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A United States regulator has fined the credit card provider Capital One Financial Corp with $80 million over last year's data breach that exposed the personal information of more than 100 million credit card applicants of Americans. The fine was imposed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), an independent bureau within the United States Department of the Treasury that governs the execution of laws relating to national banks. According to a press release published by the OCC on Thursday, Capital One failed to establish appropriate risk management before migrating its IT operations to a public cloud-based service, which included appropriate design and implementation of certain network security controls, adequate data loss prevention controls, and effective dispositioning of alerts. The OCC also said that the credit card provider also left numerous weaknesses in its cloud-based data storage in an internal audit in 2015 as well as failed to patch security

Cybersecurity researchers today highlighted an evasive phishing technique that attackers are exploiting in the wild to target visitors of several sites with a quirk in domain names, and leverage modified favicons to inject e-skimmers and steal payment card information covertly. "The idea is simple and consists of using characters that look the same in order to dupe users," Malwarebytes researchers said in a Thursday analysis . "Sometimes the characters are from a different language set or simply capitalizing the letter 'i' to make it appear like a lowercase 'l'." Called an internationalized domain name (IDN) homograph attack , the technique has been used by a Magecart group on multiple domains to load the popular Inter skimming kit hidden inside a favicon file . The visual trickery typically involves leveraging the similarities of character scripts to create and register fraudulent domains of existing ones to deceive unsuspecting users into

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,

For much of this year, IT professionals all over the globe have had their hands full, finding ways to help businesses cope with the fallout of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. In many cases, it involved a rapid rollout of significant remote work infrastructure. That infrastructure was called into service with little to no warning and even less opportunity for testing. Needless to say, the situation wasn't ideal from a cybersecurity standpoint. And hackers all over the world knew it. Almost immediately, Google reported a significant increase in malicious activity, and Microsoft noted trends that appeared to back that up. The good news is that the wave of cyberattacks unleashed by the pandemic peaked in April and has since died down. Fortunately, that's allowing IT professionals and network administrators everywhere to take a deep breath and take stock of the new security environment they're now operating in. The trouble is, there's still so much uncertainty

It turns out that the root cause behind several previously disclosed speculative execution attacks against modern processors, such as Meltdown and Foreshadow , was misattributed to 'prefetching effect,' resulting in hardware vendors releasing incomplete mitigations and countermeasures. Sharing its findings with The Hacker News, a group of academics from the Graz University of Technology and CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security finally revealed the exact reason behind why the kernel addresses are cached in the first place, as well as presented several new attacks that exploit the previously unidentified underlying issue, allowing attackers to sniff out sensitive data. The new research explains microarchitectural attacks were actually caused by speculative dereferencing of user-space registers in the kernel, which not just impacts the most recent Intel CPUs with the latest hardware mitigations, but also several modern processors from ARM, IBM, and AMD — previou

A new research has identified four new variants of HTTP request smuggling attacks that work against various commercial off-the-shelf web servers and HTTP proxy servers. Amit Klein, VP of Security Research at SafeBreach who presented the findings today at the Black Hat security conference, said that the attacks highlight how web servers and HTTP proxy servers are still susceptible to HTTP request smuggling even after 15 years since they were first documented. What is HTTP Request Smuggling? HTTP request smuggling (or HTTP Desyncing) is a technique employed to interfere with the way a website processes sequences of HTTP requests that are received from one or more users. Vulnerabilities related to HTTP request smuggling typically arise when the front-end (a load balancer or proxy) and the back-end servers interpret the boundary of an HTTP request differently, thereby allowing a bad actor to send (or "smuggle") an ambiguous request that gets prepended to the next le

Many companies today have developed a Cybersecurity Incident Response (IR) plan. It's a sound security practice to prepare a comprehensive IR plan to help the organization react to a sudden security incident in an orderly, rational manner. Otherwise, the organization will develop a plan while frantically responding to the incident, a recipe ripe for mistakes. Heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson once said, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." A significant cybersecurity incident is an equivalent punch in the mouth to the cybersecurity team and perhaps the entire organization. At least at first. Developing an Incident Response plan is undoubtedly smart, but it only gets the organization so far. Depending on the severity of the incident and the level of cybersecurity expertise within the breached organization, a cybersecurity incident often leads to panic and turmoil within the organization – plan or no plan. It's very unsettling to have system

Apple earlier this year fixed a security vulnerability in iOS and macOS that could have potentially allowed an attacker to gain unauthorized access to a user's iCloud account. Uncovered in February by Thijs Alkemade , a security specialist at IT security firm Computest, the flaw resided in Apple's implementation of TouchID (or FaceID) biometric feature that authenticated users to log in to websites on Safari, specifically those that use Apple ID logins. After the issue was reported to Apple through their responsible disclosure program, the iPhone maker addressed the vulnerability in a server-side update . An Authentication Flaw The central premise of the flaw is as follows. When users try to sign in to a website that requires an Apple ID, a prompt is displayed to authenticate the login using Touch ID. Doing so skips the two-factor authentication step since it already leverages a combination of factors for identification, such as the device (something you have) and

Intelligence agencies in the US have released information about a new variant of 12-year-old computer virus used by China's state-sponsored hackers targeting governments, corporations, and think tanks. Named " Taidoor, " the malware has done an 'excellent' job of compromising systems as early as 2008 , with the actors deploying it on victim networks for stealthy remote access. "[The] FBI has high confidence that Chinese government actors are using malware variants in conjunction with proxy servers to maintain a presence on victim networks and to further network exploitation," the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of Defense (DoD) said in a joint advisory . The US Cyber Command has also uploaded four samples of the Taidoor RAT on the public malware repository VirusTotal to let 50+ Antivirus companies check the virus's involvement in other unattributed cam

A 17-year-old teen and two other 19 and 22-year-old individuals have reportedly been arrested for being the alleged mastermind behind the recent Twitter hack that simultaneously targeted several high-profile accounts within minutes as part of a massive bitcoin scam. According to the U.S. Department of Justice , Mason Sheppard , aka "Chaewon," 19, from the United Kingdom, Nima Fazeli , aka "Rolex," 22, from Florida and an unnamed juvenile was charged this week with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and the intentional access of a protected computer. Florida news channel WFLA has identified a 17-year-old teen named  Graham Clark of Tampa Bay this week in connection with the Twitter hack, who probably is the juvenile that U.S. Department of Justice mentioned in its press release. Graham Clark has reportedly been charged with 30 felonies of communications and organized fraud for scamming hundreds of people using compromise

The Council of the European Union has imposed its first-ever sanctions against persons or entities involved in various cyber-attacks targeting European citizens, and its member states. The directive has been issued against six individuals and three entities responsible for or involved in various cyber-attacks, out of which some publicly known are ' WannaCry ', ' NotPetya ', and ' Operation Cloud Hopper ,' as well as an attempted cyber-attack against the organization for the prohibition of chemical weapons. Out of the six individuals sanctioned by the EU include two Chinese citizens and four Russian nationals. The companies involved in carrying out cyberattacks include an export firm based in North Korea, and technology companies from China and Russia. The sanctions imposed include a ban on persons traveling to any EU countries and a freeze of assets on persons and entities. Besides this, EU citizens and entities are also forbidden from doing any busin

Security researchers have outlined a new technique that renders a remote timing-based side-channel attack more effective regardless of the network congestion between the adversary and the target server. Remote timing attacks that work over a network connection are predominantly affected by variations in network transmission time (or jitter), which, in turn, depends on the load of the network connection at any given point in time. But since measuring the time taken to execute cryptographic algorithms is crucial to carrying out a timing attack and consequently leak information, the jitter on the network path from the attacker to the server can make it impractical to successfully exploit timing side-channels that rely on a small difference in execution time. The new method, called Timeless Timing Attacks (TTAs) by researchers from DistriNet Research Group and New York University Abu Dhabi, instead leverages multiplexing of network protocols and concurrent execution by applicati

Popular video conferencing app Zoom recently fixed a new security flaw that could have allowed potential attackers to crack the numeric passcode used to secure private meetings on the platform and snoop on participants. Zoom meetings are by default protected by a six-digit numeric password, but according to Tom Anthony, VP Product at SearchPilot who identified the issue , the lack of rate limiting enabled "an attacker to attempt all 1 million passwords in a matter of minutes and gain access to other people's private (password protected) Zoom meetings." It's worth noting that Zoom began requiring a passcode for all meetings back in April as a preventive measure to combat Zoom-bombing attacks, which refers to the act of disrupting and hijacking Zoom meetings uninvited to share obscene and racist content. Anthony reported the security issue to the company on April 1, 2020, along with a Python-based proof-of-concept script, a week after which Zoom patched the flaw

A team of cybersecurity researchers today disclosed details of a new high-risk vulnerability affecting billions of devices worldwide—including servers and workstations, laptops, desktops, and IoT systems running nearly any Linux distribution or Windows system. Dubbed ' BootHole ' and tracked as CVE-2020-10713 , the reported vulnerability resides in the GRUB2 bootloader, which, if exploited, could potentially let attackers bypass the Secure Boot feature and gain high-privileged persistent and stealthy access to the targeted systems. Secure Boot is a security feature of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) that uses a bootloader to load critical components, peripherals, and the operating system while ensuring that only cryptographically signed code executes during the boot process. "One of the explicit design goals of Secure Boot is to prevent unauthorized code, even running with administrator privileges, from gaining additional privileges and pre-OS pers

Many endpoint security vendors are beginning to offer their applications only in the cloud, sunsetting their on-premise offerings. This approach may be beneficial to the vendor, but many clients continue to need on-premise solutions. Vendors that sunset on-premise solutions force clients that prefer on-premise solutions to either change their operating environment and approach or change vendors. Fortunately, some vendors continue to provide their offerings in both cloud and on-premise versions. One such company is Cynet , which allows clients to deploy their EDR and XDR (Extended Detection and Response) solutions in on-premise, cloud, and hybrid cloud delivery models. Clients can access the solution in any way they see fit now and into the future. This provides an alternative for organizations that do not want to be forced to move into the cloud. Cloud vs. On-Premise The cloud vs. on-premise argument continues to rage. Recently, however, it seems that everyone is jumpin

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered critical vulnerabilities in industrial VPN implementations primarily used to provide remote access to operational technology (OT) networks that could allow hackers to overwrite data, execute malicious code, and compromise industrial control systems (ICS). A new report published by industrial cybersecurity company Claroty demonstrates multiple severe vulnerabilities in enterprise-grade VPN installations, including Secomea GateManager M2M Server, Moxa EDR-G902, and EDR-G903, and HMS Networks eWon's eCatcher VPN client. These vulnerable products are widely used in field-based industries such as oil and gas, water utilities, and electric utilities to remotely access, maintain and monitor ICS and field devices, including programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and input/output devices. According to Claroty researchers, successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities can give an unauthenticated attacker direct access to the ICS devices an