Security News

Report: US facing four times as many DDoS attacks as China
2020-04-16 18:09

New research from Atlas VPN has shown that the United States experienced more than 175,000 DDoS attacks in the month of March, more than double the number faced by the next highest country and four times as many as China. According to data gathered and analyzed by Atlas VPN researchers, South Korea and Brazil both suffered from more than 50,000 DDoS attacks while China came in just ahead of the United Kingdom with about 45,000 attacks.

Zoom adds Choose Your Own Routing Adventure to keep chats out of China
2020-04-14 05:03

Zoom's security catch-up sprint has seen it announce its users will soon be able to choose where their traffic goes. The new feature will help users in places like Taiwan, where the government banned Zoom after learning traffic could go through its frenemies in Beijing.

US Threatens to Block China Telecom From American Market
2020-04-10 12:03

The United States threatened Thursday to cut off Beijing-controlled China Telecom from serving the US market because of legal and security risks, the Justice Department announced Thursday. The agencies making the recommendation - which also included the Justice Department, the Commerce Department, and the US Trade Representative - said China Telecom is vulnerable to "Exploitation, influence and control" by the Chinese government.

China-Linked Hackers Systematically Targeted Linux Servers for Years
2020-04-09 03:06

Successfully conducting cross-platform attacks targeting Linux, Windows and Android devices, the adversaries have been engaged in both financially motivated and targeted espionage attacks. For years, these groups have been strategically targeting Linux servers across a broad range of industry verticals, exploiting the immature defensive coverage within the environment and the inadequate use of endpoint protection and endpoint detection and response products, BlackBerry notes.

China and Taiwan aren't great friends. Zoom sends chats through China. So Taiwan has banned Zoom
2020-04-08 04:34

In 1965, Gordon Moore published a short informal paper, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. Based on not much more but these few data points and his knowledge of silicon chip development - he was head of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductors, the company that was to seed Silicon Valley - he said that for the next decade, component counts by area could double every year.

Keys Used to Encrypt Zoom Meetings Sent to China: Researchers
2020-04-03 15:41

A recent analysis of the Zoom video conferencing application revealed that the keys used to encrypt and decrypt meetings may be sent to servers in China, even if all participants are located in other countries. "A scan shows a total of five servers in China and 68 in the United States that apparently run the same Zoom server software as the Beijing server. We suspect that keys may be distributed through these servers. A company primarily catering to North American clients that sometimes distributes encryption keys through servers in China is potentially concerning, given that Zoom may be legally obligated to disclose these keys to authorities in China," Citizen Lab explained in a report published on Friday.

Firefox, IE Vulnerabilities Exploited in Attacks on China, Japan
2020-04-02 15:38

Vulnerabilities patched earlier this year in Firefox and Internet Explorer have been exploited by an advanced persistent threat actor in attacks aimed at China and Japan. Both vulnerabilities were exploited in attacks before patches were released.

Hey, China. Maybe you should have held your hackers off for a bit while COVID-19 ravaged the planet. Just a suggestion
2020-03-26 14:03

During January and February APT41's attacks were concentrated against Cisco devices using previously revealed vulnerabilities and what FireEye speculated was a pre-compiled list of vulnerable devices connected to the internet. In early March the Chinese hackers picked up on CVE-2020-10189, a zero-day remote code execution vuln in Zoho ManageEngine Desktop Central.

China's APT41 Exploited Citrix, Cisco, ManageEngine Flaws in Global Campaign
2020-03-25 14:12

A China-linked threat actor tracked as APT41 has targeted many organizations around the world by exploiting vulnerabilities in Citrix, Cisco and Zoho ManageEngine products, FireEye reported on Wednesday. "It's unclear if APT41 scanned the Internet and attempted exploitation en masse or selected a subset of specific organizations to target, but the victims appear to be more targeted in nature," FireEye said.

Forget James Bond's super-gadgets, this chap spied for China using SD card dead drops. Now he's behind bars
2020-03-19 01:12

Peng earlier confessed that SD cards loaded with information stolen from an unspecified US company were left for him to collect at hotels by a contact only known as Ed. Peng would also hide tens of thousands of dollars in hotel rooms for Ed to collect as payment. Prosecution paperwork [PDF] stated that, from 2015 through 2019, Peng agreed to, under orders from the Chinese Ministry of State Security, collect SD cards filled with stolen corporate information, and fly to China to drop them off to government snoops.