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Russian internet giant Yandex has been the target of a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack by a new botnet called Mēris. The botnet is believed to have pummeled the company's web infrastructure with millions of HTTP requests, before hitting a peak of 21.8 million requests per second (RPS), dwarfing a recent botnet-powered attack that came to light last month,  bombarding  an unnamed Cloudflare customer in the financial industry with 17.2 million RPS. Russian DDoS mitigation service Qrator Labs, which disclosed details of the attack on Thursday, called  Mēris  — meaning "Plague" in the Latvian language — a "botnet of a new kind."  "It is also clear that this particular botnet is still growing. There is a suggestion that the botnet could grow in force through password brute-forcing, although we tend to neglect that as a slight possibility. That looks like some vulnerability that was either kept secret before the massive campaign...

WhatsApp on Friday  announced  it will roll out support for end-to-end encrypted chat backups on the cloud for Android and iOS users, paving the way for storing information such as chat messages and photos in Apple iCloud or Google Drive in a cryptographically secure manner. The optional feature, which will go live to all of its two billion users in the coming weeks, is expected to only work on the primary devices tied to their accounts, and not companion devices such as desktops or laptops that simply mirror the content of WhatsApp on the phones. The development marks an escalation in the growing tussle over encryption technology and meeting law enforcement needs, wherein privacy-preserving technologies have created impenetrable barriers to comply with legal demands to access vast swathes of digital information stored on smartphones and the cloud — a phenomenon referred to as the "going dark" problem. While the Facebook-owned messaging platform flipped the switch on end-...

The Linux community was caught unprepared when, in December 2020, as part of a change in the way Red Hat supports and develops CentOS, Red Hat suddenly announced that it's cutting the official CentOS 8 support window from ten years – to just two, with support ending Dec 31, 2021. It created a peculiar situation where CentOS 7 users that did the right thing and upgraded quickly to CentOS 8 were left using an OS with just a year's official support remaining – while users of CentOS 7 still get full support until June 30, 2024. Worse, the fact that stable releases of CentOS were discontinued in exchange for the rolling-release CentOS Stream means that to secure their workloads most CentOS 8 users have to opt for an entirely different Linux distribution, with just a year to choose, evaluate and implement an alternative. Red Hat's unexpected decision underlined to what degree software users depend on official support windows for their software security. Countless organization...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

A mix of banking applications, cryptocurrency wallets, and shopping apps from the U.S. and Spain are the target of a newly discovered Android trojan that could enable attackers to siphon personally identifiable information from infected devices, including banking credentials and open the door for on-device fraud. Dubbed S.O.V.A. (referring to the Russian word for owl), the current version of the banking malware comes with myriad features to steal credentials and session cookies through web overlay attacks, log keystrokes, hide notifications, and manipulate the clipboard to insert modified cryptocurrency wallet addresses, with future plans to incorporate  on-device fraud through VNC , carry out DDoS attacks, deploy ransomware, and even intercept two-factor authentication codes. The malware was discovered in the beginning of August 2021 by researchers from Amsterdam-based cybersecurity firm ThreatFabric. Overlay attacks typically involve the theft of confidential user informatio...

A previously undocumented backdoor that was recently found targeting an unnamed computer retail company based in the U.S. has been linked to a longstanding Chinese espionage operation dubbed Grayfly. In late August, Slovakian cybersecurity firm ESET  disclosed  details of an implant called SideWalk, which is designed to load arbitrary plugins sent from an attacker-controlled server, gather information about running processes in the compromised systems, and transmit the results back to the remote server. The cybersecurity firm attributed the intrusion to a group it tracks as SparklingGoblin, an adversary believed to be connected to the Winnti (aka APT41) malware family. But latest research published by researchers from Broadcom's Symantec has pinned the SideWalk backdoor on the China-linked espionage group, pointing out the malware's overlaps with the older Crosswalk malware, with the latest Grayfly hacking activities singling out a number of organizations in Mexico, Taiwa...

Microsoft on Wednesday said it remediated a vulnerability in its Azure Container Instances ( ACI ) services that could have been weaponized by a malicious actor "to access other customers' information" in what the researchers described as the "first cross-account container takeover in the public cloud." An attacker exploiting the weakness could execute malicious commands on other users' containers, steal customer secrets and images deployed to the platform. The Windows maker did not share any additional specifics related to the flaw, save that  affected customers  "revoke any privileged credentials that were deployed to the platform before August 31, 2021." Azure Container Instances is a managed service that allows users to run Docker  containers  directly in a serverless cloud environment, without requiring the use of virtual machines, clusters, or orchestrators. Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 threat intelligence team dubbed the vulnerabilit...

The operators behind the REvil ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS)  staged  a surprise return after a two-month hiatus following the widely publicized attack on technology services provider Kaseya on July 4. Two of the dark web portals, including the gang's Happy Blog data leak site and its payment/negotiation site, have resurfaced online, with the most recent victim added on July 8, five days before the sites  mysteriously went off the grid  on July 13. It's not immediately clear if REvil is back in the game or if they have launched new attacks. "Unfortunately, the Happy Blog is back online," Emsisoft threat researcher Brett Callow  tweeted  on Tuesday. The development comes a little over two months after a  wide-scale supply chain ransomware attack  aimed at Kaseya, which saw the Russia-based cybercrime gang encrypting approximately 60 managed service providers (MSPs) and over 1,500 downstream businesses using a zero-day vulnerability in the Kas...