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A new IoT botnet malware dubbed RapperBot has been observed rapidly evolving its capabilities since it was first discovered in mid-June 2022. "This family borrows heavily from the original  Mirai source code , but what separates it from other IoT malware families is its built-in capability to brute force credentials and gain access to SSH servers instead of Telnet as implemented in Mirai," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs  said  in a report. The malware, which gets its name from an embedded URL to a YouTube rap music video in an earlier version, is said to have amassed a growing collection of compromised SSH servers, with over 3,500 unique IP addresses used to scan and brute-force their way into the servers. RapperBot's current implementation also delineates it from Mirai, allowing it to primarily function as an SSH brute-force tool with limited capabilities to carry out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The deviation from traditional Mirai behavior is further ...

Twitter on Friday revealed that a now-patched zero-day bug was used to link phone numbers and emails to user accounts on the social media platform. "As a result of the vulnerability, if someone submitted an email address or phone number to Twitter's systems, Twitter's systems would tell the person what Twitter account the submitted email addresses or phone number was associated with, if any," the company  said  in an advisory. Twitter said the bug, which it was  made aware  of in January 2022, stemmed from a code change introduced in June 2021. No passwords were exposed as a result of the incident. The six-month delay in making this public stems from new evidence last month that an unidentified actor had potentially taken advantage of the flaw before the fix to scrape user information and sell it for profit on  Breach Forums . Although Twitter didn't reveal the exact number of impacted users, the forum post made by the threat actor shows that the flaw was ...

Slack said it took the step of resetting passwords for about 0.5% of its users after a flaw exposed salted password hashes when creating or revoking shared invitation links for workspaces. "When a user performed either of these actions, Slack transmitted a hashed version of their password to other workspace members," the enterprise communication and collaboration platform  said  in an alert on 4th August. Hashing refers to a cryptographic technique that transforms any form of data into a fixed-size output (called a hash value or simply hash).  Salting  is designed to add an extra security layer to the hashing process to make it resistant to brute-force attempts. The Salesforce-owned company, which reported more than  12 million daily active users  in September 2019, didn't reveal the exact  hashing algorithm  used to safeguard the passwords. The bug is said to have impacted all users who created or revoked shared invitation links between 17 ...

I had the honor of hosting the first episode of the Xposure Podcast live from Xposure Summit 2025. And I couldn't have asked for a better kickoff panel: three cybersecurity leaders who don't just talk security, they live it. Let me introduce them. Alex Delay , CISO at IDB Bank, knows what it means to defend a highly regulated environment. Ben Mead , Director of Cybersecurity at Avidity Biosciences, brings a forward-thinking security perspective that reflects the innovation behind Avidity's targeted RNA therapeutics. Last but not least, Michael Francess , Director of Cybersecurity Advanced Threat at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, leads the charge in protecting the franchise. Each brought a unique vantage point to a common challenge: applying Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) to complex production environments. Gartner made waves in 2023 with a bold prediction: organizations that prioritize CTEM will be three times less likely to be breached by 2026. But here's the kicker -...

A threat actor working to further Iranian goals is said to have been behind a set of damaging cyberattacks against Albanian government services in mid-July 2022. Cybersecurity firm Mandiant  said  the malicious activity against a NATO state represented a "geographic expansion of Iranian disruptive cyber operations." The  July 17 attacks , according to Albania's National Agency of Information Society, forced the government to "temporarily close access to online public services and other government websites" because of a "synchronized and sophisticated cybercriminal attack from outside Albania." The politically motivated disruptive operation, per Mandiant, entailed the deployment of a new ransomware family called ROADSWEEP that included a ransom note with the text: "Why should our taxes be spent on the benefit of DURRES terrorists?" A front named HomeLand Justice has since claimed responsibility for the cyber offensive, with the group als...

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has warned of critical security vulnerabilities in Emergency Alert System (EAS) encoder/decoder devices. If left unpatched, the issues could allow an adversary to issue fraudulent emergency alerts over TV, radio, and cable networks. The August 1 advisory comes courtesy of DHS' Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). CYBIR security researcher Ken Pyle has been credited with discovering the shortcoming. EAS is a U.S. national  public warning system  that enables state authorities to disseminate information within 10 minutes during an emergency. Such alerts can interrupt radio and television to broadcast emergency alert information. Details of the flaw have been kept under wraps to prevent active exploitation by malicious actors, although it's expected to be publicized as a proof-of-concept at the DEF CON conference to be held in Las Vegas next week. "In short, the vulnerability is public knowledge and will be demons...

Conflicting business requirements is a common problem – and you find it in every corner of an organization, including in information technology. Resolving these conflicts is a must, but it isn't always easy – though sometimes there is a novel solution that helps. In IT management there is a constant struggle between security and operations teams. Yes, both teams ultimately want to have secure systems that are harder to breach. However, security can come at the expense of availability – and vice versa. In this article, we'll look at the availability vs. security conflict, and a solution that helps to resolve that conflict. Ops team focus on availability… security teams lock down Operations teams will always have stability, and therefore availability, as a top priority. Yes, ops teams will make security a priority too but only as far as it touches on either stability or availability, never as an absolute goal. It plays out in the "five nines" uptime goal that sets an incredibly high...

A nascent service called Dark Utilities has already attracted 3,000 users for its ability to provide command-and-control (C2) services with the goal of commandeering compromised systems. "It is marketed as a means to enable remote access, command execution, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and cryptocurrency mining operations on infected systems," Cisco Talos  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Dark Utilities, which emerged in early 2022, is advertised as a "C2-as-a-Service" (C2aaS), offering access to infrastructure hosted on the clearnet as well as the TOR network and associated payloads with support for Windows, Linux, and Python-based implementations for a mere €9.99. Authenticated users on the platform are presented with a dashboard that makes it possible to generate new payloads tailored to a specific operating system that can then be deployed and executed on victim hosts. Additionally, users are provided an administrative panel ...