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S3 Ep136: Navigating a manic malware maelstrom

by Paul Ducklin A PYTHON PERSPECTIVE VORTEX No audio player below? Listen directly on Soundcloud. With Doug Aamoth and Paul Ducklin. Intro and outro music by Edith Mudge. You can listen to us on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and anywhere that good podcasts are found. Or just drop the URL of our RSS feed into your favourite podcatcher. READ THE TRANSCRIPT DOUG.  Cybercrime after cybercrime, some Apple updates, and an attack on a…

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Organizations Worldwide Targeted in Rapidly Evolving Buhti Ransomware Operation

A recently identified ransomware operation called Buhti is using LockBit and Babuk variants to target both Linux and Windows systems, Symantec reports. Initially observed in February 2023, the Buhti operation, which Symantec calls Blacktail, has been rapidly expanding since mid-April, exploiting recent vulnerabilities for initial access, and relying on a custom tool to steal victim files. In a recent attack, the Buhti operators used a minimally modified version of the LockBit 3.0 (LockBit Black) ransomware…

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Google Cloud Users Can Now Automate TLS Certificate Lifecycle

Google on Thursday announced the availability of its Automatic Certificate Management Environment (ACME) API for all Google Cloud users, allowing them to automatically acquire and renew TLS certificates for free. The ACME protocol was designed to automate TLS certificate lifecycle through APIs that are supported by dozens of clients, and has become the standard for certificate management across the internet, with most TLS certificates in the WebPKI being issued by ACME certificate authorities. The protocol’s…

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Zyxel Firewalls Hacked by Mirai Botnet

A Mirai botnet variant has been exploiting a recently patched vulnerability tracked as CVE-2023-28771 to hack many Zyxel firewalls.  The Taiwan-based networking device manufacturer informed customers about the security hole on April 25, when it announced the availability of patches for impacted ATP, VPN, USG Flex and ZyWALL/USG firewalls. The OS command injection vulnerability, found by Trapa Security, is caused by improper error message handling in some firewalls, and it could allow an unauthenticated attacker…

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Watch Now: Threat Detection and Incident Response Virtual Summit

All sessions from SecurityWeek’s Threat Detection & Incident Response Summit  are now available to watch on demand. This fully immersive online event brought together security practitioners from around the world to share war stories on breaches and the murky world of high-end cyberattacks. Gain insights and learn strategies as we discuss threat hunting tools and frameworks, and explore value of threat intelligence data in the defender’s security stack. Agenda sessions available to watch on demand include…

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Digital security for the self‑employed: Staying safe without an IT team to help

Nobody wants to spend their time dealing with the fallout of a security incident instead of building up their business Approximately one in seven people in Europe and the United States are self-employed, often realizing their dream to be in charge of their own destiny and having more freedom and control over their careers. But with nominally more freedom to shape the trajectory of their future comes extra jeopardy. This often means little or no…

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Ransomware tales: The MitM attack that really had a Man in the Middle

by Paul Ducklin It’s taken more than five years for justice to be served in this case, but the cops and the courts got there in the end. The UK law enforcement office SEROCU, short for South East Regional Organised Crime Unit, this week reported the peculiar tale of one Ashley Liles, the literal Man in the Middle whom we referred to in the headline. These days, we usually expand the jargon term MitM to…

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Drop in Insider Breaches Drives Decline in Intrusions at OT Organizations

The 2023 State of Operational Technology and Cybersecurity Report published on Wednesday by Fortinet shows a drop in the number of intrusions at OT organizations. The report is based on a survey of 570 OT professionals, representing the manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, oil and gas, energy, chemical, and water sectors in countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, the UK, France, Germany, Japan, India, South Africa, and Egypt. A vast majority of the respondents…

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Android app breaking bad: From legitimate screen recording to file exfiltration within a year

ESET researchers discover AhRat – a new Android RAT based on AhMyth – that exfiltrates files and records audio ESET researchers have discovered a trojanized Android app that had been available on the Google Play store with over 50,000 installs. The app, named iRecorder – Screen Recorder, was initially uploaded to the store without malicious functionality on September 19th, 2021. However, it appears that malicious functionality was later implemented, most likely in version 1.3.8, which…

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PyPI open-source code repository deals with manic malware maelstrom

by Paul Ducklin Public source code repositories, from Sourceforge to GitHub, from the Linux Kernel Archives to ReactOS.org, from PHP Packagist to the Python Package Index, better known as PyPI, are a fantastic source (sorry!) of free operating systems, applications, programming libraries, and developers’ toolkits that have done computer science and software engineering a world of good. Most software projects need “helper” code that isn’t a fundamental part of the problem that the project itself…

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