Security News
The prolific North Korean APT known as Lazarus is behind a spear-phishing campaign aimed at stealing critical data from defense companies by leveraging an advanced malware called ThreatNeedle, new research has revealed. The elaborate and ongoing cyberespionage campaign used emails with COVID-19 themes paired with publicly available personal information of targets to lure them into taking the malware bait, according to Kaspersky, which first observed the activity in mid-2020.
In early November, a developer contributing to Google's open-source Chromium project reported a problem with Oilpan, the garbage collector for the browser's Blink rendering engine: it can be used to break a memory defense known as address space layout randomization. About two weeks later, Google software security engineer Chris Palmer marked the bug "WontFix" because Google has resigned itself to the fact that ASLR can't be saved - Spectre and Spectre-like processor-level flaws can defeat it anyway, whether or not Oilpan can be exploited.
Kaspersky security researchers have found evidence that the North Korean hacking collective known as Lazarus has added another target to its list of victims: The defense industry, and companies in more than a dozen countries have already been affected. As previously reported by TechRepublic, Lazarus started off 2021 by targeting security researchers with offers of collaborating on malware research, only to infect victims with malware that could cause the theft of sensitive security-related data.
A North Korean-backed hacking group has targeted the defense industry with custom backdoor malware dubbed ThreatNeedle since early 2020 with the end goal of collecting highly sensitive information. ThreatNeedle helped the Lazarus hackers to move laterally throughout the defense orgs' networks and harvest sensitive info that got exfiltrated to attacker-controlled servers using a custom tunneling tool via SSH tunnels to remote compromised South Korean servers.
As browser-makers move to defang third-party cookies, marketers are increasingly switching to alternative tracking techniques. In 2019, Firefox was equipped with Enhanced Tracking Protection by default, blocking known trackers, third-party tracking cookies and cryptomining scripts.
Boffins based in Belgium have found that a DNS-based technique for bypassing defenses against online tracking has become increasingly common and represents a growing threat to both privacy and security. In a research paper to be presented in July at the 21st Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, KU Leuven-affiliated researchers Yana Dimova, Gunes Acar, Wouter Joosen, and Tom Van Goethem, and privacy consultant Lukasz Olejnik, delve into increasing adoption of CNAME-based tracking, which abuses DNS records to erase the distinction between first-party and third-party contexts.
Sequitur Labs announced new packages for the EmSPARK Security Suite that allows manufacturers to secure embedded designs for industrial, consumer, smart home and health care applications quickly and painlessly. The EmSPARK Security Suite Base package provides essential security defenses for IoT applications in a turnkey solution that is easy to install, integrate and manage.
CyberSheath launched its Managed IT Services for Defense Contractors to ensure compliance with the new cybersecurity standards for commercial contractors of the United States government. The managed services include a Shared Security Compliance Framework to ensure compliance for both DFARS Clause 252.204-7012 / NIST SP 800-171 and the new DFARS 252.204-7019-7021 CMMC requirements.
Chaos engineering is a way for security teams to replace continuous firefighting with continuous learning, according to two industry experts. At the RSA 365 Virtual Summit this week, Aaron Rinehart, CTO and co-founder Verica, and Jamie Dicken, manager of applied security at Cardinal Health, explained how this approach to IT security works.
Bringing more than 36 years of Department of Defense and Intelligence Community cybersecurity experience, Heckman will partner with clients to deliver cyber resilience for DoD policy, strategy, IT and weapon system cybersecurity. His focus encompasses all aspects of cyber and secure information sharing, ranging from innovative approaches to cyber strategy, policy, security architecture and engineering, to initiatives such as controls for IT modernization, Risk Management Framework transformation, identity and access management evolution and data protection.