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I have really bad news for Adobe customers in Venezuela… California-based software company Adobe on Monday announced to soon ban accounts and cancel the subscriptions for all of its customers in Venezuela in order to comply with economic sanctions that the United States imposed on the Latin American country. The Trump administration issued an executive order on 5th August 2019, targeting the President of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro for allegedly usurping the presidency and violating the human rights of the country's citizens. The Presidential Executive Order 13884 has been designed to block American companies and individuals from conducting virtually all trade with Venezuela. As a result, Adobe has now decided to deactivate all accounts in the country, leaving thousands of users and companies without access to the company's graphics and multimedia software, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat Reader, Adobe After Effects, Lightroom, and Flash Player. "The

Almost every application contains security vulnerabilities, some of which you may find today, but others would remain invisible until someone else finds and exploits them—which is the harsh reality of cybersecurity and its current state. And when we say this, Signal Private Messenger —promoted as one of the most secure messengers in the world—isn't any exception. Google Project Zero researcher Natalie Silvanovich discovered a logical vulnerability in the Signal messaging app for Android that could allow malicious caller to force a call to be answered at the receiver's end without requiring his/her interaction. In other words, the flaw could be exploited to turn on the microphone of a targeted Signal user's device and listen to all surrounding conversations. However, the Signal vulnerability can only be exploited if the receiver fails to answer an audio call over Signal, eventually forcing the incoming call to be automatically answered on the receiver's device

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,

Another day, another revelation of a critical unpatched zero-day vulnerability, this time in the world's most widely used mobile operating system, Android. What's more? The Android zero-day vulnerability has also been found to be exploited in the wild by the Israeli surveillance vendor NSO Group—infamous for selling zero-day exploits to governments—or one of its customers, to gain control of their targets' Android devices. Discovered by Project Zero researcher Maddie Stone, the details and a proof-of-concept exploit for the high-severity security vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-2215, has been made public today—just seven days after reporting it to the Android security team. The zero-day is a use-after-free vulnerability in the Android kernel's binder driver that can allow a local privileged attacker or an app to escalate their privileges to gain root access to a vulnerable device and potentially take full remote control of the device. Vulnerable Android D

A picture is worth a thousand words, but a GIF is worth a thousand pictures. Today, the short looping clips, GIFs are everywhere—on your social media, on your message boards, on your chats, helping users perfectly express their emotions, making people laugh, and reliving a highlight. But what if an innocent-looking GIF greeting with Good morning, Happy Birthday, or Merry Christmas message hacks your smartphone? Well, not a theoretical idea anymore. WhatsApp has recently patched a critical security vulnerability in its app for Android, which remained unpatched for at least 3 months after being discovered, and if exploited, could have allowed remote hackers to compromise Android devices and potentially steal files and chat messages. WhatsApp Remote Code Execution Vulnerability The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-11932 , is a double-free memory corruption bug that doesn't actually reside in the WhatsApp code itself, but in an open-source GIF image parsing library th

Phishing is still one of the widely used strategies by cybercriminals and espionage groups to gain an initial foothold on the targeted systems. Though hacking someone with phishing attacks was easy a decade ago, the evolution of threat detection technologies and cyber awareness among people has slowed down the success of phishing and social engineering attacks over the years. Since phishing is more sort of a one-time opportunity for hackers before their victims suspect it and likely won't fall for the same trick again, sophisticated hacking groups have started putting a lot of effort, time and research to design well-crafted phishing campaigns. In one such latest campaign discovered by cybersecurity researchers at Check Point, a Chinese hacking group, known as Rancor , has been found conducting very targeted and extensive attacks against Southeast Asian government entities from December 2018 to June 2019. What's interesting about this ongoing 7-month long campaign is

Cases of document-based malware are steadily rising. 59 percent of all malicious files detected in the first quarter of 2019 were contained in documents. Due to how work is done in today's offices and workplaces, companies are among those commonly affected by file-based attacks. Since small to medium businesses (SMBs) usually lack the kind of security that protects their larger counterparts, they have a greater risk of being affected. Falling victim to file-based malware can cause enormous problems for SMBs. An attack can damage critical data stored in the organization's computers. Such loss can force a company to temporarily halt operations, resulting in financial losses. If a customer's private and financial information is compromised, the company may also face compliance inquiries and lawsuits. Their reputations could also take a hit, discouraging customers from doing business with them. But despite these risks, SMBs still invest very little in cybersecurity

An ex-Yahoo! employee has pleaded guilty to misusing his access at the company to hack into the accounts of nearly 6,000 Yahoo users in search of private and personal records, primarily sexually explicit images and videos. According to an press note released by the U.S. Justice Department, Reyes Daniel Ruiz , a 34-year-old resident of California and former Yahoo software engineer, admitted accessing Yahoo internal systems to compromise accounts belonging to younger women, including his personal friends and work colleagues. Once he had access to the users' Yahoo accounts, Ruiz then used information obtained from users' email messages and their account's login access to hacking into their iCloud, Gmail, Facebook, DropBox, and other online accounts in search of more private material. Besides this, Ruiz also made copies of private images and videos that he found in the personal accounts of Yahoo users without their permission and stored them on a private computer a

Looking for ways to unlock and read the content of an encrypted PDF without knowing the password? Well, that's now possible, sort of—thanks to a novel set of attacking techniques that could allow attackers to access the entire content of a password-protected or encrypted PDF file, but under some specific circumstances. Dubbed PDFex , the new set of techniques includes two classes of attacks that take advantage of security weaknesses in the standard encryption protection built into the Portable Document Format, better known as PDF. To be noted, the PDFex attacks don't allow an attacker to know or remove the password for an encrypted PDF; instead, enable attackers to remotely exfiltrate content once a legitimate user opens that document. In other words, PDFex allows attackers to modify a protected PDF document, without having the corresponding password, in a way that when opened by someone with the right password, the file will automatically send out a copy of the decry