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Hardware security keys—such as those from Google and Yubico—are considered the most secure means to protect accounts from phishing and takeover attacks. But a new research published on Thursday demonstrates how an adversary in possession of such a two-factor authentication (2FA) device can clone it by exploiting an electromagnetic side-channel in the chip embedded in it. The vulnerability (tracked as CVE-2021-3011 ) allows the bad actor to extract the encryption key or the  ECDSA  private key linked to a victim's account from a FIDO Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) device like Google Titan Key or YubiKey, thus completely undermining the 2FA protections. "The adversary can sign in to the victim's application account without the U2F device, and without the victim noticing," NinjaLab researchers Victor Lomne and Thomas Roche  said  in a 60-page analysis. "In other words, the adversary created a clone of the U2F device for the victim's application account. This c...

A North Korean hacking group has been found deploying the RokRat Trojan in a new spear-phishing campaign targeting the South Korean government. Attributing the attack to  APT37  (aka Starcruft, Ricochet Chollima, or Reaper), Malwarebytes said it identified a malicious document last December that, when opened, executes a macro in memory to install the aforementioned remote access tool (RAT). "The file contains an embedded macro that uses a VBA self decoding technique to decode itself within the memory spaces of Microsoft Office without writing to the disk. It then embeds a variant of the RokRat into Notepad," the researchers  noted  in a Wednesday analysis. Believed to be active at least since 2012, the  Reaper APT  is known for its focus on public and private entities primarily in South Korea, such as chemicals, electronics, manufacturing, aerospace, automotive, and healthcare entities. Since then, their victimology has expanded beyond the Korean...

End-user passwords are one of the weakest components of your overall security protocols. Most users tend to reuse passwords across work and personal accounts. They may also choose relatively weak passwords that satisfy company password policies but can be easily guessed or brute-forced. Your users may also inadvertently use  breached passwords  for their corporate account password. The  National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)  has a cybersecurity framework that helps organizations address common cybersecurity pitfalls in their environment, including weak, reused, and breached passwords. This post will take a closer look at the NIST password guidelines and see how you can effectively audit your password policies to ensure these meet the standards recommended by NIST. NIST Password Guidelines and Best Practices Specific guidance around passwords is addressed within the chapter titled  Memorized Secret Verifiers . NIST has several recommendations...

The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday became the latest government agency in the country to admit its internal network was compromised as part of the SolarWinds supply chain attack. "On December 24, 2020, the Department of Justice's Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) learned of previously unknown malicious activity linked to the global SolarWinds incident that has affected multiple federal agencies and technology contractors, among others," DoJ spokesperson Marc Raimondi said in a short statement. "This activity involved access to the Department's Microsoft Office 365 email environment." Calling it a "major incident," the DoJ said the threat actors who spied on government networks through SolarWinds software potentially accessed about 3% of the Justice Department's email accounts, but added there's no indication they accessed classified systems. The disclosure comes a day after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FB...

Cybesecurity researchers today revealed a new malspam campaign that distributes a remote access Trojan (RAT) by purporting to contain a sex scandal video of U.S. President Donald Trump. The emails, which carry with the subject line "GOOD LOAN OFFER!!," come attached with a Java archive (JAR) file called "TRUMP_SEX_SCANDAL_VIDEO.jar," which, when downloaded, installs Qua or Quaverse RAT ( QRAT ) onto the infiltrated system. "We suspect that the bad guys are attempting to ride the frenzy brought about by the recently concluded Presidential elections since the filename they used on the attachment is totally unrelated to the email's theme," Trustwave's Senior Security Researcher Diana Lopera said in a write-up published today. The latest campaign is a variant of the Windows-based QRAT downloader Trustwave researchers  discovered  in August. The infection chain starts with a spam message containing an embedded attachment or a link pointing to a m...