Information

02 Dec

S3 Ep111: The business risk of a sleazy “nudity unfilter” [Audio + Text]

Information, Malware

by Paul Ducklin BUSINESS RISKS FROM AFTER-HOURS MALWARE 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 favourite podcatcher. READ THE TRANSCRIPT DOUG.  Crackdowns,…

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02 Dec

The CHRISTMA EXEC network worm – 35 years and counting!

Information, Malware

by Paul Ducklin Forget Sergeant Pepper and his Lonely Hearts Club Band, who taught the band to play a mere 20 years ago today. December 2022 sees the 35th anniversary of the first major self-spreading computer virus – the infamous CHRISTMA EXEC worm that temporarily crushed the major mainframe networks of the day… … not by any deliberately coded side-effects such as file scrambling or data deletion, but simply by leeching too much network bandwidth…

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02 Dec

LastPass admits to customer data breach caused by previous breach

Information

by Paul Ducklin Back in August 2022, popular password manager company LastPass admitted to a data breach. The company, which is owned by sofware-as-a-service business GoTo, which used to be LogMeIn, published a very brief but nevertheless useful report about that incident about a month later: Briefly put, LastPass concluded that the attackers managed to implant malware on a developer’s computer. With a beachhead on that computer, it seems that the attackers were then able…

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01 Dec

ConnectWise Quietly Patches Flaw That Helps Phishers

Information, Insights

ConnectWise, which offers a self-hosted, remote desktop software application that is widely used by Managed Service Providers (MSPs), is warning about an unusually sophisticated phishing attack that can let attackers take remote control over user systems when recipients click the included link. The warning comes just weeks after the company quietly patched a vulnerability that makes it easier for phishers to launch these attacks. A phishing attack targeting MSP customers using ConnectWise. ConnectWise Control is…

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01 Dec

Wipers Are Widening: Here’s Why That Matters

Information, Malware, News

In the first half of this year, researchers saw a rising trend of wiper malware being deployed in parallel with the Russia-Ukraine war. However, those wipers haven’t stayed in one place – they’re emerging globally, which underscores the fact that cybercrime knows no borders.  It’s not just the numbers that are growing; we’re also seeing a rise in variety and sophistication. These wiper varieties are also increasingly targeting critical infrastructure. Awash with wipers  The war…

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01 Dec

Serious Security: MD5 considered harmful – to the tune of $600,000

Information

by Paul Ducklin In a fascinating legal deliberation handed down by the French data protection regulator CNIL (Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés), the energy company Électricité de France, or EDF for short, has been fined EUR 600,000 (about $600,000). The legal declaration is, in the manner of such things, rather long and (to non-lawyers, at least) linguistically orotund, which means you need reasonable proficiency in French to understand all the ins and outs…

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30 Nov

Hackers Dump Australian Health Data Online, Declare ‘Case Closed’

Information, News

The hackers leaking stolen Australian health records to the dark web on Thursday appeared to end their extortion attempt by dumping a final batch of data online and declaring:”Case closed.” In November the hackers demanded health insurer Medibank pay US$9.7 million to keep the records off the internet — or one dollar for each of the company’s impacted customers, which included Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Medibank refused to pay at the urging of the federal…

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30 Nov

RansomBoggs: New ransomware targeting Ukraine

Information

ESET researchers spot a new ransomware campaign that goes after Ukrainian organizations and has Sandworm’s fingerprints all over it The ESET research team has spotted a new wave of ransomware attacks taking aim at multiple organizations in Ukraine and bearing the hallmarks of other campaigns previously unleashed by the Sandworm APT group. Even though the ransomware – called RansomBoggs by ESET and written in the .NET framework – is new, particularly the way it is…

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30 Nov

TikTok “Invisible Challenge” porn malware puts us all at risk

Information, Malware

by Paul Ducklin Researchers at secure coding company Checkmarx have warned of porn-themed malware that’s been attracting and attacking sleazy internet users in droves. Unfortunately, the side-effects of this malware, dubbed Unfilter or Space Unfilter, apparently involve plundering data from the victim’s computer, including Discord passwords, thus indirectly exposing the victim’s contacts – such as colleagues, friends and family – to spams and scams from cybercriminals who can now pose as someone those people know.…

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29 Nov

Ransomware Gang Takes Credit for Maple Leaf Foods Hack

Information, News

The Black Basta ransomware group has taken credit for the recently disclosed attack on Canadian meat giant Maple Leaf Foods. The cybercriminals have made public several screenshots of technical documents, financial information and other corporate files to demonstrate that they gained access to Maple Leaf Foods systems. Maple Leaf Foods announced in early November that it was experiencing an outage as a result of a cyberattack. The Mississauga, Ontario-based packaged meats company said it took…

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