Security News
The Winter Vivern cyber spy group is exploiting an XSS zero-day vulnerability in attacks on European governments. Researchers at ESET, who discovered the activity, didn't name the specific government entities it targeted but given Winter Vivern's nexus to Russia and Belarus, they are likely to be adversaries of those countries.
Their phishing messages impersonated the Outlook Team and tried to trick potential victims into opening malicious emails, automatically triggering a first-stage payload that exploited the Roundcube email server vulnerability. "The final JavaScript payload [.] is able to list folders and emails in the current Roundcube account, and to exfiltrate email messages to the C&C server."
Hacker Stephanie "Snow" Carruthers and her team found phishing emails written by security researchers saw a 3% better click rate than phishing emails written by ChatGPT. An IBM X-Force research project led by Chief People Hacker Stephanie "Snow" Carruthers showed that phishing emails written by humans have a 3% better click rate than phishing emails written by ChatGPT. The research project was performed at one global healthcare company based in Canada. In order to get ChatGPT to write an email that lured someone into clicking a malicious link, the IBM researchers had to prompt the LLM. They asked ChatGPT to draft a persuasive email taking into account the top areas of concern for employees in their industry, which in this case was healthcare.
Microsoft has disabled a bad anti-spam rule flooding Microsoft 365 admins' inboxes with blind carbon copies of outbound emails mistakenly flagged as spam. This false positive issue affected Exchange Online users worldwide, with many reports saying that all emails sent to external addresses were being tagged as spam.
In the wake of Google's announcement of new rules for bulk senders, Microsoft is urging Microsoft 365 email senders to implement SPF, DKIM and DMARC email authentication methods. "These Domain Name Service email authentication records verify that you are the legitimate sender of your email and prevent spoofing and phishing attacks," Microsoft noted.
To keep Gmail users' inboxes "Safer and more spam-free", Google is introducing new requirements for bulk senders. "Last year we started requiring that emails sent to a Gmail address must have some form of authentication. And we've seen the number of unauthenticated messages Gmail users receive plummet by 75%, which has helped declutter inboxes while blocking billions of malicious messages with higher precision," said Neil Kumaran, group product manager, Gmail Security & Trust.
Amazon mistakenly sent out purchase confirmation emails for Hotels.com, Google Play, and Mastercard gift cards to customers, making many worried their accounts were compromised. The emails were sent out last night, with customers reporting receiving three separate emails from Amazon Prime for each alleged gift card purchase.
Chinese snoops stole about 60,000 State Department emails when they broke into Microsoft-hosted Outlook and Exchange Online accounts belonging to US government officials over the summer. "No classified systems were hacked," said State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller during a press briefing Thursday.
Chinese hackers stole tens of thousands of emails from U.S. State Department accounts after breaching Microsoft's cloud-based Exchange email platform in May. During a recent Senate staff briefing, U.S. State Department officials disclosed that the attackers stole at least 60,000 emails from Outlook accounts belonging to State Department officials stationed in East Asia, the Pacific, and Europe, as Reuters first reported. Microsoft did not disclose specific details regarding the affected organizations, government agencies, or countries impacted by this email breach.
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