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A United States regulator has fined the credit card provider Capital One Financial Corp with $80 million over last year's data breach that exposed the personal information of more than 100 million credit card applicants of Americans. The fine was imposed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), an independent bureau within the United States Department of the Treasury that governs the execution of laws relating to national banks. According to a press release published by the OCC on Thursday, Capital One failed to establish appropriate risk management before migrating its IT operations to a public cloud-based service, which included appropriate design and implementation of certain network security controls, adequate data loss prevention controls, and effective dispositioning of alerts. The OCC also said that the credit card provider also left numerous weaknesses in its cloud-based data storage in an internal audit in 2015 as well as failed to patch security ...

Cybersecurity researchers today highlighted an evasive phishing technique that attackers are exploiting in the wild to target visitors of several sites with a quirk in domain names, and leverage modified favicons to inject e-skimmers and steal payment card information covertly. "The idea is simple and consists of using characters that look the same in order to dupe users," Malwarebytes researchers said in a Thursday analysis . "Sometimes the characters are from a different language set or simply capitalizing the letter 'i' to make it appear like a lowercase 'l'." Called an internationalized domain name (IDN) homograph attack , the technique has been used by a Magecart group on multiple domains to load the popular Inter skimming kit hidden inside a favicon file . The visual trickery typically involves leveraging the similarities of character scripts to create and register fraudulent domains of existing ones to deceive unsuspecting users into...

For much of this year, IT professionals all over the globe have had their hands full, finding ways to help businesses cope with the fallout of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. In many cases, it involved a rapid rollout of significant remote work infrastructure. That infrastructure was called into service with little to no warning and even less opportunity for testing. Needless to say, the situation wasn't ideal from a cybersecurity standpoint. And hackers all over the world knew it. Almost immediately, Google reported a significant increase in malicious activity, and Microsoft noted trends that appeared to back that up. The good news is that the wave of cyberattacks unleashed by the pandemic peaked in April and has since died down. Fortunately, that's allowing IT professionals and network administrators everywhere to take a deep breath and take stock of the new security environment they're now operating in. The trouble is, there's still so much uncertainty ...

It turns out that the root cause behind several previously disclosed speculative execution attacks against modern processors, such as Meltdown and Foreshadow , was misattributed to 'prefetching effect,' resulting in hardware vendors releasing incomplete mitigations and countermeasures. Sharing its findings with The Hacker News, a group of academics from the Graz University of Technology and CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security finally revealed the exact reason behind why the kernel addresses are cached in the first place, as well as presented several new attacks that exploit the previously unidentified underlying issue, allowing attackers to sniff out sensitive data. The new research explains microarchitectural attacks were actually caused by speculative dereferencing of user-space registers in the kernel, which not just impacts the most recent Intel CPUs with the latest hardware mitigations, but also several modern processors from ARM, IBM, and AMD — previou...

A new research has identified four new variants of HTTP request smuggling attacks that work against various commercial off-the-shelf web servers and HTTP proxy servers. Amit Klein, VP of Security Research at SafeBreach who presented the findings today at the Black Hat security conference, said that the attacks highlight how web servers and HTTP proxy servers are still susceptible to HTTP request smuggling even after 15 years since they were first documented. What is HTTP Request Smuggling? HTTP request smuggling (or HTTP Desyncing) is a technique employed to interfere with the way a website processes sequences of HTTP requests that are received from one or more users. Vulnerabilities related to HTTP request smuggling typically arise when the front-end (a load balancer or proxy) and the back-end servers interpret the boundary of an HTTP request differently, thereby allowing a bad actor to send (or "smuggle") an ambiguous request that gets prepended to the next le...

Many companies today have developed a Cybersecurity Incident Response (IR) plan. It's a sound security practice to prepare a comprehensive IR plan to help the organization react to a sudden security incident in an orderly, rational manner. Otherwise, the organization will develop a plan while frantically responding to the incident, a recipe ripe for mistakes. Heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson once said, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." A significant cybersecurity incident is an equivalent punch in the mouth to the cybersecurity team and perhaps the entire organization. At least at first. Developing an Incident Response plan is undoubtedly smart, but it only gets the organization so far. Depending on the severity of the incident and the level of cybersecurity expertise within the breached organization, a cybersecurity incident often leads to panic and turmoil within the organization – plan or no plan. It's very unsettling to have system...

Apple earlier this year fixed a security vulnerability in iOS and macOS that could have potentially allowed an attacker to gain unauthorized access to a user's iCloud account. Uncovered in February by Thijs Alkemade , a security specialist at IT security firm Computest, the flaw resided in Apple's implementation of TouchID (or FaceID) biometric feature that authenticated users to log in to websites on Safari, specifically those that use Apple ID logins. After the issue was reported to Apple through their responsible disclosure program, the iPhone maker addressed the vulnerability in a server-side update . An Authentication Flaw The central premise of the flaw is as follows. When users try to sign in to a website that requires an Apple ID, a prompt is displayed to authenticate the login using Touch ID. Doing so skips the two-factor authentication step since it already leverages a combination of factors for identification, such as the device (something you have) and...

Intelligence agencies in the US have released information about a new variant of 12-year-old computer virus used by China's state-sponsored hackers targeting governments, corporations, and think tanks. Named " Taidoor, " the malware has done an 'excellent' job of compromising systems as early as 2008 , with the actors deploying it on victim networks for stealthy remote access. "[The] FBI has high confidence that Chinese government actors are using malware variants in conjunction with proxy servers to maintain a presence on victim networks and to further network exploitation," the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of Defense (DoD) said in a joint advisory . The US Cyber Command has also uploaded four samples of the Taidoor RAT on the public malware repository VirusTotal to let 50+ Antivirus companies check the virus's involvement in other unattributed cam...