Security News > 2020 > March

Have you secured your streaming services' accounts? Are you sure someone else, unbeknown to you, isn't using them as well? He also posits that, despite cybercriminals having been compromising users' streaming services' accounts for ages, they will now likely increase their efforts.

New Mexico school districts, universities, and government agencies have collectively spent millions of dollars to regain control of their computer systems after employees unknowingly opened emails containing an encrypted code that effectively shut them out of their systems. The ransomware attacks occurred between January 2018 and February 2020, and have put school districts and agencies on edge amid warnings of more technology terror, the Albuquerque Journal reports.

Cybercrime groups have been exploiting vulnerabilities in digital video recorders made by Taiwan-based surveillance solutions provider LILIN to increase the size of their botnets. The vendor released firmware updates that should patch the exploited flaws on February 14, but the vulnerabilities had a zero-day status until this date.

Cisco has patched a clutch of high-priority vulnerabilities in its SD-WAN routers and their management software that admins will want to apply as soon as possible. The latter is a privilege escalation vulnerability in the SD-WAN management software used with a range of Cisco routers, including the vEdge 100 Series, 1000 Series, 2000 Series, 5000 Series, and Cloud Router.

The official - whom Peng eventually figured out was working for the MSS - asked Peng to use his citizenship in the US to assist the official with "Matters of interest" to the PRC. After that, Peng admitted, he got paid at least $30,000 for running data over to China over the course of about 3.5 years. In Beijing, Peng meets with agents of the Ministry of State Security, including the People's Republic of China official with whom Peng had been communicating, and delivers the SD card to MSS. A PRC official uses coded language to tell Peng that another dead drop will occur on April 23, 2016.

Operators of the Sodinokibi Ransomware as a Service recently published over 12GB of data that allegedly belongs to one of its victims - Brooks International - that refused to pay ransom. Sodinokibi - a GandCrab derivative blamed for numerous attacks that took place last year - is a prime example of RaaS. BleepingComputer shared a screengrab of one such hacker forum post that showed a member advertising a link to the stolen data for 8 credits: that's worth about €2.

Firefox Extended Support Release will continue to have FTP turned on by default in ESR version 78. A part of the FTP code is very old, unsafe and hard to maintain and we found a lot of security bugs in it in the past.

Microsoft today issued a new security advisory warning billions of Windows users of two new critical, unpatched zero-day vulnerabilities that could let hackers remotely take complete control over targeted computers. According to Microsoft, both unpatched flaws are being used in limited, targeted attacks and impact all supported versions of the Windows operating system-including Windows 10, 8.1 and Server 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2019 editions, as well as Windows 7 for which Microsoft ended its support on January 14, 2020.

A wide variety of Zyxel and LILIN IoT devices are being conscripted into several botnets, researchers have warned. Users are advised to implement the provided firmware updates to plug the security holes exploited by the botmasters or, if they can't, to stop using the devices altogether or to put them behind network firewalls.

I previously wrote about hacking voice assistants with lasers. Voice assistants - the demo targeted Siri, Google Assistant, and Bixby - are designed to respond when they detect the owner's voice after noticing a trigger phrase such as 'Ok, Google'.