CyberSecurity Updates

by Paul Ducklin We’re not quite sure what to call it right now, so we referred to it in the headline by the hybrid name Microsoft Office 365. (The name “Office” as the collective noun for Microsoft’s word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and collaboration apps is being killed off over the next month or two, to become simply “Microsoft 365”.) We’re sure that people will keep on using the individual app names (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and…

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More than a dozen organizations operating in various verticals were attacked by the threat actor This week, ESET researchers published their analysis of previously undocumented backdoors and cyberespionage tools that the POLONIUM APT group has deployed against targets in Israel. The group has used at least seven different custom backdoors in the past year, and ESET has named five previously undocumented backdoors with the suffix “-Creep.” More than a dozen organizations operating in various verticals…

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ESET Research spots a new version of Android malware known as FurBall that APT-C-50 is using in its wider Domestic Kitten campaign This week, ESET researchers published their analysis of a new variant of the Android malware known as FurBall that APT-C-50 has used in its wider Domestic Kitten campaign. The campaign is known to take aim at Iranian citizens as part of mobile surveillance campaigns – and the same applies to this new FurBall…

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by Naked Security writer Chinese company Zoetop, former owner of the wildly popular SHEIN and ROMWE “fast fashion” brands, has been fined $1,900,000 by the State of New York. As Attorney General Letitia James put it in a statement last week: SHEIN and ROMWE’s weak digital security measures made it easy for hackers to shoplift consumers’ personal data. As if that weren’t bad enough, James went on to say: [P]ersonal data was stolen and Zoetop…

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by Paul Ducklin Java programmers love string interpolation features. If you’re not a coder, you’re probably confused by the word “interpolation” here, because it’s been borrowed as programming jargon where it’s not a very good linguistic fit… …but the idea is simple, very powerful, and sometimes spectacularly dangerous. In other programming ecosystems it’s often known simply as string substitution, where string is shorthand for a bunch of characters, usually meant for displaying or printing out,…

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by Paul Ducklin Sadly, we’ve needed to cover the DEADBOLT ransomware several times before on Naked Security. For almost two years already, this niche player in the ransomware cybercrime scene has been preying mainly on home users and small businesses in a very different way from most contemporary ransomware attacks: If you were involved in cybersecurity about ten years ago, when ransomware first started to become a massive money-spinner for the cyberunderworld, you will remember…

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