Month: February 2022

A group of academics from Tel Aviv University have disclosed details of now-patched “severe” design flaws affecting about 100 million Android-based Samsung smartphones that could have resulted in the extraction of secret cryptographic keys. The shortcomings are the result of an analysis of the cryptographic design and implementation of Android’s hardware-backed Keystore in Samsung’s Galaxy
Insurance companies often struggle to assess their customers’ cybersecurity risks. For traditional commercial policies, insurance firms use actuarial models based on historic data going back decades or, in some cases, even centuries. These models enable insurance firms to forecast risk and provide coverage based on highly calculated premiums. Cyber insurance is a challenge. The expanding
Authorities in the UK and United States have issued an alert regarding a group of Iranian government-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT) actors known as MuddyWater. The actors, who are also known as Earth Vetala, MERCURY, Static Kitten, Seedworm, and TEMP.Zagros, have been observed conducting cyber espionage and other malicious cyber operations in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America.
Ukraine’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) has warned of Belarusian state-sponsored hackers targeting its military personnel and related individuals as part of a phishing campaign mounted amidst Russia’s military invasion of the country. “Mass phishing emails have recently been observed targeting private ‘i.ua’ and ‘meta.ua’ accounts of Ukrainian military personnel and related individuals,” the CERT-UA
What is Internet Key Exchange (IKE)? Internet Key Exchange (IKE) is a standard protocol used to set up a secure and authenticated communication channel between two parties via a virtual private network (VPN). The protocol ensures security for VPN negotiation, remote host and network access. A critical role of IKE is negotiating security associations (SAs)
Cops in Florida have arrested 10 men in a sting operation to catch online child sexual predators.  Operation Peek-a-Boo was conducted over a two-week period by 16 investigators with the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Unit at the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office (OCSO). OCSO said the 10 suspects believed they were chatting with minors online when they were
Authored by Oliver Devane and Vallabh Chole   Notifications on Chrome and Edge, both desktop browsers, are commonplace, and malicious actors are increasingly abusing this feature. McAfee previously blogged about how to change desktop browser settings to stop malicious notifications. This blog focuses on Chrome notifications on Android mobile devices such as phones and tablets, and
A new malware capable of controlling social media accounts is being distributed through Microsoft’s official app store in the form of trojanized gaming apps, infecting more than 5,000 Windows machines in Sweden, Bulgaria, Russia, Bermuda, and Spain. Israeli cybersecurity company Check Point dubbed the malware “Electron Bot,” in reference to a command-and-control (C2) domain used
by Paul Ducklin If you use Mozilla Firefox or any Chromium-based browser, notably Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge, you’ll know that the version numbers of these products are currently at 97 and 98 respectively. And if you’ve ever looked at your browser’s User-Agent string, you’ll know that these version numbers are, by default, transmitted to
The Ukrainian government is reportedly seeking volunteer hackers and security experts to help Ukraine defend its critical infrastructure against cyber-attacks.  According to a report by Reuters, Ukraine’s pleas for assistance started appearing on Ukrainian hacking forums on Thursday morning, shortly after the county was invaded on three fronts by Russian armed forces in an attack condemned by US President
Cybersecurity agencies from the U.K. and the U.S. have laid bare a new malware used by the Iranian government-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT) group in attacks targeting government and commercial networks worldwide. “MuddyWater actors are positioned both to provide stolen data and accesses to the Iranian government and to share these with other malicious cyber
A new data-wiping malware known as HermeticWiper has compromised hundreds of computers in Ukraine via a series of cyber attacks, according to research released Wednesday by antimalware vendor ESET. The malware was first seen at approximately 5 p.m. Eastern European Time (10 a.m. EST) Wednesday, hours after a wave of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were
Cryptocurrency has boomed in the last several years, with beginners and experts alike jumping into the industry. It’s proven now to be more than a passing hobby or trend. Cryptocurrency is a way of conducting business and making money for people around the world.   As the intrigue and interaction with crypto grows, cybercriminals are finding
The climate solutions we need to transform every sector are here. The question is: what role will you play in this transformation? You, your community, your business, your government? Technology is an expansive term. It’s not just apps and electronics. Human ingenuity has created everything from plows to fishing gear, bicycles to boomboxes, windmills to
Similarities have been unearthed between the Dridex general-purpose malware and a little-known ransomware strain called Entropy, suggesting that the operators are continuing to rebrand their extortion operations under a different name. “The similarities are in the software packer used to conceal the ransomware code, in the malware subroutines designed to find and obfuscate commands (API
A Seattle-based healthcare provider is facing a class action lawsuit over a cyber-attack in which the protected health information of 688,000 people was exposed. The exfiltration of data from Sea Mar Community Health Centers became apparent when files stolen in the attack showed up on the dark data leak website of cyber-criminal gang Marketo. Marketo