CyberSecure Specialist

Administrator of RSOCKS Proxy Botnet Pleads Guilty

Denis Emelyantsev, a 36-year-old Russian man accused of running a massive botnet called RSOCKS that stitched malware into millions of devices worldwide, pleaded guilty to two counts of computer crime violations in a California courtroom this week. The plea comes just months after Emelyantsev was extradited from Bulgaria, where he told investigators, “America is looking for me because I have enormous information and they need it.” A copy of the passport for Denis Emelyantsev, a.k.a.…

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Apple Patches Critical Security Vulnerabilities Actively Exploited In The Wild

The latest versions of the Safari browser, macOS, iOS, and watchOS address several recently discovered vulnerabilities. Not only does Binary Defense recommend that users upgrade their Apple devices to the latest software versions, but the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a notice for Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to patch their devices to secure them “against active threats.” https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/apple/apple-fixes-actively-exploited-ios-zero-day-on-older-iphones-ipads/ https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213597

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Chinese Cybercrime Group Using Golang Code Interpreter to Evade Detection

DragonSpark does not appear to have any notable ties to other Chinese based threat actors. Based on the attacks that the group is carrying out, especially in regards to the locations of the victims as well as the choice of tools primarily developed by Chinese authors, researchers are fairly certain that the group has ties to China. It highly recommended that companies that either have ties to Eastern Asia or do a lot of business…

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P-to-P fraud most concerning cyber threat in 2023: CSI

US financial institutions see peer-to-peer fraud and other digital fraud as the biggest cybersecurity concern in 2023. It was cited by 29% of respondents in a survey by Computer Systems Inc. (CSI), followed by data breaches (23%), ransomware (20%) and a breach at a third party (15%).  Industry respondents also expressed concerns over identity theft at 4%, unavailable or unaffordable cyber insurance at 4%, geopolitical risks at 3%, DDoS attacks at 2% and website defacement at…

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CISA Releases Protecting Our Future: Partnering to Safeguard K–12 organizations from Cybersecurity Threats

Original release date: January 24, 2023 Today, CISA released Protecting Our Future: Partnering to Safeguard K–12 organizations from Cybersecurity Threats. The report provides recommendations and resources to help K-12 schools and school districts address systemic cybersecurity risk. It also provides insight into the current threat landscape specific to the K-12 community and offers simple steps school leaders can take to strengthen their cybersecurity efforts. The report’s findings state that K-12 organizations need resources, simplicity and…

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ServiceNow to detect open source security vulnerabilities with Snyk integration

ServiceNow Vulnerability Response users will now have access to Snyk Open Source, a software composition analysis (SCA) platform designed to help developers find, prioritize, and fix security vulnerabilities and license issues in open source dependencies. Snyk Open Source is backed by the Israeli-US company’s own security intelligence that relies on a combination of public sources, data from the developer community, proprietary expert research, machine learning, and human-in-the-loop AI.  ServiceNow Vulnerability Response is part of ServiceNow Security Operations…

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Hybrid play: Leveling the playing field in online video gaming and beyond

Does VALORANT’s approach to cheating signal a turning point in how we deal with the continued hacks afflicting our hybrid world of work and play? First social apps, now gaming? The growth of cloud-powered apps like Telegram and Teams has created mega communities out of their users. Many of these apps have opened the door to personal self-expression and the types of risk-taking notorious on social media platforms. Oversharing, connecting with strangers, clickbait, and phishing…

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Serious Security: How dEliBeRaTe tYpOs might imProVe DNS security

by Paul Ducklin Over the years, we’ve written and spoken on Naked Security many times about the thorny problem of DNS hijacking. DNS, as you probably know, is short for domain name system, and you’ll often hear it described as the internet’s “telephone directory” or “gazetteer”. If you’re not familiar with the word gazeteer, it refers to the index at the back of an atlas where you look up, say, Monrovia, Liberia in a convenient…

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Apple patches are out – old iPhones get an old zero-day fix at last!

by Paul Ducklin Last year, on the last day of August 2022, we wrote with mild astonishment, and perhaps even a tiny touch of excitement, about an unexpected but rather important update for iPhones stuck back on iOS 12. As we remarked at the time, we’d already decided that iOS 12 had slipped (or perhaps been quietly pushed) off Apple’s radar, and would never be updated again, give that the previous update had been a…

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Skyhawk launches platform to provide threat detection and response across multi-cloud environments

Cloud threat detection vendor Skyhawk Security has released a platform designed to address alert fatigue that provides cloud detection and response (CDR) across multi-cloud environments, the company said Tuesday in a statement. The company says the Synthesis platform is being released on a “freemium” basis—the base version is available at no cost, but supplement features can be purchased. Skyhawk claims the platform improves upon products focused on identifying numerous static cloud security misconfigurations by employing…

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