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Microsoft has warned about a new strain of mobile ransomware that takes advantage of incoming call notifications and Android's Home button to lock the device behind a ransom note. The findings concern a variant of a known Android ransomware family dubbed "MalLocker.B" which has now resurfaced with new techniques, including a novel means to deliver the ransom demand on infected devices as well as an obfuscation mechanism to evade security solutions. The development comes amid a huge surge in ransomware attacks against critical infrastructure across sectors, with a 50% increase in the daily average of ransomware attacks in the last three months compared to the first half of the year, and cybercriminals increasingly incorporating double extortion in their playbook. MalLocker has been known for being hosted on malicious websites and circulated on online forums using various social engineering lures by masquerading as popular apps, cracked games, or video players. Pre...

A team of five security researchers analyzed several Apple online services for three months and found as many as 55 vulnerabilities, 11 of which are critical in severity. The flaws — including 29 high severity, 13 medium severity, and 2 low severity vulnerabilities — could have allowed an attacker to "fully compromise both customer and employee applications, launch a worm capable of automatically taking over a victim's iCloud account, retrieve source code for internal Apple projects, fully compromise an industrial control warehouse software used by Apple, and take over the sessions of Apple employees with the capability of accessing management tools and sensitive resources." The flaws meant a bad actor could easily hijack a user's iCloud account and steal all the photos, calendar information, videos, and documents, in addition to forwarding the same exploit to all of their contacts. The findings were  reported by Sam Curry  along with Brett Buerhaus, Ben Sadeghipo...

As businesses are increasingly migrating to the cloud, securing the infrastructure has never been more important. Now according to the latest research, two security flaws in Microsoft's Azure App Services could have enabled a bad actor to carry out server-side request forgery ( SSRF ) attacks or execute arbitrary code and take over the administration server. "This enables an attacker to quietly take over the App Service's git server, or implant malicious phishing pages accessible through Azure Portal to target system administrators," cybersecurity firm Intezer said in a report published today and shared with The Hacker News. Discovered by  Paul Litvak of Intezer Labs, the flaws were reported to Microsoft in June, after which the company subsequently addressed them. Azure App Service is a cloud computing-based platform that's used as a hosting web service for building web apps and mobile backends. When an App Service is created via Azure, a new Docker env...

Every company needs help with cybersecurity. No CISO ever said, "I have everything I need and am fully confident that our organization is fully protected against breaches." This is especially true for small and mid-sized enterprises that don't have the luxury of enormous cybersecurity budgets and a deep bench of cybersecurity experts. To address this issue, especially for small and mid-sized enterprises, we've seen a sharp rise in Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services. MDR is essentially an outsourced cybersecurity expert service that monitors a company's environment and provides an improved ability to detect, investigate, and respond to threats. Think of it as augmenting your existing staff with a group of highly skilled cybersecurity experts. MDR Services Cynet recently published a new whitepaper that reviewed all of the services provided by their MDR team, which they refer to as "CyOps" [you can download the whitepaper here] . Interestin...

Cybersecurity researchers have taken the wraps off a new botnet hijacking Internet-connected smart devices in the wild to perform nefarious tasks, mostly DDoS attacks, and illicit cryptocurrency coin mining. Discovered by Qihoo 360's Netlab security team, the  HEH Botnet  — written in Go language and armed with a proprietary peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol, spreads via a brute-force attack of the Telnet service on ports 23/2323 and can execute arbitrary shell commands. The researchers said the HEH botnet samples discovered so far support a wide variety of CPU architectures, including x86(32/64), ARM(32/64), MIPS(MIPS32/MIPS-III), and PowerPC (PPC). The botnet, despite being in its early stages of development, comes with three functional modules: a propagation module, a local HTTP service module, and a P2P module. Initially downloaded and executed by a malicious Shell script named "wpqnbw.txt," the HEH sample then uses the Shell script to download rogue programs for all ...