CyberSecure Specialist

Did you mistakenly sell your network access? – Week in security with Tony Anscombe

Many routers that are offered for resale contain sensitive corporate information and allow third-party connections to corporate networks Did you mistakenly sell access to your network when you sold a decommissioned router? Recently, ESET researchers purchased several used core routers to set up a test environment, only to find that, in many cases, the previously used configurations had not been wiped and that the devices still contained trivially accessible sensitive corporate information. The researchers went…

Read More

Bootkit zero-day fix – is this Microsoft’s most cautious patch ever?

by Paul Ducklin Microsoft’s May 2023 Patch Tuesday updates comprise just the sort of mixture you probably expected. If you go by numbers, there are 38 vulnerabilities, of which seven are considered critical: six in Windows itself, and one in SharePoint. Apparently, three of the 38 holes are zero-days, because they’re already publicly known, and at least one of them has already been actively exploited by cybercriminals. Unfortunately, those criminals seem to include the notorious…

Read More

Dell pushes security, devops integration in storage updates

Dell’s storage product lineup is set to receive a wide range of updates, including  devops integrations with the Ansible and Terraform tools, compliance with the latest US government security standards, zero trust readiness and more. PowerStore, Dell’s flash-based storage array line, is receiving the lion’s share of the security updates, according to a Dell announcement on Wednesday. Dell said that PowerStore now boasts STIG hardening, meaning that it is compliant with the federal government’s stanadards…

Read More

Microsoft fixes bypass for critical Outlook zero-click flaw patch

Microsoft fixed a new vulnerability this week that could be used to bypass defenses the company put in place in March for a critical vulnerability in Outlook that Russian cyberspies exploited in the wild. That vulnerability allowed attackers to steal NTLM hashes by simply sending specifically crafted emails to Outlook users. The exploit requires no user interaction. The new vulnerability, patched Tuesday and tracked as CVE-2023-29324, is in the Windows MSHTML Platform and can be…

Read More

Google Now Lets US Users Search Dark Web for Their Gmail ID

Gmail users in the US can now run scans to find out whether their Gmail ID appears on the dark web, Google announced today at Google I/O, its annual developer conference. The feature was initially announced in March, when the internet giant released it for Google One users only. It allows users to run scans and receive a report informing them whether their information, including name, address, email address, phone number, and Social Security number,…

Read More

IBM unveils end-to-end, quantum-safe tools to secure business, government data

Technology giant IBM has debuted a new set of tools and capabilities designed as an end-to-end, quantum-safe solution to secure organizations and governmental agencies as they head toward the post-quantum computing era. Announced at its annual Think conference in Orlando, Florida, Quantum Safe technology combines expertise across cryptography and critical infrastructure to address the potential future security risks that quantum computing poses, according to the company. IBM also unveiled the Quantum Safe Roadmap to guide…

Read More

International security agencies warn of Russian “Snake” malware threat

Security agencies from five countries have issued a joint advisory revealing technical details about a sophisticated espionage tool used by Russian cyber actors against their targets. “Snake malware” and its variants have been a core component in Russian espionage operations carried out by Center 16 of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) for nearly two decades, according to the security notice. Identified in infrastructure in over 50 countries across North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia,…

Read More

Evil digital twins and other risks: the use of twins opens up a host of new security concerns

The use of digital twins — virtual representations of actual or envisioned real-world objects — is growing. Their uses are multifold and can be incredibly helpful, providing real-time models of physical assets or even people or biological systems that can help identify problems as or even before they occur. Grand View Research has predicted that the global digital twin market, valued at $11.1 billion in 2022, will grow at a 37.5% compound annual growth rate…

Read More

Make them pay: Hackers devise new tactics to ensure ransomware payment

Ransomware remains one of the biggest cybersecurity threats that organizations and governments continue to face. However, hackers are engineering new ways to extract ransom from their victims as organizations take a conscious call to decline ransom payment demands. With the fall of the most notorious ransomware gang, Conti, in May 2022, it was assumed that ransomware attacks would see a major decline. However, Tenable found that 35.5% of breaches in 2022 were the result of a ransomware attack,…

Read More

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, May 2023 Edition

Microsoft today released software updates to fix at least four dozen security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, including patches for two zero-day vulnerabilities that are already being exploited in active attacks. First up in May’s zero-day flaws is CVE-2023-29336, which is an “elevation of privilege” weakness in Windows which has a low attack complexity, requires low privileges, and no user interaction. However, as the SANS Internet Storm Center points out, the…

Read More