Data Breaches

We soon close out the security year of 2022. Only time will tell what 2023 will bring, but for IT and security admins of Microsoft networks, 2022 has been the year of blended attacks, on-premises Exchange Server flaws, and vulnerabilities needing more than patching to mitigate. Here’s a month-by-month look at the past year. January: A bad start for on-premises Microsoft Exchange Server vulnerabilities It seems fitting that 2022 began with the release of the…

Apple today introduced several new security features focused on fending off threats to user data in the cloud, including end-to-end encryption for backups for iCloud users. Along with end-to-end encryption for iCloud, Apple’s cloud storage and computing platform, the company announced iMessage Contact Key Verification, allowing users to verify they are communicating only with whom they intend. Apple Apple also announced hardware Security Keys for Apple ID, giving users the choice to require two-factor authentication to sign…

The US Congress is rolling back proposed legislation that would place restrictions on the use of Chinese-made chips by the government and its contractors, after  companies argued that the measures would raise costs. While the draft legislation still provides for restrictions to be enacted, contractors now have five years to comply with them, rather than the two years stipulated in an earlier version of the proposal, and the language of the new draft leaves room…

Ransomware was again the top attack type in 2021, with manufacturing replacing financial services as the top industry in a Brooks Jon Hocut, director of information security for Brooks ssailants’ crosshairs—representing 23.2% of the global attacks remediated last year by IBM Security’s X-Force, according to the company’s Threat Intelligence Index 2022 report. With news like this, it is not surprising that “ransomware is the threat that keeps me up the most at night,” says Jon…

Cloud services and hosting provider Rackspace Technology acknowledged Tuesday that a recent incident that took most of its Hosted Exchange email server business offline was the product of a ransomware attack. The company shut the service down last Friday. It was not, initially, clear what had caused the outage, but Rackspace quickly moved to shift Exchange customers over to Microsoft 365, as this part of the company’s infrastructure was apparently unaffected. Rackpsace offers migration to…

Researchers have found three vulnerabilities in AMI MegaRAC, a baseband management controller (BMC) firmware used by multiple server manufacturers. If exploited, the flaws could allow attackers to remotely control servers, deploy malware and firmware implants, or trigger damaging actions that leave them inoperable. BMCs are microcontrollers present on server motherboards that have their own firmware, dedicated memory, power, and network ports and are used for out-of-band management of servers when their main operating systems are…

Action1 has announced new AI-based threat actor filtering to detect and block abuse of its remote management platform. The cloud-native patch management, remote access, and remote monitoring and management (RMM) firm stated its platform has been upgraded to spot abnormal user behavior and automatically block threat actors to prevent attackers exploiting its tool to carry out malicious activity. The release comes amid a trend of hackers misusing legitimate systems management platforms to deploy ransomware or…