Security News > 2023 > June

Microsoft says SMB signing will be required by default for all connections to defend against NTLM relay attacks, starting with today's Windows build rolling out to Insiders in the Canary Channel. "This changes legacy behavior, where Windows 10 and 11 required SMB signing by default only when connecting to shares named SYSVOL and NETLOGON and where Active Directory domain controllers required SMB signing when any client connected to them," Microsoft said.

State-sponsored North Korean hacker group Kimsuky has been impersonating journalists and academics for spear-phishing campaigns to collect intelligence from think tanks, research centers, academic institutions, and various media organizations. Kimsuky hackers meticulously plan and execute their spear-phishing attacks by using email addresses that closely resemble those of real individuals and by crafting convincing, realistic content for the communication with the target.

Azure Virtual Network Manager is a new tool for grouping network resources, configuring the connectivity and security for those resources and deploying those configurations to the right network groups automatically. You can use this to create common network topologies like a hub and spoke that connects multiple virtual networks to the hub virtual network that contains your Azure Firewall or ExpressRoute connection.

Leading snowboard maker Burton Snowboards confirmed notified customers of a data breach after some of their sensitive information was "Potentially" accessed or stolen during what the company described in February as a "Cyber incident." The attack was discovered by Burton on February 11 after causing a "System outage" and forcing the company to cancel online orders.

The evolution of identity management away from methods requiring memory, lists and, yes, password managers, got help last month from Apple and Google, which have paved the way with multi-device passkey sign-in capabilities. "Our mission is to help people safeguard their digital identities and by doubling down on passkeys, we're providing users with both greater security and ease of use," said Steve Won, the chief product officer of 1Password, in a statement.

Microsoft has warned investors about a "Non-public" draft decision by Irish regulators against LinkedIn for allegedly dodgy ad data practices, explaining it had set aside some cash to pay off any potential fine. The software giant said the funds were connected to a 2018 investigation by the Irish Data Protection Commission looking into whether LinkedIn's targeted advertising practices violated the the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation.

Building on public models like Meta's LLaMa, the open-source community has innovated in ways that allow results nearly as good as the huge models-but run on home machines with common data sets. Much of the modern internet was built on open-source technologies from the LAMP stack-a suite of applications often used in web development.

Google has removed from the Chrome Web Store 32 malicious extensions that could alter search results and push spam or unwanted ads. Cybersecurity researcher Wladimir Palant analyzed the PDF Toolbox extension available from Chrome Web Store and found that it included code that was disguised as a legitimate extension API wrapper.

Google has tripled the full reward amount for the first security bug report that includes a functional full chain exploit of its popular Chrome browser. Six months of higher rewards for a Chrome full chain exploit.

Spanish-speaking users in Latin America have been at the receiving end of a new botnet malware dubbed Horabot since at least November 2020. "Horabot enables the threat actor to control the victim's Outlook mailbox, exfiltrate contacts' email addresses, and send phishing emails with malicious HTML attachments to all addresses in the victim's mailbox," Cisco Talos researcher Chetan Raghuprasad said.