Security News

Details of a flaw in Apple's Safari browser, publicly disclosed Tuesday, outline how the cybergang known as ScamClub reached 50 million users with a three-month-long malicious ad campaign pushing malware to mobile iOS Chrome and macOS desktop browsers. Impacted was Apple's Safari browser running on macOS Big Sur 11.0.1 and Google's iOS-based Chrome browser.

Interesting research on persistent web tracking using favicons. In this paper we introduce a novel tracking mechanism that misuses a simple yet ubiquitous browser feature: favicons.

A malvertising group known as "ScamClub" exploited a zero-day vulnerability in WebKit-based browsers to inject malicious payloads that redirected users to fraudulent websites gift card scams. The attacks, first spotted by ad security firm Confiant in late June 2020, leveraged a bug that allowed malicious parties to bypass the iframe sandboxing policy in the browser engine that powers Safari and Google Chrome for iOS and run malicious code.

The ScamClub malvertising group used a zero-day vulnerability in the WebKit web browser engine to push payloads that redirected to gift card scams. During their campaigns over the past three months, the number of malicious ad impressions served in a day recorded spikes as high as 16 million.

Google has patched a zero-day vulnerability in Chrome web browser for desktop that it says is being actively exploited in the wild. While it's typical of Google to limit details of the vulnerability until a majority of users are updated with the fix, the development comes weeks after Google and Microsoft disclosed attacks carried out by North Korean hackers against security researchers with an elaborate social engineering campaign to install a Windows backdoor.

Google, whose Project Zero bug-hunting team is often surprisingly vocal when describing and discussing software vulnerabilities, has taken a very quiet approach to a just-patched bug in its Chrome browser. The phrase "Exploit exists in the wild" is shorthand for "The crooks found this vulnerability before we did and are already using it in real-life attacks".

If you use Google Chrome or a Chromium-based browser such as Microsoft Edge, update it immediately and/or check it for updates over the coming days: there is a zero-day bug being "Actively exploited" in the older version of Chrome that will also affect other vendors' browsers. Details are intentionally scant until enough of the wider world has installed the update, but the flaw exists in how Chrome handles heap overflows in V8, Chromium's Javascript engine.

The new Edge 88 browser includes tough new security features, including a password generator and a tool for monitoring whether your login details have been exposed to the dark web. Microsoft Edge 88 is rolling out to users in the Stable channel alongside some new privacy-focused features, including a long-awaited credentials monitor and a built-in password generator.

Anonymous and private, yet busted - we explain how darkweb sites sometimes keep your secrets and sometimes don't. We tell you the tale of a company with a cool name but allegedly with creepy habits coded into its browser extensions.

Google says that it will block third-party Chromium web browsers from using private Google APIs after discovering that they were integrating them although they're intended to be used only in Chrome. This is because many of the Google APIs included in the Chromium code are specific only to Google Chrome and are not intended to be integrated and used by the users of derived Chromium products.