Security News > 2020 > August

Lafayette, Colorado, officials announced Tuesday the city's computer systems were hacked and they were forced to pay a ransom to regain access. Lafayette officials said hackers disabled the city's network services and blocked its access until the city paid a $45,000 fee, the Daily Camera reported.

Vulnerabilities found in protocol gateway devices can facilitate stealthy attacks on industrial systems, enabling threat actors to obtain valuable information and sabotage critical processes. Protocol gateways are small devices designed to ensure that various types of IT and OT devices can communicate with each other even if they use different protocols.

Researchers say a mysterious vigilante is fighting the threat actors behind the malware's comeback by replacing malicious Emotet payloads with whimsical GIFs and memes. You know, in the community that tracks Emotet - my researchers track it - We have sort of made jokes in the past that Emotet and TrickBot are best friends.

Less than 50% of security leaders understand the relationship between a cybersecurity threat and how it directly affects a specific business risk, while not enough security leaders believe in a coordination with business stakeholders' needs, regarding cost, performance, and risk-reduction objectives. There's not enough discussion on cybersecurity strategy: 47% of security leaders frequently discuss cybersecurity with business execs, and 42% of business executives rarely, "If ever," consult with security leaders on business strategies.

Under a $2.2 million pilot program that began in March, the Department of Homeland Security's cybersecurity agency in partnership with the Center for Internet Security has been deploying software to election offices. Officials said the effort was just the latest in steps taken to shore up cybersecurity since the 2016 presidential election.

A new research has identified four new variants of HTTP request smuggling attacks that work against various commercial off-the-shelf web servers and HTTP proxy servers. Amit Klein, VP of Security Research at SafeBreach who presented the findings today at the Black Hat security conference, said that the attacks highlight how web servers and HTTP proxy servers are still susceptible to HTTP request smuggling even after 15 years since they were first documented.

British Airways expects the fine for its 2018 credit card data leak to be just 10.8 per cent of the £183m proposed by the UK data watchdog - while US hotel chain Marriott has both halved and kicked its own data blunder punishment into the long grass once again, The Register can reveal. Marriott has secured an extension for fine negotiations to 30 September, having secured two already; one from January to 31 March and a second that ran through May. On top of that, the company set aside $65m to cover its proposed fine, down from the Information Commissioner's original intention to impose a £99m penalty.

Last month, France-based cybersecurity company Synacktiv reported that it had found some potentially serious security issues in the DJI GO 4 Android app, which allows users to control and manage recreational drones made by DJI. Synacktiv, whose findings were validated by US-based cybersecurity firm GRIMM, reported discovering a "Forced update" mechanism that allowed the vendor to directly install an update or new software on a user's device without going through the checks required by Google Play. DJI responded to Synacktiv's findings and while it confirmed some of the vulnerabilities - the company said it released patches within a week of the report being published - it argued that the forced update mechanism is necessary to prevent users from installing hacked versions of its app in order to "Help ensure that our comprehensive airspace safety measures are applied consistently."

In the Twitter breach, the attackers leveraged social engineering tactics to target a small number of employees through a phone spear phishing attack. In Twitter's case, the intelligence gained by the attackers enabled them to target additional employees who did have access to the Twitter account support tool, which allows privileged employees to control all facets of a Twitter account.

Mozilla has announced a new Firefox protection feature to stymie a new user tracking technique lately employed by online advertisers: redirect tracking. By implementing anti-fingerprinting protections, an anti tracking policy, Enhanced Tracking Protection blocking trackers, cross-site and third-party tracking cookies, Mozilla has, slowly but surely, been enhancing Firefox tracking protections for years.