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Facebook today revealed yet another security incident admitting that roughly 100 app developers may have improperly accessed its users' data in certain Facebook groups, including their names and profile pictures. In a blog post published Tuesday, Facebook said the app developers that unauthorizedly access this information were primarily social media management and video streaming apps that let group admins manage their groups more effectively and help members share videos to the groups, respectively. For those unaware, Facebook made some changes to its Group API in April 2018, a month after the revelation of the Cambridge Analytica scandal , limiting apps integrated with a group to only access information, like the group's name, the number of members and the posts' content. To get access to additional information like names and profile pictures of members in connection with group activities, group members had to opt-in. However, it seems like Facebook once again fa...

Mozilla, in partnership with Facebook, Cloudflare, and other IETF community members, has announced technical specifications for a new cryptographic protocol called " Delegated Credentials for TLS ." Delegated Credentials for TLS is a new simplified way to implement "short-lived" certificates without sacrificing the reliability of secure connections. In short, the new TLS protocol extension aims to effectively prevent the misuse of stolen certificates by reducing their maximum validity period to a very short span of time, such as a few days or even hours. Before jumping into how Delegated Credentials for TLS works, you need to understand the current TLS infrastructure, and of course, about the core problem in it because of which we need Delegated Credentials for TLS. The Current TLS Infrastructure More than 70% of all websites on the Internet today use TLS certificates to establish a secure line of HTTPS communication between their servers and visitors, ...

A team of cybersecurity researchers has discovered a clever technique to remotely inject inaudible and invisible commands into voice-controlled devices — all just by shining a laser at the targeted device instead of using spoken words. Dubbed ' Light Commands ,' the hack relies on a vulnerability in MEMS microphones embedded in widely-used popular voice-controllable systems that unintentionally respond to light as if it were sound. According to experiments done by a team of researchers from Japanese and Michigan Universities, a remote attacker standing at a distance of several meters away from a device can covertly trigger the attack by simply modulating the amplitude of laser light to produce an acoustic pressure wave. "By modulating an electrical signal in the intensity of a light beam, attackers can trick microphones into producing electrical signals as if they are receiving genuine audio," the researchers said in their paper [ PDF ]. Doesn't this so...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

Everis , one of the largest IT consulting companies in Spain, suffered a targeted ransomware attack on Monday, forcing the company to shut down all its computer systems until the issue gets resolved completely. Ransomware is a computer virus that encrypts files on an infected system until a ransom is paid. According to several local media, Everis informed its employees about the devastating widespread ransomware attack, saying: "We are suffering a massive virus attack on the Everis network. Please keep the PCs off. The network has been disconnected with clients and between offices. We will keep you updated." "Please, urgently transfer the message directly to your teams and colleagues due to standard communication problems." According to cybersecurity consultant  Arnau Estebanell Castellví , the malware encrypted files on Everis's computers with an extension name resembling the company's name, i.e., " .3v3r1s ," which suggests the at...

If you're using the popular rConfig network configuration management utility to protect and manage your network devices, here we have an important and urgent warning for you. A cybersecurity researcher has recently published details and proof-of-concept exploits for two unpatched, critical remote code execution vulnerabilities in the rConfig utility, at least one of which could allow unauthenticated remote attackers to compromise targeted servers, and connected network devices. Written in native PHP, rConfig is a free, open source network device configuration management utility that allows network engineers to configure and take frequent configuration snapshots of their network devices. According to the project website, rConfig is being used to manage more than 3.3 million network devices, including switches, routers, firewalls, load-balancer, WAN optimizers. What's more worrisome? Both vulnerabilities affect all versions of rConfig, including the latest rConfig ver...

Cybersecurity researchers have spotted a new cyberattack that is believed to be the very first but an amateur attempt to weaponize the infamous BlueKeep RDP vulnerability in the wild to mass compromise vulnerable systems for cryptocurrency mining. In May this year, Microsoft released a patch for a highly-critical remote code execution flaw, dubbed  BlueKeep , in its Windows Remote Desktop Services that could be exploited remotely to take full control over vulnerable systems just by sending specially crafted requests over RDP. BlueKeep, tracked as CVE-2019-0708 , is a wormable vulnerability because it can be weaponized by potential malware to propagate itself from one vulnerable computer to another automatically without requiring victims' interaction. BlueKeep has been considered to be such a serious threat that since its discovery, Microsoft and even government agencies [ NSA and GCHQ ] had continuously been encouraging Windows users and admins to apply security p...

Attention readers, if you are using Chrome on your Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, you need to update your web browsing software immediately to the latest version Google released earlier today. With the release of Chrome 78.0.3904.87, Google is warning billions of users to install an urgent software update immediately to patch two high severity vulnerabilities, one of which attackers are actively exploiting in the wild to hijack computers. Without revealing technical details of the vulnerability, the Chrome security team only says that both issues are use-after-free vulnerabilities, one affecting Chrome's audio component ( CVE-2019-13720 ) while the other resides in the PDFium ( CVE-2019-13721 ) library. The use-after-free vulnerability is a class of memory corruption issues that allows corruption or modification of data in the memory, enabling an unprivileged user to escalate privileges on an affected system or software. Thus, both flaws could enable remote attackers...

A group of Chinese hackers carrying out political espionage for Beijing has been found targeting telecommunications companies with a new piece of malware designed to spy on text messages sent or received by highly targeted individuals. Dubbed " MessageTap ," the backdoor malware is a 64-bit ELF data miner that has recently been discovered installed on a Linux-based Short Message Service Center (SMSC) server of an unnamed telecommunications company. According to a recent report published by FireEye's Mandiant firm, MessageTap has been created and used by APT41 , a prolific Chinese hacking group that carries out state-sponsored espionage operations and has also been found involved in financially motivated attacks. In mobile telephone networks, SMSC servers act as a middle-man service responsible for handling the SMS operations by routing messages between senders and recipients. Since SMSes are not designed to be encrypted, neither on transmitting nor on the telec...