Security News > 2022 > April
Yesterday, American Express users across the world including US, UK, and Europe, experienced widespread outages lasting hours. The issues reported by users included being unable to log in to their Amex accounts, make payments, or get to an Amex customer service representative over the phone.
While ransomware is still conducting attacks and all companies must stay alert, ransomware news has been relatively slow this week. The Hive ransomware operation has converted their VMware ESXi Linux encryptor to the Rust programming language and added new features to make it harder for security researchers to snoop on victim's ransom negotiations.
A 15-year-old security vulnerability has been disclosed in the PEAR PHP repository that could permit an attacker to carry out a supply chain attack, including obtaining unauthorized access to publish rogue packages and execute arbitrary code. "An attacker exploiting the first one could take over any developer account and publish malicious releases, while the second bug would allow the attacker to gain persistent access to the central PEAR server," SonarSource vulnerability researcher Thomas Chauchefoin said in a write-up published this week.
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The City of London Police on Friday disclosed that it has charged two of the seven teenagers, a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old, who were arrested last week for their alleged connections to the LAPSUS$ data extortion gang. "Both teenagers have been charged with: three counts of unauthorized access to a computer with intent to impair the reliability of data; one count of fraud by false representation and one count of unauthorized access to a computer with intent to hinder access to data," Detective Inspector Michael O'Sullivan, from the City of London Police, said in a statement.
New research on the changing migration of the Doryteuthis opalescens as a result of climate change. Stanford researchers have solved a mystery about why a species of squid native to California has been found thriving in the Gulf of Alaska about 1,800 miles north of its expected range: climate change.
DevOps platform GitLab has released software updates to address a critical security vulnerability that, if potentially exploited, could permit an adversary to seize control of accounts. "A hardcoded password was set for accounts registered using an OmniAuth provider in GitLab CE/EE versions 14.7 prior to 14.7.7, 14.8 prior to 14.8.5, and 14.9 prior to 14.9.2 allowing attackers to potentially take over accounts," the company said in an advisory published on March 31.
A Chinese advanced persistent threat tracked as Deep Panda has been observed exploiting the Log4Shell vulnerability in VMware Horizon servers to deploy a backdoor and a novel rootkit on infected machines with the goal of stealing sensitive data. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which assigned the panda-themed name to the group all the way back in July 2014, called it "One of the most advanced Chinese nation-state cyber intrusion groups."
The cyberattack aimed at Viasat that temporarily knocked KA-SAT modems offline on February 24, 2022, the same day Russian military forces invaded Ukraine, is believed to have been the consequence of wiper malware, according to the latest research from SentinelOne. "The findings come as the U.S. telecom company disclosed that it was the target of a multifaceted and deliberate" cyberattack against its KA-SAT network, linking it to a "Ground-based network intrusion by an attacker exploiting a misconfiguration in a VPN appliance to gain remote access to the trusted management segment of the KA-SAT network."
Microsoft now allows enterprise admins to re-enable the MSIX ms-appinstaller protocol handler disabled after Emotet abused it to deliver malicious Windows App Installer packages. App Installer allows users to install Windows applications directly from a web server using an MSIX package or App Installer file without first downloading the installers to their computer.