CyberSecurity Updates

01 Dec

Serious Security: MD5 considered harmful – to the tune of $600,000

Information

by Paul Ducklin In a fascinating legal deliberation handed down by the French data protection regulator CNIL (Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés), the energy company Électricité de France, or EDF for short, has been fined EUR 600,000 (about $600,000). The legal declaration is, in the manner of such things, rather long and (to non-lawyers, at least) linguistically orotund, which means you need reasonable proficiency in French to understand all the ins and outs…

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30 Nov

Hackers Dump Australian Health Data Online, Declare ‘Case Closed’

Information, News

The hackers leaking stolen Australian health records to the dark web on Thursday appeared to end their extortion attempt by dumping a final batch of data online and declaring:”Case closed.” In November the hackers demanded health insurer Medibank pay US$9.7 million to keep the records off the internet — or one dollar for each of the company’s impacted customers, which included Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Medibank refused to pay at the urging of the federal…

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30 Nov

Fortanix unveils AWS integration for centralized key management

Data Breaches, Malware, Social Engineering

Cloud security vendor Fortanix has updated its Data Security Manager to incorporate support for AWS’ external encryption key store system, adding another major public cloud vendor to the list of those supported for the company’s key management system. With this week’s update, Fortanix, which already supports this type of cloud key management system in Azure and Google Cloud, is trying to solve one of the major security and regulatory problems posed by multicloud environments. Every…

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30 Nov

Android and iOS Loan Apps With 15 million Installs Extorted Borrowers

Attacks, Malware

Apple and Google allow micro-loan apps on their app stores but have stringent policies regulating their operation. The guidelines dictate that the minimum repayment period should be 60 days, and the maximum annual percentage rate of charge should be 36%. The above apps claimed terms that complied with these guidelines, but in practice, they followed a very different, much more aggressive approach, so the app stores removed them for term violations. Unfortunately, there needs to…

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30 Nov

Nvidia Releases Driver Update to Address Security Flaws

Attacks, Malware

Nvidia has not released any detail rich information of the specifics of these security flaws in order to allow users time to update their drivers before proof-of-concept exploitation tools are developed.Nvidia users can reference Nvidia’s security bulletin to identify their GPU or other product and the appropriate driver version to patch these vulnerabilities here: https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5415Users can then download the appropriate driver for their device from Nvidia’s download center here: https://www.nvidia.com/download/index.aspxUsers of Nvidia’s GeForce Experience software…

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30 Nov

AWS’ Inspector offers vulnerability management for Lambda serverless functions

Data Breaches, Malware, Social Engineering

Amazon Web Services has announced AWS Lambda serverless function support for its automated vulnerability management service, Amazon Inspector, and a new automated sensitive data discovery capability in its machine learning security and privacy service, Amazon Macie. Both announcements were made during the AWS Re:Invent 2022 conference in Las Vegas this week. They follow other security-focused AWS releases including the launch of Wickr, a new encrypted messaging service for enterprises and Amazon Security Lake, which centralizes…

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30 Nov

AWS launches new cybersecurity service Amazon Security Lake

Data Breaches, Malware, Social Engineering

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a new cybersecurity service, Amazon Security Lake, which automatically centralizes security data from cloud and on-premises sources into a purpose-built data lake in a customer’s AWS account, the company said in a statement.  “Customers must be able to quickly detect and respond to security risks so they can take swift action to secure data and networks, but the data they need for analysis is often spread across multiple sources…

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30 Nov

What is Ransom Cartel? A ransomware gang focused on reputational damage

Data Breaches, Malware, Social Engineering

Ransom Cartel, a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation, has stepped up its attacks over the past year after the disbanding of prominent gangs such as REvil and Conti. Believed to have launched in December 2021, Ransom Cartel has made victims of organizations from among the education, manufacturing, utilities, and energy sectors with aggressive malware and tactics that resemble those used by REvil. The group employs double extortion, combining data encryption with data theft and subsequent threats to…

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30 Nov

5 top qualities you need to become a next-gen CISO

Data Breaches, Malware, Social Engineering

Ransomware and data breaches pose a massive risk to organizations, resulting in loss of customer trust and shareholder value, reputation damage, hefty fines, and penalties. Cyber risk is a top concern in US corporate boardrooms, elevating the role of the chief information security officer to rapid prominence. More than half (61%) of CISOs report to a board and board members are increasingly interested in what CISOs have to say. But technical skills alone won’t suffice…

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30 Nov

RansomBoggs: New ransomware targeting Ukraine

Information

ESET researchers spot a new ransomware campaign that goes after Ukrainian organizations and has Sandworm’s fingerprints all over it The ESET research team has spotted a new wave of ransomware attacks taking aim at multiple organizations in Ukraine and bearing the hallmarks of other campaigns previously unleashed by the Sandworm APT group. Even though the ransomware – called RansomBoggs by ESET and written in the .NET framework – is new, particularly the way it is…

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