CyberSecurity Updates

Teach a Man to Phish and He’s Set for Life

One frustrating aspect of email phishing is the frequency with which scammers fall back on tried-and-true methods that really have no business working these days. Like attaching a phishing email to a traditional, clean email message, or leveraging link redirects on LinkedIn, or abusing an encoding method that makes it easy to disguise booby-trapped Microsoft Windows files as relatively harmless documents. KrebsOnSecurity recently heard from a reader who was puzzled over an email he’d just…

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Threat Actors Abuse Cloudflare Tunnel for Persistent Access, Data Theft

Threat actors have been observed abusing an open source tool named Cloudflared to maintain persistent access to compromised systems and to steal information without being detected, cybersecurity firm GuidePoint Security reports. Cloudflared is a command-line client for Cloudflare Tunnel, a tunneling daemon for proxying traffic between the Cloudflare network and the user’s origin. The tool creates an outbound connection over HTTPS, with the connection’s settings manageable via the Cloudflare Zero Trust dashboard. Through Cloudflared, services…

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CISA Releases its Cybersecurity Strategic Plan

Today, CISA released a strategic plan to lay out how we will fulfill our cybersecurity mission over the next three years. The CISA Cybersecurity Strategic Plan aligns the following nine objectives to specific enabling measures and measures of effectiveness to drive accountability: Increase visibility into, and ability to disrupt, cybersecurity threats and campaigns Coordinate disclosure of, hunt for, and drive mitigation of critical and exploitable vulnerabilities Plan for, exercise, and execute joint cyber defense operations…

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S3 Ep146: Tell us about that breach! (If you want to.)

by Paul Ducklin WEIRD BUT TRUE No audio player below? 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 and anywhere that good podcasts are found. Or just drop the URL of our RSS feed into your favourite podcatcher. READ THE TRANSCRIPT DOUG.  Firefox updates, another Bug With An Impressive Name, and the SEC demands disclosure.…

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CISA Calls Urgent Attention to UEFI Attack Surfaces

The US government’s cybersecurity agency CISA is calling attention to under-researched attack surfaces in UEFI, warning that the dominant firmware standard presents a juicy target for malicious hackers. “UEFI is a critical attack surface. Attackers have a clear value proposition for targeting UEFI software,” the agency said in a call-to-action penned by CISA technical advisor Jonathan Spring and vulnerability management director Sandra Radesky.  Noting that UEFI code represents a compilation of several components (security and…

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CISA, NSA, FBI, and International Partners Release Joint CSA on Top Routinely Exploited Vulnerabilities of 2022 

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and international partners are releasing a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA), 2022 Top Routinely Exploited Vulnerabilities. This advisory provides details on the top Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) routinely exploited by malicious cyber actors in 2022, and the associated Common Weakness Enumeration(s) (CWE), to help organizations better understand the impact exploitation could have on their systems. International partners include:…

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How Malicious Android Apps Slip Into Disguise

Researchers say mobile malware purveyors have been abusing a bug in the Google Android platform that lets them sneak malicious code into mobile apps and evade security scanning tools. Google says it has updated its app malware detection mechanisms in response to the new research. At issue is a mobile malware obfuscation method identified by researchers at ThreatFabric, a security firm based in Amsterdam. Aleksandr Eremin, a senior malware analyst at the company, told KrebsOnSecurity…

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Performance and security clash yet again in “Collide+Power” attack

by Paul Ducklin Another week, another BWAIN! As you’ll know if you listened to last week’s podcast (hint, hint!), BWAIN is short for Bug With An Impressive Name: It’s a nickname we apply when the finders of a new cybersecurity attack get so excited about their discovery that they give it a PR-friendly moniker, register a vanity domain name for it, build it a custom website, and design it a special logo. This time, the…

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