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S3 Ep105: WONTFIX! The MS Office cryptofail that “isn’t a security flaw” [Audio + Text]

by Paul Ducklin WHAT DO YOU MEAN, “DOESN’T MEET THE BAR FOR SECURITY SERVICING”? 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 anywhere that good podcasts are found. Or just drop the URL of our RSS feed into your…

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Women in Cryptology – USPS celebrates WW2 codebreakers

by Paul Ducklin The US Postal Service just issued a commemorative stamp to remember the service of some 11,000 women cryptologists during World War 2. Like their Bletchley Park counterparts in the UK, these wartime heros didn’t finish the war with any sort of hero’s welcome back into civilian life. Indeed, they got no public recognition at all for the amazing physical and intellectual effort they put into decrypting and decoding enemy intelligence. Make no…

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Zoom for Mac patches sneaky “spy-on-me” bug – update now!

by Paul Ducklin Popular and ubiquitous (software isn’t always both of those things!) cloud meeting company Zoom recently announced an oops-that-wasn’t-supposed-to-happen bug in the Mac version of its software. The security bulletin is, forgivably, written in the typically staccato and jargon-soaked style of bug-hunters, but the meaning is fairly clear. The bug is denoted CVE-2022-28762, and is detailed in Zoom Bulletin ZB-22023: When camera mode rendering context is enabled as part of the Zoom App…

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5 steps to protect your school from cyberattacks

What can schools, which all too often make easy prey for cybercriminals, do to bolster their defenses and keep threats at bay? Schools are at the center of societal change, whether it is by educating and empowering students or by serving as a mirror of current social and economic realities. In order to fulfill their role, however, schools need resources and staff ready to answer these challenges. While the digital era was increasing in pace…

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Domestic Kitten campaign spying on Iranian citizens with new FurBall malware

APT-C-50’s Domestic Kitten campaign continues, targeting Iranian citizens with a new version of the FurBall malware masquerading as an Android translation app ESET researchers recently identified a new version of the Android malware FurBall being used in a Domestic Kitten campaign conducted by the APT-C-50 group. The Domestic Kitten campaign is known to conduct mobile surveillance operations against Iranian citizens and this new FurBall version is no different in its targeting. Since June 2021, it…

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Don’t get scammed when buying tickets online

With hot-ticket events firmly back on the agenda, scammers selling fake tickets online have also come out in force As the events scene slowly came back to life in 2022, the clamor for tickets to festivals and gigs surged massively. Many festivals around the UK sold out within hours, and as a result people were tempted to take to secondary marketplaces and social networks to find resale tickets. Unfortunately, this created the ideal breeding ground…

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Google’s GUAC Open Source Tool Centralizes Software Security Metadata

Google today introduced Graph for Understanding Artifact Composition (GUAC), an open source tool for centralizing build, security, and dependency metadata. Developed in collaboration with Kusari, Purdue University, and Citi, the new project is meant to help organizations better understand software supply chains. GUAC aggregates metadata from different sources, including supply chain levels for software artifacts (SLSA) provenance, software bills of materials (SBOM), and vulnerabilities, to provide a more comprehensive view over them. “Graph for Understanding…

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Battle with Bots Prompts Mass Purge of Amazon, Apple Employee Accounts on LinkedIn

On October 10, 2022, there were 576,562 LinkedIn accounts that listed their current employer as Apple Inc. The next day, half of those profiles no longer existed. A similarly dramatic drop in the number of LinkedIn profiles claiming employment at Amazon comes as LinkedIn is struggling to combat a significant uptick in the creation of fake employee accounts that pair AI-generated profile photos with text lifted from legitimate users. Jay Pinho is a developer who…

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How Card Skimming Disproportionally Affects Those Most In Need

When people banking in the United States lose money because their payment card got skimmed at an ATM, gas pump or grocery store checkout terminal, they may face hassles or delays in recovering any lost funds, but they are almost always made whole by their financial institution. Yet, one class of Americans — those receiving food assistance benefits via state-issued prepaid debit cards — are particularly exposed to losses from skimming scams, and usually have…

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Anti-Money Laundering Service AMLBot Cleans House

AMLBot, a service that helps businesses avoid transacting with cryptocurrency wallets that have been sanctioned for cybercrime activity, said an investigation published by KrebsOnSecurity last year helped it shut down three dark web services that secretly resold its technology to help cybercrooks avoid detection by anti-money laundering systems. Antinalysis, as it existed in 2021. In August 2021, KrebsOnSecurity published “New Anti Anti-Money Laundering Services for Crooks,” which examined Antinalysis, a service marketed on cybercrime forums…

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