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27 Jul

S3 Ep145: Bugs With Impressive Names!

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by Paul Ducklin ONE WEEK, TWO BWAINS Apple patches two zero-days, one for a second time. How a 30-year-old cryptosystem got cracked. All your secret are belong to Zenbleed. Remembering those dodgy PC/Mac ads. 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 and anywhere that good podcasts are found. Or…

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27 Jul

US Senator Wyden Accuses Microsoft of ‘Cybersecurity Negligence’

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Oregon senator Ron Wyden wants the U.S. government to hold Microsoft responsible for what he describes as “negligent cybersecurity practices” that enabled “a successful Chinese espionage campaign against the United States government.” In a strongly worded letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and the heads of CISA and the FTC, Wyden said the software giant “bears significant responsibility” for the M365 cloud hack that started with the theft of a Microsoft encryption key. “Since the…

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26 Jul

Zenbleed: How the quest for CPU performance could put your passwords at risk

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by Paul Ducklin Remember Heartbleed? That was the bug, back in 2014, that introduced the suffix -bleed for vulnerabilities that leak data in a haphazard way that neither the attacker nor the victim can reliably control. In other words, a crook can’t use a bleed-style bug for a precision attack, such as “Find the shadow password file in the /etc directory and upload it to me,” or “Search backwards in memory until the first run…

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26 Jul

Russia Sends Cybersecurity CEO to Jail for 14 Years

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The Russian government today handed down a treason conviction and 14-year prison sentence on Iyla Sachkov, the former founder and CEO of one of Russia’s largest cybersecurity firms. Sachkov, 37, has been detained for nearly two years under charges that the Kremlin has kept classified and hidden from public view, and he joins a growing roster of former Russian cybercrime fighters who are now serving hard time for farcical treason convictions. Ilya Sachkov. Image: Group-IB.com.…

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26 Jul

Ex-NSA Official Harry Coker Tapped for National Cyber Director Job

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Former Navy commander and senior official in the NSA and CIA Harry Coker has been formally tapped to replace the retired Chris Inglis as the U.S. government’s National Cyber Director. Coker’s nomination, announced by the Biden administration on Wednesday, puts him in line to lead the implementation of the government’s newly formed national cybersecurity strategy and manage the tricky relationship between the federal government and big-tech vendors struggling to cope with nonstop malicious hacker attacks.…

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25 Jul

Who and What is Behind the Malware Proxy Service SocksEscort?

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Researchers this month uncovered a two-year-old Linux-based remote access trojan dubbed AVrecon that enslaves Internet routers into botnet that bilks online advertisers and performs password-spraying attacks. Now new findings reveal that AVrecon is the malware engine behind a 12-year-old service called SocksEscort, which rents hacked residential and small business devices to cybercriminals looking to hide their true location online. Image: Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs. In a report released July 12, researchers at Lumen’s Black Lotus…

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25 Jul

Apple ships that recent “Rapid Response” spyware patch to everyone, fixes a second zero-day

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by Paul Ducklin Two weeks ago, we urged Apple users with recent hardware to grab the company’s second-ever Rapid Response patch. As we pointed out at the time, this was an emergency bug fix to block off a web-browsing security hole that had apparently been used in real-world spyware attacks: Component: WebKit Impact: Processing web content may lead to arbitrary code execution. Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively…

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