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Apple source code for a core component of iPhone's operating system has purportedly been leaked on GitHub, that could allow hackers and researchers to discover currently unknown zero-day vulnerabilities to develop persistent malware and iPhone jailbreaks. The source code appears to be for iBoot —the critical part of the iOS operating system that's responsible for all security checks and ensures a trusted version of iOS is loaded. In other words, it's like the BIOS of an iPhone which makes sure that the kernel and other system files being booted whenever you turn on your iPhone are adequately signed by Apple and are not modified anyhow. The iBoot code was initially shared online several months back on Reddit , but it just resurfaced today on GitHub (repository now unavailable due to DMCA takedown). Motherboard consulted some security experts who have confirmed the legitimacy of the code. However, at this moment, it is unclear if the iBoot source code is complete

Security researchers have discovered a custom-built piece of malware that's wreaking havoc in Asia for past several months and is capable of performing nasty tasks, like password stealing, bitcoin mining, and providing hackers complete remote access to compromised systems. Dubbed Operation PZChao , the attack campaign discovered by the security researchers at Bitdefender have been targeting organizations in the government, technology, education, and telecommunications sectors in Asia and the United States. Researchers believe nature, infrastructure, and payloads, including variants of the Gh0stRAT trojan, used in the PZChao attacks are reminiscent of the notorious Chinese hacker group— Iron Tiger . However, this campaign has evolved its payloads to drop trojan, conduct cyber espionage and mine Bitcoin cryptocurrency. The PZChao campaign is attacking targets across Asia and the U.S. by using similar attack tactics as of Iron Tiger, which, according to the researchers, si

Follow this real-life network attack simulation, covering 6 steps from Initial Access to Data Exfiltration. See how attackers remain undetected with the simplest tools and why you need multiple choke points in your defense strategy. Surprisingly, most network attacks are not exceptionally sophisticated, technologically advanced, or reliant on zero-day tools that exploit edge-case vulnerabilities. Instead, they often use commonly available tools and exploit multiple vulnerability points. By simulating a real-world network attack, security teams can test their detection systems, ensure they have multiple choke points in place, and demonstrate the value of networking security to leadership. In this article, we demonstrate a real-life attack that could easily occur in many systems. The attack simulation was developed based on the MITRE ATT&CK framework, Atomic Red Team,  Cato Networks ' experience in the field, and public threat intel. In the end, we explain why a holistic secur

Virtual Private Network (VPN) is one of the best solutions you can have to protect your privacy and data on the Internet, but you should be more vigilant while choosing a VPN service which truly respects your privacy. If you are using the popular VPN service Hotspot Shield for online anonymity and privacy, you may inadvertently be leaking your real IP address and other sensitive information. Developed by AnchorFree GmbH, Hotspot Shield is a VPN service available for free on Google Play Store and Apple Mac App Store with an estimated 500 million users around the world. The service promises to " secure all online activities ," hide users' IP addresses and their identities and protect them from tracking by transferring their internet and browsing traffic through its encrypted channel. However, an 'alleged' information disclosure vulnerability discovered in Hotspot Shield results in the exposure of users data, like the name of Wi-Fi network name (if conne

Due to the recent surge in cryptocurrency prices, threat actors are increasingly targeting every platform, including IoT, Android, and Windows, with malware that leverages the CPU power of victims' devices to mine cryptocurrency. Just last month, Kaspersky researchers spotted fake antivirus and porn Android apps infected with malware that mines Monero cryptocurrency, launches DDoS attacks, and performs several other malicious tasks, causing the phone's battery to bulge out of its cover. Now, security researchers at Chinese IT security firm Qihoo 360 Netlab discovered a new piece of wormable Android malware, dubbed ADB.Miner , that scans wide-range of IP addresses to find vulnerable devices and infect them to mine digital cryptocurrency. According to the researchers, ADB.Miner is the first Android worm to reuse the scanning code programmed in Mirai —the infamous IoT botnet malware that knocked major Internet companies offline last year by launching massive DDoS attac

A critical vulnerability discovered in the Chrome and Firefox browser extension of the grammar-checking software Grammarly inadvertently left all 22 million users' accounts, including their personal documents and records, vulnerable to remote hackers. According to Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy, who discovered the vulnerability on February 2, the Chrome and Firefox extension of Grammarly exposed authentication tokens to all websites that could be grabbed by remote attackers with just 4 lines of JavaScript code. In other words, any website a Grammarly user visits could steal his/her authentication tokens, which is enough to login into the user's account and access every "documents, history, logs, and all other data" without permission. "I'm calling this a high severity bug, because it seems like a pretty severe violation of user expectations," Ormandy said in a vulnerability report . "Users would not expect that visiting a we

British citizen and hacker Lauri Love, who was accused of hacking into United States government websites, will not be extradited to stand trial in the U.S., the High Court of England and Wales ruled today. Love, 33, is facing a 99-year prison sentence in the United States for allegedly carrying out series of cyber attacks against the FBI, US Army, US Missile Defence Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and New York's Federal Reserve Bank between 2012 and 2013. The High Court ruled Monday that Love should be tried in U.K. after Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett of Maldon and Justice Ouseley heard he suffered severe mental illness like Asperger syndrome, eczema, asthma, and depression, and may kill himself if extradited. At Westminster Magistrates' Court in London in late 2016, District Judge Nina Tempia ordered Love to be extradited to the U.S. to stand trial, although his lawyers appealed the decision, arguing that he should be tried for his al

The growing popularity of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is generating curiosity—and concern—among security specialists. Crypto mining software has been found on user machines, often installed by botnets. Organizations need to understand the risks posed by this software and what actions, if any, should be taken. To better advise our readers, we reached out to the security researchers at Cato Networks. Cato provides a cloud-based SD-WAN that includes FireWall as a Service (FWaaS) . Its research team, Cato Research Labs, maintains the company's Cloud IPS, and today released a list of crypto mining pool addresses that you can use as a blacklist in your firewall. (To download the list, visit this page .) Cato Research Labs determined crypto mining represents a moderate threat to the organization. Immediate disruption of the organization infrastructure or loss of sensitive data is not likely to be a direct outcome of crypto mining. However, there are significant risks of i

A simple yet serious application-level denial of service (DoS) vulnerability has been discovered in WordPress CMS platform that could allow anyone to take down most WordPress websites even with a single machine—without hitting with a massive amount of bandwidth, as required in network-level DDoS attacks to achieve the same. Since the company has denied patching the issue, the vulnerability ( CVE-2018-6389 ) remains unpatched and affects almost all versions of WordPress released in last nine years, including the latest stable release of WordPress (Version 4.9.2). Discovered by Israeli security researcher Barak Tawily , the vulnerability resides in the way " load-scripts.php ," a built-in script in WordPress CMS, processes user-defined requests. For those unaware, load-scripts.php file has only been designed for admin users to help a website improve performance and load page faster by combining (on the server end) multiple JavaScript files into a single request. Howe

Another reason to uninstall Adobe Flash Player—a new zero-day Flash Player exploit has reportedly been spotted in the wild by North Korean hackers. South Korea's Computer Emergency Response Team (KR-CERT) issued an alert Wednesday for a new Flash Player zero-day vulnerability that's being actively exploited in the wild by North Korean hackers to target Windows users in South Korea. Simon Choi of South Korea-based cybersecurity firm Hauri first reported the campaign on Twitter, saying the North Korean hackers have been using the Flash zero-day against South Koreans since mid-November 2017. Although Choi did not share any malware sample or details about the vulnerability, the researcher said the attacks using the new Flash zero-day is aimed at South Korean individuals who focus on researching North Korea. Adobe also released an advisory on Wednesday, which said the zero-day is exploiting a critical 'use-after-free' vulnerability (CVE-2018-4878) in its Flash

It has been few weeks since the details of the Spectre, and Meltdown processor vulnerabilities came out in public and researchers have discovered more than 130 malware samples trying to exploit these chip flaws. Spectre and Meltdown are security vulnerabilities disclosed by security researchers earlier this month in many processors from Intel, ARM and AMD used in modern PCs, servers and smartphones, among other devices. These CPU vulnerabilities could enable attackers to bypass memory isolation mechanisms and access everything, including memory allocated for the kernel containing sensitive data like passwords, encryption keys and other private information. Researchers from independent antivirus testing firm AV-TEST detected at least 139 malware samples, as of today, which are related to these CPU vulnerabilities, as shown in the growth graph. You can find SHA256 hashes for all malware samples here. Meanwhile, cybersecurity firm Fortinet also tracked and analyzed many m

2017 was the year of high profile data breaches and ransomware attacks, but from the beginning of this year, we are noticing a faster-paced shift in the cyber threat landscape, as cryptocurrency-related malware is becoming a popular and profitable choice of cyber criminals. Several cybersecurity firms are reporting of new cryptocurrency mining viruses that are being spread using EternalBlue —the same NSA exploit that was leaked by the hacking group Shadow Brokers and responsible for the devastating widespread ransomware threat WannaCry . Researchers from Proofpoint discovered a massive global botnet dubbed "Smominru," a.k.a Ismo, that is using EternalBlue SMB exploit (CVE-2017-0144) to infect Windows computers to secretly mine Monero cryptocurrency, worth millions of dollars, for its master. Active since at least May 2017, Smominru botnet has already infected more than 526,000 Windows computers, most of which are believed to be servers running unpatched versions of Wi

Oracle has released a security patch update to address a critical remotely exploitable vulnerability that affects its MICROS point-of-sale (POS) business solutions for the hospitality industry. The fix has been released as part of Oracle's January 2018 update that patches a total of 238 security vulnerabilities in its various products. According to public disclosure by ERPScan, the security firm which discovered and reported this issue to the company, Oracle's MICROS EGateway Application Service, deployed by over 300,000 small retailers and business worldwide, is vulnerable to directory traversal attack. If exploited, the vulnerability ( CVE-2018-2636 ) could allow attackers to read sensitive data and receive information about various services from vulnerable MICROS workstations without any authentication. Using directory traversal flaw, an unauthorized insider with access to the vulnerable application could read sensitive files from the MICROS workstation, includi

Mozilla has released an important update for its Firefox web browser to patch a critical vulnerability that could allow remote attackers to execute malicious code on computers running an affected version of the browser. The update comes just a week after the company rolled out its new Firefox Quantum browser, a.k.a Firefox 58, with some new features like improved graphics engine and performance optimizations and patches for more than 30 vulnerabilities. According to a security advisory published by Cisco, Firefox 58.0.1 addresses an 'arbitrary code execution' flaw that originates due to 'insufficient sanitization' of HTML fragments in chrome-privileged documents (browser UI). Hackers could exploit this vulnerability (CVE-2018-5124) to run arbitrary code on the victim's computer just by tricking them into accessing a link or ' opening a file that submits malicious input to the affected software .' "A successful exploit could allow the attacker t

Every one of us now has at least one internet-connected smart device, which makes this question even more prominent —how much does your smart device know about you? Over the weekend, the popular fitness tracking app Strava proudly published a " 2017 heat map " showing activities from its users around the world, but unfortunately, the map revealed what it shouldn't—locations of the United States military bases worldwide. Strava which markets itself as a "social-networking app for athletes" publicly made available the global heat map, showing the location of all the rides, runs, swims, and downhills taken by its users, as collected by their smartphones and wearable devices like Fitbit. Since Strava has been designed to track users' routes and locations, IUCA analyst Nathan Ruser revealed that the app might have unintentionally mapped out the location of some of the military forces around the world, especially some secret ones from the United States. Wi

Lenovo has recently rolled out security patches for a severe vulnerability in its Fingerprint Manager Pro software that could allow leak sensitive data stored by the users. Fingerprint Manager Pro is a utility for Microsoft Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 operating systems that allows users to log into their fingerprint-enabled Lenovo PCs using their fingers. The software could also be configured to store website credentials and authenticate site via fingerprint. In addition to fingerprint data, the software also stores users sensitive information like their Windows login credentials—all of which are encrypted using a weak cryptography algorithm. According to the company, Fingerprint Manager Pro version 8.01.86 and earlier contains a hard-coded password vulnerability, identified as CVE-2017-3762 , that made the software accessible to all users with local non-administrative access. "Sensitive data stored by Lenovo Fingerprint Manager Pro, including users' Windows logon credentials

More than 2,000 WordPress websites have once again been found infected with a piece of crypto-mining malware that not only steals the resources of visitors' computers to mine digital currencies but also logs visitors' every keystroke. Security researchers at Sucuri discovered a malicious campaign that infects WordPress websites with a malicious script that delivers an in-browser cryptocurrency miner from CoinHive and a keylogger. Coinhive is a popular browser-based service that offers website owners to embed a JavaScript to utilise CPUs power of their website visitors in an effort to mine the Monero cryptocurrency. Sucuri researchers said the threat actors behind this new campaign is the same one who infected more than 5,400 Wordpress websites last month since both campaigns used keylogger/cryptocurrency malware called cloudflare[.]solutions. Spotted in April last year, Cloudflare[.]solutions is cryptocurrency mining malware and is not at all related to network

Coincheck, a Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange, has suffered what appears to be the biggest hack in the history of cryptocurrencies, losing $532 million in digital assets (nearly $420 million in NEM tokens and $112 in Ripples ). In 2014, Mt Gox , one of the largest bitcoin exchange at that time, filed for bankruptcy after admitting it had lost $450 million worth of Bitcoins. Apparently, the cryptocurrency markets reacted negatively to the news, which resulted in 5% drop in Bitcoin price early this morning. In a blog post published today, the Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange confirmed the cyber heist without explaining how the tokens were stolen, and abruptly froze most of its services, including deposits, withdrawals and trade of almost all cryptocurrencies, except Bitcoin. Coincheck also said the exchange had even stopped deposits into NEM cryptocurrencies, which resulted in 16.5% drop in NEM coin value, as well as other deposit methods including credit cards. Durin

Are you using Linux or Mac OS? If you think your system is not prone to viruses, then you should read this. Wide-range of cybercriminals are now using a new piece of 'undetectable' spying malware that targets Windows, macOS, Solaris and Linux systems. Just last week we published a detailed article on the report from EFF/Lookout that revealed a new advanced persistent threat (APT) group, called Dark Caracal , engaged in global mobile espionage campaigns. Although the report revealed about the group's successful large-scale hacking operations against mobile phones rather than computers, it also shed light on a new piece of cross-platform malware called CrossRAT (version 0.1), which is believed to be developed by, or for, the Dark Caracal group. CrossRAT is a cross-platform remote access Trojan that can target all four popular desktop operating systems, Windows, Solaris, Linux, and macOS, enabling remote attackers to manipulate the file system, take screenshots, ru