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Qualcomm on Tuesday  released patches  to address multiple security flaws in its chipsets, some of which could be exploited to cause information disclosure and memory corruption. The five vulnerabilities -- tracked from CVE-2022-40516 through CVE-2022-40520 -- also impact Lenovo ThinkPad X13s laptops, prompting the Chinese PC maker to issue BIOS updates to plug the security holes. The list of flaws is as follows - CVE-2022-40516, CVE-2022-40517 & CVE-2022-40520  (CVSS scores: 8.4) - Memory corruption in Core due to  stack-based buffer overflow CVE-2022-40518 & CVE-2022-40519  (CVSS scores: 6.8) - Information disclosure due to  buffer over-read  in Core Stack-based buffer overflow vulnerabilities can result in severe impacts, such as data corruption, system crashes, and arbitrary code execution. Buffer over-reads, on the other hand, can be weaponized to read out-of-bounds memory, leading to the exposure of secret data. Successful explo...

Ransomware: contemporary threats, how to prevent them and how the FBI can help In April 2021, Dutch supermarkets faced a food shortage. The cause wasn't a drought or a sudden surge in the demand for avocados. Rather, the reason was a ransomware attack. In the past years, companies, universities, schools, medical facilities and other organizations have been targeted by ransomware threat actors, turning ransomware into the internet's most severe security crisis. The Ransomware Landscape Ransomware has existed for more than 30 years, but it became a lucrative source of income for cyber actors and gangs in the past decade. Since 2015, ransomware gangs have been targeting organizations instead of individuals. Consequently, ransom sums have increased significantly, reaching millions of dollars. Ransomware is effective because it pressures victims in two, complementary ways. First, by threatening victims to destroy their data. Second, by threatening to publicize the attack. The s...

A new Linux malware developed using the shell script compiler ( shc ) has been observed deploying a cryptocurrency miner on compromised systems. "It is presumed that after successful authentication through a dictionary attack on inadequately managed Linux SSH servers, various malware were installed on the target system," AhnLab Security Emergency Response Center (ASEC)  said  in a report published today. shc allows shell scripts to be converted directly into binaries, offering protections against unauthorized source code modifications. It's analogous to the  BAT2EXE utility  in Windows that's used to convert any batch file to an executable. By using shc to generate ELF files, the idea is to protect the malicious shell commands from being inspected and potentially bypass detection by security software as the executables are encoded using the RC4 algorithm . In an attack chain detailed by the South Korean cybersecurity firm, a successful compromise of the SSH ser...

Synology has released security updates to address a critical flaw impacting VPN Plus Server that could be exploited to take over affected systems. Tracked as  CVE-2022-43931 , the vulnerability carries a maximum severity rating of 10 on the CVSS scale and has been described as an out-of-bounds write bug in the remote desktop functionality in Synology VPN Plus Server. Successful exploitation of the issue "allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands via unspecified vectors," the Taiwanese company  said , adding it was internally discovered by its Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT). Users of VPN Plus Server for Synology Router Manager (SRM) 1.2 and VPN Plus Server for SRM 1.3 are advised to update to versions 1.4.3-0534 and 1.4.4-0635, respectively. The network-attached storage appliance maker, in a second advisory, also  warned  of several flaws in SRM that could permit remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands, conduct denial-of-servi...

Challenges with an enforcement-based approach An enforcement-based approach to security begins with a security policy backed by security controls, often heavy-handed and designed to prevent employees from engaging in risky behavior or inadvertently expanding the potential attack surface of an organization.  Most organizations exclusively use enforcement-based security controls, usually carried out at the network level with a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) or a Security Services Edge (SSE). CASBs secure data between on-premises and cloud architectures, validate authorization rules, and access controls against the company's security policy. Some organizations also use CASBs to block SaaS applications, but like SSEs, CASBs only support  some  applications. The applications these tools  don't  support are often the riskiest because they don't meet common industry and security standards, including SAML for authentication and SCIM for user management. At Cerb...

A new malware campaign has been observed using sensitive information stolen from a bank as a lure in phishing emails to drop a remote access trojan called  BitRAT . The unknown adversary is believed to have hijacked the IT infrastructure of a Colombian cooperative bank, using the information to craft convincing decoy messages to lure victims into opening suspicious Excel attachments. The discovery comes from cybersecurity firm Qualys, which  found  evidence of a database dump comprising 418,777 records that's said to have been obtained by exploiting SQL injection faults. The leaked details include Cédula numbers (a national identity document issued to Colombian citizens), email addresses, phone numbers, customer names, payment records, salary details, and addresses, among others. There are no signs that the information has been previously shared on any forums in the darknet or clear web, suggesting that the threat actors themselves got access to customer data to mou...

Financial and insurance sectors in Europe have been targeted by the Raspberry Robin worm, as the malware continues to evolve its post-exploitation capabilities while remaining under the radar. "What is unique about the malware is that it is heavily obfuscated and highly complex to statically disassemble," Security Joes  said  in a new report published Monday. The intrusions, observed against Spanish and Portuguese-speaking organizations, are notable for collecting more victim machine data than previously documented, with the malware now exhibiting sophisticated techniques to resist analysis. Raspberry Robin, also called QNAP worm, is  being used  by several threat actors as a means to gain a foothold into target networks. Spread via infected USB drives and other methods, the framework has been recently put to use in attacks aimed at telecom and government sectors. Microsoft is tracking the operators of Raspberry Robin under the moniker  DEV-0856 . Securi...

Chinese international students in the U.K. have been targeted by persistent Chinese-speaking scammers for over a year as part of an activity dubbed  RedZei  (aka RedThief). "The RedZei fraudsters have chosen their targets carefully, researched them and realized it was a rich victim group that is ripe for exploitation," cybersecurity researcher Will Thomas (@BushidoToken)  said  in a write-up published last week. The most notable aspect about the operation is the steps taken by the threat actors to bypass steps taken by users to prevent scam calls, using a new pay-as-you-go U.K. phone number for each wave so as to render phone number-based blocking ineffective. Thomas, pointing out the meticulous tradecraft employed by the scammers, said the threat actor alternates between SIMs from several mobile carriers such as Three, O2, EE, Tesco Mobile, and Telia. Indications are that the lucrative RedZei campaign may have started as far back as August 2019, with a report ...

The maintainers of the PyTorch package have warned users who have installed the nightly builds of the library between December 25, 2022, and December 30, 2022, to uninstall and download the latest versions following a  dependency confusion attack . "PyTorch-nightly Linux packages installed via pip during that time installed a dependency,  torchtriton , which was compromised on the Python Package Index (PyPI) code repository and ran a malicious binary," the PyTorch team  said  in an alert over the weekend. PyTorch, analogous to Keras and TensorFlow, is an open source Python-based machine learning framework that was originally developed by Meta Platforms. The PyTorch team said that it became aware of the malicious dependency on December 30, 4:40 p.m. GMT. The supply chain attack entailed uploading the malware-laced copy of a legitimate dependency named torchtriton to the Python Package Index (PyPI) code repository. Since package managers like pip check public cod...