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A global fraud campaign has been found leveraging 151 malicious Android apps with 10.5 million downloads to rope users into premium subscription services without their consent and knowledge. The  premium SMS scam  campaign — dubbed " UltimaSMS " — is believed to commenced in May 2021 and involved apps that cover a wide range of categories, including keyboards, QR code scanners, video and photo editors, spam call blockers, camera filters, and games, with most of the fraudulent apps downloaded by users in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the U.A.E., Turkey, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, the U.S., and Poland. Although a significant  chunk of the apps  in question has since been removed from the Google Play Store, 82 of them have continued to remain available in the online marketplace as of October 19, 2021. It all starts with the apps prompting users to enter their phone numbers and email addresses to gain access to the advertised features, only to subscribe the victims to p...

Mozilla on Monday disclosed it blocked two malicious Firefox add-ons installed by 455,000 users that were found misusing the Proxy API to impede downloading updates to the browser. The two extensions in question, named Bypass and Bypass XM, "interfered with Firefox in a way that prevented users who had installed them from downloading updates, accessing updated blocklists, and updating remotely configured content," Mozilla's Rachel Tublitz and Stuart Colville  said . Because Proxy API can be  used  to proxy web requests, an abuse of the API could enable a bad actor to control the manner Firefox browser connects to the internet effectively. In addition to blocking the extensions to prevent installation by other users, Mozilla said it's pausing on approvals for new add-ons that use the proxy API until the fixes are broadly available. What's more, the California-based non-profit said it'd deployed a system add-on named " Proxy Failover " that ships ...

A "potentially devastating and hard-to-detect threat" could be abused by attackers to collect users' browser fingerprinting information with the goal of spoofing the victims without their knowledge, thus effectively compromising their privacy. Academics from Texas A&M University dubbed the attack system " Gummy Browsers ," likening it to a nearly 20-year-old " Gummy Fingers " technique that can impersonate a user's fingerprint biometrics.  "The idea is that the attacker 𝐴 first makes the user 𝑈 connect to his website (or to a well-known site the attacker controls) and transparently collects the information from 𝑈 that is used for fingerprinting purposes (just like any fingerprinting website 𝑊 collects this information)," the researchers outlined. "Then, 𝐴 orchestrates a browser on his own machine to replicate and transmit the same fingerprinting information when connecting to 𝑊, fooling 𝑊 to think that 𝑈 is the one re...

The average cost of a data breach, according to the latest research by IBM, now stands at  USD 4.24 million , the highest reported. The leading cause? Compromised credentials, often caused by human error. Although these findings continue to show an upward trend in the wrong direction, the challenge itself is not new. What is new is the unprecedented and accelerated complexity of securing the workplace. CISOs/CIOs are dealing with legacy systems, cloud hosting, on-prem, remote workers, office based, traditional software, and SaaS. How businesses adapted was laudable, but now that employees spread across locations, offices and homes – with  more than half  threatening not to return to offices unless hybrid working is implemented – the challenge morphs into securing a nonuniform perimeter.  We know passwords aren’t sufficient. Knowledge-based access is usually fortified with other forms of multi-factor authentication (MFA), such as auth apps or FIDO tokens, and in hi...

Nobelium, the  threat actor  behind the SolarWinds compromise in December 2020, has been behind an ongoing wave of attacks that compromised 14 downstream customers of multiple cloud service providers (CSP), managed service providers (MSP), and other IT services organizations, illustrating the adversary's continuing interest in targeting the supply chain via the "compromise-one-to-compromise-many" approach. Microsoft, which disclosed details of the campaign on Monday, said it notified more than 140 resellers and technology service providers since May. Between July 1 and October 19, 2021, Nobelium is said to have singled out 609 customers, who were collectively attacked a grand total of 22,868 times. "This recent activity is another indicator that Russia is trying to gain long-term, systematic access to a variety of points in the technology supply chain and establish a mechanism for surveilling – now or in the future – targets of interest to the Russian government,...