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Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a large-scale ongoing fraud scheme that lures unsuspecting Russian Internet users with promises of financial rewards to steal their payment card information. According to researchers at Group-IB , the multi-stage phishing attack exploited the credibility of Russian Internet portal Rambler to trick users into participating in a fictitious "Like of the Year 2020" contest. The development is a reminder that rewards-based social engineering campaigns continue to be an effective means to scam users, not to mention the leveraging the collected data to their financial advantage. Under the "Like of the Year" scheme, users were invited to win a large cash prize, telling them they've been randomly selected after liking a post on social media platforms such as VKontakte. The invites were sent via an email blast by hacking the mail servers of a fiscal data operator , which refers to a legal entity created to aggregate, st

Cloud computing and networking are two of the most significant areas of growth in the IT business. Companies need engineers who can maintain distributed software and keep the company connected. If you want to work in either niche, the Essential Cloud & Networking Certification Training Bundle offers 93 hours of essential knowledge. You can pick up all 5 courses now for only $39.99 via the THN Store. This bundle focuses on the key skills and certificates the technical recruiters are currently looking for. It would be best if you came away with the knowledge to ace top exams, and the experience to handle real-world challenges. First up, the CCNA Routing & Switching Training helps you master Cisco networks. Professionals with these skills earn around 9% more on average . The AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate) covers the most popular cloud computing platform, showing you how to design, configure, and optimize cloud software. Implementing Microsoft Azure Infr

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,

Adobe today released out-of-band software updates for After Effects and Media Encoder applications that patch a total of two new critical vulnerabilities. Both critical vulnerabilities exist due to out-of-bounds write memory corruption issues and can be exploited to execute arbitrary code on targeted systems by tricking victims into opening a specially crafted file using the affected software. The bug ( CVE-2020-3765 ) in Adobe After Effects, an application for creating motion graphics and special effects used in the video, was discovered by security researcher Matt Powell and reported to Adobe via Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative project. Whereas, the second issue ( CVE-2020-3764 ) affecting Adobe Media Encoder, software for encoding and compressing audio or video files, was discovered by Canadian security researcher Francis Provencher. None of the security vulnerabilities fixed in this batch of Adobe updates were publicly disclosed or found being exploited in the wild, as th

Smart doorbells and cameras bring a great sense of security to your home, especially when you're away, but even a thought that someone could be spying on you through the same surveillance system would shiver up your spine. Following several recent reports of hackers gaining access to people's internet-connected Ring doorbell and security cameras, Amazon yesterday announced to make two-factor authentication security feature mandatory for all Ring users. Until now, enabling the two-factor authentication in Ring devices was optional, which definitely would have prevented most Ring hacks, but of course, many never bothered to enable it. That means, from now onwards, at the time of login after entering the account's username and password, every user needs to input a secret six-digit authentication code sent to them via their phone or email. Two-factor authentication is an effective defense because it acts as a deterrent, preventing unauthorized users from gaining acces

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) earlier today issued a warning to all industries operating critical infrastructures about a new ransomware threat that if left unaddressed could have severe consequences. The advisory comes in response to a cyberattack targeting an unnamed natural gas compression facility that employed spear-phishing to deliver ransomware to the company's internal network, encrypting critical data and knocking servers out of operation for almost two days. "A cyber threat actor used a spear-phishing link to obtain initial access to the organization's information technology network before pivoting to its operational technology network. The threat actor then deployed commodity ransomware to encrypt data for impact on both networks," CISA noted in its alert. As ransomware attacks continue to escalate in frequency and scale , the new development is yet another indication that p

A new report published by cybersecurity researchers has unveiled evidence of Iranian state-sponsored hackers targeting dozens of companies and organizations in Israel and around the world over the past three years. Dubbed " Fox Kitten ," the cyber-espionage campaign is said to have been directed at companies from the IT, telecommunication, oil and gas, aviation, government, and security sectors. "We estimate the campaign revealed in this report to be among Iran's most continuous and comprehensive campaigns revealed until now," ClearSky researchers said . "The revealed campaign was used as a reconnaissance infrastructure; however, it can also be used as a platform for spreading and activating destructive malware such as ZeroCleare and Dustman." Tying the activities to threat groups APT33, APT34, and APT39, the offensive — conducted using a mix of open source and self-developed tools — also facilitated the groups to steal sensitive information

Visibility into an environment attack surface is the fundamental cornerstone to sound security decision making. However, the standard process of 3rd party threat assessment as practiced today is both time consuming and expensive. Cynet changes the rules of the game with a free threat assessment offering ( click here to learn more ) based on more than 72 hours of data collection, enabling organizations to benchmark their security posture against their vertical industry peers and take actions accordingly. Cynet Free Threat Assessment (available for organizations with 250 endpoints and above, from North America and Europe) spotlights critical, exposed attack surfaces and provides actionable knowledge of attacks that are currently alive and active in the environment. 1.) Indication of live attacks — active malware, connection to C&C, data exfiltration, access to phishing links, user credential theft attempts, and others: 2.) Host and app attack surfaces — unpatched vulnera

A popular WordPress theme plugin with over 200,000 active installations contains a severe but easy-to-exploit software vulnerability that, if left unpatched, could let unauthenticated remote attackers compromise a wide range of websites and blogs. The vulnerable plugin in question is ' ThemeGrill Demo Importer ' that comes with free as well as premium themes sold by the software development company ThemeGrill. ThemeGrill Demo Importer plugin has been designed to allow WordPress site admins to import demo content, widgets, and settings from ThemeGrill, making it easier for them to quickly customize the theme. According to a report WebARX security company shared with The Hacker News, when a ThemeGrill theme is installed and activated, the affected plugin executes some functions with administrative privileges without checking whether the user running the code is authenticated and is an admin. The flaw could eventually allow unauthenticated remote attackers to wipe the e

Here's excellent news for sysadmins. You can now use a physical security key as hardware-based two-factor authentication to securely log into a remote system via SSH protocol. OpenSSH, one of the most widely used open-source implementations of the Secure Shell (SSH) Protocol, yesterday announced the 8.2 version of the software that primarily includes two new significant security enhancements. First, OpenSSH 8.2 added support for FIDO/U2F hardware authenticators , and the second, it has deprecated SSH-RSA public key signature algorithm and planned to disable it by default in the future versions of the software. FIDO (Fast Identity Online) protocol based hardware security devices are stronger and fool-proof mechanisms for authentication because it enables public-key cryptography to protect against advanced malware, phishing, and man-in-the-middle attacks. "In OpenSSH, FIDO devices are supported by new public key types' ecdsa-sk' and 'ed25519-sk', along

A team of cybersecurity researchers late last week disclosed the existence of 12 potentially severe security vulnerabilities, collectively named ' SweynTooth ,' affecting millions of Bluetooth-enabled wireless smart devices worldwide—and worryingly, a few of which haven't yet been patched. All SweynTooth flaws basically reside in the way software development kits (SDKs) used by multiple system-on-a-chip (SoC) have implemented Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) wireless communication technology—powering at least 480 distinct products from several vendors including Samsung, FitBit and Xiaomi. According to the researchers, hackers in close physical proximity to vulnerable devices can abuse this vulnerability to remotely trigger deadlocks, crashes, and even bypass security in BLE products, allowing them to arbitrary read or write access to device's functions that are otherwise only allowed to be accessed by an authorized user. "As of today, SweynTooth vulnerabilities a

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) charged Huawei with racketeering and conspiring to steal trade secrets from six US firms, in a significant escalation of a lawsuit against the Chinese telecom giant that began last year. Accusing Huawei and its affiliates of "using fraud and deception to misappropriate sophisticated technology from US counterparts," the new charges allege the company of offering bonuses to employees who obtained "confidential information" from its competitors. The indictment adds to a list of two other charges filed by the US government last year, including violating US sanctions on Iran and stealing technology from T-Mobile — called Tappy — that's used to test smartphone durability. The development is the latest salvo fired by the Trump administration in its year-long fight against the networking equipment maker, which it deems a threat to national security. "The misappropriated

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\

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