Security News
Without a critical update, Amazon Alexa devices could wake themselves up and start executing audio commands issued by a remote attacker, according to infosec researchers at Royal Holloway, University of London. Executing the attack requires exploitation of Amazon Alexa Skills.
Cyberattackers are targeting 60 different high-profile companies with the TrickBot malware, researchers have warned, with many of those in the U.S. The goal is to attack those companies' customers, according to Check Point Research, which are being cherry-picked for victimization. The TrickBot malware was originally a banking trojan, but it has evolved well beyond those humble beginnings to become a wide-ranging credential-stealer and initial-access threat, often responsible for fetching second-stage binaries such as ransomware.
Cyberattackers are abusing Amazon Web Services and Azure Cloud services to deliver a trio of remote access trojans, researchers warned - all aimed at hoovering up sensitive information from target users. "When the initial script is executed on the victim's machine, it connects to a download server to download the next stage, which can be hosted on an Azure Cloud-based Windows server or an AWS EC2 instance."
An Amazon Echo owner was left shocked after Alexa proposed a dangerous challenge to her ten-year-old daughter. AI-powered virtual assistants like Alexa that power smart devices and speakers such as Echo, Echo Dot, and Amazon Tap, come with a plethora of capabilities.
Amazon has published a post-event summary to shed some light on the root cause behind this week's massive AWS outage that took down a long list of high-profile sites and online services, including Ring, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Roku. "At 7:30 AM PST, an automated activity to scale capacity of one of the AWS services hosted in the main AWS network triggered an unexpected behavior from a large number of clients inside the internal network," Amazon explained in a summary of this incident.
Amazon announced on Wednesday plans to shut down its global website ranking system and competitor analysis tool "Alexa.com", which has been available for 25 years. Alexa.com is a subsidiary company of Amazon and it's widely known for its global ranking system which uses web traffic data from its partners to list the most popular internet companies.
Amazon AWS in the US-EAST-1 Region is suffering an outage that affected numerous online services, including Ring, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Roku. The ongoing outage started at approximately 12 PM EST and is caused by problematic network equipment affecting the US-EAST-1 AWS region, which feeds a good portion of the connectivity for people in the northeastern part of the United States.
Research conducted by Egress and Orpheus Cyber has revealed a surge in phishing kits imitating major brands in the lead up to Black Friday, as security experts warn that cybercriminals are stepping up their phishing attacks over the holiday shopping season. Amazon was a popular choice for cybercriminals, with a 334.1% increase in phishing kits impersonating the brand ahead of its anticipated Black Friday promotions.
Most modern chat systems are entirely proprietary: proprietary clients, talking proprietary protocols to proprietary servers. There's no need for this: there are free open standards for one-to-one and one-to-many comms for precisely this sort of system, and some venerable clients are still a lot more capable than you might remember.
Impersonating an Amazon order notification, the attackers end up calling victims to try to obtain their credit card details, says Avanan. A recent campaign spotted by email security provider Avanan spoofs Amazon with both a traditional phishing message and a voice call to try to steal credit card information.