Continuous Monitoring and Protection
Your smart speaker is designed to listen, but could it be eavesdropping too? Ever since Amazon came under fire for being able to potentially listen in on people through its Echo smart speakers, and even transcribe what they were saying, I have been intrigued by the idea of how IoT could be used to snoop on us, unbeknown to the victims. Big tech companies behind Alexa-enabled and other similar devices have since taken steps towards…
Read Moreby Paul Ducklin Popular social media site Reddit – “orange Usenet with ads”, as we’ve somewhat ungraciously heard it described – is the latest well-known web property to suffer a data breach in which its own source code was stolen. In recent weeks, LastPass and GitHub have confessed to similar experiences, with cyercriminals apparently breaking and entering in much the same way: by figuring out a live access code or password for an individual staff…
Read MoreOrganizations worldwide have been warned of an increase in the number of attacks abusing Microsoft OneNote documents for malware delivery. Part of the Office suite, OneNote is typically used within organizations for note taking and task management, among other operations. What makes OneNote documents an attractive target for threat actors includes the fact that they do not benefit from the Mark-of-the-Web (MOTW) protection, along with the fact that files can be attached to OneNote notebooks…
Read MoreThe number of vulnerabilities discovered in industrial control systems (ICS) continues to increase, and many of them have a ‘critical’ or ‘high’ severity rating, according to a new report from industrial cybersecurity firm SynSaber. The report compares the number of ICS and ICS medical advisories published by CISA between 2020 and 2022. While the number of advisories was roughly the same in 2021 and 2022, at 350, the number of vulnerabilities discovered last year reached…
Read MoreNo internet, perfect security? Two ESET researchers perform a thought experiment where they consider the implications of being plunged into digital darkness. Not every computer problem is due to a war in Ukraine, or the failure of the power grid in Texas. But let’s say your network access gets shut off from the rest of the world due to a catastrophic event. Whether it is an armed conflict, a decision of an authoritarian regime, an…
Read MoreA view of the T3 2022 threat landscape as seen by ESET telemetry and from the perspective of ESET threat detection and research experts In 2022, an unprovoked and unjustified attack on Ukraine shocked the world, bringing devastating effects on the country and its population. The war continues to impact everything from energy prices and inflation to cyberspace, which ESET researchers and analysts have monitored extensively throughout the year. Among the effects seen in cyberspace,…
Read Moreby Paul Ducklin CAN YOU GET HACKED AND THEN PROSECUTED FOR IT? Cryptocurrency crimelords. Security patches for VMware, OpenSSH and OpenSSL. Medical breacher busted. Is that a bug or a feature? Click-and-drag on the soundwaves below to skip to any point. You can also 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…
Read MoreAuthorities in the United States and United Kingdom today levied financial sanctions against seven men accused of operating “Trickbot,” a cybercrime-as-a-service platform based in Russia that has enabled countless ransomware attacks and bank account takeovers since its debut in 2016. The U.S. Department of the Treasury says the Trickbot group is associated with Russian intelligence services, and that this alliance led to the targeting of many U.S. companies and government entities. Initially a stealthy trojan…
Read MoreVulnCheck, a Massachusetts startup with ambitious plans in the vulnerability intelligence space, has attracted $3.2 million in seed-stage funding from several prominent investors. The early-stage financing round was led by Sorensen Ventures and included equity stakes for In-Q-Tel, Lux Capital, and Aviso Ventures. Based in Lexington, Mass., VulnCheck is building technology that promises exploit intelligence for vulnerability prioritization and an early-warning system for in-the-wild software exploitation activity. Founded in 2021, VulnCheck is the brainchild of…
Read Moreby Paul Ducklin OpenSSL, probably the best-known if not the most widely-used encryption library in the world, has just release a trifecta of security updates. These patches cover the two current open-source versions that the organisation supports for everyone, plus the “old” 1.0.2-version series, where updates are only available to customers who pay for premium support. (Getting into a position where you no longer need to pay for support is probably better for you, even…
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