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Two client-side risks dominate the problems with data loss and data exfiltration: improperly placed trackers on websites and web applications and malicious client-side code pulled from third-party repositories like NPM.  Client-side security researchers are finding that improperly placed trackers, while not intentionally malicious, are a growing problem and have clear and significant privacy implications when it comes to both compliance/regulatory concerns, like HIPAA or PCI DSS 4.0. To highlight the risks with misplaced trackers, a  recent study  by The Markup (a non-profit news organization) examined Newsweek's top 100 hospitals in America. They found a Facebook tracker on one-third of the hospital websites which sent Facebook highly personal healthcare data whenever the user clicked the "schedule appointment" button. The data was not necessarily anonymized, because the data was connected to an IP address, and both the IP address and the appointment information get de...

A new method devised to leak information and jump over air-gaps takes advantage of Serial Advanced Technology Attachment ( SATA ) or Serial ATA cables as a communication medium, adding to a  long list  of electromagnetic, magnetic, electric, optical, and acoustic methods already demonstrated to plunder data. "Although air-gap computers have no wireless connectivity, we show that attackers can use the SATA cable as a wireless antenna to transfer radio signals at the 6GHz frequency band," Dr. Mordechai Guri, the head of R&D in the Cyber Security Research Center in the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel,  wrote  in a paper published last week. The technique, dubbed  SATAn , takes advantage of the prevalence of the computer bus interface, making it "highly available to attackers in a wide range of computer systems and IT environments." Put simply, the goal is to use the SATA cable as a covert channel to emanate electromagnetic signals and transfer ...

Google has taken steps to ax dozens of fraudulent apps from the official Play Store that were spotted propagating Joker, Facestealer, and Coper malware families through the virtual marketplace. While the Android storefront is considered to be a trusted source for discovering and installing apps, bad actors have repeatedly found ways to sneak past security barriers erected by Google in hopes of luring unsuspecting users into downloading malware-laced apps. The latest findings from  Zscaler ThreatLabz  and  Pradeo  are no different. "Joker is one of the most  prominent malware families  targeting Android devices," researchers Viral Gandhi and Himanshu Sharma said in a Monday report. "Despite public awareness of this particular malware, it keeps finding its way into Google's official app store by regularly modifying the malware's trace signatures including updates to the code, execution methods, and payload-retrieving techniques." Categorized as  fl...

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has warned of cyber criminals building rogue cryptocurrency-themed apps to defraud investors in the virtual assets space. "The FBI has observed cyber criminals contacting U.S. investors, fraudulently claiming to offer legitimate cryptocurrency investment services, and convincing investors to download fraudulent mobile apps, which the cyber criminals have used with increasing success over time to defraud the investors of their cryptocurrency," the agency  said  [PDF]. The illicit scheme, which aims to take advantage of increased interest in the crypto sector, is believed to have netted 244 victims, with losses estimated at $42.7 million between October 4, 2021, and May 13, 2022. According to the law enforcement authority, threat actors are misusing the names, logos, and other identifying information of legitimate businesses to create fake websites in an attempt to lure potential investors. In three instances highlighted by ...

With speculative execution attacks remaining a stubbornly persistent vulnerability ailing modern processors, new research has highlighted an "industry failure" to adopt mitigations released by AMD and Intel, posing a firmware supply chain threat. Dubbed  FirmwareBleed  by Binarly, the information leaking assaults stem from the continued exposure of microarchitectural attack surfaces on the part of enterprise vendors either as a result of not correctly incorporating the fixes or only using them partially. "The impact of such attacks is focused on disclosing the content from privileged memory (including protected by virtualization technologies) to obtain sensitive data from processes running on the same processor (CPU)," the firmware protection firm  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Cloud environments can have a greater impact when a physical server can be shared by multiple users or legal entities." In recent years, implementations of sp...

Thai activists involved in the country's pro-democracy protests have had their smartphones infected with NSO Group's infamous Pegasus government-sponsored spyware. At least 30 individuals, spanning activists, academics, lawyers, and NGO workers, are believed to have been targeted between October 2020 and November 2021, many of whom have been previously detained, arrested and imprisoned for their political activities or criticism of the government. "The timing of the infections is highly relevant to specific political events in Thailand, as well as specific actions by the Thai justice system," the Citizen Lab  said  in a Sunday report. "In many cases, for example, infections occurred slightly before protests and other political activities by the victims." The findings are the result of  threat notifications  sent by Apple last November to alert users it believes have been targeted by state-sponsored attackers. The attacks entailed the use of two zero-cl...

Researchers from Wordfence have  sounded  the alarm about a "sudden" spike in cyber attacks attempting to exploit an unpatched flaw in a WordPress plugin called  Kaswara Modern WPBakery Page Builder Addons . Tracked as  CVE-2021-24284 , the issue is rated 10.0 on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system and relates to an unauthenticated arbitrary file upload that could be abused to gain code execution, permitting attackers to seize control of affected WordPress sites. Although the bug was originally  disclosed  in April 2021 by the WordPress security company, it continues to remain unresolved to date. To make matters worse, the plugin has been closed and is no longer actively maintained. Wordfence, which is protecting over 1,000 websites that have the plugin installed, said it has blocked an average of 443,868 attack attempts per day since the start of the month. The attacks have emanated from 10,215 IP addresses, with a majority of the exploitation att...