CyberSecure Specialist

23 Nov

The Biden administration has racked up a host of cybersecurity accomplishments

Data Breaches, Malware, Social Engineering

When it comes to hitting the ground running on cybersecurity, the Biden administration has engaged in an extensive set of initiatives that far outstrip those of the Trump administration – and even those of the Obama administration, which established the previous highwater mark for cybersecurity actions. In mid-October, the White House issued a fact sheet about the Biden-Harris administration’s “relentless focus” on improving the nation’s cybersecurity to tout its impressive sprint. The document outlined the…

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23 Nov

Proofpoint: Watch Out for Nighthawk Hacking Tool Abuse

Information, Malware, News

Security researchers at Proofpoint are calling attention to the discovery of a commercial red-teaming tool called Nighthawk, warning that the command-and-control framework is likely to be abused by threat actors. According to a new report from Proofpoint, Nighthawk is an advanced C2 framework sold by MDSec, a European outfit that sells adversary simulation and penetration testing tools and services. “Nighthawk is at its core a commercially distributed remote access trojan (RAT) that is similar to…

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23 Nov

UK finalizes first independent post-Brexit data transfer deal with South Korea

Data Breaches, Malware, Social Engineering

The UK has finalized its first independent data adequacy decision since leaving the European Union (EU) which will allow UK organisations to securely transfer personal data to the Republic of Korea without restrictions by the end of the year. The UK government stated that the new legislation, first agreed upon in principle in July, will allow businesses in both countries to share data more easily, enhancing opportunities for cooperation and growth. The decision comes following…

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23 Nov

Cross-Tenant AWS Vulnerability Exposed Account Resources

Information, News

A cross-tenant vulnerability in Amazon Web Services (AWS) could have allowed attackers to abuse AWS AppSync to gain access to resources in an organization’s account. An attacker could exploit the AWS AppSync service to assume identity and access management (IAM) roles in other AWS accounts, gaining access to resources within those accounts, cloud security company Datadog Security Labs explains. The AppSync service allows developers to create GraphQL and Pub/Sub APIs, each with an associated data…

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23 Nov

Facebook Parent Meta Links Influence Campaign to US Military

Information, News

Facebook parent Meta has tied a recent influence operation powered by tens of accounts, pages and groups to the United States military. The social media giant on Tuesday released its adversarial threat report for the third quarter of 2022. During Q3, in addition to disrupting operations linked to Chinese and Russian threat actors, the company disrupted an operation that has been connected to the United States. According to Meta, the operation that originated in the…

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23 Nov

Online retailers should prepare for a holiday season spike in bot-operated attacks

Data Breaches, Malware, Social Engineering

With the holiday shopping season in full swing, retail websites can expect a spike in account takeover fraud, DDoS, and other attacks, including attacks via APIs, which now represent almost half of e-commerce traffic. According to a recent report from application and data security company Imperva, bots account for more than 40% of traffic to online retail websites on average, with around 24% of traffic coming from “bad bots” that engage in various forms of…

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23 Nov

How to reset a Kerberos password and get ahead of coming updates

Data Breaches, Malware, Social Engineering

Do you recall when you last reset your Kerberos password? Hopefully that was not the last time I suggested you change it, back in April of 2021, when I urged you to do a regular reset of the KRBTGT account password. If you’ve followed my advice, you are already one step ahead of the side effects caused by the November updates that introduced Kerberos changes. While many of you may be waiting to install the…

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22 Nov

Life in pursuit of answers: In the words of Ada Yonath

Information

From a little girl financially helping her family in Jerusalem to a Nobel Prize laureate. That is the exceptional life of Ada Yonath in a nutshell. The first female Israeli Nobel Laureate and the fourth woman in the world to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Ada Yonath has dedicated her life to the pursuit of answers to the most crucial scientific questions and to advancing progress in her field. Her curiosity and her…

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22 Nov

How to hack an unpatched Exchange server with rogue PowerShell code

Information, Uncategorized

by Paul Ducklin Just under two months ago, some worrying bug news broke: a pair of zero-day vulnerabilities were announced in Microsoft Exchange. As we advised at the time, these vulnerabilities, officially designated CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082: [were] two zero-days that [could] be chained together, with the first bug used remotely to open enough of a hole to trigger the second bug, which potentially allows remote code execution (RCE) on the Exchange server itself. The first…

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22 Nov

DraftKings Sports App Hacked

Attacks, Malware

DraftKings said that almost 300 thousand dollars was stolen from user accounts. According to some of the victims, when they took to Twitter to get help from DraftKings, there were many twitter accounts commenting aabout getting free money using various techniques, but none of them could be identified as the actual attacker. Attacks like these highlight the reasons why it is important to not reuse passwords, especially on websites that credit card information is being…

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