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In the last two weeks, Florida has paid more than $1.1 million in bitcoin to cybercriminals to recover encrypted files from two separate ransomware attacks—one against Riviera Beach and the other against Lake City . Lake City, a city in northern Florida, agreed on Monday to pay hackers 42 Bitcoin (equivalent to $573,300 at the current value) to unlock phone and email systems following a ransomware attack that crippled its computer systems for two weeks. The ransomware attack, dubbed "Triple Threat" since it combines three different methods of attack to target network systems, infected Lake City systems on June 10 after an employee in city hall opened a malicious email. Though the IT staff disconnected computers within just 10 minutes of the cyber attack starting, it was too late. The attack locked down the city workers' email accounts and servers. Since the police and fire departments operate on a different server, they were the only ones not impacted by the a...

A popular gaming platform used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide has been found vulnerable to multiple security flaws that could have allowed remote hackers to takeover players' accounts and steal sensitive data. The vulnerabilities in question reside in the "Origin" digital distribution platform developed by Electronic Arts (EA)—the world's second-largest gaming company with over 300 million users—that allows users to purchase and play some of the most popular video games including Battlefield, Apex Legends, Madden NFL, and FIFA. The Origin platform also manages users EA Games account authentication and allows them to find friends, join games, and manage their profiles. Discovered by researchers at Check Point and CyberInt, the vulnerabilities when chained together could have allowed attackers to hijack gamer's EA account just by convincing them into opening an official webpage from the EA Games website. To perform this attack, as shown in th...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning about an ongoing Android malware campaign that has been active since 2016 and was first publicly reported in August 2018. Dubbed " ViceLeaker " by researchers at Kaspersky, the campaign has recently been found targeting Israeli citizens and some other middle eastern countries with a powerful surveillance malware designed to steal almost all accessible information, including call recordings, text messages, photos, videos, and location data—all without users' knowledge. Besides these traditional spying functionalities, the malware also has backdoor capabilities including upload, download, and delete files, record surrounding audio, takeover camera, and make calls or send messages to specific numbers. The malware used in these campaigns was named " Triout " in a report published by Bitdefender in 2018, which is sort of a malware framework that attackers are using to turn legitimate applications into spyware by inject...

Microsoft has introduced a new password-protected folder within its OneDrive online file storage service that will allow you to keep your sensitive and important files protected and secured with an extra layer of authentication. Dubbed Personal Vault , the new OneDrive folder can only be accessed with an additional step of identity verification, such as your fingerprint, face, PIN, or a two-factor authentication code sent to you via email or SMS. The Personal Vault folder will appear next to other folders in the OneDrive app like your Documents and Pictures, but it will be locked and prompt you for an additional code each time you try to access them via the web, PC, or mobile devices, thus keeping them more secure in the event when someone gains access to your account or your device. Microsoft suggests this new protected area in OneDrive would be useful for users to store more sensitive and personal files like copies of passport, tax, car or home documents, identification cards,...

Cybersecurity researchers from Intego are warning about possible active exploitation of an unpatched security vulnerability in Apple's macOS Gatekeeper security feature details and PoC for which were publicly disclosed late last month. Intego team last week discovered four samples of new macOS malware on VirusTotal that leverage the GateKeeper bypass vulnerability to execute untrusted code on macOS without displaying users any warning or asking for their explicit permission. However, the newly discovered malware, dubbed OSX/Linker , has not been seen in the wild as of now and appears to be under development. Though the samples leverage unpatched Gatekeeper bypass flaw, it does not download any malicious app from the attacker's server. According to Joshua Long from Intego, until last week, the "malware maker was merely conducting some detection testing reconnaissance." "One of the files was signed with an Apple Developer ID (as explained below), it is ...

In recent years, several groups of cybersecurity researchers have disclosed dozens of memory side-channel vulnerabilities in modern processors and DRAM s, like Rowhammer , RAMBleed , Spectre, and Meltdown . Have you ever noticed they all had at least one thing in common? That's OpenSSH. As a proof-of-concept, many researchers demonstrated their side-channel attacks against OpenSSH application installed on a targeted computer, where an unprivileged attacker-owned process exploits memory read vulnerabilities to steal secret SSH private keys from the restricted memory regions of the system. That's possible because OpenSSH has an agent that keeps a copy of your SSH key in the memory so that you don't have to type your passphrase every time you want to connect to the same remote server. However, modern operating systems by default store sensitive data, including encryption keys and passwords, in the kernel memory which can not be accessed by user-level privileged p...

As we reported two days ago, Microsoft this week released an updated version of its Outlook app for Android that patches a severe remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2019-1105 ) that impacted over 100 million users. However, at that time, very few details of the flaw were available in the advisory, which just revealed that the earlier versions of the email app contained a cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw that could allow attackers to run scripts in the context of the current user just by sending a specially crafted email to the victims. Now, Bryan Appleby from F5 Networks, one of the security researchers who reported this issue independently to Microsoft, released more details and proof-of-concept for the Outlook vulnerability that he reported to the tech giant almost six months ago. In a blog post published Friday, Appleby revealed that while exchanging some JavaScript code with his friends over an email, he accidentally discovered a cross-site scripting (XSS) issue th...