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A new widespread ransomware attack is spreading like wildfire around Europe and has already affected over 200 major organisations, primarily in Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and Germany, in the past few hours. Dubbed " Bad Rabbit ," is reportedly a new Petya-like targeted ransomware attack against corporate networks, demanding 0.05 bitcoin (~ $285) as ransom from victims to unlock their systems. According to an initial analysis provided by the Kaspersky, the ransomware was distributed via drive-by download attacks, using fake Adobe Flash players installer to lure victims' in to install malware unwittingly. "No exploits were used, so the victim would have to manually execute the malware dropper, which pretends to be an Adobe Flash installer. We've detected a number of compromised websites, all of which were news or media websites." Kaspersky Lab said . However, security researchers at ESET have detected Bad Rabbit malware as ' Win32/Diskcoder.D ' —...

DUHK — Don't Use Hard-coded Keys — is a new 'non-trivial' cryptographic implementation vulnerability that could allow attackers to recover encryption keys that secure VPN connections and web browsing sessions. DUHK is the third crypto-related vulnerability reported this month after KRACK Wi-Fi attack and ROCA factorization attack . The vulnerability affects products from dozens of vendors, including Fortinet , Cisco, TechGuard, whose devices rely on ANSI X9.31 RNG — an outdated pseudorandom number generation algorithm — 'in conjunction with a hard-coded seed key.' Before getting removed from the list of FIPS-approved pseudorandom number generation algorithms in January 2016, ANSI X9.31 RNG was included into various cryptographic standards over the last three decades. Pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs) don't generate random numbers at all. Instead, it is a deterministic algorithm that produces a sequence of bits based on initial secret values called a...

Kaspersky Lab — We have nothing to hide! Russia-based Antivirus firm hits back with what it calls a " comprehensive transparency initiative ," to allow independent third-party review of its source code and internal processes to win back the trust of customers and infosec community. Kaspersky launches this initiative days after it was accused of helping, knowingly or unknowingly, Russian government hackers to steal classified material from a computer belonging to an NSA contractor. Earlier this month another story published by the New York Times claimed that Israeli government hackers hacked into Kaspersky 's network in 2015 and caught Russian hackers red-handed hacking US government with the help of Kaspersky. US officials have long been suspicious that Kaspersky antivirus firm may have ties to Russian intelligence agencies. Back in July, the company offered to turn over the source code for the U.S. government to audit. However, the offer did not stop U.S. Dep...

Security operations centers (SOCs) are under pressure from both sides: threats are growing more complex and frequent, while security budgets are no longer keeping pace. Today's security leaders are expected to reduce risk and deliver results without relying on larger teams or increased spending. At the same time, SOC inefficiencies are draining resources. Studies show that up to half of all alerts are false positives, with some reports citing false positive rates as high as 99 percent . This means highly trained analysts spend a disproportionate amount of time chasing down harmless activity, wasting effort, increasing fatigue, and raising the chance of missing real threats. In this environment, the business imperative is clear: maximize the impact of every analyst and every dollar by making security operations faster, smarter, and more focused. Enter the Agentic AI SOC Analyst The agentic AI SOC Analyst is a force multiplier that enables organizations to do more with the team an...

No doubt your Internet Service Provides (ISPs), or network-level hackers cannot spy on https communications. But do you know — ISPs can still see all of your DNS requests, allowing them to know what websites you visit. Google is working on a new security feature for Android that could prevent your Internet traffic from network spoofing attacks. Almost every Internet activity starts with a DNS query, making it a fundamental building block of the Internet. DNS works as an Internet's phone book that resolves human-readable web addresses, like thehackernews.com, against their IP addresses. DNS queries and responses are sent in clear text (using UDP or TCP) without encryption, which makes it vulnerable to eavesdropping and compromises privacy. ISPs by default resolve DNS queries from their servers. So when you type a website name in your browser, the query first goes to their DNS servers to find the website's IP address, which eventually exposes this information (metada...

Just a year after Mirai —biggest IoT-based malware that caused vast Internet outages by launching massive DDoS attacks—completed its first anniversary, security researchers are now warning of a brand new rapidly growing IoT botnet. Dubbed ' IoT_reaper ,' first spotted in September by researchers at firm Qihoo 360, the new malware no longer depends on cracking weak passwords; instead, it exploits vulnerabilities in various IoT devices and enslaves them into a botnet network. IoT_reaper malware currently includes exploits for nine previously disclosed vulnerabilities in IoT devices from following manufactures: Dlink (routers) Netgear (routers) Linksys (routers) Goahead (cameras) JAWS (cameras) AVTECH (cameras) Vacron (NVR) Researchers believe IoT_reaper malware has already infected nearly two million devices and growing continuously at an extraordinary rate of 10,000 new devices per day. This is extremely worrying because it took only 100,000 infected devices...

A newly discovered unpatched attacking method that exploits a built-in feature of Microsoft Office is currently being used in various widespread malware attack campaigns. Last week we reported how hackers could leveraging an old Microsoft Office feature called Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), to perform malicious code execution on the targeted device without requiring Macros enabled or memory corruption. DDE protocol is one of the several methods that Microsoft uses to allow two running applications to share the same data. The protocol is being used by thousands of apps, including MS Excel, MS Word, Quattro Pro, and Visual Basic for one-time data transfers and for continuous exchanges for sending updates to one another. The DDE exploitation technique displays no "security" warnings to victims, except asking them if they want to execute the application specified in the command—although this popup alert could also be eliminated "with proper syntax modification....