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Microsoft is urging customers to patch two security vulnerabilities in Active Directory domain controllers that it  addressed in November  following the availability of a proof-of-concept (PoC) tool on December 12. The two vulnerabilities — tracked as  CVE-2021-42278  and  CVE-2021-42287  — have a severity rating of 7.5 out of a maximum of 10 and concern a privilege escalation flaw affecting the Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) component. Credited with discovering and reporting both the bugs is Andrew Bartlett of Catalyst IT. Active Directory is a  directory service  that runs on Microsoft Windows Server and is used for identity and access management. Although the tech giant marked the shortcomings as " exploitation Less Likely " in its assessment, the public disclosure of the PoC has prompted renewed calls for applying the fixes to mitigate any potential exploitation by threat actors. While CVE-2021-42278 enables an attacker to tamp...

The transportation industry and government agencies related to the sector are the victims of an ongoing campaign since July 2020 by a sophisticated and well-equipped cyberespionage group in what appears to be yet another uptick in malicious activities that are "just the tip of the iceberg." "The group tried to access some internal documents (such as flight schedules and documents for financial plans) and personal information on the compromised hosts (such as search histories)," Trend Micro researchers Nick Dai, Ted Lee, and Vickie Su  said  in a report published last week. Earth Centaur, also known by the monikers  Pirate Panda  and Tropic Trooper, is a long-running threat group focused on information theft and espionage that has led targeted campaigns against government, healthcare, transportation, and high-tech industries in Taiwan, the Philippines, and Hong Kong dating all the way back to 2011. The hostile agents, believed to be a Chinese-speaking actor, are...

Even with the growing awareness about cybersecurity, many myths about it are prevalent. These misconceptions can be a barrier to effective security.  The first step to ensure the security of your business is to separate the false information, myths, and rumors from the truth. Here, we're busting some common cybersecurity myths. Read on to find out which of the following you thought were true. Cybersecurity Myths vs. Truths Myth #1 — Too much security diminishes productivity There is a common idea that increased security makes it difficult for even employees to access what they need, not just hackers. Strict security policies such as regular monitoring and access control are believed to hinder productivity at work. However, doing away with security may have far-reaching consequences for your business. A successful attack like a  DDoS attack or ransomware can bring your business to a standstill. Employees might not be able to access important files, networks, and info...

Multiple backdoors have been discovered during a penetration test in the firmware of a widely used voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) appliance from Auerswald, a German telecommunications hardware manufacturer, that could be abused to gain full administrative access to the devices. "Two backdoor passwords were found in the firmware of the  COMpact 5500R PBX ," researchers from RedTeam Pentesting said in a  technical   analysis  published Monday. "One backdoor password is for the secret user ' Schandelah ', the other can be used for the highest-privileged user ' admin .' No way was discovered to disable these backdoors." The vulnerability has been assigned the identifier  CVE-2021-40859  and carries a critical severity rating of 9.8. Following responsible disclosure on September 10, Auerswald addressed the problem in a firmware update (version 8.2B) released in November 2021. "Firmware Update 8.2B contains important security updates that you...

Facebook's parent company Meta Platforms on Monday said it has filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. state of California against bad actors who operated more than 39,000 phishing websites that impersonated its digital properties to mislead unsuspecting users into divulging their login credentials. The social engineering scheme involved the creation of rogue webpages that masqueraded as the login pages of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, on which victims were prompted to enter their usernames and passwords that were then harvested by the defendants. The tech giant is also seeking $500,000 from the anonymous actors. The attacks were carried out using a relay service, Ngrok , that redirected internet traffic to the phishing websites in a manner that concealed the true location of the fraudulent infrastructure. Meta said the volume of these phishing attacks ramped up in volume since March 2021 and that it worked with the relay service to suspend thousands of URLs to the...

Researchers have disclosed security vulnerabilities in handover, a fundamental mechanism that undergirds modern cellular networks, which could be exploited by adversaries to launch denial-of-service (DoS) and man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks using low-cost equipment. The "vulnerabilities in the handover procedure are not limited to one handover case only but they impact all different handover cases and scenarios that are based on unverified measurement reports and signal strength thresholds," researchers Evangelos Bitsikas and Christina Pöpper from the New York University Abu Dhabi said in a  new paper . "The problem affects all generations since 2G (GSM), remaining unsolved so far." Handover , also known as handoff, is a process in telecommunications in which a phone call or a data session is transferred from one  cell site  (aka base station) to another cell tower without losing connectivity during the transmission. This method is crucial to establishing cellul...

The last several years have seen an ever-increasing number of cyber-attacks, and while the frequency of such attacks has increased, so too has the resulting damage. One needs only to look at  CISA's list of significant cyber incidents  to appreciate the magnitude of the problem. In May of 2021, for example, a ransomware attack brought down the Colonial Pipeline, causing a serious fuel disruption for much of the United States. Just last month, a hacking group gained access to call logs and text messages from telecommunications carriers all over the world. These are just two of dozens of cyber-attacks occurring this year. Because of these and other cyber security incidents, the Department of Homeland Security issues a  compulsory directive  to federal agencies to better protect federal information systems and the data that they contain against cyber-attack. This directive is based around  CISA's catalog of vulnerabilities  that are known to pose a signific...