Information

StrongPity espionage campaign targeting Android users

ESET researchers identified an active StrongPity campaign distributing a trojanized version of the Android Telegram app, presented as the Shagle app – a video-chat service that has no app version ESET researchers identified an active campaign that we have attributed to the StrongPity APT group. Active since November 2021, the campaign has distributed a malicious app through a website impersonating Shagle – a random-video-chat service that provides encrypted communications between strangers. Unlike the entirely web-based,…

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Cyber Incident Hits UK Postal Service, Halts Overseas Mail

Britain’s postal service said it was hit Wednesday by a “cyber incident” that is temporarily preventing it from sending letters or parcels to other countries. Royal Mail reported on its website that international export services were “experiencing severe service disruption” without providing further details. “We are temporarily unable to dispatch items to overseas destinations,” the service said, adding that it recommended customers hold on to mail destined for outside the country while it works on…

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Hybrid work: Turning business platforms into preferred social spaces

Hybrid work and hybrid play now merge into hybrid living, but where is the line between the two? Is there one? That the COVID-19 pandemic brought a new normal to businesses, educational institutions, and our everyday lives is an understatement. Many interactions, whether work-related or personal, moved online or at least gained a virtual mirror. This virtual migration began alongside the pandemic when most people and businesses first turned to tried-and-tested communications solutions, such as…

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Cracked it! Highlights from KringleCon 5: Golden Rings

Learning meets fun at the 2022 SANS Holiday Hack Challenge – strap yourself in for a crackerjack ride at the North Pole as I foil Grinchum’s foul plan and recover the five golden rings This is my first year participating in the SANS Holiday Hack Challenge and it was a blast. Through a series of 16 challenges ranging from easy to difficult, I practiced analyzing suspicious network traffic and PowerShell logs, writing Suricata rules, breaking…

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Popular JWT cloud security library patches “remote” code execution hole

by Paul Ducklin JWT is short for JSON Web Token, where JSON itself is short for JavaScript Object Notation. JSON is a modernish way of representing structured data; its format is a bit like XML, and can often be used instead, but without all the opening-and-closing angle brackets to get in the way of legibility. For example, data that might be recorded like this in XML… <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?> <data> <name>Duck</name> <job> <employer>Sophos</employer> <role>NakSec</role> </job>…

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday: One 0-day; Win 7 and 8.1 get last-ever patches

by Paul Ducklin As far as we can tell, there are a whopping 2874 items in this month’s Patch Tuesday update list from Microsoft, based on the CSV download we just grabbed from Redmond’s Security Update Guide web page. (The website itself says 2283, but the CSV export contained 2875 lines, where the first line isn’t actually a data record but a list of the various field names for the rest of the lines in…

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday, January 2023 Edition

Microsoft today released updates to fix nearly 100 security flaws in its Windows operating systems and other software. Highlights from the first Patch Tuesday of 2023 include a zero-day vulnerability in Windows, printer software flaws reported by the U.S. National Security Agency, and a critical Microsoft SharePoint Server bug that allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to make an anonymous connection. At least 11 of the patches released today are rated “Critical” by Microsoft, meaning they…

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday: 97 Windows Vulns, 1 Exploited Zero-Day

Microsoft’s security patching machine hummed into overdrive Tuesday with the release of fixes for at least 97 documented software vulnerabilities, including a zero-day that’s already been exploited to escape the browser sandbox. The zero-day, flagged by researchers at anti-malware company Avast, was exploited in live attacks to elevate privileges and escape a browser’s sandbox mitigation. As has become customary, Microsoft is stingy with details on the vulnerability or the attacks.  An advisory from Redmond marks…

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CircleCI – code-building service suffers total credential compromise

by Paul Ducklin If you’re a programmer, whether you code for a hobby or professionally, you’ll know that creating a new version of your project – an official “release” version that you yourself, or your friends, or your customers, will actually install and use – is always a bit of a white-knuckle ride. After all, a release version depends on all your code, relies on all your default settings, goes out only with your published…

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Microsoft Flags Ransomware Problems on Apple’s macOS Platform

Security researchers at Microsoft are flagging ransomware attacks on Apple’s flagship macOS operating system, warning that financially motivated cybercriminals are abusing legitimate macOS functionalities to exploit vulnerabilities, evade defenses, or coerce users to infect their devices. In a blog post documenting its research into four known macOS ransomware families, Microsoft’s Security Threat Intelligence team published IOCs and technical details to show how ransomware actors target users on macOS-powered devices. “While these malware families are old,…

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