Social Engineering

In late November, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 8-3 to give the police the option to launch potentially lethal, remote-controlled robots in emergencies, creating an international outcry over law enforcement use of “killer robots.” The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD), which was behind the proposal, said they would deploy robots equipped with explosive charges “to contact, incapacitate, or disorient violent, armed, or dangerous suspects” only when lives are at stake. Missing from the…

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We’re about to finish yet another erratic year, in which Elon Musk bought Twitter, Russia invaded Ukraine, and many workers returned to their offices. We also saw, for the first time, a security chief sentenced to prison for concealing a data breach. These events and many more have changed the business landscape and forced CISOs to steer a course through uncertain waters. “With the shifts in the cybersecurity landscape, 2022 has been a milestone year…

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CNAPP (cloud native application protection platform) and XDR (extended detection and response ) provider Uptycs announced Friday that it has added agentless scanning to its existing cloud workload protection platform, which it said will open up a range of new use cases and attract new potential customers. The company said that its agentless workload scanning system will be fully interoperable with its agent-based Uptycs sensors, providing security metadata in the same format and letting users…

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Security researchers have developed a generic technique for SQL injection that bypasses multiple web application firewalls (WAFs). At the core of the issue was WAF vendors failing to add support for JSON inside SQL statements, allowing potential attackers to easily hide their malicious payloads. The bypass technique, discovered by researchers from Claroty’s Team82, was confirmed to work against WAFs from Palo Alto Networks, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudflare, F5, and Imperva. These vendors have released…

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We soon close out the security year of 2022. Only time will tell what 2023 will bring, but for IT and security admins of Microsoft networks, 2022 has been the year of blended attacks, on-premises Exchange Server flaws, and vulnerabilities needing more than patching to mitigate. Here’s a month-by-month look at the past year. January: A bad start for on-premises Microsoft Exchange Server vulnerabilities It seems fitting that 2022 began with the release of the…

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Apple today introduced several new security features focused on fending off threats to user data in the cloud, including end-to-end encryption for backups for iCloud users. Along with end-to-end encryption for iCloud, Apple’s cloud storage and computing platform, the company announced iMessage Contact Key Verification, allowing users to verify they are communicating only with whom they intend. Apple Apple also announced hardware Security Keys for Apple ID, giving users the choice to require two-factor authentication to sign…

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The US Congress is rolling back proposed legislation that would place restrictions on the use of Chinese-made chips by the government and its contractors, after  companies argued that the measures would raise costs. While the draft legislation still provides for restrictions to be enacted, contractors now have five years to comply with them, rather than the two years stipulated in an earlier version of the proposal, and the language of the new draft leaves room…

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Ransomware was again the top attack type in 2021, with manufacturing replacing financial services as the top industry in a Brooks Jon Hocut, director of information security for Brooks ssailants’ crosshairs—representing 23.2% of the global attacks remediated last year by IBM Security’s X-Force, according to the company’s Threat Intelligence Index 2022 report. With news like this, it is not surprising that “ransomware is the threat that keeps me up the most at night,” says Jon…

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Cloud services and hosting provider Rackspace Technology acknowledged Tuesday that a recent incident that took most of its Hosted Exchange email server business offline was the product of a ransomware attack. The company shut the service down last Friday. It was not, initially, clear what had caused the outage, but Rackspace quickly moved to shift Exchange customers over to Microsoft 365, as this part of the company’s infrastructure was apparently unaffected. Rackpsace offers migration to…

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Researchers have found three vulnerabilities in AMI MegaRAC, a baseband management controller (BMC) firmware used by multiple server manufacturers. If exploited, the flaws could allow attackers to remotely control servers, deploy malware and firmware implants, or trigger damaging actions that leave them inoperable. BMCs are microcontrollers present on server motherboards that have their own firmware, dedicated memory, power, and network ports and are used for out-of-band management of servers when their main operating systems are…

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