Security News > 2022 > October

Why did a single security bulletin describe updates dubbed iOS 16.1 and iPadOS 16? We know that iPadOS 16 was delayed, so did this recent update mean that iPadOS was now getting patched only to the same security level as iOS 16, which came out more than a month ago, while iOS advanced to 16.1, thus leaving iPadOS more than five weeks adrift in cybersecurity terms? Why did iPadOS 16 ultimately report itself as version 16.1? After updating, the About screen apparently says iPadOS 16, like the security bulletin did, while the iPadOS Version screen explicitly says 16.1. It sounds as though iPhones and iPads now not only both support "The version family known as 16", but also both have the very latest security fixes, so why not simply call both of them version 16.1 everywhere for clarity, including in the security bulletin and on the About screen? Where did macOS 10 Catalina go? Traditionally, Apple drops support for macOS version X-3 when version X comes out, but is that the actual explanation of why macOS 11 Big Sur and macOS 12 Monterey got updates while Catalina didn't? What happened to iOS/iPadOS 15.7.1? When iOS 16 came out in September 2022, the previous version family received critical updates as well, taking it to version 15.7.

Only a "Handful" of US states have stopped buying Chinese technologies deemed by the government to pose security threats, according to a report from a Washington policy research group. The Georgetown University think tank paper, published this week, says that "Thousands" of public officials are still purchasing prohibited tech from "Huawei, ZTE, and other Chinese companies" and that most state and local governments simply haven't bought into existing federal actions by making any changes to their procurement policies.

German copper producer Aurubis has announced that it suffered a cyberattack that forced it to shut down IT systems to prevent the attack's spread. Aurubis is Europe's largest copper producer and the second largest in the world, with 6,900 employees worldwide, and produces one million tonnes of copper cathodes yearly. In an announcement published on their website, Aurubis says they shut down various systems at their locations but that it has not impacted production.

Data migration is the process of moving data from one location or system to another. Read on as we explain how data migration works and some of the pros and cons that come with moving data to new environments and platforms.

Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office has arrested a 22-year-old student in Bavaria, who is suspected of being the administrator of 'Deutschland im Deep Web', one of the largest darknet markets in the country. The platform had already gone offline in March 2022, with 16,000 registered users, 28,000 posts, and 72 high-volume sellers of prohibited goods, including weapons and drugs.

Proof-of-concept exploit code is now available for a pre-authentication remote code execution vulnerability allowing attackers to execute arbitrary code remotely with root privileges on unpatched Cloud Foundation and NSX Manager appliances. The flaw is in the XStream open-source library used by the two VMware products and was assigned an almost maximum CVSSv3 base score of 9.8/10 by VMware.

Multiple high-severity security flaws have been disclosed as affecting Juniper Networks devices, some of which could be exploited to achieve code execution.Chief among them is a remote pre-authenticated PHP archive file deserialization vulnerability in the J-Web component of Junos OS, according to Octagon Networks researcher Paulos Yibelo.

Five malicious dropper Android apps with over 130,000 cumulative installations have been discovered on the Google Play Store distributing banking trojans like SharkBot and Vultur, which are capable of stealing financial data and performing on-device fraud. Targets of these droppers include 231 banking and cryptocurrency wallet apps from financial institutions in Italy, the U.K., Germany, Spain, Poland, Austria, the U.S., Australia, France, and the Netherlands.

For lean security teams, the more important question is how to make cloud security work, especially as the cloud footprint grows faster than security resources. It explains how security teams with less than 20, 10, or even 5 members can make cloud security work from here forward.

Microsoft says Windows domain join processes may fail with "0xaac" errors after applying this month's security updates. The issue stems from hardening changes introduced when addressing the CVE-2022-38042 elevation of privilege vulnerability in the Active Directory Domain Services that would allow attackers to gain domain administrator privileges.