by Paul Ducklin Bug hunter Tavis Ormandy of Google’s Project Zero just discovered a dangerous bug in the GNU Privacy Guard team’s libgcrypt encryption software. The libgcrypt library is an open-source toolkit that anyone can use, but it’s probably best known as the encryption library used by the GNU Privacy Guard team’s own widely deployed
Month: January 2021
A “persistent attacker group” with alleged ties to Hezbollah has retooled its malware arsenal with a new version of a remote access Trojan (RAT) to break into companies worldwide and extract valuable information. In a new report published by the ClearSky research team on Thursday, the Israeli cybersecurity firm said it identified at least 250
The organizers of an English beauty pageant established over nine decades ago are being held to ransom by cyber-criminals. The Daily Mail reports that malicious hackers targeted the organizers of Miss England on Tuesday night with a sophisticated online scam. Pageant organizer and former Miss England Angie Beasley was sent what appeared to be an authentic message from the
Organizations often focus their security efforts on the data center and invest significant financial and intellectual capital to secure the centralized servers and storage that drive their productivity, but they may be overlooking endpoint security. However, the data center’s resources are useless without user endpoints that can access and manipulate vital business data from almost
by Paul Ducklin What’s the connection between coronavirus facemasks and fingerprint biometrics? Who would have expected funky job ads on the White House website? And who would you call if you spotted a deceased former colleague hanging out on your network? With Kimberly Truong, Doug Aamoth and Paul Ducklin. Intro and outro music by Edith
As schools and students continue to contend with the very real cyber-risks of virtual classrooms, we share some advice for protecting children’s data and privacy The COVID-19 pandemic is still here, with pupils and students still soldiering on mostly remotely and focusing on their education from the confines of their houses. While another semester studying
The pressure on small to medium-sized enterprises to protect their organizations against cyberthreats is astronomical. These businesses face the same threats as the largest enterprises, experience the same (relative) damages and consequences when breaches occur as the largest enterprises but are forced to protect their organizations with a fraction of the resources as the largest
A retired Nevada cop who headed up a Cyber Crimes Unit has been charged with burglary, bigamy, and forgery. Former Washoe County Sheriff’s deputy Dennis Carry was arrested on Tuesday on seven different felony counts following a two-year investigation by the Reno Police Department. The 46-year-old was previously in charge of the Cyber Crimes Unit at the Washoe County
The law enforcement action is one of the most significant operations against cybercriminal enterprises ever Europol has announced the disruption of the Emotet botnet, one of the longest-lived and most pervasive malware threats, following a large-scale operation that also included a number of national law enforcement agencies across Europe and North America. Authorities in the
by Paul Ducklin If you’re a user of the venerable, powerful and popular open source programming language Perl, you’ll almost certainly have visited its official website at some point, at: https://perl.org. You may very well also have visited its sister site perl.com, which until very recently looked like this: Main page of perl.com on 2021-01-25,
Google Project Zero on Thursday disclosed details of a new security mechanism that Apple quietly added to iOS 14 as a countermeasure to prevent attacks that were recently found to leverage zero-days in its messaging app. Dubbed “BlastDoor,” the improved sandbox system for iMessage data was disclosed by Samuel Groß, a security researcher with Project
Organizations must be far more focused on data privacy issues this year, according to a panel of experts speaking during the Spirion webinar Customer Data Privacy 2021: It’s No Longer Just Business, It’s Personal. The panel began by setting out the trends that have pushed data privacy issues to the fore over recent years. These
The company emits emergency updates to fix bugs affecting devices ranging from iPhones to Apple Watches Apple has rolled out an update for its iOS and iPadOS operating systems to patch three zero-day security flaws that are being actively exploited in the wild. The trio of flaws affects various versions of iPhones and iPads and
by Harriet Stone Harriet Stone Hello, Naked Security readers. I’m Harriet Stone, an intern in the Sophos marketing team. Seven months of working (virtually) with cybersecurity professionals has made me realise just how unaware many students are when it comes to their online security. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic drove a switch to online learning,
Researchers have disclosed a new family of Android malware that abuses accessibility services in the device to hijack user credentials and record audio and video. Dubbed “Oscorp” by Italy’s CERT-AGID, the malware “induce(s) the user to install an accessibility service with which [the attackers] can read what is present and what is typed on the
New data protection issues brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic were discussed by Behnam Dayanim, partner and global chair of privacy and cybersecurity practice at Paul Hastings LLP, during a session at the RSAC 365 Virtual Summit. With COVID-19 vaccines now being rolled out across the world, many organizations are preparing to enable the safe return
“Download This application and Win Mobile Phone”, reads the message attempting to trick users into downloading a fake Huawei app Android users should watch out for new wormable malware that spreads through WhatsApp and lures the prospective victims into downloading an app from a website masquerading as Google Play. ESET malware researcher Lukas Stefanko looked
The infamous Emotet botnet operation has been disrupted, thanks to an international operation coordinated by Europol and Eurojust. Emotet’s infrastructure has been taken over as part of an “international coordinated action” between law enforcement agencies in Canada, France, Germany, Lithuania, Netherlands, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the U.S., “with international activity coordinated by Europol and
Summary In response to the SolarWinds supply chain compromise, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) published an advisory describing advanced techniques that threat actors can use to maintain persistent access to compromised cloud tenants and exfiltrate sensitive data. Most of the public commentary about this advisory has focused on the theft of Active Directory Federation
by Paul Ducklin Apple, rather unusually in today’s cybersecurity world, rarely announces that security fixes are on the way. There’s no equivalent of Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday, which is a regular and predictable fixture in anyone’s cybersecurity calendar; there’s no “new version every fourth Tuesday” as there is with Firefox; there’s no predetermined quarterly schedule for
Cybersecurity researchers today disclosed an unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft Azure Functions that could be used by an attacker to escalate privileges and escape the Docker container used for hosting them. The findings come as part of Intezer Lab‘s investigations into the Azure compute infrastructure. Following disclosure to Microsoft, the Windows maker is said to have
Increased digital adoption since the start of COVID-19 is leaving consumers more vulnerable to cyber-attacks, according to McAfee’s 2021 Consumer Security Mindset Report. The analysis found that Brits across all age groups have embraced new digital solutions amid ongoing social distancing restrictions. Nearly three-quarters purchased at least one connected device in 2020 and one in
by Paul Ducklin Many, if not most, organisations will tell you that they have processes and procedures that they follow when employees leave. In particular, most companies have a slick and quick procedure for removing ex-staff from the payroll. Firstly, it doesn’t make economic sense to pay someone who is no longer entitled to the
An evolving phishing campaign observed at least since May 2020 has been found to target high-ranking company executives across manufacturing, real estate, finance, government, and technological sectors with the goal of obtaining sensitive information. The campaign hinges on a social engineering trick that involves sending emails to potential victims containing fake Office 365 password expiration
Application security threat modeling solutions provider IriusRisk has announced the appointment of Dr Gary McGraw to its threat modeling technical advisory board. Dr McGraw – who has a PhD in computer science and cognitive science – joins existing advisor Adam Shostack and will assist in the strategic direction and development of the AppSec firm. The
by Paul Ducklin Here’s our latest Naked Security Live talk, where we talk about the difference between online “secrets” that aren’t really secret but were hidden away to be found as a bit of fun… …and genuine secrets, such as passwords and encryption keys, that get “hidden” away in apps or websites in the hope
In 1982, when SMTP was first specified, it did not contain any mechanism for providing security at the transport level to secure communications between mail transfer agents. Later, in 1999, the STARTTLS command was added to SMTP that in turn supported the encryption of emails in between the servers, providing the ability to convert a
The Russian government has issued cybersecurity guidance to businesses in the country after claiming they are at risk of US reprisals for the recent SolarWinds attacks. The alert came late last week from the National Coordination Center for Computer Incidents (NKTsKI), an agency created in 2018 by KGB successor the Federal Security Service (FSB). It
When you hear the term “pen testing,” what do you envision? A web app test done with a dynamic scanning tool? A test done by a human being who’s digging deep to replicate what an attacker would do in the real world? What about the term “network pen testing?” An automated discovery of your network
Cybersecurity researchers have warned of a publicly available fully-functional exploit that could be used to target SAP enterprise software. The exploit leverages a vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2020-6207, that stems from a missing authentication check in SAP Solution Manager (SolMan) version 7.2 SAP SolMan is an application management and administration solution that offers end-to-end application lifecycle
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