Information

API Security Firm FireTail Raises $5 Million

API security startup FireTail this week announced that it has raised $5 million in an early-stage financing round led by Paladin Capital Group, with participation from General Advance, Secure Octane, Zscaler, and angel investors. Founded in 2021, the Mclean, Virginia-based firm proposes a new approach to securing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), helping organizations build API inventories and eliminate security issues associated with them. Already seeing early adopters across North America, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, FireTail says…

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Six Charged in Mass Takedown of DDoS-for-Hire Sites

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) today seized four-dozen domains that sold “booter” or “stresser” services — businesses that make it easy and cheap for even non-technical users to launch powerful Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks designed knock targets offline. The DOJ also charged six U.S. men with computer crimes related to their alleged ownership of the popular DDoS-for-hire services. The booter service OrphicSecurityTeam[.]com was one of the 48 DDoS-for-hire domains seized by the…

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday, December 2022 Edition

Microsoft has released its final monthly batch of security updates for 2022, fixing more than four dozen security holes in its various Windows operating systems and related software. The most pressing patches include a zero-day in a Windows feature that tries to flag malicious files from the Web, a critical bug in PowerShell, and a dangerous flaw in Windows 11 systems that was detailed publicly prior to this week’s Patch Tuesday. The security updates include…

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Cybersecurity Trends 2023: Securing our hybrid lives

ESET experts offer their reflections on what the continued blurring of boundaries between different spheres of life means for our human and social experience – and especially our cybersecurity and privacy The future isn’t what it used to be. This adage, if a little trite, has taken on a whole new meaning after our lives turned on a dime with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. And as the world was bouncing back from the…

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Top tips for security‑ and privacy‑enhancing holiday gifts

Think outside the (gift) box. Here are a few ideas for security and privacy gifts to get for your relatives – or even for yourself. Some don’t cost a penny! Thanks to a decade or more of big-name data breaches, global privacy scandals and consumer rights legislation like the GDPR, we’re all more aware of cybersecurity and privacy issues today. And now that many of us are working more from home and our personal and…

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COVID-bit: the wireless spyware trick with an unfortunate name

by Paul Ducklin If you’re a regular Naked Security reader, you can probably guess where on the planet we’re headed in this virtual journey…. …we’re off once more to the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Researchers in the department’s Cyber-Security Research Center regularly investigate security issues related to so-called airgapped networks. As the name suggests, an airgapped network is deliberately disconnected not only from the…

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Patch Tuesday: 0-days, RCE bugs, and a curious tale of signed malware

by Paul Ducklin Another month, another Microsoft Patch Tuesday, another 48 patches, another two zero-days… …and an astonishing tale about a bunch of rogue actors who tricked Microsoft itself into giving their malicious code an official digital seal of approval. For a threat researcher’s view of the Patch Tuesday fixes for December 2002, please consult the Sophos X-Ops writeup on our sister site Sophos News: For a deep dive into the saga of the signed…

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Apple patches everything, finally reveals mystery of iOS 16.1.2

by Paul Ducklin Apple has just published a wide range of security fixes for all its supported platforms, from the smallest watch to the biggest laptop. In other words, if you’ve got an Apple product, and it’s still officially supported, we urge you to do an update check now. Remember that even if you’ve set your iDevices to update entirely automatically, doing a manual check is still well worth it, because: It ensures that you…

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High-Severity Memory Safety Bugs Patched With Latest Chrome 108 Update

Google this week announced a Chrome update that resolves eight vulnerabilities in the popular browser, including five reported by external researchers. All five security defects are use-after-free flaws, a type of memory safety bug that has been prevalent in Chrome over the past years, and which Google has long-battled to eliminate. According to Google’s advisory, four of these issues are high-severity bugs, impacting components such as Blink Media, Mojo IPC, Blink Frames, and Aura. The…

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FBI’s Vetted Info Sharing Network ‘InfraGard’ Hacked

InfraGard, a program run by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to build cyber and physical threat information sharing partnerships with the private sector, this week saw its database of contact information on more than 80,000 members go up for sale on an English-language cybercrime forum. Meanwhile, the hackers responsible are communicating directly with members through the InfraGard portal online — using a new account under the assumed identity of a financial industry CEO…

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