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The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Friday charged a Latvian woman for her alleged role as a programmer in a cybercrime gang that helped develop TrickBot malware. The woman in question, Alla Witte , aka Max, 55, who resided in Paramaribo, Suriname, was arrested in Miami, Florida on February 6. Witte has been charged with 19 counts, including conspiracy to commit computer fraud and aggravated identity theft, wire and bank fraud affecting a financial institution, and money laundering. According to heavily redacted court documents released by the DoJ, Witte and 16 other unnamed cohorts have been accused of running a transnational criminal organization to develop and deploy a digital suite of malware tools with an aim to target businesses and individuals worldwide for theft and ransom. Since its origin as a banking Trojan in late 2015,  TrickBot  has evolved into a " crimeware-as-a-service " capable of pilfering valuable personal and financial information and even droppi...

Code-hosting platform GitHub Friday officially announced a series of updates to the  site's policies  that delve into how the company deals with malware and exploit code uploaded to its service. "We explicitly permit dual-use security technologies and content related to research into vulnerabilities, malware, and exploits," the Microsoft-owned company  said . "We understand that many security research projects on GitHub are dual-use and broadly beneficial to the security community. We assume positive intention and use of these projects to promote and drive improvements across the ecosystem." Stating that it will not allow the use of GitHub in direct support of unlawful attacks or malware campaigns that cause technical harm, the company said it may take steps to disrupt ongoing attacks that leverage the platform as an exploit or a malware content delivery network (CDN). To that end, users are refrained from uploading, posting, hosting, or transmitting any co...

Popular short-form video-sharing service TikTok quietly revised its privacy policy in the U.S., allowing it to automatically collect biometric information such as faceprints and voiceprints from the content its users post on the platform. The policy change, first spotted by TechCrunch , went into effect on June 2. TikTok users who reside in the European Economic Area (EEA), the U.K., Switzerland, and other geographies (excluding India) where the service operates are exempted from the changes. "We may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information as defined under U.S. laws, such as faceprints and voiceprints, from your User Content. Where required by law, we will seek any required permissions from you prior to any such collection," the ByteDance-owned company  said  in a newly introduced section called "Image and Audio Information." On top of this, the company's privacy policy also notes that it may collect information about "the nature of the...

Malicious actors are actively mass scanning the internet for vulnerable VMware vCenter servers that are unpatched against a critical remote code execution flaw, which the company addressed late last month. The ongoing activity was detected by Bad Packets on June 3 and corroborated  yesterday  by security researcher Kevin Beaumont. "Mass scanning activity detected from 104.40.252.159 checking for VMware vSphere hosts vulnerable to remote code execution,"  tweeted  Troy Mursch, chief research officer at Bad Packets. The development follows the publication of a proof-of-concept (PoC) RCE exploit code targeting the VMware vCenter bug. Tracked as  CVE-2021-21985  (CVSS score 9.8), the issue is a consequence of a lack of input validation in the Virtual SAN (vSAN) Health Check plug-in, which could be abused by an attacker to execute commands with unrestricted privileges on the underlying operating system that hosts the vCenter Server. Although the flaw was...

Google is tightening its privacy practices that could make it harder for apps on Android phones and tablets to track users who have opted out of receiving personalized interest-based ads. The change will go into effect sometime in late 2021. The development, which mirrors Apple's move to enable iPhone and iPad users to opt-out of ad tracking, was first  reported  by the Financial Times.  Once the revised policy goes live, Google is expected to completely cut off developers' access to the so-called "Advertising IDs," showing a "string of zeros" in its place. The Google Advertising ID (AAID), analogous to Apple's  IDFA , is a unique device identifier that can be used by app developers to track users as they move between apps to target ads better and measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. "Starting in late 2021, when a user opts out of interest-based advertising or ads personalization, the advertising identifier will not be available,...