CyberSecurity Updates

26 Jul

Ex-NSA Official Harry Coker Tapped for National Cyber Director Job

Information, News

Former Navy commander and senior official in the NSA and CIA Harry Coker has been formally tapped to replace the retired Chris Inglis as the U.S. government’s National Cyber Director. Coker’s nomination, announced by the Biden administration on Wednesday, puts him in line to lead the implementation of the government’s newly formed national cybersecurity strategy and manage the tricky relationship between the federal government and big-tech vendors struggling to cope with nonstop malicious hacker attacks.…

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26 Jul

CISA Releases Analysis of FY22 Risk and Vulnerability Assessments

Attacks, Insights, Malware

CISA has released an analysis and infographic detailing the findings from the 121 Risk and Vulnerability Assessments (RVAs) conducted across multiple critical infrastructure sectors in fiscal year 2022 (FY22).  The analysis details a sample attack path including tactics and steps a cyber threat actor could follow to compromise an organization with weaknesses representative of those CISA observed in FY22 RVAs. The infographic highlights the most successful techniques for each tactic that RVAs documented. Both the…

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25 Jul

Who and What is Behind the Malware Proxy Service SocksEscort?

Information, Insights

Researchers this month uncovered a two-year-old Linux-based remote access trojan dubbed AVrecon that enslaves Internet routers into botnet that bilks online advertisers and performs password-spraying attacks. Now new findings reveal that AVrecon is the malware engine behind a 12-year-old service called SocksEscort, which rents hacked residential and small business devices to cybercriminals looking to hide their true location online. Image: Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs. In a report released July 12, researchers at Lumen’s Black Lotus…

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25 Jul

Apple ships that recent “Rapid Response” spyware patch to everyone, fixes a second zero-day

Information

by Paul Ducklin Two weeks ago, we urged Apple users with recent hardware to grab the company’s second-ever Rapid Response patch. As we pointed out at the time, this was an emergency bug fix to block off a web-browsing security hole that had apparently been used in real-world spyware attacks: Component: WebKit Impact: Processing web content may lead to arbitrary code execution. Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively…

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