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The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday  added  single-factor authentication to the short list of "exceptionally risky" cybersecurity practices that could expose critical infrastructure as well as government and the private sector entities to devastating cyberattacks. Single-factor authentication is a  method  of signing in users to websites and remote systems by using only one way of verifying their identity, typically a combination of username and password. It's considered to be of low-security, since it heavily relies on "matching one factor — such as a password — to a username to gain access to a system." But with weak, reused, and common passwords posing a grave threat and emerging a lucrative attack vector, the use of single-factor authentication can lead to unnecessary risk of compromise and increase the possibility of account takeover by cybercriminals. With the latest development, the  list of bad practices  ...

Details have emerged about a now-patched security vulnerability impacting Microsoft Exchange Server that could be weaponized by an unauthenticated attacker to modify server configurations, thus leading to the disclosure of Personally Identifiable Information (PII). The issue, tracked as  CVE-2021-33766  (CVSS score: 7.3) and coined " ProxyToken ," was discovered by Le Xuan Tuyen, a researcher at the Information Security Center of Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group (VNPT-ISC), and reported through the Zero-Day Initiative (ZDI) program in March 2021. "With this vulnerability, an unauthenticated attacker can perform configuration actions on mailboxes belonging to arbitrary users," the ZDI  said  Monday. "As an illustration of the impact, this can be used to copy all emails addressed to a target and account and forward them to an account controlled by the attacker." Microsoft addressed the issue as part of its  Patch Tuesday updates  for July 2021...

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol or SMTP has easily exploitable security loopholes. Email routing protocols were designed in a time when cryptographic technology was at a nascent stage (e.g., the de-facto protocol for email transfer, SMTP, is nearly 40 years old now), and therefore security was not an important consideration.  As a result, in most email systems encryption is still opportunistic, which implies that if the opposite connection does not support TLS, it gets rolled back to an unencrypted one delivering messages in plaintext.  To mitigate SMTP security problems,  MTA-STS  (Mail Transfer Agent Strict Transport Security) is the recommended email authentication standard. It enforces TLS in order to allow MTAs to send emails securely. This means that it will only allow mail from MTAs that support TLS encryption, and it will only allow mail to go to MX hosts that support TLS encryption. In case an encrypted connection cannot be negotiated between communicating...

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A new ransomware family that emerged last month comes with its own bag of tricks to bypass ransomware protection by leveraging a novel technique called "intermittent encryption." Called  LockFile , the operators of the ransomware have been found exploiting recently disclosed flaws such as  ProxyShell  and  PetitPotam  to compromise Windows servers and deploy file-encrypting malware that scrambles only every alternate 16 bytes of a file, thereby giving it the ability to evade ransomware defences. "Partial encryption is generally used by ransomware operators to speed up the encryption process and we've seen it implemented by BlackMatter, DarkSide and LockBit 2.0 ransomware," Mark Loman, Sophos director of engineering, said in a statement. "What sets LockFile apart is that, unlike the others, it doesn't encrypt the first few blocks. Instead, LockFile encrypts every other 16 bytes of a document." "This means that a file such as a text documen...

Microsoft is warning of a widespread credential phishing campaign that leverages  open redirector links  in email communications as a vector to trick users into visiting malicious websites while effectively bypassing security software. "Attackers combine these links with social engineering baits that impersonate well-known productivity tools and services to lure users into clicking," Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team  said  in a report published this week. "Doing so leads to a series of redirections — including a CAPTCHA verification page that adds a sense of legitimacy and attempts to evade some automated analysis systems — before taking the user to a fake sign-in page. This ultimately leads to credential compromise, which opens the user and their organization to other attacks." Although redirect links in email messages serve a vital tool to take recipients to third-party websites or track click rates and measure the success of sales and marketin...

Google and Microsoft said they are pledging to invest a total of $30 billion in cybersecurity advancements over the next five years, as the U.S. government  partners  with private sector companies to address threats facing the country in the wake of a string of sophisticated malicious cyber activity targeting critical infrastructure, laying bare the risks to data, organizations, and governments worldwide. The White House cybersecurity meeting, which brought together executives from the education, energy, finance, insurance, and tech sectors, included companies like ADP, Amazon, Apple, Bank of America, Code.org, Girls Who Code, Google, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, and Vantage Group, among others. To that end, the U.S. government on Wednesday announced a collaboration between the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and industry partners to develop a new framework to improve the security and integrity of the technology supply chain, alongside plans to exp...