Security News > 2022 > May

Interpol has announced the arrest of three Nigerian men in Lagos, who are suspected of using remote access trojans to reroute financial transactions and steal account credentials. Interpol did not disclose how much money the gang was able to steal from the victimized organizations.

A zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft Office allows adversaries to run malicious code on targeted systems via a flaw a remote Word template feature. Noted security researcher Kevin Beaumont dubbed the vulnerability "Follina", explaining the zero day code references the Italy-based area code of Follina - 0438.Beaumont said the flaw is abusing the remote template feature in Microsoft Word and is not dependent on a typical macro-based exploit path, common within Office-based attacks.

Security researchers have discovered a new Microsoft Office zero-day vulnerability that is being used in attacks to execute malicious PowerShell commands via Microsoft Diagnostic Tool simply by opening a Word document.The vulnerability, which has yet to receive a tracking number and is referred to by the infosec community as 'Follina,' is leveraged using malicious Word documents that execute PowerShell commands via the MSDT. This new Follina zero-day opens the door to a new critical attack vector leveraging Microsoft Office programs as it works without elevated privileges, bypasses Windows Defender detection, and does not need macro code to be enabled to execute binaries or scripts.

Enterprise security teams being overrun by the rising numbers of vulnerabilities uncovered each day could vastly reduce their patching workload by changing how they prioritize the flaws, according to recent research from vulnerability startup Rezilion. Companies will start their remediation efforts with the vulnerabilities deemed "Critical" and work their way down, said Yotam Perkal, director of vulnerability research with Rezilion.

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a zero-day flaw in Microsoft Office that could be abused to achieve arbitrary code execution on affected Windows systems. According to security researcher Kevin Beaumont, who dubbed the flaw "Follina," the maldoc leverages Word's remote template feature to fetch an HTML file from a server, which then makes use of the "Ms-msdt://" URI scheme to run the malicious payload. MSDT is short for Microsoft Support Diagnostics Tool, a utility that's used to troubleshoot and collect diagnostic data for analysis by support professionals to resolve a problem.

Here's what a security team can share with employees and handle themselves to mitigate third party app access risk. Once the security team knows which third party apps are connected, they should map the permissions and the type of access that each third party app has been given.

The Unique Identification Authority of India has backtracked on advice about how best to secure the "Aadhaar" national identity cards that enable access to a range of government and financial serivces. Privacy concerns have also been raised over whether biometric data is properly secured stored and secured, if surveillance of individuals is made possible through Aadhaar, and and possible data mining of the schemes' massive data store.

In 2021, ransomware attacks continued to be one of the most prominent threats targeting businesses and organizations worldwide. High-profile attacks disrupted operations of companies in various sectors.

Truecaller announced a research conducted in partnership with The Harris Poll in March of 2022, and the findings detail trends/insights on the impact of spam and phone scams that have increasingly permeated the U.S. over the last 12 months. The study estimates that a staggering $39.5 billion was lost to phone scams this past year, which is the highest number recorded since Truecaller began researching scam and spam calls in the U.S. eight years ago.

The compliance risk report is based on a survey of 860 global compliance executives across 10 sectors - found that even as compliance pressures continue to increase at speed and scale, significant strides have been made toward establishing a working system that is more responsive and agile. A substantial number of compliance officers feel a greater emphasis on the function's stature is needed to truly strengthen compliance and uphold its mandate.