Cyber Security

U.S. telecoms giant T-Mobile has confirmed that it was also among the companies that were targeted by Chinese threat actors to gain access to valuable information. The adversaries, tracked as Salt Typhoon, breached the company as part of a “monthslong campaign” designed to harvest cellphone communications of “high-value intelligence targets.” It’s not clear what information

Nov 18, 2024Ravie LakshmananPrivacy / Email Security Google appears to be readying a new feature called Shielded Email that allows users to create email aliases when signing up for online services and better combat spam. The feature was first reported by Android Authority last week following a teardown of the latest version of Google Play

Nov 14, 2024Ravie LakshmananArtificial Intelligence / Cryptocurrency Google has revealed that bad actors are leveraging techniques like landing page cloaking to conduct scams by impersonating legitimate sites. “Cloaking is specifically designed to prevent moderation systems and teams from reviewing policy-violating content which enables them to deploy the scam directly to users,” Laurie Richardson, VP and

Nov 13, 2024Ravie LakshmananVulnerability / Patch Tuesday Microsoft on Tuesday revealed that two security flaws impacting Windows NT LAN Manager (NTLM) and Task Scheduler have come under active exploitation in the wild. The security vulnerabilities are among the 90 security bugs the tech giant addressed as part of its Patch Tuesday update for November 2024.

Nov 09, 2024Ravie LakshmananCryptocurrency / Cybercrime The 36-year-old founder of the Bitcoin Fog cryptocurrency mixer has been sentenced to 12 years and six months in prison for facilitating money laundering activities between 2011 and 2021. Roman Sterlingov, a dual Russian-Swedish national, pleaded guilty to charges of money laundering and operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business earlier

Nov 07, 2024Ravie LakshmananNational Security / Social Media The Canadian government on Wednesday ordered ByteDance-owned TikTok to dissolve its operations in the country, citing national security risks, but stopped short of instituting a ban on the popular video-sharing platform. “The decision was based on the information and evidence collected over the course of the review

Nov 06, 2024Ravie LakshmananCloud Security / Phishing Protection Google’s cloud division has announced that it will enforce mandatory multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all users by the end of 2025 as part of its efforts to improve account security. “We will be implementing mandatory MFA for Google Cloud in a phased approach that will roll out

Nov 05, 2024Ravie LakshmananMobile Security / Vulnerability Google has warned that a security flaw impacting its Android operating system has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-43093, has been described as a privilege escalation flaw in the Android Framework component that could result in unauthorized access to “Android/data,” “Android/obb,” and

Nov 05, 2024Ravie LakshmananMalware / Blockchain An ongoing campaign is targeting npm developers with hundreds of typosquat versions of their legitimate counterparts in an attempt to trick them into running cross-platform malware. The attack is notable for utilizing Ethereum smart contracts for command-and-control (C2) server address distribution, according to independent findings from Checkmarx, Phylum, and

Nov 04, 2024Mohit KumarDDoS Attack / Cybercrime German law enforcement authorities have announced the disruption of a criminal service called dstat[.]cc that made it possible for other threat actors to easily mount distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. “The platform made such DDoS attacks accessible to a wide range of users, even those without any in-depth technical

Nov 01, 2024Ravie LakshmananData Security / Artificial Intelligence Microsoft is further delaying the release of its controversial Recall feature for Windows Copilot+ PCs, stating it’s taking the time to improve the experience. The development was first reported by The Verge. The artificial intelligence-powered tool was initially slated for a preview release starting in October. “We

Nov 01, 2024Ravie LakshmananThreat Intelligence / Network Security Microsoft has revealed that a Chinese threat actor it tracks as Storm-0940 is leveraging a botnet called Quad7 to orchestrate highly evasive password spray attacks. The tech giant has given the botnet the name CovertNetwork-1658, stating the password spray operations are used to steal credentials from multiple

Oct 28, 2024Ravie LakshmananCloud Security / Cyber Attack A government entity and a religious organization in Taiwan were the target of a China-linked threat actor known as Evasive Panda that infected them with a previously undocumented post-compromise toolset codenamed CloudScout. “The CloudScout toolset is capable of retrieving data from various cloud services by leveraging stolen

Oct 25, 2024Ravie LakshmananCloud Security / Artificial Intelligence Apple has publicly made available its Private Cloud Compute (PCC) Virtual Research Environment (VRE), allowing the research community to inspect and verify the privacy and security guarantees of its offering. PCC, which Apple unveiled earlier this June, has been marketed as the “most advanced security architecture ever

The prolific Chinese nation-state actor known as APT41 (aka Brass Typhoon, Earth Baku, Wicked Panda, or Winnti) has been attributed to a sophisticated cyber attack targeting the gambling and gaming industry. “Over a period of at least six months, the attackers stealthily gathered valuable information from the targeted company including, but not limited to, network

Oct 18, 2024Ravie LakshmananThreat Intelligence / Browser Security Microsoft has disclosed details about a now-patched security flaw in Apple’s Transparency, Consent, and Control (TCC) framework in macOS that has likely come under exploitation to get around a user’s privacy preferences and access data. The shortcoming, codenamed HM Surf by the tech giant, is tracked as

China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center (CVERC) has doubled down on claims that the threat actor known as the Volt Typhoon is a fabrication of the U.S. and its allies. The agency, in collaboration with the National Engineering Laboratory for Computer Virus Prevention Technology, went on to accuse the U.S. federal government, intelligence agencies,

Oct 10, 2024Ravie LakshmananVulnerability / Browser Security Mozilla has revealed that a critical security flaw impacting Firefox and Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-9680, has been described as a use-after-free bug in the Animation timeline component. “An attacker was able to achieve code

Oct 09, 2024Ravie LakshmananCybercrime / Threat Detection Google on Wednesday announced a new partnership with the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA) and DNS Research Federation (DNS RF) to combat online scams. The initiative, which has been codenamed the Global Signal Exchange (GSE), is designed to create real-time insights into scams, fraud, and other forms of cybercrime

Oct 09, 2024Ravie LakshmananPhishing Attack / Malware Threat actors with ties to North Korea have been observed targeting job seekers in the tech industry to deliver updated versions of known malware families tracked as BeaverTail and InvisibleFerret. The activity cluster, tracked as CL-STA-0240, is part of a campaign dubbed Contagious Interview that Palo Alto Networks