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If you have visited any popular mainstream website over the past two months, your computer may have been infected — Thanks to a new exploit kit discovered by security researchers. Researchers from antivirus provider ESET released a report on Tuesday stating that they have discovered an exploit kit, dubbed Stegano , hiding malicious code in the pixels of banner advertisements that are currently in rotation on several high profile news websites. Stegano originally dates back to 2014, but since early October this year, cyber crooks had managed to get the malicious ads displayed on a variety of unnamed reputable news websites, each with Millions of daily visitors. Stegano derived from the word Steganography , which is a technique of hiding messages and content inside a digital graphic image, making the content impossible to spot with the naked eye. In this particular malvertising campaign, operators hide malicious code inside transparent PNG image's Alpha Channel, which def

Do you know how many kinds of sensors your smartphone has inbuilt? And what data they gather about your physical and digital activities? An average smartphone these days is packed with a wide array of sensors such as GPS, Camera, microphone, accelerometer, magnetometer, proximity, gyroscope, pedometer, and NFC, to name a few. Now, according to a team of scientists from Newcastle University in the UK, hackers can potentially guess PINs and passwords – that you enter either on a bank website, app, your lock screen – to a surprising degree of accuracy by monitoring your phone's sensors, like the angle and motion of your phone while you are typing. The danger comes due to the way malicious websites and apps access most of a smartphone's internal sensors without requesting any permission to access them – doesn't matter even if you are accessing a secure website over HTTPS to enter your password. Your Phone doesn't Restrict Apps from Accessing Sensors' Data

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

Due to the majority in the mobile platform, Google's Android operating system has been a prior target for cybercriminals and a recently exposed weakness in the way the operating system handles certificate validation, left millions of Android devices open to attack. Researchers at BlueBox security , who identified the vulnerability, dubbed the flaw as Fake ID , which affects all versions of Android operating system from 2.1 ( released in 2010 ) up to Android 4.4, also known as KitKat . ALL VERSIONS ARE VULNERABLE UPTO KITKAT Researchers marked the vulnerability as critical because it could allow a fake and malicious app to masquerade as a legitimate and trusted application, enabling an attacker to perform various actions such as inserting malicious code into a legitimate app, infiltrating your personal information or even take complete control of an affected device. Specifically, devices running the 3LM administration extension are at risk for a complete compromise, whic

India-linked highly targeted mobile malware campaign, first unveiled two weeks ago , has been found to be part of a broader campaign targeting multiple platforms, including windows devices and possibly Android as well. As reported in our previous article , earlier this month researchers at Talos threat intelligence unit discovered a group of Indian hackers abusing mobile device management (MDM) service to hijack and spy on a few targeted iPhone users in India. Operating since August 2015, the attackers have been found abusing MDM service to remotely install malicious versions of legitimate apps, including Telegram, WhatsApp, and PrayTime, onto targeted iPhones. These modified apps have been designed to secretly spy on iOS users, and steal their real-time location, SMS, contacts, photos and private messages from third-party chatting applications. During their ongoing investigation, Talos researchers identified a new MDM infrastructure and several malicious binaries – designed

Security researchers have been warning of a new trick that cybercriminals are leveraging to hide their malicious code designed to re-introduce the infection to steal confidential information from Magento based online e-commerce websites. So, if you have already cleaned up your hacked Magento website, there are chances your website is still leaking login credentials and credit card details of your customers to hackers. More than 250,000 online stores use open-source Magento e-commerce platform, which makes them an enticing target for hackers, and therefore the security of both your data and your customer data is of the utmost importance. According to the researchers at Sucuri , who have previously spotted several Magento malware campaigns in the wild, cybercriminals are currently using a simple yet effective method to ensure that their malicious code is added back to a hacked website after it has been removed. To achieve this, criminals are hiding their 'credit card stea

So you love Minecraft ? You might want to be very careful before downloading the cheats for the popular Minecraft game from Google Play Store. Nearly 3 Million users have downloaded malicious Minecraft Android applications for their smartphone and tablets from the Google Play store, security researchers warned. The security researchers from IT security firm ESET have uncovered as many as 33 fake "scareware" applications that have been uploaded to the Google Play store in the course of the past 9 months, masquerading as Minecraft cheats and tip guides. These malicious applications have been downloaded between 660,000 and 2.8 million times. "All of the discovered apps were fake in that they did not contain any of the promised functionality and only displayed banners that tried to trick users into believing that their Android system is infected with a dangerous virus," ESET researcher Lukas Stefanko wrote in a blog post . Once downloaded, these mali

Yet another incident which showcases that you should not explicitly trust user-controlled software repositories. One of the most popular Linux distros Arch Linux has pulled as many as three user-maintained software repository AUR packages after it was found hosting malicious code. Arch Linux is an independently developed, general-purpose GNU/Linux distribution composed predominantly of free and open-source software, and supports community involvement. Besides official repositories like Arch Build System (ABS), Arch Linux users can also download software packages from several other repositories, including AUR (Arch User Repository), a community-driven repository created and managed by Arch Linux users. Since AUR packages are user-produced content, Arch maintainers always suggest Linux users to carefully check all files, especially PKGBUILD and any .install file for malicious commands. However, this AUR repository has recently been found hosting malware code in several inst

A widely used third-party NodeJS module with nearly 2 million downloads a week was compromised after one of its open-source contributor gone rogue, who infected it with a malicious code that was programmed to steal funds stored in Bitcoin wallet apps. The Node.js library in question is "Event-Stream," a toolkit that makes it easy for developers to create and work with streams, a collection of data in Node.js — just like arrays or strings. The malicious code detected earlier this week was added to Event-Stream version 3.3.6, published on September 9 via NPM repository , and had since been downloaded by nearly 8 million application programmers. Event-Stream module for Node.js was originally created by Dominic Tarr, who maintained the Event-Stream library for a long time, but handed over the development and maintenance of the project several months ago to an unknown programmer, called "right9ctrl." Apparently, right9ctrl gained Dominic's trust by making

Android -  a widely used Smartphone platform offered by Google is once again suspected to affect its users with malicious software that puts their android devices at risk. This time the vulnerabilities occur in the way Android handle the updates to add new flavors to your device. Researchers from Indiana University and Microsoft have discovered [ Paper PDF ] a new set of Android vulnerabilities that is capable to carry out privilege escalation attacks because of the weakness in its Package Management Service (PMS) that puts more than one billion Android devices at risk. The researchers dubbed the new set of security-critical vulnerabilities as Pileup flaws which is a short for privilege escalation through updating, that waylays inside the Android PMS and intensifies the permissions offered to malicious apps whenever an android update occurs, without informing users. The research was carried out by Indiana University Bloomington researchers, Luyi Xing, Xiaorui Pan, Ka

Last year, the popular system cleanup software CCleaner suffered a massive supply-chain malware attack of all times, wherein hackers compromised the company's servers for more than a month and replaced the original version of the software with the malicious one. The malware attack infected over 2.3 million users who downloaded or updated their CCleaner app between August and September last year from the official website with the backdoored version of the software. Now, it turns out that the hackers managed to infiltrate the company's network almost five months before they first replaced the official CCleaner build with the backdoored version, revealed Avast executive VP and CTO Ondrej Vlcek at the RSA security conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. 6-Months Timeline of CCleaner Supply Chain Attack Vlcek shared a brief timeline of the last year's incident that came out to be the worst nightmare for the company, detailing how and when unknown hackers breached Pi

Google Android has been a primary concern of the attackers. Counting from a simple text message that could hack an Android phone remotely to the Stagefright bug making Billion users vulnerable. Now, the latest is the ' Kemoge Malware ' that has made its debut as an Adware on the Android mobile phones, allowing third-party app stores to fetch your device's information and take full control of it. Security researchers from FireEye Labs have discovered that Kemoge malicious adware family is spreading in 20 countries around the globe. Also, the origin of the Adware's attack is suspected from China. What is Kemoge? The name given to the malicious Adware family is because of its command and control (C2) domain: aps.kemoge.net. Kemoge is an Adware in the disguise of popular Apps; it has circulated in such numbers because it takes the name of popular apps and repackages them with the malicious code and make them available to the user. They even use

Google has made several new announcements for its Chrome Web Store that aims at making Chrome extensions more secure and transparent to its users. Over a couple of years, we have seen a significant rise in malicious extensions that appear to offer useful functionalities, while running hidden malicious scripts in the background without the user's knowledge. However, the best part is that Google is aware of the issues and has proactively been working to change the way its Chrome web browser handles extensions. Earlier this year, Google banned extensions using cryptocurrency mining scripts and then in June, the company also disabled inline installation of Chrome extensions completely. The company has also been using machine learning technologies to detect and block malicious extensions. To take a step further, Google announced Monday five major changes that give users more control over certain permissions, enforces security measures, as well as makes the ecosystem more t

Even after so many efforts by Google, malicious apps somehow managed to fool its Play Store's anti-malware protections and infect people with malicious software. The same happened once again when at least 50 apps managed to make its way onto Google Play Store and were successfully downloaded as many as 4.2 million times—one of the biggest malware outbreaks. Security firm Check Point on Thursday published a blog post revealing at least 50 Android apps that were free to download on official Play Store and were downloaded between 1 million and 4.2 million times before Google removed them. These Android apps come with hidden malware payload that secretly registers victims for paid online services, sends fraudulent premium text messages from victims' smartphones and leaves them to pay the bill—all without the knowledge or permission of users. Dubbed ExpensiveWall by Check Point researchers because it was found in the Lovely Wallpaper app, the malware comes hidden in fre

The Kaspersky Lab researchers recently have discovered a number of Android malware apps are abusing the Google Cloud Messaging Service (GCM) as Command and Control server . The GCM  service allows Android app developers to send messages using JSON Format for installed apps, but hackers exploited it for malicious Purposes. Using Google Cloud Messaging Service (GCM) as Command and Control server for Android Malware is not a new concept, as last year Security researcher and Hacker ' Mohit Kumar ' demonstrated ' Android Malware Engine ' - One of the Most Sophisticated Android malware during Malcon conference. The Kaspersky Lab researchers have detected at least five Different Android Trojans that used JSON format: 1. SMS.AndroidOS.FakeInst.a 2. SMS.AndroidOS.Agent.ao 3. SMS.AndroidOS.OpFake.a 4. Backdoor.AndroidOS.Maxit.a 5. SMS.AndroidOS.Agent.az. The authors of the malware in Every case took advantage of Google Cloud Messaging Service to Exchange messag