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A British court has rejected the U.S. government's request to extradite Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to the country on charges pertaining to illegally obtaining and sharing classified material related to national security. In a hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court today, Judge Vanessa Baraitser denied the extradition on the grounds that Assange is a suicide risk and extradition to the U.S. prison system would be oppressive. "I find that the mental condition of Mr. Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America," judge Baraitser  said  in a 132-page ruling. The U.S. government is expected to appeal the decision. The case against Assange centers on WikiLeaks' publication of hundreds of thousands of leaked documents about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as well as diplomatic cables, in 2010 and 2011. The documents include "approximately 90,000 Afghanistan war-related significant activity reports, 400,0...

Ticketmaster has agreed to pay a $10 million fine after being charged with illegally accessing computer systems of a competitor repeatedly between 2013 and 2015 in an attempt to "cut [the company] off at the knees." A subsidiary of Live Nation, the California-based ticket sales and distribution company used the stolen information to gain an advantage over CrowdSurge — which merged with Songkick in 2015 and later acquired by Warner Music Group (WMG) in 2017 — by hiring a former employee to break into its tools and gain insight into the firm's operations. "Ticketmaster employees repeatedly – and illegally – accessed a competitor's computers without authorization using stolen passwords to unlawfully collect business intelligence,"  said  Acting U.S. Attorney Seth DuCharme. "Further, Ticketmaster's employees brazenly held a division-wide 'summit' at which the stolen passwords were used to access the victim company's computers, as if th...

Zyxel has released a patch to address a critical vulnerability in its firmware concerning a hardcoded, undocumented secret account that could be abused by an attacker to login with administrative privileges and compromise its networking devices. The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2020-29583  (CVSS score 7.8), affects  version 4.60  present in a wide-range of Zyxel devices, including Unified Security Gateway (USG), USG FLEX, ATP, and VPN firewall products. EYE researcher  Niels Teusink  reported the vulnerability to Zyxel on November 29, following which the company released a firmware patch (ZLD V4.60 Patch1) on December 18. According to the  advisory  published by Zyxel, the undocumented account ("zyfwp") comes with an unchangeable password that's not only stored in plaintext but could also be used by a malicious third-party to login to the SSH server or web interface with admin privileges. Zyxel said the hardcoded credentials were put in place to de...

Microsoft on Thursday revealed that the threat actors behind the SolarWinds supply chain attack were able to gain access to a small number of internal accounts and escalate access inside its internal network. The "very sophisticated nation-state actor" used the unauthorized access to view, but not modify, the source code present in its repositories, the company said. "We detected unusual activity with a small number of internal accounts and upon review, we discovered one account had been used to view source code in a number of source code repositories," the Windows maker  disclosed  in an update. "The account did not have permissions to modify any code or engineering systems and our investigation further confirmed no changes were made. These accounts were investigated and remediated." The development is the latest in the far-reaching  espionage saga  that came to light earlier in December following revelations by cybersecurity firm FireEye that attac...

Google has patched a bug in its feedback tool incorporated across its services that could be exploited by an attacker to potentially steal screenshots of sensitive Google Docs documents simply by embedding them in a malicious website. The flaw was discovered on July 9 by security researcher  Sreeram KL , for which he was awarded $3133.70 as part of Google's Vulnerability Reward Program. Many of Google's products, including Google Docs, come with a " Send feedback " or "Help Docs improve" option that allows users to send feedback along with an option to include a screenshot — something that's automatically loaded to highlight specific issues. But instead of having to duplicate the same functionality across its services, the feedback feature is deployed in Google's main website ("www.google.com") and integrated to other domains via an iframe element that loads the pop-up's content from "feedback.googleusercontent.com." Th...

Threat actors have been discovered distributing a new credential stealer written in AutoHotkey (AHK) scripting language as part of an ongoing campaign that started early 2020. Customers of financial institutions in the US and Canada are among the primary targets for credential exfiltration, with a specific focus on banks such as Scotiabank, Royal Bank of Canada, HSBC, Alterna Bank, Capital One, Manulife, and EQ Bank. Also included in the list is an Indian banking firm ICICI Bank. AutoHotkey  is an open-source custom scripting language for Microsoft Windows aimed at providing easy hotkeys for macro-creation and software automation that allows users to automate repetitive tasks in any Windows application. The multi-stage infection chain commences with a malware-laced Excel file that's embedded with a Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)  AutoOpen  macro, which is subsequently used to drop and execute the downloader client script ("adb.ahk") via a legitimate portable AHK...