Security News > 2023 > March
A new ransomware operation named 'Dark Power' has appeared, and it has already listed its first victims on a dark web data leak site, threatening to publish the data if a ransom is not paid. According to Trellix, which analyzed Dark Power, this is an opportunistic ransomware operation that targets organizations worldwide, asking for relatively small ransom payments of $10,000.
American university researchers have developed a novel attack called "Near-Ultrasound Inaudible Trojan" that can launch silent attacks against devices powered by voice assistants, like smartphones, smart speakers, and other IoTs. The main principle that makes NUIT effective and dangerous is that microphones in smart devices can respond to near-ultrasound waves that the human ear cannot, thus performing the attack with minimal risk of exposure while still using conventional speaker technology.
Russia's Rostec has reportedly bought a platform that allows it to uncover the identities of anonymous Telegram users, likely to be used to tamp down on unfavorable news out of the country. The organization, which has an active role in monitoring the circulation of information within the country, is particularly interested in the identity of Telegram channel administrators who are critical of the Russian state.
In what's a case of setting a thief to catch a thief, the U.K. National Crime Agency revealed that it has created a network of fake DDoS-for-hire websites to infiltrate the online criminal underground. "All of the NCA-run sites, which have so far been accessed by around several thousand people, have been created to look like they offer the tools and services that enable cyber criminals to execute these attacks," the law enforcement agency said.
Microsoft on Friday shared guidance to help customers discover indicators of compromise associated with a recently patched Outlook vulnerability.Tracked as CVE-2023-23397, the critical flaw relates to a case of privilege escalation that could be exploited to steal NT Lan Manager hashes and stage a relay attack without requiring any user interaction.
OpenAI on Friday disclosed that a bug in the Redis open source library was responsible for the exposure of other users' personal information and chat titles in the upstart's ChatGPT service earlier this week. The glitch, which came to light on March 20, 2023, enabled certain users to view brief descriptions of other users' conversations from the chat history sidebar, prompting the company to temporarily shut down the chatbot.
On the third day of the Pwn2Own hacking contest, security researchers were awarded $185,000 after demonstrating 5 zero-day exploits targeting Windows 11, Ubuntu Desktop, and the VMware Workstation virtualization software. The highlight of the day was the Ubuntu Desktop operating system getting hacked three times by three different teams, although one of them was a collision with the exploit being previously known.
Today, the FBI confirmed they have access to the database of the notorious BreachForums hacking forum after the U.S. Justice Department also officially announced the arrest of its owner. 20-year-old Conor Brian Fitzpatrick was charged for his involvement in the theft and sale of sensitive personal information belonging to "Millions of U.S. citizens and hundreds of U.S. and foreign companies, organizations, and government agencies" on the Breached cybercrime forum.
The push to innovate and create can often drive software developers to move at breakneck speed to deliver new apps, updates and bug fixes - a frenetic pace that can lead to security oversight. DevSecOps - a portmanteau for developers, cybersecurity and operations - is a collaborative method that brings principles of application security into software development and operations with as little friction and as much agility as possible.
Finally, we saw some reports on ransomware released this week about the ACL scareware pretending to be ransomware and a write-up on the DarkPower gang. March 21st 2023 LockBit ransomware gang now also claims City of Oakland breach.