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Credit: Marina Minkin A novel attack method has been disclosed against a crucial piece of technology called time-triggered ethernet ( TTE ) that's used in safety-critical infrastructure, potentially causing the failure of systems powering spacecraft and aircraft. Dubbed  PCspooF  by a group of academics and researchers from the University of Michigan , the University of Pennsylvania, and the NASA Johnson Space Center, the  technique  is designed to break TTE's security guarantees and induce TTE devices to lose synchronization for up to a second, a behavior that can even lead to uncontrolled maneuvers in spaceflight missions and threaten crew safety. TTE is one among the networking technologies that's part of what's called a mixed-criticality network wherein traffic with different timing and faults tolerance requirements coexist in the same physical network. This means that both critical devices, which, say, enable vehicle control, and non-critical devices, w...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of now-patched flaws in Zendesk Explore that could have been exploited by an attacker to gain unauthorized access to information from customer accounts that have the feature turned on. "Before it was patched, the flaw would have allowed threat actors to access conversations, email addresses, tickets, comments, and other information from Zendesk accounts with Explore enabled," Varonis  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The cybersecurity firm said there was no evidence to suggest that the issues were actively exploited in real-world attacks. No action is required on the part of the customers. Zendesk Explore is a  reporting and analytics solution  that allows organizations to "view and analyze key information about your customers, and your support resources." According to the security software company, exploitation of the shortcoming first requires an attacker to register for the  ticketing servi...

Today, most Network Detection and Response (NDR) solutions rely on traffic mirroring and Deep Packet Inspection (DPI). Traffic mirroring is typically deployed on a single-core switch to provide a copy of the network traffic to a sensor that uses DPI to thoroughly analyze the payload. While this approach provides detailed analysis, it requires large amounts of processing power and is blind when it comes to encrypted network traffic. Metadata Analysis has been specifically developed to overcome these limitations. By utilizing metadata for analysis, network communications can be observed at any collection point and be enriched by the information providing insights about encrypted communication. Network Detection and Response (NDR) solutions have become crucial to reliably monitor and protect network operations. However, as network traffic becomes encrypted and data volumes continue to increase, most traditional NDR solutions are reaching their limits. This begs the question: What detect...

A suspected Chinese state-sponsored actor breached a digital certificate authority as well as government and defense agencies located in different countries in Asia as part of an ongoing campaign since at least March 2022. Symantec, by Broadcom Software, linked the attacks to an adversarial group it tracks under the name  Billbug , citing the use of tools previously attributed to this actor. The activity appears to be driven by espionage and data-theft, although no data is said to have been stolen to date. Billbug , also called Bronze Elgin, Lotus Blossom, Lotus Panda,  Spring Dragon , and  Thrip , is an advanced persistent threat (APT) group that is believed to operate on behalf of Chinese interests. Primary targets include government and military organizations in South East Asia. Attacks mounted by the adversary in 2019 involved the use of backdoors like  Hannotog and Sagerunex , with the intrusions observed in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philip...

Internet giant Google has agreed to pay a record $391.5 million to settle with 40 states in the U.S. over charges the company misled users about the collection of personal location data. "Google misled its users into thinking they had turned off location tracking in their account settings, when, in fact, Google continued to collect their location information," Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum  said  Monday. "For years Google has prioritized profit over their users' privacy. They have been crafty and deceptive," Rosenblum stated. The investigation was sparked by a  2018 report  from the Associated Press that revealed Google was continuing to track users' locations on Android and iOS even when they turned off "location history" in their account settings, effectively undermining the privacy controls. Rosenblum said the location data gathered by Google is combined with other personal and behavioral information it collects to flesh out deta...

Entities located in East and Southeast Asia as well as Ukraine have been targeted at least since 2020 by a previously undocumented subgroup of  APT41 , a prolific Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT). Cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, which  christened  the espionage crew  Earth Longzhi , said the actor's long-running campaign can be split into two based on the toolset deployed to attack its victims. The first wave from May 2020 to February 2021 is said to have targeted government, infrastructure, and healthcare industries in Taiwan and the banking sector in China, whereas the succeeding set of intrusions from August 2021 to June 2022 infiltrated high-profile victims in Ukraine and several countries in Asia. This included defense, aviation, insurance, and urban development industries in Taiwan, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Ukraine. The victimology patterns and the targeted sectors overlap with attacks mounted by a distinct subordinate g...

A new malicious campaign has compromised  over 15,000 WordPress websites  in an attempt to redirect visitors to bogus Q&A portals. "These malicious redirects appear to be designed to increase the authority of the attacker's sites for search engines," Sucuri researcher Ben Martin  said  in a report published last week, calling it a "clever black hat SEO trick." The search engine poisoning technique is designed to promote a "handful of fake low quality Q&A sites" that share similar website-building templates and are operated by the same threat actor. A notable aspect of the campaign is the ability of the hackers to modify over 100 files per website on average, an approach that contrasts dramatically from other attacks of this kind wherein only a limited number of files are tampered with to reduce footprint and escape detection. Some of the most commonly infected pages consist of wp-signup.php, wp-cron.php, wp-links-opml.php, wp-settings.php...

A penetration test (also known as a pentest) is a security assessment that simulates the activities of real-world attackers to identify security holes in your IT systems or applications.  The aim of the test is to understand what vulnerabilities you have, how they could be exploited, and what the impact would be if an attacker was successful. Usually performed first, an external pentest (also known as external network penetration testing) is an assessment of your perimeter systems. Your perimeter is all the systems that are directly reachable from the internet. By definition, they are exposed and are, therefore the most easily and regularly attacked. Testing for weaknesses External pentests look for ways to compromise these external, accessible systems and services to access sensitive information and see how an attacker could target your clients, customers or users.  In a high-quality external pentest, the security professional(s) will copy the activities of real hackers...

A newly discovered evasive malware leverages the Secure Shell ( SSH ) cryptographic protocol to gain entry into targeted systems with the goal of mining cryptocurrency and carrying out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Dubbed  KmsdBot  by the Akamai Security Intelligence Response Team (SIRT), the Golang-based malware has been found targeting a variety of companies ranging from gaming to luxury car brands to security firms. "The botnet infects systems via an SSH connection that uses weak login credentials," Akamai researcher Larry W. Cashdollar  said . "The malware does not stay persistent on the infected system as a way of evading detection." The malware gets its name from an executable named "kmsd.exe" that's downloaded from a remote server following a successful compromise. It's also designed to support multiple architectures, such as Winx86, Arm64, mips64, and x86_64. KmsdBot comes with capabilities to perform scanning operatio...

A recently discovered cyber espionage group dubbed  Worok  has been found hiding malware in seemingly innocuous image files, corroborating a crucial link in the threat actor's infection chain. Czech cybersecurity firm Avast said the purpose of the PNG files is to conceal a payload that's used to facilitate information theft. "What is noteworthy is data collection from victims' machines using Dropbox repository, as well as attackers using Dropbox API for communication with the final stage," the company  said . The development comes a little over two months after ESET disclosed details of attacks carried out by  Worok  against high-profile companies and local governments located in Asia and Africa. Worok is believed to share tactical overlaps with a Chinese threat actor tracked as  TA428 . The Slovak cybersecurity company also documented Worok's compromise sequence, which makes use of a C++-based loader called CLRLoad to pave the way for an unknown Pow...

Two long-running surveillance campaigns have been found targeting the Uyghur community in China and elsewhere with Android spyware tools designed to harvest sensitive information and track their whereabouts. This encompasses a previously undocumented malware strain called BadBazaar and updated variants of an espionage artifact dubbed  MOONSHINE  by researchers from the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab in September 2019. "Mobile surveillance tools like BadBazaar and MOONSHINE can be used to track many of the 'pre-criminal' activities, actions considered indicative of religious extremism or separatism by the authorities in Xinjiang," Lookout  said  in a detailed write-up of the operations. The BadBazaar campaign, according to the security firm, is said to date as far back as late 2018 and comprise 111 unique apps that masquerade as benign video players, messengers, religious apps, and even TikTok. While these samples were distributed through Uyghur-language ...

Google has removed two new malicious dropper apps that have been detected on the Play Store for Android, one of which posed as a lifestyle app and was caught distributing the Xenomorph banking malware. "Xenomorph is a trojan that steals credentials from banking applications on users' devices," Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers Himanshu Sharma and Viral Gandhi  said  in an analysis published Thursday. "It is also capable of intercepting users' SMS messages and notifications, enabling it to steal one-time passwords and multi-factor authentication requests." The cybersecurity firm said it also found an expense tracker app that exhibited similar behavior, but noted that it couldn't extract the URL used to fetch the malware artifact. The two malicious apps are as follows - Todo: Day manager (com.todo.daymanager) 経費キーパー (com.setprice.expenses) Both the apps function as a dropper, meaning the apps themselves are harmless and are a conduit to retrieve t...

When you are trying to get another layer of cyber protection that would not require a lot of resources, you are most likely choosing between a VPN service & a DNS Security solution. Let's discuss both.  VPN Explained VPN stands for Virtual Private Networks and basically hides your IP and provides an encrypted server by redirecting your traffic via a server run by a VPN host. It establishes a protected connection in public networks. It does protect your actions from being seen by your ISP and potential hackers, however, it does not provide full protection and can still let intrusions happen.  Worth noting, VPN does gain access to restricted resources in your region, but bear in mind, it might be collecting your personal data. This problem relates mostly to free and cheap VPN services. In addition to that, VPNs, depending on their type, can proxy requests or not. Most of the free ones do not even encrypt your data. According to Cybernews, last year 20 million emails and...

Multiple high-severity flaws have been uncovered in the open source OpenLiteSpeed Web Server as well as its enterprise variant that could be weaponized to achieve remote code execution. "By chaining and exploiting the vulnerabilities, adversaries could compromise the web server and gain fully privileged remote code execution," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42  said  in a Thursday report. OpenLiteSpeed , the open source edition of LiteSpeed Web Server, is the sixth most popular web server, accounting for 1.9 million unique servers across the world. The first of the three flaws is a directory traversal flaw ( CVE-2022-0072 , CVSS score: 5.8), which could be exploited to access forbidden files in the web root directory. The remaining two vulnerabilities ( CVE-2022-0073  and  CVE-2022-0074 , CVSS scores: 8.8) relate to a case of privilege escalation and command injection, respectively, that could be chained to achieve privileged code execution. "A threat actor who man...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) has announced charges against a dual Russian and Canadian national for his alleged participation in  LockBit ransomware attacks  across the world. The 33-year-old Ontario resident,  Mikhail Vasiliev , has been taken into custody and is awaiting extradition to the U.S., where is likely to be sentenced for a maximum of five years in prison. Vasiliev has been charged with conspiracy to intentionally damage protected computers and to transmit ransom demands, according to a  criminal complaint  filed in the District of New Jersey. A search of the defendant's home in August and October 2022 by Canadian law enforcement unearthed a file stored on a device containing what's suspected to be a list of "prospective or historical" victims as well as screenshots of communications exchanged with "LockBitSupp" on the Tox messaging platform. Also found were a text file with instructions to deploy LockBit ransomware, the malware'...

It's no secret that antivirus software is as essential to your computer as a power cord. However, the threats don't stop at your devices. For example, criminals trying to steal your data can attack your Wi-Fi router, and phishing attempts can target your email.  ESET's latest consumer product release takes a comprehensive approach to security to guard against a full range of threats. All are built with ESET's signature light footprint for gaming, browsing, shopping and socializing with no interruptions or slowdowns. Introducing enhanced security for Windows, Mac and Android For more than 30 years, ESET® has created industry-leading IT security software and services, protecting businesses worldwide from ever-evolving digital threats.  ESET's solutions for consumers use the same advanced technologies. By protecting your digital life, ESET delivers real-world protection against criminals trying to steal your identity, hack your bank account or lock down your com...

Microsoft on Thursday attributed the recent spate of ransomware incidents targeting transportation and logistics sectors in Ukraine and Poland to a threat cluster that shares overlaps with the Russian state-sponsored  Sandworm group . The attacks, which were disclosed by the tech giant last month, involved a strain of previously undocumented malware called  Prestige  and is said to have taken place within an hour of each other across all victims. The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) is now tracking the threat actor under its element-themed moniker Iridium (née DEV-0960), a Russia-based group that's publicly tracked by the name Sandworm (aka Iron Viking, TeleBots, and Voodoo Bear). "This attribution assessment is based on forensic artifacts, as well as overlaps in victimology, tradecraft, capabilities, and infrastructure, with known Iridium activity," MSTIC  said  in an update. The company also further assessed the group to have orchestrated comp...