed an important update to address an easily exploitable vulnerability in Cortana that could allow hackers to break into a locked Windows 10 system and execute malicious commands with the user's privileges. In worst case scenario, hackers could also compromise the system completely if the user has elevated privileges on the targeted system. The elevation of privilege vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-8140 and reported by McAfee security researchers, resides due to Cortana's failure to adequately check command inputs, which eventually leads to code execution with elevated permissions. "An Elevation of Privilege vulnerability exists when Cortana retrieves data from user input services without consideration for status," Microsoft explain...

You probably have come across many websites that let you install browser extensions without ever going to the official Chrome web store. It's a great way for users to install an extension, but now Google has decided to remove the ability for websites to offer "inline installation" of Chrome extensions on all platforms. Google announced today in its Chromium blog that by the end of this year, its Chrome browser will no longer support the installation of extensions from outside the Web Store in an effort to protect its users from shady browser extensions. "We continue to receive large volumes of complaints from users about unwanted extensions causing their Chrome experience to change unexpectedly — and the majority of these complaints are attributed to confusing or deceptive uses of inline installation on websites," says ​James Wagner, Google's extensions platform product manager. Google's browser extensions crackdown will take place in three ph...

It's time to gear up for the latest June 2018 Microsoft security patch updates. Microsoft today released security patch updates for more than 50 vulnerabilities, affecting Windows, Internet Explorer, Edge, MS Office, MS Office Exchange Server, ChakraCore, and Adobe Flash Player—11 of which are rated critical and 39 as important in severity. Only one of these vulnerabilities, a remote code execution flaw ( CVE-2018-8267 ) in the scripting engine, is listed as being publicly known at the time of release. However, none of the flaws are listed as under active attack. Discovered by security researcher Dmitri Kaslov, the publicly known vulnerability is a remote memory-corruption issue affecting Microsoft Internet Explorer. The flaw exists within the IE rendering engine and triggers when it fails to properly handle the error objects, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code in the context of the currently logged-in user. Microsoft has also addressed an important vulnera...

A years-old vulnerability has been discovered in the way several security products for Mac implement Apple's code-signing API that could make it easier for malicious programs to bypass the security check, potentially leaving millions of Apple users vulnerable to hackers. Josh Pitts, a researcher from security firm Okta, discovered that several third-party security products for Mac—including Little Snitch, F-Secure xFence, VirusTotal, Google Santa, and Facebook OSQuery—could be tricked into believing that an unsigned malicious code is signed by Apple. Code-signing mechanism is a vital weapon in the fight against malware, which helps users identify who has signed the app and also provides reasonable proof that it has not been altered. However, Pitts found that the mechanism used by most products to check digital signatures is trivial to bypass, allowing malicious files bundle with a legitimate Apple-signed code to effectively make the malware look like it has been signed by...

Despite warnings about the threat of leaving insecure remote services enabled on Android devices, manufacturers continue to ship devices with open ADB debug port setups that leave Android-based devices exposed to hackers. Android Debug Bridge (ADB) is a command-line feature that generally uses for diagnostic and debugging purposes by helping app developers communicate with Android devices remotely to execute commands and, if necessary, completely control a device. Usually, developers connect to ADB service installed on Android devices using a USB cable, but it is also possible to use ADB wirelessly by enabling a daemon server at TCP port 5555 on the device. If left enabled, unauthorized remote attackers can scan the Internet to find a list of insecure Android devices running ADB debug interface over port 5555, remotely access them with highest "root" privileges, and then silently install malware without any authentication. Therefore, vendors are recommended to make...

Due to the surge in cryptocurrency prices, not only hackers but also legitimate websites and mobile apps are increasingly using cryptocurrency miners to monetize by levying the CPU power of your PC and phones to mine cryptocurrencies. However, Apple wants to protect your Mac and iPhone battery from shady cryptocurrency mining apps, and therefore, the company has put restrictions on such apps by disallowing them in its official App Store. The company has updated the Hardware Compatibility section of its App Store guidelines, which now explicitly restrict iOS and Mac apps and ads from mining cryptocurrency in the background. "Apps, including any third party advertisements displayed with them, may not run unrelated background processes, such as cryptocurrency mining," the updated guidelines read. The update reportedly occurred last week, possibly in response to popular Mac app Calendar 2 that bundled a Monero (XMR) miner in with its premium upgrade that unlocked ...

The United States Department of Justice announced Monday the arrest of 74 email fraudsters across three continents in a global crackdown on a large-scale business email compromise (BEC) scheme. The arrest was the result of a six-month-long operation dubbed " Operation Wire Wire " that involved the US Department of Justice, the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Treasury, and the US Postal Inspection Service. The international law enforcement authorities led by the FBI arrested 42 of the total 74 individuals involved in BEC scheme in the United States, 29 in Nigeria and 3 each in Canada, Mauritius, and Poland. "Foreign citizens perpetrate many BEC scams. Those individuals are often members of transnational criminal organizations, which originated in Nigeria but have spread throughout the world," the DoJ says. Moreover, the authorities seized nearly $2.4 million and recovered about $14 million in fraudulent transfers, according to the FBI, which estima...

China no longer owns the fastest supercomputer in the world; It is the United States now. Though China still has more supercomputers on the Top 500 list, the USA takes the crown of "world's fastest supercomputer" from China after IBM and the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) unveiled " Summit ." Summit is claimed to be more than twice as powerful as the current world leader with a peak performance of a whopping 200,000 trillion calculations per second—that's as fast as each 7.6 billion people of this planet doing 26.3 million calculations per second on a calculator. Until now the world's most powerful supercomputer was China's Sunway TaihuLight with the processing power of 93 petaflops (93,000 trillion calculations per second). Since June 2012, the U.S. has not possessed the world's most powerful supercomputer, but if Summit performs as claimed by IBM, it will be made straight to the top of the Top5...

It's no secret that expecting security controls to block every infection vector is unrealistic. For most organizations, the chances are very high that threats have already penetrated their defenses and are lurking in their network. Pinpointing such threats quickly is essential, but traditional approaches to finding these needles in the haystack often fall short. Now there is a unique opportunity for more feasible, more effective threat hunting capabilities, and it stems from a most unusual effort: rethinking the approach to wide area networking. When we look at the cyber kill-chain today, there are two major phases—infection and post-infection. Security experts acknowledge that organizations can get infected no matter how good their security controls are. The simple fact is, infection vectors change rapidly and continuously. Attackers use new delivery methods – everything from social engineering to zero-day exploits – and they often are effective. In most cases, an infecti...

Security researchers have been warning about cybercriminals who have made over 20 million dollars in just past few months by hijacking insecurely configured Ethereum nodes exposed on the Internet. Qihoo 360 Netlab in March tweeted about a group of cybercriminals who were scanning the Internet for port 8545 to find insecure geth clients running Ethereum nodes and, at that time, stole 3.96234 units of Ethereum cryptocurrency (Ether). However, researchers now noticed that another cybercriminal group have managed to steal a total 38,642 Ether, worth more than $20,500,000 at the time of writing, in past few months by hijacking Ethereum wallets of users who had opened their JSON-RPC port 8545 to the outside world. Geth is one of the most popular clients for running Ethereum node and enabling JSON-RPC interface on it allows users to remotely access the Ethereum blockchain and node functionalities, including the ability to send transactions from any account which has been unlocked b...

Have you recently bought a OnePlus 6? Don't leave your phone unattended. A serious vulnerability has been discovered in the OnePlus 6 bootloader that makes it possible for someone to boot arbitrary or modified images to take full admin control of your phone—even if the bootloader is locked. A bootloader is part of the phone's built-in firmware and locking it down stops users from replacing or modifying the phone's operating system with any uncertified third-party ROMs, ensuring the system boots into the right operating system. Discovered by security researcher Jason Donenfeld of Edge Security , the bootloader on OnePlus 6 is not entirely locked, allowing anyone to flash any modified boot image on to the handset and take full control of your phone. In a video demonstration, Donenfeld showed how it is possible for an attacker with physical access to OnePlus 6 to boot any malicious image using the ADB tool's fastboot command, giving the attacker complete control ove...

In its years-long efforts to censor the Internet by blocking access to a large number of websites in the country, Russia has now approved a new bill introducing fines for search engines that provide links to banned sites, VPN services , and anonymization tools . VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks , are third-party services that help users access block banned websites by encrypting users' Internet traffic and routing it through a distant connection, hiding their location data and access sites that are usually restricted or censored by a specific country. According to the amendments to the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation, besides introducing fines for providing links to banned resources, the lower house of Russian parliament, the State Duma, will also impose fines on search engines if they fail to stop issuing links to resources providing up-to-date database of blocked domains upon users request. According to the bill, individuals who break the law ...

Facebook admits as many as 14 millions of its users who thought they're sharing content privately with only friends may have inadvertently shared their posts with everyone because of a software bug. Facebook said in front of Congress in March over the Cambridge Analytica scandal that "every piece of content that you share on Facebook you own, you have complete control over who sees it and how you share it," but the news came out to be another failure of the company to keep the information of millions of users private. Facebook typically allows users to select the audiences who can see their posts, and that privacy setting remains the default until the user itself manually updates it. However, the social media giant revealed Thursday that it recently found a bug that automatically updated the default audience setting for 14 million users' Facebook posts to "Public," even if they had intended to share them just with their friends, or a smaller group...

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...

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...