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By the end of 2021, there will be 12 billion connected IoT devices, and by 2025, that number will rise to 27 billion . All these devices will be connected to the internet and will send useful data that will make industries, medicine, and cars more intelligent and more efficient. However, will all these devices be safe? It's worth asking what you can do to prevent (or at least reduce) becoming a victim of a cybercrime such as data theft or other forms of cybercrime in the future? Will IoT security ever improve? In recent years, the number of security vulnerabilities related to the Internet of Things has increased significantly. Let us start at the very beginning — most IoT devices come with default and publicly disclosed passwords. Moreover, the fact is that there are many cheap and low-capacity Internet of Things devices that lack even the most basic security. And that's not all — security experts are discovering new critical vulnerabilities every day. Numerous IoT devic...

A security flaw has been unearthed in Microsoft's Azure App Service that resulted in the exposure of source code of customer applications written in Java, Node, PHP, Python, and Ruby for at least four years since September 2017. The vulnerability, codenamed " NotLegit ," was reported to the tech giant by Wiz researchers on October 7, 2021, following which mitigations have been undertaken to fix the information disclosure bug in November. Microsoft  said  a "limited subset of customers" are at risk, adding "Customers who deployed code to App Service Linux via Local Git after files were already created in the application were the only impacted customers." The  Azure App Service  (aka Azure Web Apps) is a cloud computing-based platform for building and hosting web applications. It allows users to deploy source code and artifacts to the service using a local  Git  repository, or via repositories hosted on GitHub and Bitbucket. The insecure default be...

Microsoft said it won't be fixing or is pushing patches to a later date for three of the four security flaws uncovered in its Teams business communication platform earlier this March. The disclosure comes from Berlin-based cybersecurity firm Positive Security, which  found  that the implementation of the link preview feature was susceptible to a number of issues that could "allow accessing internal Microsoft services, spoofing the link preview, and, for Android users, leaking their IP address, and DoS'ing their Teams app/channels." Of the four vulnerabilities, Microsoft is said to have addressed only one that results in IP address leakage from Android devices, with the tech giant noting that a fix for the denial-of-service (DoS) flaw will be considered in a future version of the product. The issues were responsibly disclosed to the company on March 10, 2021. Chief among the flaws is a server-side request forgery ( SSRF ) vulnerability in the endpoint "/urlp...

China's internet regulator, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), has temporarily suspended a partnership with Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing subsidiary of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, for six months on account of the fact that it failed to promptly inform the government about a critical security vulnerability affecting the broadly used Log4j logging library. The development was disclosed by  Reuters  and  South China Morning Post , citing a report from 21st Century Business Herald, a Chinese business-news daily newspaper. "Alibaba Cloud did not immediately report vulnerabilities in the popular, open-source logging framework Apache Log4j2 to China's telecommunications regulator," Reuters said. "In response, MIIT suspended a cooperative partnership with the cloud unit regarding cybersecurity threats and information-sharing platforms." Tracked as  CVE-2021-44228  (CVSS score: 10.0) and codenamed  Log4Shell  or LogJam, t...

A short-lived phishing campaign has been observed taking advantage of a novel exploit that bypassed a patch put in place by Microsoft to fix a remote code execution vulnerability affecting the MSHTML component with the goal of delivering Formbook malware. "The attachments represent an escalation of the attacker's abuse of the CVE-2021-40444 bug and demonstrate that even a patch can't always mitigate the actions of a motivated and sufficiently skilled attacker," SophosLabs researchers Andrew Brandt and Stephen Ormandy  said  in a new report published Tuesday. CVE-2021-40444  (CVSS score: 8.8) relates to a remote code execution flaw in MSHTML that could be exploited using specially crafted Microsoft Office documents. Although Microsoft addressed the security weakness as part of its September 2021  Patch Tuesday updates , it has been put to use in  multiple attacks  ever since details pertaining to the flaw became public. That same month, the technology g...

Microsoft is urging customers to patch two security vulnerabilities in Active Directory domain controllers that it  addressed in November  following the availability of a proof-of-concept (PoC) tool on December 12. The two vulnerabilities — tracked as  CVE-2021-42278  and  CVE-2021-42287  — have a severity rating of 7.5 out of a maximum of 10 and concern a privilege escalation flaw affecting the Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) component. Credited with discovering and reporting both the bugs is Andrew Bartlett of Catalyst IT. Active Directory is a  directory service  that runs on Microsoft Windows Server and is used for identity and access management. Although the tech giant marked the shortcomings as " exploitation Less Likely " in its assessment, the public disclosure of the PoC has prompted renewed calls for applying the fixes to mitigate any potential exploitation by threat actors. While CVE-2021-42278 enables an attacker to tamp...

The transportation industry and government agencies related to the sector are the victims of an ongoing campaign since July 2020 by a sophisticated and well-equipped cyberespionage group in what appears to be yet another uptick in malicious activities that are "just the tip of the iceberg." "The group tried to access some internal documents (such as flight schedules and documents for financial plans) and personal information on the compromised hosts (such as search histories)," Trend Micro researchers Nick Dai, Ted Lee, and Vickie Su  said  in a report published last week. Earth Centaur, also known by the monikers  Pirate Panda  and Tropic Trooper, is a long-running threat group focused on information theft and espionage that has led targeted campaigns against government, healthcare, transportation, and high-tech industries in Taiwan, the Philippines, and Hong Kong dating all the way back to 2011. The hostile agents, believed to be a Chinese-speaking actor, are...

Even with the growing awareness about cybersecurity, many myths about it are prevalent. These misconceptions can be a barrier to effective security.  The first step to ensure the security of your business is to separate the false information, myths, and rumors from the truth. Here, we're busting some common cybersecurity myths. Read on to find out which of the following you thought were true. Cybersecurity Myths vs. Truths Myth #1 — Too much security diminishes productivity There is a common idea that increased security makes it difficult for even employees to access what they need, not just hackers. Strict security policies such as regular monitoring and access control are believed to hinder productivity at work. However, doing away with security may have far-reaching consequences for your business. A successful attack like a  DDoS attack or ransomware can bring your business to a standstill. Employees might not be able to access important files, networks, and info...

Multiple backdoors have been discovered during a penetration test in the firmware of a widely used voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) appliance from Auerswald, a German telecommunications hardware manufacturer, that could be abused to gain full administrative access to the devices. "Two backdoor passwords were found in the firmware of the  COMpact 5500R PBX ," researchers from RedTeam Pentesting said in a  technical   analysis  published Monday. "One backdoor password is for the secret user ' Schandelah ', the other can be used for the highest-privileged user ' admin .' No way was discovered to disable these backdoors." The vulnerability has been assigned the identifier  CVE-2021-40859  and carries a critical severity rating of 9.8. Following responsible disclosure on September 10, Auerswald addressed the problem in a firmware update (version 8.2B) released in November 2021. "Firmware Update 8.2B contains important security updates that you...

Facebook's parent company Meta Platforms on Monday said it has filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. state of California against bad actors who operated more than 39,000 phishing websites that impersonated its digital properties to mislead unsuspecting users into divulging their login credentials. The social engineering scheme involved the creation of rogue webpages that masqueraded as the login pages of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, on which victims were prompted to enter their usernames and passwords that were then harvested by the defendants. The tech giant is also seeking $500,000 from the anonymous actors. The attacks were carried out using a relay service, Ngrok , that redirected internet traffic to the phishing websites in a manner that concealed the true location of the fraudulent infrastructure. Meta said the volume of these phishing attacks ramped up in volume since March 2021 and that it worked with the relay service to suspend thousands of URLs to the...

Researchers have disclosed security vulnerabilities in handover, a fundamental mechanism that undergirds modern cellular networks, which could be exploited by adversaries to launch denial-of-service (DoS) and man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks using low-cost equipment. The "vulnerabilities in the handover procedure are not limited to one handover case only but they impact all different handover cases and scenarios that are based on unverified measurement reports and signal strength thresholds," researchers Evangelos Bitsikas and Christina Pöpper from the New York University Abu Dhabi said in a  new paper . "The problem affects all generations since 2G (GSM), remaining unsolved so far." Handover , also known as handoff, is a process in telecommunications in which a phone call or a data session is transferred from one  cell site  (aka base station) to another cell tower without losing connectivity during the transmission. This method is crucial to establishing cellul...

The last several years have seen an ever-increasing number of cyber-attacks, and while the frequency of such attacks has increased, so too has the resulting damage. One needs only to look at  CISA's list of significant cyber incidents  to appreciate the magnitude of the problem. In May of 2021, for example, a ransomware attack brought down the Colonial Pipeline, causing a serious fuel disruption for much of the United States. Just last month, a hacking group gained access to call logs and text messages from telecommunications carriers all over the world. These are just two of dozens of cyber-attacks occurring this year. Because of these and other cyber security incidents, the Department of Homeland Security issues a  compulsory directive  to federal agencies to better protect federal information systems and the data that they contain against cyber-attack. This directive is based around  CISA's catalog of vulnerabilities  that are known to pose a signific...

A U.S. federal government commission associated with international rights has been targeted by a backdoor that reportedly compromised its internal network in what the researchers described as a "classic APT-type operation."  "This attack could have given total visibility of the network and complete control of a system and thus could be used as the first step in a multi-stage attack to penetrate this, or other networks more deeply," Czech security company Avast  said  in a report published last week. The name of the federal entity was not disclosed, but reports from  Ars Technica  and  The Record  tied it to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom ( USCIRF ). Avast said it was making its findings public after unsuccessful attempts to directly notify the agency about the intrusion and through other channels put in place by the U.S. government. At this stage, only "parts of the attack puzzle" have been uncovered, leaving the door open ...

A malicious Android app with more than 500,000 downloads from the Google Play app store has been found hosting malware that stealthily exfiltrates users' contact lists to an attacker-controlled server and signs up users to unwanted paid premium subscriptions without their knowledge. The latest Joker malware was found in a messaging-focused app named  Color Message  ("com.guo.smscolor.amessage"), which has since been removed from the official app marketplace. In addition, it has been observed simulating clicks in order to generate revenue from malicious ads and connecting to servers located in Russia. Color Message "accesses users' contact list and exfiltrates it over the network [and] automatically subscribes to unwanted paid services," mobile security firm Pradeo  noted . "To make it difficult to be removed, the application has the capability to hides it icon once installed." "We is [sic] committed to ensuring that the app is as useful ...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an entirely new attack vector that enables adversaries to exploit the Log4Shell vulnerability on servers locally by using a JavaScript WebSocket connection. "This newly-discovered attack vector means that anyone with a vulnerable Log4j version on their machine or local private network can browse a website and potentially trigger the vulnerability," Matthew Warner, CTO of Blumira,  said . "At this point, there is no proof of active exploitation. This vector significantly expands the attack surface and can impact services even running as localhost which were not exposed to any network." WebSockets  allow for two-way communications between a web browser (or other client application) and a server, unlike HTTP, which is unidirectional where the client sends the request and the server sends the response. While the issue can be resolved by updating all local development and internet-facing environments to Log4j 2.16.0, Apache o...

The issues with Log4j continued to stack up as the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) on Friday rolled out yet another patch — version 2.17.0 — for the widely used logging library that could be exploited by malicious actors to stage a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. Tracked as  CVE-2021-45105  (CVSS score: 7.5), the new vulnerability affects all versions of the tool from 2.0-beta9 to 2.16.0, which the open-source nonprofit shipped earlier this week to remediate a second flaw that could result in remote code execution ( CVE-2021-45046 ), which, in turn, stemmed from an "incomplete" fix for  CVE-2021-44228 , otherwise called the Log4Shell vulnerability. "Apache Log4j2 versions 2.0-alpha1 through 2.16.0 did not protect from uncontrolled recursion from self-referential lookups," the ASF  explained  in a revised advisory. "When the logging configuration uses a non-default Pattern Layout with a Context Lookup (for example, $${ctx:loginId}), attackers with control o...