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Microsoft on Tuesday rolled out its scheduled  monthly security update  with patches for 55 security flaws affecting Windows, Exchange Server, Internet Explorer, Office, Hyper-V, Visual Studio, and Skype for Business. Of these 55 bugs, four are rated as Critical, 50 are rated as Important, and one is listed as Moderate in severity. Three of the vulnerabilities are publicly known, although, unlike  last month , none of them are under active exploitation at the time of release. The most critical of the flaws addressed is  CVE-2021-31166 , a wormable remote code execution vulnerability in the HTTP protocol stack. The issue, which could allow an unauthenticated attacker to send a specially crafted packet to a targeted server, is rated 9.8 out of a maximum of 10 on the CVSS scale. Another vulnerability of note is a remote code execution flaw in Hyper-V ( CVE-2021-28476 ), which also scores the highest severity among all flaws patched this month with a CVSS rating of...

The cybercrime syndicate behind Babuk ransomware has leaked more personal files belonging to the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) after negotiations with the DC Police broke down, warning that they intend to publish all data if their ransom demands are not met. "The negotiations reached a dead end, the amount we were offered does not suit us, we are posting 20 more personal files on officers, you can download this archive, the password will be released tomorrow. if during tomorrow they do not raise the price, we will release all the data," the gang said in a statement on their data leak site. "You still have the ability to stop it," it added. The Babuk group is said to have  stolen 250GB of data , including investigation reports, arrests, disciplinary actions, and other intelligence briefings. Like other ransomware platforms, DarkSide adheres to a practice called double extortion, which involves demanding money in return for unlocking files and servers en...

Adobe has released  Patch Tuesday updates  for the month of May with fixes for multiple vulnerabilities spanning 12 different products, including a zero-day flaw affecting Adobe Reader that's actively exploited in the wild. The list of updated applications includes Adobe Experience Manager , Adobe InDesign , Adobe Illustrator , Adobe InCopy , Adobe Genuine Service , Adobe Acrobat and Reader, Magento , Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop Application, Adobe Media Encoder , Adobe After Effects , Adobe Medium, and Adobe Animate. In a security bulletin, the company  acknowledged  it received reports that the flaw "has been exploited in the wild in limited attacks targeting Adobe Reader users on Windows." Tracked as CVE-2021-28550, the zero-day concerns an arbitrary code execution flaw that could allow adversaries to execute virtually any command on target systems. While the targeted attacks took aim at Windows users of Adobe Reader, the issue affects both Windows and macO...

The concept of automation has taken on a life of its own in recent years. The idea is nothing new, but the current interest in automation is a mix of both hype and innovation. On the one hand, it's much easier today to automate everything from small processes to massive-scale tasks than it's ever been before. On the other hand, are we really prepared to hand the reins over to completely automated systems, and should we? There are areas in security operations where automation is already a critical component. In terms of analytics and parsing through ever-expanding data flows, it's impossible for most teams to keep up without impacting other areas of their jobs. Automated systems help us make sense of threats much faster and more reliably. However, automation isn't a cure-all (just yet). A new live webinar from XDR provider Cynet dives into the topic more in depth ( register here ). The webinar explores automation as it exists today in the cybersecurity industry. Led ...

Inadequate implementation of telecom standards, supply chain threats, and weaknesses in systems architecture could pose major cybersecurity risks to 5G networks, potentially making them a lucrative target for cybercriminals and nation-state adversaries to exploit for valuable intelligence. The analysis, which aims to identify and assess risks and vulnerabilities introduced by 5G adoption, was published on Monday by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), in partnership with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). "As new 5G policies and standards are released, there remains the potential for threats that impact the end-user," the report  said . "For example, nation states may attempt to exert undue influence on standards that benefit their proprietary technologies and limit customers' choices to use other equipment or software." S...

Cybersecurity researchers on Monday disclosed a new Android trojan that hijacks users' credentials and SMS messages to facilitate fraudulent activities against banks in Spain, Germany, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Called " TeaBot " (or Anatsa), the malware is said to be in its early stages of development, with malicious attacks targeting financial apps commencing in late March 2021, followed by a rash of infections in the first week of May against Belgium and Netherlands banks. The first signs of TeaBot activity emerged in January. "The main goal of TeaBot is stealing victim's credentials and SMS messages for enabling frauds scenarios against a predefined list of banks," Italian cybersecurity and online fraud prevention firm Cleafy said in a Monday write-up. "Once TeaBot is successfully installed in the victim's device, attackers can obtain a live streaming of the device screen (on demand) and also interact with it via Accessibility Serv...

The ransomware attack  against Colonial Pipeline's networks has prompted the U.S. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) to issue a  regional emergency declaration  in 17 states and the District of Columbia (D.C.). The declaration provides a temporary exemption to Parts 390 through 399 of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations ( FMCSRs ), allowing alternate transportation of gasoline, diesel, and refined petroleum products to address supply shortages stemming from the attack. "Such [an] emergency is in response to the unanticipated shutdown of the Colonial pipeline system due to network issues that affect the supply of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and other refined petroleum products throughout the Affected States," the directive said. "This Declaration addresses the emergency conditions creating a need for immediate transportation of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and other refined petroleum products and provides necessary relief." The states...

An unknown threat actor managed to control more than 27% of the entire Tor network exit capacity in early February 2021, a new study on the dark web infrastructure revealed. "The entity attacking Tor users is actively exploiting tor users since over a year and expanded the scale of their attacks to a new record level," an independent security researcher who goes by the name nusenu  said  in a write-up published on Sunday. "The average exit fraction this entity controlled was above 14% throughout the past 12 months." It's the latest in a series of efforts undertaken to bring to light malicious Tor activity perpetrated by the actor since  December 2019 . The attacks, which are said to have begun in January 2020, were first  documented and exposed  by the same researcher in August 2020. Tor is open-source software for enabling anonymous communication on the Internet. It obfuscates the source and destination of a web request by directing network traffic through...

For as long as corporate IT has been in existence, users have been required to change their passwords periodically. In fact, the need for scheduled password changes may be one of the most long-standing of all IT best practices. Recently, however, things have started to change. Microsoft has reversed course on the best practices that it has had in place for decades and  no longer recommends that organizations require users to change passwords periodically . Organizations are being forced to consider, perhaps for the first time, whether or not requiring periodic password changes is a good idea. Microsoft password reset recommendations According to Microsoft, requiring users to change their passwords frequently does more harm than good.  Humans are notoriously resistant to change. When a user is forced to change their password, they will often come up with a new password that is based on their previous password. A user might, for example, append a number to the end of their ...

Four Eastern European nationals face 20 years in prison for Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization (RICO) charges after pleading guilty to providing bulletproof hosting services between 2008 and 2015, which were used by cybercriminals to distribute malware to financial entities across the U.S. The individuals, Aleksandr Grichishkin, 34, and Andrei Skvortsov, 34, of Russia; Aleksandr Skorodumov, 33, of Lithuania; and Pavel Stassi, 30, of Estonia, have been accused of renting their wares to cybercriminal clients, who used the infrastructure to disseminate malware such as Zeus, SpyEye, Citadel, and the Blackhole Exploit Kit that were capable of co-opting victim machines into a botnet, and stealing sensitive information. The deployment of malware caused or attempted to cause millions of dollars in losses to U.S. victims, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a statement on Friday. "A key service provided by the defendants was helping their clients to evade detection by...

Colonial Pipeline , which carries 45% of the fuel consumed on the U.S. East Coast, on Saturday said it halted operations due to a ransomware attack,  once again demonstrating  how critical infrastructure is vulnerable to cyber attacks. "On May 7, the Colonial Pipeline Company learned it was the victim of a cybersecurity attack," the company  said  in a statement posted on its website. "We have since determined that this incident involves ransomware. In response, we proactively took certain systems offline to contain the threat, which has temporarily halted all pipeline operations, and affected some of our IT systems." Colonial Pipeline is the largest refined products pipeline in the U.S., a 5,500 mile (8,851 km) system involved in transporting over 100 million gallons from the Texas city of Houston to New York Harbor. Cybersecurity firm FireEye's Mandiant incident response division is said to be assisting with the investigation, according to reports from  B...

WhatsApp on Friday disclosed that it won't deactivate accounts of users who don't accept its  new privacy policy  rolling out on May 15, adding it will continue to keep reminding them to accept the new terms. "No one will have their accounts deleted or lose functionality of WhatsApp on May 15 because of this update," the Facebook-owned messaging service  said  in a statement. The move marks a turnaround from its previous stance earlier this year when the company outlined plans to make the accounts completely inaccessible should users choose not to comply with the data-sharing agreement and opt not to have their WhatsApp account information shared with Facebook. "If you haven't accepted by [May 15], WhatsApp will not delete your account. However, you won't have full functionality of WhatsApp until you accept," the company had  previously said . "For a short time, you'll be able to receive calls and notifications, but won't be able to...

Cyber operatives affiliated with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) have switched up their tactics in response to previous public disclosures of their attack methods, according to a  new advisory  jointly published by intelligence agencies from the U.K. and U.S. Friday. "SVR cyber operators appear to have reacted [...] by changing their TTPs in an attempt to avoid further detection and remediation efforts by network defenders," the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)  said . These include the deployment of an open-source tool called  Sliver  to maintain their access to compromised victims as well as leveraging the ProxyLogon flaws in Microsoft Exchange servers to conduct post-exploitation activities. The development follows the  public attribution  of SVR-linked actors to the  SolarWinds  supply-chain attack last month. The adversary is also tracked under different monikers, such as Advanced Persistent Threat 29 (APT29), t...

Google has announced a number of user-facing and under-the-hood changes in an attempt to boost privacy and security, including rolling out two-factor authentication automatically to all eligible users and bringing iOS-styled privacy labels to Android app listings. "Today we ask people who have enrolled in  two-step verification  (2SV) to confirm it's really them with a simple tap via a Google prompt on their phone whenever they sign in," the company  said . "Soon we'll start automatically enrolling users in 2SV if their accounts are appropriately configured." Google Play To Get Apple-Like Privacy Labels The Google Play Store for Android is also getting a huge overhaul on the privacy front. The search giant said it plans to include a new  safety section  for app listings that highlights the type of data being collected and stored — such as approximate or precise location, contacts, personal information, photos and videos, and audio files — and how the dat...

As many as six zero-days have been uncovered in an application called Remote Mouse, allowing a remote attacker to achieve full code execution without any user interaction. The unpatched flaws, collectively named ' Mouse Trap, ' were disclosed on Wednesday by security researcher Axel Persinger, who said, "It's clear that this application is very vulnerable and puts users at risk with bad authentication mechanisms, lack of encryption, and poor default configuration." Remote Mouse is a remote control application for Android and iOS that turns mobile phones and tablets into a wireless mouse, keyboard, and trackpad for computers, with support for voice typing, adjusting computer volume, and switching between applications with the help of a Remote Mouse server installed on the machine. The Android app alone has been installed over 10 million times. In a nutshell, the issues, which were identified by analysing the packets sent from the Android app to its Windows ser...

Security researchers Thursday disclosed a new critical vulnerability affecting Domain Name System (DNS) resolvers that could be exploited by adversaries to carry out reflection-based denial-of-service attacks against authoritative nameservers. The flaw, called  'TsuNAME ,' was discovered by researchers from SIDN Labs and InternetNZ, which manage the national top-level internet domains '.nl' and '.nz' for the Netherlands and New Zealand, respectively. "TsuNAME occurs when domain names are misconfigured with cyclic dependent DNS records, and when vulnerable resolvers access these misconfigurations, they begin looping and send DNS queries rapidly to authoritative servers and other resolvers," the researchers said. A recursive DNS resolver is one of the core components involved in  DNS resolution , i.e., converting a hostname such as www.google.com into a computer-friendly IP address like 142.250.71.36. To achieve this, it responds to a client's r...

An unknown threat actor with the capabilities to evolve and tailor its toolset to target environments infiltrated high-profile organizations in Asia and Africa with an evasive Windows rootkit since at least 2018. Called  'Moriya ,' the malware is a "passive backdoor which allows attackers to inspect all incoming traffic to the infected machine, filter out packets that are marked as designated for the malware and respond to them," said Kaspersky researchers Mark Lechtik and Giampaolo Dedola in a Thursday deep-dive. The Russian cybersecurity firm termed the ongoing espionage campaign  'TunnelSnake .' Based on telemetry analysis, less than 10 victims around the world have been targeted to date, with the most prominent targets being two large diplomatic entities in Southeast Asia and Africa. All the other victims were located in South Asia. The first reports of Moriya emerged last November when Kaspersky said it discovered the stealthy implant in the networks...

InfoSec leaders tend to be a specific type. Their jobs require them to think of possible threats, take actions that may not pay immediate results, plan for unknown security risks, and react quickly when emergencies arise, often before the morning's first coffee. The high-stakes position also means that CISOs need to keep their knowledge and skills sharp – you can never really know what's around the corner. So, what can security leaders do to make sure they're prepared and hone their skills ahead of the next inevitable threat? Now, they can test themselves and their knowledge at a new website, 'The CISO Challenge' ( visit it here ). The website, launched by XDR provider Cynet, aims to let information security leaders test their cybersecurity mettle. The website features a challenge for InfoSec leaders (and those who are looking to become one) to test their knowledge in an exciting, high-stakes, realistic series of scenarios. The challenge consists of 25 scenario...