Security News > 2021 > December
Any individual or any company can become their target, as long as someone pays to spy on them. Engagement: This part consists of engaging contact with the target or people close to it in an effort to build enough trust to entice the target to download/execute files or click on infecting links.
No, you're not seeing triple: On Friday, Apache released yet another patch - version 2.17 - for yet another flaw in the ubiquitous log4j logging library, this time for a DoS bug. The latest bug isn't a variant of the Log4Shell remote-code execution bug that's plagued IT teams since Dec. 10, coming under active attack worldwide within hours of its public disclosure, spawning even nastier mutations and leading to the potential for denial-of-service in Apache's initial patch.
The Clop ransomware gang pwned a managed service provider with access to the UK's Police National Computer, dumping data on its dark web leaks site - but officials deny that police data was compromised. Reports surfaced in the Mail on Sunday newspaper over the weekend that the criminals had published information from the Police National Computer on their leaks site.
T-Mobile says it blocked 21 billion scam, spam, and unwanted robocalls this year through its free Scam Shield robocall and scam protection service, amounting to an average of 1.8 billion scam calls identified or blocked every month. Last year, when it announced the Scam Shield service, T-Mobile said it could detect or block approximately 12 billion scam calls in 2019 and that around 30 million Americans fell victim to a phone scam within 12 months.
Citizen Lab published another report on the spyware used against two Egyptian nationals. The other was hacked both by Pegasus and by the spyware from another cyberweapons arms manufacturer: Cytrox.
Threat actors are conducting a highly targeted phishing campaign impersonating Pfizer to steal business and financial information from victims. In a new report by INKY, researchers explain that threat actors are impersonating Phizer in a phishing email campaign that started around August 15, 2021.
The growing awareness of cloud misconfigurations comes at a time of huge growth in cloud platforms. On one hand, 87 percent said they were fully or mostly in control of their remote working environment, with 51 percent crediting the acceleration of cloud migration as an influence that had improved their security best practice.
The Apache Log4j saga continues, as several new vulnerabilities have been discovered in the popular library since Log4Shell was fixed by releasing Log4j v2.15.0. There is going to be continued focus on log4j vulns for some time.
With the end of the year rapidly approaching, IT professionals should put cyber security at the top of their New Year's resolutions. The reason why this is such a problem is because users very often use their work passwords on various websites to minimize the number of passwords that they must remember.
VMware has warned users a flaw in its VMware Verify two-factor authentication product could allow a malicious actor with a first-factor authentication credential to obtain a second factor from its VMware Verify product. CVE-2021-22057 is the rascal behind this issue and is rated 6.6/10. VMware Verify is part of the wider VMware Workspace ONE Access product, now available in version 21.08.0.1 to fix this bug and a 5.5-rated Server Side Request Forgery that can allow a malicious actor with network access to make HTTP requests to arbitrary origins and read the full response.