Information

A brief summary of what happened with Emotet since its comeback in November 2021 Emotet is a malware family active since 2014, operated by a cybercrime group known as Mealybug or TA542. Although it started as a banking trojan, it later evolved into a botnet that became one of the most prevalent threats worldwide. Emotet spreads via spam emails; it can exfiltrate information from, and deliver third-party malware to, compromised computers. Emotet operators are not…

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by Paul Ducklin Firefox’s latest monthly update just came out, bumping the primary version of the popular alternative browser to 115.0. OK, it’s technically a once-every-four-weeks update, so that there will sometimes be two major updates in a single calendar month, just as you sometimes get two full moons in a month, but this month there’s only one. (At the end of next month, August 2023, there will co-incidentally be both a blue moon, which…

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Criminals increasingly create deepfake nudes from people’s benign public photos in order to extort money from them, the FBI warns The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is warning about an increase in extortion campaigns where criminals tap into readily available artificial intelligence (AI) tools to create sexually explicit deepfakes from people’s innocent photos and then harass or blackmail them. According to its recent Public Service Announcement, the Bureau has received a growing number of…

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by Paul Ducklin Even if you haven’t heard of the venerable Ghostscript project, you may very well have used it without knowing. Alternatively, you may have it baked into a cloud service that you offer, or have it preinstalled and ready to go if you use a package-based software service such as a BSD or Linux distro, Homebrew on a Mac, or Chocolatey on Windows. Ghostscript is a free and open-source implementation of Adobe’s widely-used…

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Here are some of the key insights on the evolving data breach landscape as revealed by Verizon’s analysis of more than 16,000 incidents Contrary to common perception, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are often the target of cyberattacks. That’s understandable, as in the US and UK, they comprise over 99% of businesses, a majority of private sector jobs and around half of earnings. But if you’re an IT or business leader at a smaller organization,…

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by Paul Ducklin If you run a WordPress site with the Ultimate Members plugin installed, make sure you’ve updated it to the latest version. Over the weekend, the plugin’s creator published version 2.6.7, which is supposed to patch a serious security hole, described by user @softwaregeek on the WordPress support site as follows: A critical vulnerability in the plugin (CVE-2023-3460) allows an unauthenticated attacker to register as an administrator and take full control of the…

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