News

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

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

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

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 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

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

You may not know it, but thousands of often shadowy companies routinely traffic in personal data you probably never agreed to share — everything from your real-time location information to private financial details. Even if you could identify these data brokers, there isn’t much you can do about their activities, including in California, which has some of the strongest digital privacy laws in the U.S. That’s on the verge of changing. Both houses of the…

Read More

Russian hacker Dariy Pankov has pleaded guilty to computer fraud and now faces a maximum penalty of five years in federal prison, according to an announcement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Pankov, who was extradited from the Eastern European country of Georgia earlier this year, was charged with developing and selling a piece of malware called NLBrute that was used in cybercriminal activities. As part of a plea deal, the government said Pankov will forfeit…

Read More

The US Department of Defense (DoD) this week published an unclassified summary of its 2023 Cyber Strategy, outlining plans for both offensive and defensive efforts. One key focus of the 2023 Cyber Strategy is the commitment to boost the cyber capabilities of allies and partners, and to increase collective resilience against cyberattacks. This includes augmenting the capacity of partners and expanding their access to cybersecurity infrastructure, as well as helping them mature their cyber workforce…

Read More