Security News > 2021 > September
A Pakistani fraudster was sentenced to 12 years in prison earlier this week after AT&T, the world's largest telecommunications company, lost over $200 million after he and his co-conspirators coordinated a seven-year scheme that led to the fraudulent unlocking of almost 2 million phones. Throughout this operation, Muhammad Fahd - the scheme leader - bribed multiple AT&T employees to do his bidding, including unlocking phones, giving him access to their credentials, and installing malware that gave him remote access to the mobile carrier's servers.
Kali Linux 2021.3 released: Kali NetHunter on a smartwatch, wider OpenSSL compatibility, new tools, and more!Offensive Security has released Kali Linux 2021.3, the latest version of its popular open source penetration testing platform. Third-party cloud providers: Expanding the attack surfaceIn this interview with Help Net Security, Fred Kneip, CEO at CyberGRX, talks about the lack of visibility into third-party risk, how to address this issue, and what companies should consider when choosing the right cloud provider.
Google on Monday released security updates for Chrome web browser to address a total of 11 security issues, two of which it says are actively exploited zero-days in the wild. Tracked as CVE-2021-30632 and CVE-2021-30633, the vulnerabilities concern an out of bounds write in V8 JavaScript engine and a use after free flaw in Indexed DB API respectively, with the internet giant credited anonymous researchers for reporting the bugs on September 8.
Windows 11 is no longer compatible with the immensely popular Oracle VirtualBox virtualization platform after Microsoft changed its hardware requirement policies for virtual machines. "Microsoft recognizes that the user experience when running the Windows 11 in virtualized environments may vary from the experience when running non-virtualized. So, while Microsoft recommends that all virtualized instances of the Windows 11 follow the same minimum hardware requirements as described in Section 1.2, the Windows 11 does not apply the hardware-compliance check for virtualized instances either during setup or upgrade," explains Microsoft in their Windows 11 minimum hardware requirements document.
Security researchers are compiling an easy-to-follow list of vulnerabilities ransomware gangs and their affiliates are using as initial access to breach victims' networks. While these bugs have been or still are exploited by one ransomware group or another in past and ongoing attacks, the list has also been expanded to include actively exploited flaws, as security researcher Pancak3 explained.
It has been an interesting week with decryptors released, ransomware gangs continuing to rail against negotiators, and the US government expected to sanction crypto exchanges next week. Finally, ransomware gangs continue to rail against negotiators in posts from both DoppelPaymer and the Grief ransomware operations, which are believed to be run by the same threat actors.
Linux binaries have been found trying to take over Windows systems in what appears to be the first publicly identified malware to utilize Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux to install unwelcome payloads. On Thursday, Black Lotus Labs, the threat research group at networking biz Lumen Technologies, said it had spotted several malicious Python files compiled in the Linux binary format ELF for Debian Linux.
The Biden administration is expected to issue sanctions against crypto exchanges, wallets, and traders used by ransomware gangs to convert ransom payments into fiat money. With ransomware attacks against US interests and infrastructure escalating over the past two years, the White House has increased its efforts to disrupt ransomware operations.
You can find ram’s horn squid shells on beaches in Texas (and presumably elsewhere). As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t...
32-year old Matthew Gatrel of St. Charles, Illinois, ran two websites that allowed paying users to launch more than 200,000 DDoS attacks on targets in both the private and public sector. He ran two sites, DownThem and Ampnode, both enabling DDoS attacks.