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Google removed 500 malicious Chrome extensions from its Web Store after they found to inject malicious ads and siphon off user browsing data to servers under the control of attackers. These extensions were part of a malvertising and ad-fraud campaign that's been operating at least since January 2019, although evidence points out the possibility that the actor behind the scheme may have been active since 2017. The findings come as part of a joint investigation by security researcher Jamila Kaya and Cisco-owned Duo Security, which unearthed 70 Chrome Extensions with over 1.7 million installations. Upon sharing the discovery privately with Google, the company went on to identify 430 more problematic browser extensions, all of which have since been deactivated. "The prominence of malvertising as an attack vector will continue to rise as long as tracking-based advertising remains ubiquitous, and particularly if users remain underserved by protection mechanisms," sa

The realistic approach to security is that incidents occur. While ideally, the CISO would want to prevent all of them, in practice, some will succeed to a certain degree—making the ability to efficiently manage an incident response process a mandatory skill for any CISO. Moreover, apart from the management of the actual response process, the CISO must also be able to efficiently communicate the ongoing activities and status to the executive level. While the IR process is mostly technical, reporting to the organization's management should take place on a much higher level in order for the non-security -savvy executives to understand. To assist CISOs with these tasks, Cynet created the IR Management and Reporting PowerPoint template ( download here ), which apart from providing an actionable response framework, is also clear and intuitive for the executive level. Let's drill down on the two aspects of the template: IR Management The template was built on the SANS\

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

Emotet, the notorious trojan behind a number of botnet-driven spam campaigns and ransomware attacks, has found a new attack vector: using already infected devices to identify new victims that are connected to nearby Wi-Fi networks. According to researchers at Binary Defense , the newly discovered Emotet sample leverages a "Wi-Fi spreader" module to scan Wi-Fi networks, and then attempts to infect devices that are connected to them. The cybersecurity firm said the Wi-Fi spreader has a timestamp of April 16, 2018, indicating the spreading behavior has been running "unnoticed" for close to two years until it was detected for the first time last month. The development marks an escalation of Emotet's capabilities, as networks in close physical proximity to the original victim are now susceptible to infection. How Does Emotet's Wi-Fi Spreader Module Work? The updated version of the malware works by leveraging an already compromised host to list all

A few hours after Adobe today released security updates for five of its widely-distributed software, Microsoft also issued its February 2020 Patch Tuesday edition with patches for a total of 99 new vulnerabilities. According to the advisories, 12 of the total issues patched by the tech giant this month are critical in severity, and the remaining 87 have been listed as important. Five of the bugs are listed as publicly known at the time of release, four of which are important in severity and one critical ( CVE-2020-0674 ) that is also listed as under active attack. Microsoft warned about this zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer (IE) browser last month when it released an advisory without releasing a patch for millions of its affected users. As explained previously, this flaw could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on targeted computers and take full control over them just by convincing victims into opening a maliciously crafted web page on the vulner

Here comes the second 'Patch Tuesday' of this year. Adobe today released the latest security updates for five of its widely used software that patch a total of 42 newly discovered vulnerabilities, 35 of which are critical in severity. The first four of the total five affected software, all listed below, are vulnerable to at least one critical arbitrary code execution vulnerability that could allow attackers to take full control of vulnerable systems. Adobe Framemaker Adobe Acrobat and Reader Adobe Flash Player Adobe Digital Edition Adobe Experience Manager In brief, Adobe Framemaker for Windows, an advanced document processing software, contains 21 flaws, and all of them are critical buffer error, heap overflow, memory corruption, and out-of-bounds write issues, leading to code execution attacks. Adobe Acrobat and Reader for Windows and macOS also contain 12 similar critical code execution vulnerabilities, along with 3 other important information disclosure

An election campaigning website operated by Likud―the ruling political party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu―inadvertently exposed personal information of all 6.5 million eligible Israeli voters on the Internet, just three weeks before the country is going to have a legislative election. In Israel, all political parties receive personal details of voters before the election, which they can't share with any third party and are responsible for protecting the privacy of their citizens and erasing it after the elections are over. Reportedly, Likud shared the entire voter registry with Feed-b, a software development company, who then uploaded it a website (elector.co.il) designed to promote the voting management app called 'Elector.' According to Ran Bar-Zik , a web security researcher who disclosed the issue, the voters' data was not leaked using any security vulnerability in the Elector app; instead, the incident occurred due to negligence by the softw

The United States Department of Justice today announced charges against 4 Chinese military hackers who were allegedly behind the Equifax data breach that exposed the personal and financial data of nearly 150 million Americans. In a joint press conference held today with the Attorney General William Barr and FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich, the DoJ officials labeled the state-sponsored hacking campaign as the largest hacking case ever uncovered of this type. The four accused, Wu Zhiyong (吴志勇), Wang Qian (王乾), Xu Ke (许可) and Liu Lei (刘磊), have also been indicted for their involvement in hacking and stealing trade secrets, intellectual property and confidential information from several other U.S. businesses in recent years. In September 2017, credit reporting agency Equifax disclosed it had become a victim of a massive cyberattack that left highly sensitive data of nearly half of the U.S. population in the hands of hackers. As The Hacker News reported earlier, hackers compr