Security News > 2020 > July
The proof is in the results: Phishing attacks of just one type - the business email compromise - have caused at least $26 billion in losses in the past five years alone, according to the FBI. The Heart of the Problem. Almost 90% of email attacks manipulate sender identity to fool recipients and initiate social engineering attacks.
Microsoft has quietly pushed out two emergency security updates to fix remote code execution bugs in Microsoft Windows Codecs Library. The out-of-band updates, addressing a critical-severity flaw and important-severity vulnerability, were sent out via Windows Update Tuesday night and affect several versions of Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday designated Chinese telecommunications companies Huawei and ZTE as national security threats. By declaring the Chinese companies national security threats, the FCC is banning U.S. organizations from acquiring equipment or services using money from the agency's Universal Service Fund.
You don't have to pay to vote in the US. Up until recently, you wouldn't have necessarily known that, were you to have run a Google search for how or where to vote. Such a search would have been polluted with ads like this one offering "Same-day processing" of voter registration for $129:. That ad, which directs to a site from PrivacyWall.org, is the first ad in a Google search for "Register to vote" that was run in an analysis done by watchdog Tech Transparency Project.
Chinese state security agencies will also operate in Hong Kong for the first time, and the local police force will be able to intercept communications and spy on suspects, with the approval of Hong Kong's chief executive. The legislation will apply not just within inside Hong Kong but overseas too, meaning foreign nationals who speak against Beijing could be prosecuted upon entering Hong Kong or mainland China.
Netgear has started releasing patches for ten vulnerabilities affecting nearly 80 of its products, including flaws disclosed last year at the Pwn2Own hacking competition. All of the security holes were reported to Netgear through Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative, including five by a hacker who uses the online moniker d4rkn3ss, from VNPT ISC, and five by Pedro Ribeiro and Radek Domanski of Team Flashback.
Within days after a report detailing the GoldenSpy malware operation targeting organizations doing business in China, an uninstaller was pushed to affected systems to completely remove the infection. Designed to provide attackers with unfettered access to the victim networks, with SYSTEM privileges, the GoldenSpy malware is believed to have been around since 2016, but it's unclear how many organizations it might have compromised to date.
ESR is short for Extended Support Release, often preferred by IT departments because it gets security fixes at the same rate as the regular version, but only takes on new features in a staggered fashion - in other words, users of the ESR versions are shielded from sudden switches in appearance, user interface and workflow. Firefox 78 no longer supports TLS 1.0 or TLS 1.1, which are older versions of the TLS security protocol that is now de rigueur for web servers.
A new piece of ransomware dubbed EvilQuest is being delivered bundled up with pirated versions of popular macOS software, researchers warned. The ransomware is also a smokescreen, as its "Noisiness" is meant to hide other things happening on the system in the background: the installation of a keylogger and a reverse shell, and the exfiltration of files that contain valuable information.
Microsoft on Tuesday published advisories to provide details on two remote code execution vulnerabilities addressed in the Windows Codecs Library. Both of these vulnerabilities are related to the manner in which the affected Windows component handles objects in memory and both feature a CVSS score of 7.3.