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All Intel processors released in the past 5 years contain an unpatchable vulnerability that could allow hackers to compromise almost every hardware-enabled security technology that are otherwise designed to shield sensitive data of users even when a system gets compromised. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-0090 , resides in the hard-coded firmware running on the ROM ("read-only memory") of the Intel's Converged Security and Management Engine (CSME), which can't be patched without replacing the silicon. Intel CSME is a separate security micro-controller incorporated into the processors that provides an isolated execution environment protected from the host opening system running on the main CPU. It is responsible for the initial authentication of Intel-based systems by loading and verifying firmware components, root of trust based secure boot, and also cryptographically authenticates the BIOS, Microsoft System Guard, BitLocker, and other security features...

On the same day yesterday, when the US-based telecom giant T-Mobile admitted a data breach , the UK-based telecommunication provider Virgin Media announced that it has also suffered a data leak incident exposing the personal information of roughly 900,000 customers. What happened? Unlike the T-Mobile data breach that involved a sophisticated cyber attack, Virgin Media said the incident was neither a cyber attack nor the company's database was hacked. Rather the personal details of around 900,000 Virgin Media UK-based customers were exposed after one of its marketing databases was left unsecured on the Internet and accessible to anyone without requiring any authentication. "The precise situation is that information stored on one of our databases has been accessed without permission. The incident did not occur due to a hack, but as a result of the database being incorrectly configured," the company said in a note published on its website on Thursday night. Acc...

The US-CERT today issued advisory warning users of a new dangerous 17-year-old remote code execution vulnerability affecting the PPP daemon (pppd) software that comes installed on almost all Linux based operating systems, as well as powers the firmware of many other networking devices. The affected pppd software is an implementation of Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) that enables communication and data transfer between nodes, primarily used to establish internet links such as those over dial-up modems, DSL broadband connections, and Virtual Private Networks. Discovered by IOActive security researcher Ilja Van Sprundel , the critical issue is a stack buffer overflow vulnerability that exists due to a logical error in the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) packet parser of the pppd software, an extension that provides support for additional authentication methods in PPP connections. The vulnerability , tracked as CVE-2020-8597  with CVSS Score 9.8, can be exploited by ...

More than 200 million records containing a wide range of property-related information on US residents were left exposed on a database that was accessible on the web without requiring any password or authentication. The exposed data — a mix of personal and demographic details — included the name, address, email address, age, gender, ethnicity, employment, credit rating, investment preferences, income, net worth, and property information, such as: Market value Property type Mortgage amount, rate, type, and lender Refinance amount, rate, type, and lender Previous owners Year built Number of beds and bathrooms Tax assessment information According to security firm Comparitech , the database, which was hosted on Google Cloud, is said to have been first indexed by search engine BinaryEdge on 26th January and discovered a day later by cybersecurity researcher Bob Diachenko. But after failing to identify the database owner, the server was eventually taken offline more than a...

If you are a T-Mobile customer, this news may concern you. US-based telecom giant T-Mobile has suffered yet another data breach incident that recently exposed personal and accounts information of both its employees and customers to unknown hackers. What happened? In a breach notification posted on its website, T-Mobile today said its cybersecurity team recently discovered a sophisticated cyberattack against the email accounts of some of its employees that resulted in unauthorized access to the sensitive information contained in it, including details for its customers and other employees. Although the telecom company did not disclose how the breach happened, when it happened, and exactly how many employees and users were affected, it did confirm that the leaked information on its users doesn't contain financial information like credit card and Social Security numbers. What type of information was accessed? The exposed data of an undisclosed number of affected users incl...

Not happy with your expensive iPhone and wondered if it's possible to run any other operating system on your iPhone, maybe, how to install Android on an iPhone or Linux for iPhones? Android phones can be rooted, and iPhones can be jailbroken to unlock new features, but so far, it's been close to impossible to get Android running on iPhones, given the mobile device hardware constraints and software limitations. However, it's now possible to smoothly run Android on an iPhone—thanks to a new initiative, dubbed Project Sandcastle . Undertaken by cybersecurity startup Corellium , Project Sandcastle is the consequence of a 13-year-long developmental effort to port Android to iOS and as well as demonstrate that Apple's much-vaunted security barriers can indeed be compromised. "Where sandboxes set limits and boundaries, sandcastles provide an opportunity to create something new from the limitless bounds of your imagination," the project website says. "T...

The most popular free certificate signing authority Let's Encrypt is going to revoke more than 3 million TLS certificates within the next 24 hours that may have been issued wrongfully due to a bug in its Certificate Authority software. The bug, which Let's Encrypt confirmed on February 29 and was fixed two hours after discovery, impacted the way it checked the domain name ownership before issuing new TLS certificates. As a result, the bug opened up a scenario where a certificate could be issued even without adequately validating the holder's control of a domain name. The Certification Authority Authorization (CAA), an internet security policy, allows domain name holders to indicate to certificate authorities (CAs) whether or not they are authorized to issue digital certificates for a specific domain name. Let's Encrypt considers domain validation results good only for 30 days from the time of validation, after which it rechecks the CAA record authorizing t...

The RSA Conference , the world's leading information security conference and exposition, held its 29th annual event in San Francisco last week. According to the organizers, over 36,000 attendees, 704 speakers, and 658 exhibitors gathered at the Moscone Center to discuss privacy, Machine Learning, and AI, policy and government, applied crypto and blockchain, and, new for the RSA Conference 2020, open source tools, product security and anti-fraud. Despite several large vendors including Verizon and IBM canceling their presence in light of the spiraling panic around coronavirus, the event was one of the brightest and innovative, according to numerous stakeholders expressing their excitement in the media and on social networks. We decided to gather some feedback from the attendees, journalists, and security experts involved in RSA 2020 to understand the most recent cybersecurity trends after this milestone event. Below is our selection of 10 most innovative cybersecurity com...

Qihoo 360, one of the most prominent cybersecurity firms, today published a new report accusing the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to be behind an 11-year-long hacking campaign against several Chinese industries and government agencies. The targeted industry sectors include aviation organizations, scientific research institutions, petroleum, and Internet companies—which, if true, gives the CIA the ability to do "unexpected things." According to the researchers, these cyberattacks were carried out between September 2008 and June 2019, and most of the targets were located in Beijing, Guangdong, and Zhejiang. "We speculate that in the past eleven years of infiltration attacks, the CIA may have already grasped the most classified business information of China, even of many other countries in the world," the researchers said . "It does not even rule out the possibility that now the CIA is able to track down the real-time global flight status, passe...

At a certain point, almost every organization reaches the conclusion that there is a need to move past just the standard AV and firewall stack in order to soundly protect their environment. The common practice in recent years is to gain extra protection through implementing either EDR\EPP solutions (represented by vendors like Crowdstrike and Carbon Black) or Network Traffic Analysis/NDR solutions (such as Darktrace and Vectra Networks). Fortune 500 companies who have large security teams, would usually choose to buy and implement both. A recently published guide, 'Advanced Threat Protection Beyond the AV' ( download here ) is the first resource that not only guides security executives through the pros and cons of each solution type but also outlines a best-practice approach that allows the "non-Fortune 500" companies to combine the advantages of both approaches – without actually buying both. The proliferation of advanced threats in the decade has gradually ...

Two Chinese nationals have been charged by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) and sanctioned by the US Treasury for allegedly laundering $100 million worth of virtual currency using prepaid Apple iTunes gift cards. According to a newly unsealed court document , the illicit funds originated from a $250 million haul stolen from two different unnamed cryptocurrency exchanges that were perpetrated by Lazarus Group , a cybercrime group with ties with the North Korean government. The two individuals in question — Tian Yinyin (田寅寅)  and Li Jiadong (李家东) — were both charged with operating an unlicensed money transmitting business and money laundering conspiracy. Prosecutors said the defendants worked on behalf of the threat actors based in North Korea to allegedly launder over a $100 million worth of stolen cryptocurrency to obscure transactions, adding the hacking of cryptocurrency exchanges posed a severe threat to the security of the global financial system. It's worth notin...

Researchers have discovered a new means to target voice-controlled devices by propagating ultrasonic waves through solid materials in order to interact with and compromise them using inaudible voice commands without the victims' knowledge. Called " SurfingAttack ," the attack leverages the unique properties of acoustic transmission in solid materials — such as tables — to "enable multiple rounds of interactions between the voice-controlled device and the attacker over a longer distance and without the need to be in line-of-sight." In doing so, it's possible for an attacker to interact with the devices using the voice assistants, hijack SMS two-factor authentication codes, and even place fraudulent calls, the researchers outlined in the paper, thus controlling the victim device inconspicuously. The research was published by a group of academics from Michigan State University, Washington University in St. Louis, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Un...

If your web server is running on Apache Tomcat, you should immediately install the latest available version of the server application to prevent hackers from taking unauthorized control over it. Yes, that's possible because all versions (9.x/8.x/7.x/6.x) of the Apache Tomcat released in the past 13 years have been found vulnerable to a new high-severity (CVSS 9.8) ' file read and inclusion bug '—which can be exploited in the default configuration. But it's more concerning because several proof-of-concept exploits ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4  and more ) for this vulnerability have also been surfaced on the Internet, making it easy for anyone to hack into publicly accessible vulnerable web servers. Dubbed ' Ghostcat ' and tracked as CVE-2020-1938 , the flaw could let unauthenticated, remote attackers read the content of any file on a vulnerable web server and obtain sensitive configuration files or source code, or execute arbitrary code if the server allows file uploa...

Let's Encrypt, a free, automated, and open certificate signing authority (CA) from the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), has said it's issued a billion certificates since its launch in 2015. The CA issued its first certificate in September 2015, before eventually reaching 100 million in June 2017. Since late last year, Let's Encrypt has issued at least 1.2 million certificates each day. The development comes as over 80 percent of the web page loads have begun using HTTPS worldwide , and 91 percent in the US alone. HTTPS, the default means of secure communication on the internet, comes with three benefits: authentication, integrity, and encryption. It allows HTTP requests to be transmitted over a secure encrypted channel, thus protecting users from an array of malicious activities, including site forgery and content manipulation. "Since 2017, browsers have started requiring HTTPS for more features, and they've greatly improved the way...

The City of Baltimore was under cyber-attack last year, with hackers demanding $76,000 in ransom. Though the city chose not to pay the ransom, the attack still cost them nearly $18 million in damages, and then the city signed up for a $20 million cyber insurance policy. It's very evident that cyber-attacks are not only costly in terms of time and money but also bring extensive legal liability with them. According to Juniper Research 's prediction, the cost of a data breach could cross $150 million by 2020. With the rising cost of data breaches and cyber-attacks, cybersecurity has become a board room conversation on an unprecedented scale. In this ever-connected online world, web application security is the cornerstone of the overall cybersecurity of any company. When it comes to application security, web application firewall (WAF) based protection has been the first line of defense against web attacks for a while now. A web application firewall is deployed in fron...