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Google on Monday introduced a new bug bounty program for its open source projects, offering payouts anywhere from $100 to $31,337 (a reference to  eleet or leet ) to secure the ecosystem from  supply chain attacks . Called the Open Source Software Vulnerability Rewards Program (OSS VRP), the offering is one of the first open source-specific vulnerability programs. With the tech giant the maintainer of major projects such as Angular, Bazel, Golang, Protocol Buffers, and Fuchsia, the program aims to reward vulnerability discoveries that could otherwise have a significant impact on the larger open source landscape.  Other projects managed by Google and hosted on public repositories such as GitHub as well as the third-party dependencies that are included in those projects are also eligible. Submissions  from bug hunters are expected to meet the following criteria - Vulnerabilities that lead to supply chain compromise Design issues that cause product vulnerabilit...

A months-long cyber espionage campaign undertaken by a Chinese nation-state group targeted several entities with reconnaissance malware so as to glean information about its victims and meet its strategic goals. "The targets of this recent campaign spanned Australia, Malaysia, and Europe, as well as entities that operate in the South China Sea," enterprise security firm Proofpoint  said  in a published in partnership with PwC. Targets encompass local and federal Australian Governmental agencies, Australian news media companies, and global heavy industry manufacturers which conduct maintenance of fleets of wind turbines in the South China Sea. Proofpoint and PwC attributed the intrusions with moderate confidence to a threat actor tracked by the two companies under the names TA423 and Red Ladon respectively, which is also known as APT40 and Leviathan. APT40 is the name designated to a China-based, espionage-motivated threat actor that's known to be active since 2013 and...

As many as three disparate but related campaigns between March and Jun 2022 have been found to deliver a variety of malware, including ModernLoader, RedLine Stealer, and cryptocurrency miners onto compromised systems. "The actors use PowerShell, .NET assemblies, and HTA and VBS files to spread across a targeted network, eventually dropping other pieces of malware, such as the  SystemBC  trojan and  DCRat , to enable various stages of their operations," Cisco Talos researcher Vanja Svajcer said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The malicious implant in question, ModernLoader , is designed to provide attackers with remote control over the victim's machine, which enables the adversaries to deploy additional malware, steal sensitive information, or even ensnare the computer in a botnet. Cisco Talos attributed the infections to a previously undocumented but Russian-speaking threat actor, citing the use of off-the-shelf tools. Potential targets included Eastern Eur...

As threat complexity increases and the boundaries of an organization have all but disappeared, security teams are more challenged than ever to deliver consistent security outcomes. One company aiming to help security teams meet this challenge is  Stellar Cyber .  Stellar Cyber claims to address the needs of MSSPs by providing capabilities typically found in NG-SIEM, NDR, and SOAR products in their Open XDR platform, managed with a single license. According to Stellar Cyber, this consolidation means faster security analyst ramp time and customer onboarding with far less manually intensive tasks required. Stellar Cyber currently counts 20+ of the top MSSP providers as customers, providing security for over 3 million assets. In addition, stellar Cyber claims after deployment, users see up to 20x faster mean time to respond (MTTR), a bold claim. We recently took a closer look at the Stellar Cyber Security Operations Platform.  Before we begin Before digging into the plat...

Akasa Air, India's newest commercial airline, exposed the personal data belonging to its customers that the company blamed on a technical configuration error. According to security researcher Ashutosh Barot , the issue is rooted in the account registration process, leading to the exposure of details such as names, gender, email addresses, and phone numbers. The bug was identified on August 7, 2022, the same day the low-cost airline commenced its operations in the country. "I found an HTTP request which gave my name, email, phone number, gender, etc. in JSON format," Barot  said  in a write-up. "I immediately changed some parameters in [the] request and I was able to see other user's PII. It took around ~30 minutes to find this issue." Upon receiving the report, the company  said  it temporarily shut down parts of its system to incorporate additional security guardrails. It has also reported the incident to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (...

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Monday warned of cyber criminals increasingly exploiting flaws in decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms to plunder cryptocurrency. "The FBI has observed cyber criminals exploiting vulnerabilities in the smart contracts governing DeFi platforms to steal investors' cryptocurrency," the agency  said  in a notification. Attackers are said to have used different methods to hack and steal cryptocurrency from DeFi platforms, including initiating flash loans that trigger exploits in the platforms' smart contracts and exploiting signature verification flaws in their token bridge to withdraw all investments. The agency has also observed criminals defrauding the platforms by manipulating cryptocurrency price pairs – assets that can be traded for each other on an exchange – by exploiting a series of vulnerabilities to bypass  slippage checks  and steal roughly $35 million in digital funds. It further said that the threat a...

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Monday said it filed a lawsuit against Kochava, a location data broker, for collecting and selling precise geolocation data gathered from consumers' mobile devices. The complaint alleges that the U.S. company  amasses  a "wealth of information" about users by purchasing data from other data brokers to sell to its own clients. "Kochava then sells customized data feeds to its clients to, among other purposes, assist in advertising and analyzing foot traffic at stores or other locations," the FTC  said . "Among other categories, Kochava sells timestamped latitude and longitude coordinates showing the location of mobile devices." The Idaho-based company advertises itself as a "real-time data solutions company" and the "largest independent data marketplace for connected devices." It also claims its  Kochava Collective  data marketplace provides "premium data feeds, audience targeting, a...