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Apple has sued NSO Group and its parent company Q Cyber Technologies in a U.S. federal court holding it accountable for illegally targeting users with its Pegasus surveillance tool, marking yet another setback for the Israeli spyware vendor. The Cupertino-based tech giant painted NSO Group as "notorious hackers — amoral 21st century mercenaries who have created highly sophisticated cyber-surveillance machinery that invites routine and flagrant abuse." In addition, the lawsuit seeks to permanently prevent the infamous hacker-for-hire company from breaking into any Apple software, services or devices. The iPhone maker, separately, also revealed its plans to  notify targets  of state-sponsored spyware attacks and has committed $10 million, as well as any monetary damages won as part of the lawsuit, to cybersurveillance research groups and advocates. To that end, the company intends to display a "Threat Notification" after the targeted users sign into appleid.apple[

Marvel has been entertaining us for the last 20 years. We have seen gods, super-soldiers, magicians, and other irradiated heroes fight baddies at galactic scales. The eternal fight of good versus evil. A little bit like in cybersecurity, goods guys fighting cybercriminals. If we choose to go with this fun analogy, is there anything useful we can learn from those movies? World-ending baddies always come with an army When we watch the different Avenger movies, the first thing we realize is that big baddies never fight alone. Think Ultron and his bot army, Thanos or Loki with the Chitauri. They all come with large, generic clone proxy armies that heroes must fight before getting to the final boss. In the same way, serious cyberattacks are planned and delivered by organized and structured groups of cybercriminals such as APT groups with sometimes hundreds of members. In real-life scenarios, attacks are coming from IPs (one or many) that have been stolen, hacked, or bought by the crimin

A now-patched vulnerability affecting Oracle VM VirtualBox could be potentially exploited by an adversary to compromise the hypervisor and cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. "Easily exploitable vulnerability allows high privileged attacker with logon to the infrastructure where Oracle VM VirtualBox executes to compromise Oracle VM VirtualBox," the advisory  reads . "Successful attacks of this vulnerability can result in unauthorized ability to cause a hang or frequently repeatable crash (complete DoS) of Oracle VM VirtualBox" Tracked as  CVE-2021-2442  (CVSS score: 6.0), the flaw affects all versions of the product prior to 6.1.24. SentinelLabs researcher Max Van Amerongen has been credited with discovering and reporting the issue, following which  fixes have been rolled out  by Oracle as part of its Critical Patch Update for July 2021. Oracle VM  VirtualBox  is an open-source and cross-platform hypervisor and desktop virtualization software that enabl

There's a natural human desire to avoid threatening scenarios. The irony, of course, is if you hope to attain any semblance of security, you've got to remain prepared to confront those very same threats. As a decision-maker for your organization, you know this well. But no matter how many experts or trusted cybersecurity tools your organization has a standing guard, you're only as secure as your weakest link. There's still one group that can inadvertently open the gates to unwanted threat actors—your own people. Security must be second nature for your first line of defense For your organization to thrive, you need capable employees. After all, they're your source for great ideas, innovation, and ingenuity. However, they're also human. And humans are fallible. Hackers understand no one is perfect, and that's precisely what they seek to exploit. This is why your people must become your first line of defense against cyber threats. But to do so, they need to learn how to defend thems

Banking apps from Brazil are being targeted by a more elusive and stealthier version of an Android remote access trojan (RAT) that's capable of carrying out financial fraud attacks by stealing two-factor authentication (2FA) codes and initiating rogue transactions from infected devices to transfer money from victims' accounts to an account operated by the threat actor. IBM X-Force dubbed the revamped banking malware BrazKing , a previous version of which was referred to as  PixStealer  by Check Point Research. The mobile RAT was first seen around November 2018,  according  to ThreatFabric. "It turns out that its developers have been working on making the malware more agile than before, moving its core overlay mechanism to pull fake overlay screens from the command-and-control (C2) server in real-time," IBM X-Force researcher Shahar Tavor  noted  in a technical deep dive published last week. "The malware […] allows the attacker to log keystrokes, extract the pa

In the business world, mergers and acquisitions are commonplace as businesses combine, acquire, and enter various partnerships. Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) are filled with often very complicated and complex processes to merge business processes, management, and a whole slew of other aspects of combining two businesses into a single logical entity. In the modern business world before and after the acquisition, a new concern with M&A activities is cybersecurity. What role does cybersecurity play in today's mergers and acquisitions of businesses? Why is it becoming a tremendous concern? Cybersecurity threats are growing in leaps and bounds There is no question that cybersecurity risks and threats are growing exponentially. A  report from Cybersecurity Ventures  estimated a ransomware attack on businesses would happen every 11 seconds in 2021. Global ransomware costs in 2021 would exceed $20 billion. It seems there are constantly new reports of major ransomware attacks, cos

Web hosting giant GoDaddy on Monday disclosed a data breach that resulted in the unauthorized access of data belonging to a total of 1.2 million active and inactive customers, making it the  third   security incident  to come to light since 2018. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the world's largest domain registrar  said  that a malicious third-party managed to gain access to its  Managed WordPress  hosting environment on September 6 with the help of a compromised password, using it to obtain sensitive information pertaining to its customers. It's not immediately clear if the compromised password was secured with two-factor authentication. The Arizona-based company  claims  over 20 million customers, with more than 82 million domain names registered using its services. GoDaddy revealed it discovered the break-in on November 17. An investigation into the incident is ongoing and the company said it's "contacting all impacted custo

Weaknesses in e-commerce portals are being exploited to deploy a Linux backdoor as well as a credit card skimmer that's capable of stealing payment information from compromised websites. "The attacker started with automated e-commerce attack probes, testing for dozens of weaknesses in common online store platforms," researchers from Sansec Threat Research  said  in an analysis. "After a day and a half, the attacker found a file upload vulnerability in one of the store's plugins." The name of the affected vendor was not revealed. The initial foothold was then leveraged to upload a malicious web shell and alter the server code to siphon customer data. Additionally, the attacker delivered a Golang-based malware called " linux_avp " that serves as a backdoor to execute commands remotely sent from a command-and-control server hosted in Beijing. Upon execution, the program is designed to remove itself from the disk and camouflage as a " ps -ef

Threat actors are exploiting ProxyLogon and ProxyShell exploits in unpatched Microsoft Exchange Servers as part of an ongoing spam campaign that leverages stolen email chains to bypass security software and deploy malware on vulnerable systems. The findings come from Trend Micro following an investigation into a number of intrusions in the Middle East that culminated in the distribution of a never-before-seen loader dubbed SQUIRRELWAFFLE. First publicly  documented  by Cisco Talos, the attacks are believed to have commenced in mid-September 2021 via laced Microsoft Office documents. "It is known for sending its malicious emails as replies to pre-existing email chains, a tactic that lowers a victim's guard against malicious activities," researchers Mohamed Fahmy, Sherif Magdy, Abdelrhman Sharshar  said  in a report published last week. "To be able to pull this off, we believe it involved the use of a chain of both ProxyLogon and ProxyShell exploits." ProxyLo

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, disclosed that it doesn't intend to roll out default end-to-end encryption (E2EE) across all its messaging services until 2023, pushing its original plans by at least a year. "We're taking our time to get this right and we don't plan to finish the global rollout of end-to-end encryption by default across all our messaging services until sometime in 2023," Meta's head of safety, Antigone Davis,  said  in a post published in The Telegraph over the weekend. The new scheme, described as a "three-pronged approach," aims to employ a mix of non-encrypted data across its apps as well as account information and reports from users to improve safety and combat abuse, noting that the goal is to deter illegal behavior from happening in the first place, giving users more control, and actively encouraging users to flag harmful messages. Meta had previously  outlined  plans to be "fully end-to-en

A corporate cyber-espionage hacker group has resurfaced after a seven-month hiatus with new intrusions targeting four companies this year, including one of the largest wholesale stores in Russia, while simultaneously making tactical improvements to its toolset in an attempt to thwart analysis. "In every attack, the threat actor demonstrates extensive red teaming skills and the ability to bypass traditional antivirus detection using their own custom malware," Group-IB's Ivan Pisarev  said . Active since at least November 2018, the Russian-speaking  RedCurl hacking group  has been linked to 30 attacks to date with the goal of corporate cyber espionage and document theft aimed at 14 organizations spanning construction, finance, consulting, retail, insurance, and legal sectors and located in the U.K., Germany, Canada, Norway, Russia, and Ukraine. The threat actor uses an array of established hacking tools to infiltrate its targets and steal internal corporate documentat

A threat actor with ties to North Korea has been linked to a prolific wave of credential theft campaigns targeting research, education, government, media and other organizations, with two of the attacks also attempting to distribute malware that could be used for intelligence gathering. Enterprise security firm Proofpoint  attributed  the infiltrations to a group it tracks as  TA406 , and by the wider threat intelligence community under the monikers  Kimsuky  ( Kaspersky ), Velvet Chollima ( CrowdStrike ), Thallium ( Microsoft ), Black Banshee ( PwC ), ITG16 ( IBM ), and the Konni Group ( Cisco Talos ). Policy experts, journalists and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were targeted as part of weekly campaigns observed between from January through June 2021, Proofpoint researchers Darien Huss and Selena Larson disclosed in a technical report detailing the actor's tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), with the attacks spread across North America, Russia, China, and South

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered as many as 11 malicious Python packages that have been cumulatively downloaded more than 41,000 times from the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository, and could be exploited to steal Discord access tokens, passwords, and even stage dependency confusion attacks. The Python packages have since been removed from the repository following responsible disclosure by DevOps firm JFrog — importantpackage / important-package pptest ipboards owlmoon DiscordSafety trrfab 10Cent10 / 10Cent11 yandex-yt yiffparty Two of the packages ("importantpackage," "10Cent10," and their variants) were found obtaining a reverse shell on a compromised machine, giving the attacker full control over the system. Two other packages "ipboards" and "trrfab" masqueraded as legitimate dependencies designed to be automatically imported by taking advantage of a technique called  dependency confusion  or namespace confusion. Unli

The U.S. government on Thursday  unsealed  an indictment that accused two Iranian nationals of their involvement in cyber-enabled disinformation and threat campaign orchestrated to interfere in the 2020 presidential elections by gaining access to confidential voter information from at least one state election website. The two defendants in question — Seyyed Mohammad Hosein Musa Kazemi , 24, and Sajjad Kazemi , 27 — have been  charged  with conspiracy to commit computer fraud and abuse, intimidate voters, and transmit interstate threats, voter intimidation, transmission of interstate threats, with Kazemi additionally charged with unauthorized computer intrusion. Both the individuals are  currently at large . The influence campaign's goal was to erode confidence in the integrity of the U.S. electoral system and to sow discord among Americans, the Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a statement, characterizing the two individuals as "experienced Iran-based computer hackers&qu

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has disclosed that an unidentified threat actor has been exploiting a previously unknown weakness in the FatPipe MPVPN networking devices at least since May 2021 to obtain an initial foothold and maintain persistent access into vulnerable networks, making it the latest company to join the likes of Cisco, Fortinet, Citrix, Pulse Secure that have had their systems exploited in the wild. "The vulnerability allowed APT actors to gain access to an unrestricted file upload function to drop a web shell for exploitation activity with root access, leading to elevated privileges and potential follow-on activity," the agency  said  in an alert published this week. "Exploitation of this vulnerability then served as a jumping off point into other infrastructure for the APT actors." In other words, the zero-day vulnerability enables a remote attacker to upload a file to any location on the filesystem on an affected device. The se

Today's businesses run on data. They collect it from customers at every interaction, and they use it to improve efficiency, increase their agility, and provide higher levels of service. But it's becoming painfully obvious that all of that data businesses collect has also made them an enticing target for cybercriminals. With each passing day, the evidence of that grows. In the last few months, we've witnessed massive data breaches that targeted  Neiman Marcus ,  Facebook , and the  Robinhood  stock trading app. And they're hardly alone. In recent years, the number of data breaches worldwide has averaged  close to three per day . That statistic suggests that the average business has a target on its back and is running out of time to mount a defense of its data. And doing so doesn't have to be difficult. To help, here's a simple 5-step framework businesses of all sizes can use to protect their customer data. Step One: Review and Adapt Data Collection Standards

The clearnet and dark web payment portals operated by the  Conti  ransomware group have gone down in what appears to be an attempt to shift to new infrastructure after details about the gang's inner workings and its members were made public. According to  MalwareHunterTeam , "while both the clearweb and Tor domains of the leak site of the Conti ransomware gang is online and working, both their clearweb and Tor domains for the payment site (which is obviously more important than the leak) is down." It's not clear what prompted the shutdown, but the development comes as Swiss cybersecurity firm PRODAFT  offered  an unprecedented look into the group's ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) model, wherein the developers sell or lease their ransomware technology to affiliates hired from darknet forums, who then carry out attacks on their behalf while also netting about 70% of each ransom payment extorted from the victims. The result? Three members of the Conti team have b