High-Severity Flaws Uncovered in Bosch Thermostats and Smart Nutrunners

Multiple security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Bosch BCC100 thermostats and Rexroth NXA015S-36V-B smart nutrunners that, if successfully exploited, could allow attackers to execute arbitrary code on affected systems. Romanian cybersecurity firm Bitdefender, which discovered the flaw in Bosch BCC100 thermostats last August, said the issue could be weaponized by an attacker to

Act Now: CISA Flags Active Exploitation of Microsoft SharePoint Vulnerability

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added a critical security vulnerability impacting Microsoft SharePoint Server to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The issue, tracked as CVE-2023-29357 (CVSS score: 9.8), is a privilege escalation flaw that could be exploited by an attacker to gain

FTC Bans Outlogic (X-Mode) From Selling Sensitive Location Data

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Tuesday prohibited data broker Outlogic, which was previously known as X-Mode Social, from sharing or selling any sensitive location data with third-parties. The ban is part of a settlement over allegations that the company "sold precise location data that could be used to track people's visits to sensitive locations such as medical and

Russian Hackers Had Covert Access to Ukraine's Telecom Giant for Months

Ukrainian cybersecurity authorities have disclosed that the Russian state-sponsored threat actor known as Sandworm was inside telecom operator Kyivstar's systems at least since May 2023. The development was first reported by Reuters. The incident, described as a "powerful hacker attack," first came to light last month, knocking out access to mobile and internet services

Microsoft Disables MSIX App Installer Protocol Widely Used in Malware Attacks

Microsoft on Thursday said it’s once again disabling the ms-appinstaller protocol handler by default following its abuse by multiple threat actors to distribute malware. “The observed threat actor activity abuses the current implementation of the ms-appinstaller protocol handler as an access vector for malware that may lead to ransomware distribution,” the Microsoft Threat Intelligence

Remote Encryption Attacks Surge: How One Vulnerable Device Can Spell Disaster

Ransomware groups are increasingly switching to remote encryption in their attacks, marking a new escalation in tactics adopted by financially motivated actors to ensure the success of their campaigns. "Companies can have thousands of computers connected to their network, and with remote ransomware, all it takes is one underprotected device to compromise the entire network," Mark Loman, vice

FBI Takes Down BlackCat Ransomware, Releases Free Decryption Tool

The U.S. Justice Department (DoJ) has officially announced the disruption of the BlackCat ransomware operation and released a decryption tool that more than 500 affected victims can use to regain access to files locked by the malware. Court documents show that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) enlisted the help of a confidential human source (CHS) to act as an affiliate

Unmasking the Dark Side of Low-Code/No-Code Applications

Low-code/no-code (LCNC) and robotic process automation (RPA) have gained immense popularity, but how secure are they? Is your security team paying enough attention in an era of rapid digital transformation, where business users are empowered to create applications swiftly using platforms like Microsoft PowerApps, UiPath, ServiceNow, Mendix, and OutSystems? The simple truth is often swept under

Google's New Tracking Protection in Chrome Blocks Third-Party Cookies

Google on Thursday announced that it will start testing a new feature called "Tracking Protection" beginning January 4, 2024, to 1% of Chrome users as part of its efforts to deprecate third-party cookies in the web browser. The setting is designed to limit "cross-site tracking by restricting website access to third-party cookies by default," Anthony Chavez, vice president of Privacy

Google Using Clang Sanitizers to Protect Android Against Cellular Baseband Vulnerabilities

Google is highlighting the role played by Clang sanitizers in hardening the security of the cellular baseband in the Android operating system and preventing specific kinds of vulnerabilities. This comprises Integer Overflow Sanitizer (IntSan) and BoundsSanitizer (BoundSan), both of which are part of UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer (UBSan), a tool designed to catch various kinds of

Microsoft's Final 2023 Patch Tuesday: 33 Flaws Fixed, Including 4 Critical

Microsoft released its final set of Patch Tuesday updates for 2023, closing out 33 flaws in its software, making it one of the lightest releases in recent years. Of the 33 shortcomings, four are rated Critical and 29 are rated Important in severity. The fixes are in addition to 18 flaws Microsoft addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of Patch

Apple Releases Security Updates to Patch Critical iOS and macOS Security Flaws

Apple on Monday released security patches for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, and Safari web browser to address multiple security flaws, in addition to backporting fixes for two recently disclosed zero-days to older devices. This includes updates for 12 security vulnerabilities in iOS and iPadOS spanning AVEVideoEncoder, ExtensionKit, Find My, ImageIO, Kernel, Safari

New 5G Modem Flaws Affect iOS Devices and Android Models from Major Brands

A collection of security flaws in the firmware implementation of 5G mobile network modems from major chipset vendors such as MediaTek and Qualcomm impact USB and IoT modems as well as hundreds of smartphone models running Android and iOS. Of the 14 flaws – collectively called 5Ghoul (a combination of "5G" and "Ghoul") – 10 affect 5G modems from the two companies, out of which three

Governments May Spy on You by Requesting Push Notifications from Apple and Google

Unspecified governments have demanded mobile push notification records from Apple and Google users to pursue people of interest, according to U.S. Senator Ron Wyden. "Push notifications are alerts sent by phone apps to users' smartphones," Wyden said. "These alerts pass through a digital post office run by the phone operating system provider -- overwhelmingly Apple or Google. Because of

Meta Launches Default End-to-End Encryption for Chats and Calls on Messenger

Meta has officially begun to roll out support for end-to-end encryption (E2EE) in Messenger for personal calls and one-to-one personal messages by default in what it called the "most significant milestone yet." "This isn't a routine security update: we rebuilt the app from the ground up, in close consultation with privacy and safety experts," Loredana Crisan, vice president of

Sierra:21 - Flaws in Sierra Wireless Routers Expose Critical Sectors to Cyber Attacks

A collection of 21 security flaws have been discovered in Sierra Wireless AirLink cellular routers and open-source software components like TinyXML and OpenNDS. Collectively tracked as Sierra:21, the issues expose over 86,000 devices across critical sectors like energy, healthcare, waste management, retail, emergency services, and vehicle tracking to cyber threats, according

Qualcomm Releases Details on Chip Vulnerabilities Exploited in Targeted Attacks

Chipmaker Qualcomm has released more information about three high-severity security flaws that it said came under "limited, targeted exploitation" back in October 2023. The vulnerabilities are as follows - CVE-2023-33063 (CVSS score: 7.8) - Memory corruption in DSP Services during a remote call from HLOS to DSP. CVE-2023-33106 (CVSS score: 8.4) - Memory corruption in

Generative AI Security: Preventing Microsoft Copilot Data Exposure

Microsoft Copilot has been called one of the most powerful productivity tools on the planet. Copilot is an AI assistant that lives inside each of your Microsoft 365 apps — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, Outlook, and so on. Microsoft's dream is to take the drudgery out of daily work and let humans focus on being creative problem-solvers. What makes Copilot a different beast than ChatGPT and

15,000 Go Module Repositories on GitHub Vulnerable to Repojacking Attack

New research has found that over 15,000 Go module repositories on GitHub are vulnerable to an attack called repojacking. "More than 9,000 repositories are vulnerable to repojacking due to GitHub username changes," Jacob Baines, chief technology officer at VulnCheck, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "More than 6,000 repositories were vulnerable to repojacking due to account

New BLUFFS Bluetooth Attack Expose Devices to Adversary-in-the-Middle Attacks

New research has unearthed multiple novel attacks that break Bluetooth Classic's forward secrecy and future secrecy guarantees, resulting in adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) scenarios between two already connected peers. The issues, collectively named BLUFFS, impact Bluetooth Core Specification 4.2 through 5.4. They are tracked under the identifier CVE-2023-24023 (CVSS score: 6.8)

LogoFAIL: UEFI Vulnerabilities Expose Devices to Stealth Malware Attacks

The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) code from various independent firmware/BIOS vendors (IBVs) has been found vulnerable to potential attacks through high-impact flaws in image parsing libraries embedded into the firmware. The shortcomings, collectively labeled LogoFAIL by Binarly, "can be used by threat actors to deliver a malicious payload and bypass Secure Boot, Intel

WhatsApp's New Secret Code Feature Lets Users Protect Private Chats with Password

Meta-owned WhatsApp has launched a new Secret Code feature to help users protect sensitive conversations with a custom password on the messaging platform. The feature has been described as an "additional way to protect those chats and make them harder to find if someone has access to your phone or you share a phone with someone else." Secret Code builds on another feature

Zero-Day Alert: Apple Rolls Out iOS, macOS, and Safari Patches for 2 Actively Exploited Flaws

Apple has released software updates for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and Safari web browser to address two security flaws that it said have come under active exploitation in the wild on older versions of its software. The vulnerabilities, both of which reside in the WebKit web browser engine, are described below - CVE-2023-42916 - An out-of-bounds read issue that could be exploited to

Google Unveils RETVec - Gmail's New Defense Against Spam and Malicious Emails

Google has revealed a new multilingual text vectorizer called RETVec (short for Resilient and Efficient Text Vectorizer) to help detect potentially harmful content such as spam and malicious emails in Gmail. "RETVec is trained to be resilient against character-level manipulations including insertion, deletion, typos, homoglyphs, LEET substitution, and more," according to the&

Kubernetes Secrets of Fortune 500 Companies Exposed in Public Repositories

Cybersecurity researchers are warning of publicly exposed Kubernetes configuration secrets that could put organizations at risk of supply chain attacks. “These encoded Kubernetes configuration secrets were uploaded to public repositories,” Aqua security researchers Yakir Kadkoda and Assaf Morag said in a new research published earlier this week. Some of those impacted include two top blockchain

Play Ransomware Goes Commercial - Now Offered as a Service to Cybercriminals

The ransomware strain known as Play is now being offered to other threat actors "as a service," new evidence unearthed by Adlumin has revealed. "The unusual lack of even small variations between attacks suggests that they are being carried out by affiliates who have purchased the ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) and are following step-by-step instructions from playbooks delivered with it," the

Reptar: New Intel CPU Vulnerability Impacts Multi-Tenant Virtualized Environments

Intel has released fixes to close out a high-severity flaw codenamed Reptar that impacts its desktop, mobile, and server CPUs. Tracked as CVE-2023-23583 (CVSS score: 8.8), the issue has the potential to "allow escalation of privilege and/or information disclosure and/or denial of service via local access." Successful exploitation of the vulnerability could also permit a bypass of the CPU's

Urgent: VMware Warns of Unpatched Critical Cloud Director Vulnerability

VMware is warning of a critical and unpatched security flaw in Cloud Director that could be exploited by a malicious actor to get around authentication protections. Tracked as CVE-2023-34060 (CVSS score: 9.8), the vulnerability impacts instances that have been upgraded to version 10.5 from an older version. "On an upgraded version of VMware Cloud Director Appliance 10.5, a malicious actor with

CacheWarp Attack: New Vulnerability in AMD SEV Exposes Encrypted VMs

A group of academics has disclosed a new "software fault attack" on AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology that could be potentially exploited by threat actors to infiltrate encrypted virtual machines (VMs) and even perform privilege escalation. The attack has been codenamed CacheWarp (CVE-2023-20592) by researchers from the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and the

New Campaign Targets Middle East Governments with IronWind Malware

Government entities in the Middle East are the target of new phishing campaigns that are designed to deliver a new initial access downloader dubbed IronWind. The activity, detected between July and October 2023, has been attributed by Proofpoint to a threat actor it tracks under the name TA402, which is also known as Molerats, Gaza Cyber Gang, and shares tactical overlaps with a pro-Hamas

Chinese Hackers Launch Covert Espionage Attacks on 24 Cambodian Organizations

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered what they say is malicious cyber activity orchestrated by two prominent Chinese nation-state hacking groups targeting 24 Cambodian government organizations. "This activity is believed to be part of a long-term espionage campaign," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers said in a report last week. "The observed activity aligns with geopolitical goals of

New BiBi-Windows Wiper Targets Windows Systems in Pro-Hamas Attacks

Cybersecurity researchers have warned about a Windows version of a wiper malware that was previously observed targeting Linux systems in cyber attacks aimed at Israel. Dubbed BiBi-Windows Wiper by BlackBerry, the wiper is the Windows counterpart of BiBi-Linux Wiper, which has been put to use by a pro-Hamas hacktivist group in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war last month. "The Windows variant [...

Russian Hackers Sandworm Cause Power Outage in Ukraine Amidst Missile Strikes

The notorious Russian hackers known as Sandworm targeted an electrical substation in Ukraine last year, causing a brief power outage in October 2022. The findings come from Google's Mandiant, which described the hack as a "multi-event cyber attack" leveraging a novel technique for impacting industrial control systems (ICS). "The actor first used OT-level living-off-the-land (LotL) techniques to

Iran-Linked Imperial Kitten Cyber Group Targeting Middle East's Tech Sectors

A group with links to Iran targeted transportation, logistics, and technology sectors in the Middle East, including Israel, in October 2023 amid a surge in Iranian cyber activity since the onset of the Israel-Hamas war. The attacks have been attributed by CrowdStrike to a threat actor it tracks under the name Imperial Kitten, and which is also known as Crimson Sandstorm (previously Curium),

TikTok Faces Massive €345 Million Fine Over Child Data Violations in E.U.

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) slapped TikTok with a €345 million (about $368 million) fine for violating the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in relation to its handling of children's data. The investigation, initiated in September 2021, examined how the popular short-form video platform processed personal data relating to child users (those between the

India Passes New Digital Personal Data Protection Bill (DPDPB), Putting Users' Privacy First

The Indian President Droupadi Murmu on Friday granted assent to the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill (DPDPB) after it was unanimously passed by both houses of the parliament last week, marking a significant step towards securing people's information. "The Bill provides for the processing of digital personal data in a manner that recognizes both the rights of the individuals to protect their

16 New CODESYS SDK Flaws Expose OT Environments to Remote Attacks

A set of 16 high-severity security flaws have been disclosed in the CODESYS V3 software development kit (SDK) that could result in remote code execution and denial-of-service under specific conditions, posing risks to operational technology (OT) environments. The flaws, tracked from CVE-2022-47378 through CVE-2022-47393 and dubbed CoDe16, carry a CVSS score of 8.8 with the exception of CVE-2022-

5 Things CISOs Need to Know About Securing OT Environments

For too long the cybersecurity world focused exclusively on information technology (IT), leaving operational technology (OT) to fend for itself. Traditionally, few industrial enterprises had dedicated cybersecurity leaders. Any security decisions that arose fell to the plant and factory managers, who are highly skilled technical experts in other areas but often lack cybersecurity training or

Researchers Expose New Severe Flaws in Wago and Schneider Electric OT Products

Three security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in operational technology (OT) products from Wago and Schneider Electric. The flaws, per Forescout, are part of a broader set of shortcomings collectively called OT:ICEFALL, which now comprises a total of 61 issues spanning 13 different vendors. "OT:ICEFALL demonstrates the need for tighter scrutiny of, and improvements to, processes related to

5 Reasons Why IT Security Tools Don't Work For OT

Attacks on critical infrastructure and other OT systems are on the rise as digital transformation and OT/IT convergence continue to accelerate. Water treatment facilities, energy providers, factories, and chemical plants — the infrastructure that undergirds our daily lives could all be at risk. Disrupting or manipulating OT systems stands to pose real physical harm to citizens, environments, and

China Bans U.S. Chip Giant Micron, Citing "Serious Cybersecurity Problems"

China has banned U.S. chip maker Micron from selling its products to Chinese companies working on key infrastructure projects, citing national security risks. The development comes nearly two months after the country's cybersecurity authority initiated a probe in late March 2023 to assess potential network security risks. "The purpose of this network security review of Micron's products is to

Apple and Google Join Forces to Stop Unauthorized Location-Tracking Devices

Apple and Google have teamed up to work on a draft industry-wide specification that's designed to tackle safety risks and alert users when they are being tracked without their knowledge or permission using devices like AirTags. "The first-of-its-kind specification will allow Bluetooth location-tracking devices to be compatible with unauthorized tracking detection and alerts across Android and

Beyond Traditional Security: NDR's Pivotal Role in Safeguarding OT Networks

Why is Visibility into OT Environments Crucial? The significance of Operational Technology (OT) for businesses is undeniable as the OT sector flourishes alongside the already thriving IT sector. OT includes industrial control systems, manufacturing equipment, and devices that oversee and manage industrial environments and critical infrastructures. In recent years, adversaries have recognized the

Google Rolling Out Privacy Sandbox Beta on Android 13 Devices

Google announced on Tuesday that it's officially rolling out Privacy Sandbox on Android in beta to eligible mobile devices running Android 13. "The Privacy Sandbox Beta provides new APIs that are designed with privacy at the core, and don't use identifiers that can track your activity across apps and websites," the search and advertising giant said. "Apps that choose to participate in the Beta

3 New Vulnerabilities Affect OT Products from German Companies Festo and CODESYS

Researchers have disclosed details of three new security vulnerabilities affecting operational technology (OT) products from CODESYS and Festo that could lead to source code tampering and denial-of-service (DoS). The vulnerabilities, reported by Forescout Vedere Labs, are the latest in a long list of flaws collectively tracked under the name OT:ICEFALL. "These issues exemplify either an

Irish Regulator Fines Facebook $277 Million for Leak of Half a Billion Users' Data

Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) has levied fines of €265 million ($277 million) against Meta Platforms for failing to safeguard the personal data of more than half a billion users of its Facebook service, ramping up privacy enforcement against U.S. tech firms. The fines follow an inquiry initiated by the European regulator on April 14, 2021, close on the heels of a leak of a "collated

Your OT Is No Longer Isolated: Act Fast to Protect It

Not too long ago, there was a clear separation between the operational technology (OT) that drives the physical functions of a company – on the factory floor, for example – and the information technology (IT) that manages a company's data to enable management and planning.  As IT assets became increasingly connected to the outside world via the internet, OT remained isolated from IT – and the

New Evil PLC Attack Weaponizes PLCs to Breach OT and Enterprise Networks

Cybersecurity researchers have elaborated a novel attack technique that weaponizes programmable logic controllers (PLCs) to gain an initial foothold in engineering workstations and subsequently invade the operational technology (OT) networks. Dubbed "Evil PLC" attack by industrial security firm Claroty, the issue impacts engineering workstation software from Rockwell Automation, Schneider

What is Shadow IT and why is it so risky?

Shadow IT refers to the practice of users deploying unauthorized technology resources in order to circumvent their IT department. Users may resort to using shadow IT practices when they feel that existing IT policies are too restrictive or get in the way of them being able to do their jobs effectively. An old school phenomenon  Shadow IT is not new. There have been countless examples of