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Security is only as strong as the weakest link. As further proof of this, Apple released an update to macOS operating systems to address an actively exploited zero-day vulnerability that could circumvent all security protections, thus permitting unapproved software to run on Macs. The macOS flaw, identified as  CVE-2021-30657 , was discovered and reported to Apple by security engineer Cedric Owens on March 25, 2021. "An unsigned, unnotarized, script-based proof of concept application [...] could trivially and reliably sidestep all of macOS's relevant security mechanisms (File Quarantine, Gatekeeper, and Notarization Requirements), even on a fully patched M1 macOS system," security researcher Patrick Wardle  explained  in a write-up. "Armed with such a capability macOS malware authors could (and are) returning to their proven methods of targeting and infecting macOS users." Apple's macOS comes with a feature called  Gatekeeper , which allows only  truste...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Monday published a new joint advisory as part of their latest attempts to expose the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) adopted by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) in its attacks targeting the U.S and foreign entities. By employing "stealthy intrusion tradecraft within compromised networks," the intelligence agencies  said , "the SVR activity—which includes the recent  SolarWinds Orion supply chain compromise —primarily targets government networks, think tank and policy analysis organizations, and information technology companies and seeks to gather intelligence information." The cyber actor is also being tracked under different monikers, including Advanced Persistent Threat 29 (APT29), the Dukes, CozyBear, and Yttrium. The development comes as the U.S. sanctioned Russia and  formally pinn...

Researchers from the University of Minnesota apologized to the maintainers of Linux Kernel Project on Saturday for intentionally including vulnerabilities in the project's code, which led to the school being banned from contributing to the open-source project in the future. "While our goal was to improve the security of Linux, we now understand that it was hurtful to the community to make it a subject of our research, and to waste its effort reviewing these patches without its knowledge or permission," assistant professor Kangjie Lu, along with graduate students Qiushi Wu and Aditya Pakki,  said  in an email. "We did that because we knew we could not ask the maintainers of Linux for permission, or they would be on the lookout for the hypocrite patches," they added. The apology comes over a study into what's called "hypocrite commits," which was  published  earlier this February. The project aimed to deliberately add  use-after-free  vulnerabil...

I had the honor of hosting the first episode of the Xposure Podcast live from Xposure Summit 2025. And I couldn't have asked for a better kickoff panel: three cybersecurity leaders who don't just talk security, they live it. Let me introduce them. Alex Delay , CISO at IDB Bank, knows what it means to defend a highly regulated environment. Ben Mead , Director of Cybersecurity at Avidity Biosciences, brings a forward-thinking security perspective that reflects the innovation behind Avidity's targeted RNA therapeutics. Last but not least, Michael Francess , Director of Cybersecurity Advanced Threat at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, leads the charge in protecting the franchise. Each brought a unique vantage point to a common challenge: applying Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) to complex production environments. Gartner made waves in 2023 with a bold prediction: organizations that prioritize CTEM will be three times less likely to be breached by 2026. But here's the kicker -...

New research has uncovered privacy weaknesses in Apple's wireless file-sharing protocol that could result in the exposure of a user's contact information such as email addresses and phone numbers. "As an attacker, it is possible to learn the phone numbers and email addresses of AirDrop users – even as a complete stranger,"  said  a team of academics from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. "All they require is a Wi-Fi-capable device and physical proximity to a target that initiates the discovery process by opening the sharing pane on an iOS or macOS device." AirDrop  is a proprietary ad hoc service present in Apple's iOS and macOS operating systems, allowing users to transfer files between devices by making use of close-range wireless communication. While this feature shows only receiver devices that are in users' contact lists by an authentication mechanism that compares an individual's phone number and email address with entrie...

No matter which type of business you are in, whether small, medium, or large, email has become an irrefutable tool for communicating with your employees, partners, and customers. Emails are sent and received each day in bulk by companies from various sources. In addition, organizations may also employ third-party vendors who may be authorized to send emails on behalf of the company. As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between sources that are legitimate and malicious. Here's a solution – PowerDMARC. This SaaS platform helps you assess your  email authentication  protocols from time to time and see if your domain is secure against spoofing with a DMARC record checker, so you can make changes if necessary. Check Your Domain Today!  Use our free tool to examine your domain's DMARC, SPF, DKIM, BIMI, and MTA-STS records instantly to ensure your domain is protected from impersonation and email fraud! Importance of Having Robust Email Security in 2...

Emotet, the notorious email-based Windows malware behind several botnet-driven spam campaigns and ransomware attacks, was automatically wiped from infected computers en masse following a European law enforcement operation. The development comes three months after a coordinated disruption of Emotet as part of " Operation Ladybird " to seize control of servers used to run and maintain the malware network. The orchestrated effort saw at least 700 servers associated with the botnet's infrastructure neutered from the inside, thus preventing further exploitation. Law enforcement authorities from the Netherlands, Germany, the U.S., U.K., France, Lithuania, Canada, and Ukraine were involved in the international action. Previously, the Dutch police, which seized two central servers located in the country, said it had deployed a software update to counter the threat posed by Emotet effectively. "All infected computer systems will automatically retrieve the update there, a...

A staggering number of 3.28 billion passwords linked to 2.18 billion unique email addresses were exposed in what's one of the largest data dumps of breached usernames and passwords. In addition, the leak includes 1,502,909 passwords associated with email addresses from government domains across the world, with the U.S. government alone taking up 625,505 of the exposed passwords, followed by the U.K (205,099), Australia (136,025), Brazil (68,535), and Canada (50,726). The findings come from an analysis of a massive 100GB data set called "COMB21" — aka Compilation of Many Breaches — that was published for free in an online cybercrime forum earlier this February by putting together data from multiple leaks in different companies and organizations that occurred over the years. It's worth noting that a leak doesn't imply a breach of public administration systems. The passwords are said to have been obtained via techniques such as password hash cracking after bein...

A recently identified security vulnerability in the official Homebrew Cask repository could have been exploited by an attacker to execute arbitrary code on users' machines that have Homebrew installed. The issue, which was reported to the maintainers on April 18 by a Japanese security researcher named RyotaK, stemmed from the way code changes in its  GitHub repository  were handled, resulting in a scenario where a malicious  pull request  — i.e., the proposed changes — could be automatically reviewed and approved. The flaw was fixed on April 19. Homebrew is a free and open-source software package manager solution that allows the installation of software on Apple's macOS operating system as well as Linux. Homebrew  Cask  extends the functionality to include command-line workflows for GUI-based macOS applications, fonts, plugins, and other non-open source software. "The discovered vulnerability would allow an attacker to inject arbitrary code into a cask...

Click Studios, the Australian software company behind the Passwordstate password management application, has notified customers to reset their passwords following a supply chain attack. The Adelaide-based firm said a bad actor used sophisticated techniques to compromise the software's update mechanism and used it to drop malware on user computers. The breach is said to have occurred between April 20, 8:33 PM UTC, and April 22, 0:30 AM UTC, for a total period of about 28 hours. "Only customers that performed In-Place Upgrades between the times stated above are believed to be affected," the company  said  in an advisory. "Manual Upgrades of Passwordstate are not compromised. Affected customers password records may have been harvested." The development was first reported by the Polish tech news site  Niebezpiecznik . It's not immediately clear who the attackers are or how they compromised the password manager's update feature. Click Studios said an i...

A new ransomware strain called " Qlocker " is targeting QNAP network attached storage (NAS) devices as part of an ongoing campaign and encrypting files in password-protected 7zip archives. First reports of the  infections   emerged on April 20, with the adversaries behind the operations demanding a bitcoin payment (0.01 bitcoins or about $500.57) to receive the decryption key. In response to the ongoing attacks, the Taiwanese company has released an advisory prompting users to apply updates to QNAP NAS running Multimedia Console, Media Streaming Add-on, and HBS 3 Hybrid Backup Sync to secure the devices from any attacks. "QNAP strongly urges that all users immediately install the latest Malware Remover version and run a malware scan on QNAP NAS," the company  said . "The Multimedia Console, Media Streaming Add-on, and Hybrid Backup Sync apps need to be updated to the latest available version as well to further secure QNAP NAS from ransomware attacks....

Attackers are exploiting the ProxyLogon Microsoft Exchange Server flaws to co-opt vulnerable machines to a cryptocurrency botnet named Prometei, according to new research. "Prometei exploits the recently disclosed Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities associated with the HAFNIUM attacks to penetrate the network for malware deployment, credential harvesting and more," Boston-based cybersecurity firm Cybereason  said  in an analysis summarizing its findings. First documented by Cisco Talos in July 2020,  Prometei  is a multi-modular botnet, with the actor behind the operation employing a wide range of specially-crafted tools and known exploits such as EternalBlue and BlueKeep to harvest credentials, laterally propagate across the network and "increase the amount of systems participating in its Monero-mining pool." "Prometei has both Windows-based and Linux-Unix based versions, and it adjusts its payload based on the detected operating system, on the targeted in...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has disclosed details of a new advanced persistent threat (APT) that's leveraging the Supernova backdoor to compromise SolarWinds Orion installations after gaining access to the network through a connection to a Pulse Secure VPN device. "The threat actor connected to the entity's network via a Pulse Secure virtual private network (VPN) appliance, moved laterally to its SolarWinds Orion server, installed malware referred to by security researchers as SUPERNOVA (a .NET web shell), and collected credentials," the agency  said  on Thursday. CISA said it identified the threat actor during an incident response engagement at an unnamed organization and found that the attacker had access to the enterprise's network for nearly a year through the use of the VPN credentials between March 2020 and February 2021. Interestingly, the adversary is said to have used valid accounts that had multi-factor authent...

The sprawling  SolarWinds cyberattack  which came to light last December was known for its sophistication in the breadth of tactics used to infiltrate and persist in the target infrastructure, so much so that Microsoft went on to call the threat actor behind the campaign "skillful and methodic operators who follow operations security (OpSec) best practices to minimize traces, stay under the radar, and avoid detection." As further proof of this, new research published today shows that the threat actor carefully planned each stage of the operation to "avoid creating the type of patterns that make tracking them simple," thus deliberately making forensic analysis difficult. By analyzing telemetry data associated with previously published indicators of compromise, RiskIQ said it identified an additional set of 18 servers with high confidence that likely communicated with the targeted, secondary Cobalt Strike payloads delivered via the TEARDROP and RAINDROP malware, r...

There are many labor-intensive tasks that the IT service desk carries out on a daily basis. None as tedious and costly as resetting passwords. Modern IT service desks spend a significant amount of time both unlocking and resetting passwords for end-users. This issue has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Causes of account lockouts and password resets End-user password policies, such as those found in Microsoft Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS), typically define a  password age . The password age is the length of time an end-user can keep their current password. While  new guidance from NIST  recommends against the long-held notion of forced password changes, it is still a common and required security mechanism across other compliance standards and industry certifications such as PCI and HITRUST. When the password age is reached for the user account, the user must change their account password. It is generally prompted at the next login on their worksta...

Adversaries are increasingly abusing Telegram as a "command-and-control" system to distribute malware into organizations that could then be used to capture sensitive information from targeted systems. "Even when Telegram is not installed or being used, the system allows hackers to send malicious commands and operations remotely via the instant messaging app," said researchers from cybersecurity firm Check Point , who have identified no fewer than 130 attacks over the past three months that make use of a new multi-functional remote access trojan (RAT) called "ToxicEye." The use of Telegram for facilitating malicious activities is not new. In September 2019, an information stealer dubbed  Masad Stealer  was found to plunder information and cryptocurrency wallet data from infected computers using Telegram as an exfiltration channel. Then last year,  Magecart groups  embraced the same tactic to send stolen payment details from compromised websites back to ...

Facebook on Wednesday said it took steps to dismantle malicious activities perpetrated by two state-sponsored hacking groups operating out of Palestine that abused its platform to distribute malware. The social media giant attributed the attacks to a network connected to the Preventive Security Service ( PSS ), the security apparatus of the State of Palestine, and another threat actor known as Arid Viper (aka Desert Falcon and APT-C-23), the latter of which is alleged to be connected to the cyber arm of Hamas. The two digital espionage campaigns, active in 2019 and 2020, exploited a range of devices and platforms, such as Android, iOS, and Windows, with the PSS cluster primarily targeting domestic audiences in Palestine. The other set of attacks went after users in the Palestinian territories and Syria and, to a lesser extent Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, and Libya. Both the groups appear to have leveraged the platform as a springboard to launch a variety of social engineering attacks in...

Prominent Apple supplier Quanta on Wednesday said it suffered a ransomware attack from the REvil ransomware group, which is now demanding the iPhone maker pay a ransom of $50 million to prevent leaking sensitive files on the dark web. In a post shared on its deep web "Happy Blog" portal, the threat actor said it came into possession of schematics of the U.S. company's products such as MacBooks and Apple Watch by infiltrating the network of the Taiwanese manufacturer, claiming it's making a ransom demand to Apple after Quanta expressed no interest in paying to recover the stolen blueprints. "Our team is negotiating the sale of large quantities of confidential drawings and gigabytes of personal data with several major brands," the REvil operators said. "We recommend that Apple buy back the available data by May 1." Since first detected in June 2019,  REvil  (aka Sodinokibi or Sodin) has emerged as one of the most prolific ransomware-as-a-servic...