Information

by Paul Ducklin The second Tuesday of every month is Microsoft’s regular day for security updates, still known by almost everyone by its unofficial nickname of “Patch Tuesday”. But the second Tuesday in October is also Ada Lovelace Day, celebrating Ada, Countess of Lovelace. Ada was a true pioneer not only of computing, but also of computer science, and gave her name to the programming language Ada. The Ada language, intriguingly, emerged from a US…

Read More

What are the warning signs that someone has hijacked your Steam account? Here is what to look for and what you can do to get your account back. The videogaming industry doesn’t stop growing. In fact, it is estimated to reach a market value of $197 billon by the end of 2022 and surpass $250 billon by 2025. This, together with its irresistible allure for ever younger and younger gamers, has contributed to an increase in scams…

Read More

ESET researchers analyzed previously undocumented custom backdoors and cyberespionage tools deployed in Israel by the POLONIUM APT group ESET researchers reveal their findings about POLONIUM, an advanced persistent threat (APT) group about which little information is publicly available and its initial compromise vector is unknown. POLONIUM is a cyberespionage group first documented by Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) in June 2022. MSTIC’s assessment is that POLONIUM is an operational group based in Lebanon, coordinating its…

Read More

Fraudsters use various tactics to separate people from their hard-earned cash on Zelle. Here’s how to keep your money safe while using the popular P2P payment service. The consumer payments space has undergone a radical shift in recent years. A new breed of apps, including Venmo, Cash App and Zelle, now offer a fast, effective and free way for users to pay friends, family and selected small businesses. Launched in 2017 by a US banking…

Read More

by Paul Ducklin Two weeks ago we reported on two zero-days in Microsoft Exchange that had been reported to Microsoft three weeks before that by a Vietnamese company that claimed to have stumbled across the bugs on an incident response engagement on a customer’s network. (You may need to read that twice.) As you probably recall, the bugs are reminiscent of last year’s ProxyLogin/ProxyShell security problems in Windows, although this time an authenticated connection is…

Read More

by Paul Ducklin THREE DEEP QUESTIONS Should hospital ransomware attackers get life in prison? Who was the Countess of Computer Science, and just how close did we come to digital music in the 19th century? And could a weirdly wacky email brick your iPhone? With Doug Aamoth and Paul Ducklin. Intro and outro music by Edith Mudge. Click-and-drag on the soundwaves below to skip to any point. You can also listen directly on Soundcloud. You…

Read More

by Paul Ducklin We’re not quite sure what to call it right now, so we referred to it in the headline by the hybrid name Microsoft Office 365. (The name “Office” as the collective noun for Microsoft’s word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and collaboration apps is being killed off over the next month or two, to become simply “Microsoft 365”.) We’re sure that people will keep on using the individual app names (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and…

Read More

More than a dozen organizations operating in various verticals were attacked by the threat actor This week, ESET researchers published their analysis of previously undocumented backdoors and cyberespionage tools that the POLONIUM APT group has deployed against targets in Israel. The group has used at least seven different custom backdoors in the past year, and ESET has named five previously undocumented backdoors with the suffix “-Creep.” More than a dozen organizations operating in various verticals…

Read More

ESET Research spots a new version of Android malware known as FurBall that APT-C-50 is using in its wider Domestic Kitten campaign This week, ESET researchers published their analysis of a new variant of the Android malware known as FurBall that APT-C-50 has used in its wider Domestic Kitten campaign. The campaign is known to take aim at Iranian citizens as part of mobile surveillance campaigns – and the same applies to this new FurBall…

Read More