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A persistent denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability has been discovered in Apple's iOS mobile operating system that's capable of sending affected devices into a crash or reboot loop upon connecting to an Apple Home-compatible appliance. The behavior, dubbed "doorLock," is trivial in that it can be triggered by simply changing the name of a HomeKit device to a string larger than 500,000 characters. This causes an iPhone or iPad that attempts to connect to the device to become unresponsive and enter an indefinite cycle of system failure and restart that can only be mitigated by restoring the affected device from Recovery or DFU (Device Firmware Update) Mode. HomeKit  is Apple's software framework that allows iOS and iPadOS users to configure, communicate with, and control connected accessories and smart-home appliances using Apple devices. "Any device with an affected iOS version installed that loads the string will be disrupted, even after rebooting,...

Trojanized installers of the Telegram messaging application are being used to distribute the Windows-based Purple Fox backdoor on compromised systems. That's according to new research published by Minerva Labs, describing the attack as different from intrusions that typically take advantage of legitimate software for dropping malicious payloads. "This threat actor was able to leave most parts of the attack under the radar by separating the attack into several small files, most of which had very low detection rates by [antivirus] engines, with the final stage leading to Purple Fox rootkit infection," researcher Natalie Zargarov  said . First discovered in 2018, Purple Fox comes with rootkit capabilities that allow the malware to be planted beyond the reach of security solutions and evade detection. A March 2021 report from Guardicore  detailed  its worm-like propagation feature, enabling the backdoor to spread more rapidly. Then in October 2021, Trend Micro researche...

Cybersecurity researchers have proposed a novel approach that harnesses electromagnetic field emanations from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices as a side-channel to glean precise knowledge about the different kinds of malware targeting the embedded systems, even in scenarios where obfuscation techniques have been applied to hinder analysis. With the rapid adoption of IoT appliances presenting an attractive attack surface for threat actors, in part due to them being equipped with higher processing power and capable of running fully functional operating systems, the latest research aims to improve malware analysis to mitigate potential security risks. The findings were presented by a group of academics from the Research Institute of Computer Science and Random Systems (IRISA) at the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference ( ACSAC ) held last month. "[Electromagnetic] emanation that is measured from the device is practically undetectable by the malware," the res...

In May 2017, the first documented ransomware assault on networked medical equipment happened. The worldwide ransomware assault WannaCry compromised radiological and other instruments in several hospitals during its height, after a software failure caused by a cyberattack on its third-party vendor's oncology cloud service, cancer patients having radiation therapy at four healthcare institutions had to reschedule appointments. These examples show how cyberattacks and data breaches may have a significant impact on the healthcare industry, heavily reliant on connected medical equipment. PHI (patient health information) captured and stored in these connected medical devices must be secured. Because PHI is transferred over the cloud via server-based systems, making it very susceptible to hackers. Ransomware attacks on health care professionals have become more common, sophisticated, and severe in recent years. Individual bad actors have been supplanted as the main perpetrators by orga...

Microsoft, over the weekend, rolled out a fix to address an issue that caused email messages to get stuck on its Exchange Server platforms due to what it blamed on a date validation error at around the turn of the year. "The problem relates to a date check failure with the change of the new year and it [is] not a failure of the [antivirus] engine itself," the company  said  in a blog post. "This is not an issue with malware scanning or the malware engine, and it is not a security-related issue. The version checking performed against the signature file is causing the malware engine to crash, resulting in messages being stuck in transport queues." The Windows maker said the issue impacted on-premises versions of Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2019 but didn't specify how widespread the impact was. The issue began to  gain   attention  as the year 2022 kicked in, causing the servers to no longer deliver email messages while throwing the following erro...

A previously unknown rootkit has been found setting its sights on Hewlett-Packard Enterprise's Integrated Lights-Out ( iLO ) server management technology to carry out in-the-wild attacks that tamper with the firmware modules and completely wipe data off the infected systems. The discovery, which is the first instance of real-world malware in iLO firmware, was documented by Iranian cybersecurity firm Amnpardaz this week. "There are numerous aspects of iLO that make it an ideal utopia for malware and APT groups: Extremely high privileges (above any level of access in the operating system), very low-level access to the hardware, being totally out of the sight of the admins, and security tools, the general lack of knowledge and tools for inspecting iLO and/or protecting it, the persistence it provides for the malware to remain even after changing the operating system, and in particular being always running and never shutting down," the researchers  said . Besides managin...

A never-before-seen China-based targeted intrusion adversary dubbed Aquatic Panda has been observed leveraging  critical flaws  in the Apache Log4j logging library as an access vector to perform various post-exploitation operations, including reconnaissance and credential harvesting on targeted systems. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said the infiltration, which was ultimately foiled, was aimed at an unnamed "large academic institution." The state-sponsored group is believed to have been operating since mid-2020 in pursuit of intelligence collection and industrial espionage, with its attacks primarily directed against companies in the telecommunications, technology, and government sectors. The attempted intrusion exploited the newly discovered  Log4Shell  flaw (CVE-2021-44228, CVSS score: 10.0) to gain access to a vulnerable instance of the  VMware Horizon  desktop and app virtualization product, followed by running a series of malicious commands orches...