Malware

Securing your organization against phishing can cost up to $85 per email

As phishing attacks increase, preventing them from doing damage is proving costly for organizations. Phishing-related activities are consuming a third of the total time available to IT and security teams and costing organizations anywhere between $2.84 and $85.33 per phishing email, according to a new report by Osterman Research. The report does not calculate the cost of damage caused by phishing, rather the productivity loss of IT and security teams. On average, organizations spend 16-30…

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CISA Releases Three Industrial Control Systems Advisories

Original release date: October 20, 2022 CISA has released three (3) Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories on October 20, 2022. These advisories provide timely information about current security issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits surrounding ICS. CISA encourages users and administrators to review the newly released ICS advisories for technical details and mitigations: •    ICSA-22-293-01 Bentley Systems MicroStation Connect •    ICSMA-21-294-01 B Braun Infusomat Space Large Volume Pump (Update A) •    ICSMA-20-296-02 B. Braun SpaceCom Battery Pack…

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Mozilla Releases Security Updates for Firefox

Original release date: October 20, 2022 Mozilla has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in Firefox ESR and Firefox. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to cause denial-of-service conditions. CISA encourages users and administrators to review Mozilla’s security advisories for Firefox ESR 102.4 and Firefox 106 for mitigations and updates. This product is provided subject to this Notification and this Privacy & Use policy.

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Financial losses to synthetic identity-based fraud to double by 2024

Losses to imposter scams based on synthetic identities—identities that only exist as figments in a credit reporting bureau’s records—will rise from a reported $1.2 billion in 2020 to $2.48 billion by 2024 in the US, according to an analysis published Thursday by identity verification vendor Socure. Synthetic identities became a common concern for businesses and financial institutions in the mid-2010s, Socure’s report said. Typically, such an identity is based on a real person, but with…

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Attackers switch to self-extracting password-protected archives to distribute email malware

Distributing malware inside password-protected archives has long been one of the main techniques used by attackers to bypass email security filters. More recently, researchers have spotted a variation that uses nested self-extracting archives that no longer require victims to input the password. “This is significant because one of the most difficult obstacles threat actors face when conducting this type of spam campaign is to convince the target to open the archive using the provided password,”…

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CISA Requests for Comment on Microsoft 365 Security Configuration Baselines

Original release date: October 20, 2022 CISA has issued requests for comment (RFCs) on eight Microsoft 365 security configuration baselines as part of the Secure Cloud Business Application (SCuBA) project to secure federal civilian executive branch agencies’ (FCEB) cloud environments. The baselines: •    Build on and integrate previous security configuration baselines developed by the Federal Chief Information Officers Council’s Cyber Innovation Tiger Team (CITT). •    Initiate a series of pilot efforts to advance cloud security…

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High, medium severity vulnerabilities impacting Zimbra Collaboration Suite

Threat actors are actively exploiting multiple Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) against enterprise cloud-hosted collaboration software and email platform Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS), according to an advisory update jointly issued by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC). The latest update lists CVEs currently being exploited based on a new Malware Analysis Report, MAR-10398871.r1.v2 and warns that threat actors may be targeting unpatched ZCS instances in…

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Supply chain attacks increased over 600% this year and companies are falling behind

The number of documented supply chain attacks involving malicious third-party components has increased 633% over the past year, now sitting at over 88,000 known instances, according to a new report from software supply chain management company Sonatype. Meanwhile, instances of transitive vulnerabilities that software components inherit from their own dependencies have also reached unprecedented levels and plague two-thirds of open-source libraries. “The networked nature of dependencies highlights the importance of having visibility and awareness about…

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Apache Commons Text RCE Vulnerability Patched in Latest Update

As time progresses, supply chain attacks are growing to become a popular attack vector among threat actors across the world. Fortunately, it seems that this vulnerability was not exploited in the wild in the seven months that it remained unpatched, but this will likely change. The problem with supply chain attacks is that in many instances, there are limited ways to detect them until they are more broadly known. It is recommended to have a…

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Verizon Notifies Prepaid Customers of Data Breach

SIM swapping attacks have gained popularity and are very useful to threat actors that already have breached credentials but get stopped from accessing accounts via Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). MFA is always a recommended tool to add another layer of defense to credential theft, but it is typically recommended that MFA is provided through a trusted third-party application and never through a phone number. SIM swapping attacks are great example of why it is dangerous to…

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