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The cybercrime ring that was apprehended last week in connection with Clop (aka Cl0p) ransomware attacks against dozens of companies in the last few months helped launder money totaling $500 million for several malicious actors through a plethora of illegal activities. "The group — also known as FANCYCAT — has been running multiple criminal activities: distributing cyber attacks; operating a high-risk exchanger; and laundering money from dark web operations and high-profile cyber attacks such as Cl0p and Petya ransomware," popular cryptocurrency exchange Binance  said  Thursday. On June 16, the Ukraine Cyber Police  nabbed six individuals  in the city of Kyiv, describing the arrests as resulting from an international operation involving law enforcement authorities from Korea, the U.S., and Interpol. While the bust was seen as a major blow to the operations of the Clop gang, the hackers published earlier this week a fresh batch of confidential employee records st...

Cybersecurity researchers on Thursday disclosed a chain of vulnerabilities affecting the BIOSConnect feature within Dell Client BIOS that could be abused by a privileged network adversary to gain arbitrary code execution at the BIOS/UEFI level of the affected device. "As the attacker has the ability to remotely execute code in the pre-boot environment, this can be used to subvert the operating system and undermine fundamental trust in the device," researchers from enterprise device security firm Eclypsium said . "The virtually unlimited control over a device that this attack can provide makes the fruit of the labor well worth it for the attacker." In all, the flaws affect 128 Dell models spanning across consumer and business laptops, desktops, and tablets, totalling an estimated 30 million individual devices. Worse, the weaknesses also impact computers that have  Secure Boot  enabled, a security feature designed to prevent  rootkits from being installed  at boot...

Enterprise applications used to live securely in data centers and office employees connected to internal networks using company-managed laptops or desktops. And data was encircled by a walled perimeter to keep everything safe. All that changed in the last 18 months. Businesses and employees had to adapt quickly to cloud technology and remote work. The cloud gave businesses the agility to respond faster to change and the scale to accommodate rapid growth. Remote work boosted productivity by letting employees access cloud data from anywhere on any device. This is not business as usual. The data center and the perimeter security are no longer the center of the universe. Now remote workers, personal mobile devices, applications, and data are in the middle. Although employees, applications, and data have left the building, IT security teams still shoulder the responsibility for protecting confidential data and ensuring compliance with strict privacy regulations. The risk of not doing so...

Cybersecurity researchers on Wednesday disclosed critical flaws in the Atlassian project and software development platform that could be exploited to take over an account and control some of the apps connected through its single sign-on ( SSO ) capability. "With just one click, an attacker could have used the flaws to get access to Atlassian's publish Jira system and get sensitive information, such as security issues on Atlassian cloud, Bitbucket and on premise products," Check Point Research said in an analysis shared with The Hacker News. After the issues were reported to Atlassian on Jan. 8, 2021, the Australian company deployed a fix as part of its  updates  rolled out on  May 18 . The sub-domains affected by the flaws include -  jira.atlassian.com confluence.atlassian.com getsupport.atlassian.com partners.atlassian.com developer.atlassian.com support.atlassian.com training.atlassian.com Successful exploitation of these flaws could result in a supp...

VMware has rolled out security updates to resolve a critical flaw affecting Carbon Black App Control that could be exploited to bypass authentication and take control of vulnerable systems. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2021-21998, is rated 9.4 out of 10 in severity by the industry-standard Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) and affects App Control (AppC) versions 8.0.x, 8.1.x, 8.5.x, and 8.6.x. Carbon Black App Control  is a security solution designed to lock down critical systems and servers to prevent unauthorized changes in the face of cyber-attacks and ensure compliance with regulatory mandates such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, SOX, FISMA, and NERC. "A malicious actor with network access to the VMware Carbon Black App Control management server might be able to obtain administrative access to the product without the need to authenticate," the California-based cloud computing and virtualization technology company  said  in an advisory. CVE-2021-21998 i...

Controversial mogul and antivirus pioneer John McAfee on Wednesday died by suicide in a jail cell in Barcelona, hours after reports that he would be extradited to face federal charges in the U.S. McAfee was 75. He is said to have died by hanging "as his nine months in prison brought him to despair," according to McAfee's lawyer Javier Villalba, Reuters  reported . Security personnel at the Brians 2 prison tried to revive McAfee, but he was eventually declared dead, per  Associated Press . News of his death comes after Spain's National Court approved his extradition to the U.S. to face federal criminal tax evasion charges. McAfee worked for NASA, Xerox, and Lockheed Martin before launching the world's first commercial antivirus software in 1987. He later resigned from the namesake security firm in 1994. The former cybersecurity tycoon turned fugitive was detained in Spain last October for " willful failure to file tax returns ," with the U.S. Depar...

A threat actor with suspected ties to Pakistan has been striking government and energy organizations in the South and Central Asia regions to deploy a remote access trojan on compromised Windows systems, according to new research. "Most of the organizations that exhibited signs of compromise were in India, and a small number were in Afghanistan," Lumen's Black Lotus Labs  said  in a Tuesday analysis. "The potentially compromised victims aligned with the government and power utility verticals." Some of the victims include a foreign government organization, a power transmission organization, and a power generation and transmission organization. The covert operation is said to have begun at least in January 2021. The intrusions are notable for a number of reasons, not least because in addition to its highly-targeted nature, the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) adopted by the adversary rely on repurposed open-source code and the use of compromised dom...

It seems like every new day brings with it a new ransomware news item – new attacks, methods, horror stories, and data being leaked. Ransomware attacks are on the rise, and they've become a major issue for organizations across industries. A recent report estimated that by 2031, ransomware attacks would cost the world over $260 billion. A new whitepaper from XDR provider Cynet demonstrates how the company's platform can help organizations mitigate the impact of ransomware ( download here ). Today, attackers have shown themselves to be less interested in ignoring the most vulnerable sectors, such as health care providers and hospitals. With a parallel increase in the number of variants – Wastedlocker, FTCode, Tycooon, TrickBot, REvil, and many others – it's becoming harder to defend against the growing threat of ransomware. Ransomware operates by using a variety of infection and encryption techniques to steal or barricade companies' files behind hard paywalls. Even t...

Open-source Tor browser has been updated to version 10.0.18 with fixes for multiple issues, including a privacy-defeating bug that could be used to uniquely fingerprint users across different browsers based on the apps installed on a computer. In addition to  updating  Tor to 0.4.5.9, the browser's Android version has been upgraded to Firefox to version 89.1.1, alongside incorporating patches rolled out by Mozilla for several  security vulnerabilities  addressed in Firefox 89. Chief among the rectified issues is a new fingerprinting attack that came to light last month. Dubbed  scheme flooding , the vulnerability enables a malicious website to leverage information about installed apps on the system to assign users a permanent unique identifier even when they switch browsers, use incognito mode, or a VPN. Put differently, the  weakness  takes advantage of custom URL schemes in apps as an attack vector, allowing a bad actor to track a device's user ...