News

Google Rushes to Patch New Zero-Day Exploited by Spyware Vendor

Google has rushed to patch another Chrome zero-day vulnerability exploited by a commercial spyware vendor.  The internet giant announced on Tuesday that the stable channel of Chrome for Windows, macOS and Linux has been updated to version 117.0.5938.132. The latest update patches 10 vulnerabilities, three of which have been highlighted by the company in its advisory. The most important vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-5217, has been described as a “heap buffer overflow in vp8 encoding in…

Read More

New GPU Side-Channel Attack Allows Malicious Websites to Steal Data

Nearly all modern graphics processing units (GPUs) are vulnerable to a new type of side-channel attack that could be leveraged to obtain sensitive information, according to a team of researchers from various universities in the United States. The new attack method, named GPU.zip, was discovered and detailed by representatives of the University of Texas at Austin, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Washington, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The GPU.zip attack leverages hardware-based graphical data compression,…

Read More

Stealthy APT Gelsemium Seen Targeting Southeast Asian Government

A stealthy advanced persistent threat (APT) actor known as Gelsemium has been observed targeting a government entity in Southeast Asia to establish persistence and collect intelligence, cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks reveals. As part of the observed activity, spanning over a period of six months in late 2022 and into 2023, the threat actor deployed a variety of web shells to support lateral movement and malware delivery, along with backdoors, a Cobalt Strike beacon, and…

Read More

Researchers Discover Attempt to Infect Leading Egyptian Opposition Politician With Predator Spyware

A leading Egyptian opposition politician was targeted with spyware after announcing a presidential bid, security researchers reported Friday. They said Egyptian authorities were likely behind the attempted hack. Discovery of the attempt last week by researchers at Citizen Lab and Google’s Threat Analysis Group prompted Apple to rush out operating system updates for iPhones, iPads, Mac computers and Apple Watches to patch the associated vulnerabilities. Citizen Lab said in a blog post that recent attempts…

Read More

In Other News: New Analysis of Snowden Files, Yubico Goes Public, Election Hacking

SecurityWeek is publishing a weekly cybersecurity roundup that provides a concise compilation of noteworthy stories that might have slipped under the radar. We provide a valuable summary of stories that may not warrant an entire article, but are nonetheless important for a comprehensive understanding of the cybersecurity landscape. Each week, we will curate and present a collection of noteworthy developments, ranging from the latest vulnerability discoveries and emerging attack techniques to significant policy changes and…

Read More

China’s Offensive Cyber Operations in Africa Support Soft Power Efforts

Chinese state-sponsored threat groups have targeted telecommunications, financial and government organizations in Africa in support of Beijing’s soft power agenda in the region, according to SentinelOne. Earlier this year, SentinelOne reported seeing a Chinese cyberespionage group targeting telecoms providers in the Middle East as part of an operation dubbed Tainted Love. The cybersecurity firm revealed on Thursday that the same threat actor, which could be linked to China’s APT41 group, has also been observed targeting…

Read More

New ‘Sandman’ APT Group Hitting Telcos With Rare LuaJIT Malware

A new and mysterious APT group has been spotted targeting telco service providers in Europe and Asia as part of what appears to be a cyberespionage campaign, according to a joint investigation by SentinelLabs and QGroup GmbH. According to SentinelLabs researcher Aleksandar Milenkoski, the shadowy APT group is using a sophisticated modular backdoor based on Lua, the lightweight cross-platform programming language designed primarily for embedded use in applications. “Sandman has deployed a novel modular backdoor…

Read More

MGM Resorts Computers Back Up After 10 Days as Analysts Eye Effects of Casino Cyberattacks

MGM Resorts brought to an end a 10-day computer shutdown prompted by efforts to shield from a cyberattack data including hotel reservations and credit card processing, the casino giant said Wednesday, as analysts and academics measured the effects of the event. “We are pleased that all of our hotels and casinos are operating normally,” the Las Vegas-based company posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. It reported last week that the attack was…

Read More

UK Minister Warns Meta Over End-to-End Encryption

Britain’s interior minister on Wednesday warned tech giant Meta that rolling out end-to-end encryption on its platforms must “not to come at a cost to our children’s safety”. Suella Braverman and security minister Tom Tugendhat have called on the company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, to “work with us” and ensure police can access data. “The use of strong encryption for online users remains a vital part of our digital world and I support…

Read More

Microsoft AI Researchers Expose 38TB of Data, Including Keys, Passwords and Internal Messages

Researchers at Wiz have flagged another major security misstep at Microsoft that caused the exposure of 38 terabytes of private data during a routine open source AI training material update on GitHub. The exposed data includes a disk backup of two employees’ workstations, corporate secrets, private keys, passwords, and over 30,000 internal Microsoft Teams messages, Wiz said in a note documenting the discovery. Wiz, a cloud data security startup founded by ex-Microsoft software engineers, said…

Read More