Security News > 2022 > December

As you'll know if ever you've lost a phone, or damaged a SIM card, mobile phone numbers aren't burned into the phone itself, but are programmed into the subscriber identity module chip that you insert into your phone. A crook who can sweet-talk, or bribe, or convince using fake ID, or otherwise browbeat your mobile phone provider into issuing "You" a new SIM card.

Rackspace has finally confirmed the cause of the ongoing outage of its Hosted Exchange service: it's ransomware. "As you know, on Friday, December 2nd, 2022, we became aware of suspicious activity and immediately took proactive measures to isolate the Hosted Exchange environment to contain the incident. We have since determined this suspicious activity was the result of a ransomware incident," the company stated in the newest released service announcement.

Four men suspected of hacking into US networks to steal employee data for identity theft and the filing of fraudulent US tax returns have been arrested in London, UK, and Malmo, Sweden, at the request of the U.S. law enforcement authorities. The suspects identified in four recently unsealed U.S. indictments are Akinola Taylor, Olayemi Adafin, Olakunle Oyebanjo, and Kazeem Olanrewaju Runsewe.

Microsoft says that cryptocurrency investment companies have been targeted by a threat group it tracks as DEV-0139 via Telegram groups used to communicate with the firms' VIP customers. "Microsoft recently investigated an attack where the threat actor, tracked as DEV-0139, took advantage of Telegram chat groups to target cryptocurrency investment companies," the company's Security Threat Intelligence team revealed.

For even the most skilled hackers, it can take at least an hour to write a script to exploit a software vulnerability and infiltrate their target. Soon, a machine may be able to do it in mere seconds.When OpenAI last week released its ChatGPT tool, allowing users to interact with an artificial intelligence chatbot, computer security researcher Brendan Dolan-Gavitt wondered whether he could instruct it to write malicious code. So, he asked the model to solve a simple capture-the-flag challenge.

Google has released the December 2022 security update for Android, fixing four critical-severity vulnerabilities, including a remote code execution flaw exploitable via Bluetooth. CVE-2022-20472 - Remote code execution flaw in Android Framework, impacting Android versions 10 to 13.

A malicious campaign targeting the Middle East is likely linked to BackdoorDiplomacy, an advanced persistent threat (APT) group with ties to China. The espionage activity, directed against a...

Hackers with ties to the Iranian government have been linked to an ongoing social engineering and credential phishing campaign directed against human rights activists, journalists, researchers, academics, diplomats, and politicians working in the Middle East. The digital break-in entailed gaining access to their emails, cloud storage, calendars, and contacts, as well as exfiltrating the entire data associated with their Google accounts in the form of archive files through Google Takeout.

Texas-based cloud computing provider Rackspace has confirmed today that a ransomware attack is behind its ongoing Hosted Exchange outage. "Although Rackspace Technology is in the early stages of assessing this incident, the incident has caused and may continue to cause an interruption in its Hosted Exchange business and may result in a loss of revenue for the Hosted Exchange business, which generates approximately $30 million of annual revenue in the Apps & Cross Platform segment," the company said.

Enterprise security pros can detect malware samples in environments that incorporate the highly evasive Cobalt Strike attack code by analyzing artifacts in process memory, according to researchers with Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 threat intelligence unit. "One of the main advantages of Cobalt Strike is that it mainly operates in memory once the initial loader is executed," Unit 42 malware researchers Dominik Reichel, Esmid Idrizovic, and Bob Jung write in a report.