Security News
New research has disclosed what's being called a security vulnerability in Microsoft 365 that could be exploited to infer message contents due to the use of a broken cryptographic algorithm. Office 365 Message Encryption is a security mechanism used to send and receive encrypted email messages between users inside and outside an organization without revealing anything about the communications themselves.
Microsoft Office 365 Message Encryption claims to offer a way "To send and receive encrypted email messages between people inside and outside your organization." Office 365 Message Encryption relies on a strong cipher, AES, but WithSecure says that's irrelevant because ECB is weak and vulnerable to cryptanalysis regardless of the cipher used.
We're not quite sure what to call it right now, so we referred to it in the headline by the hybrid name Microsoft Office 365. The web-based versions of the Office tools don't have the same feature set as the full apps, so any results we might obtain are unlikely to align with how most business users of Office, ah, 365 have configured Word, Excel, Outlook and friends on their Windows laptops.
WithSecure researchers are warning organizations of a security weakness in Microsoft Office 365 Message Encryption that could be exploited by attackers to obtain sensitive information. OME, which is used by organizations to send encrypted emails internally and externally, utilizes the Electronic Codebook implementation - a mode of operation known to leak certain structural information about messages.
Security researchers at WithSecure, previously F-Secure Business, found that it is possible to partially or fully infer the contents of encrypted messages sent through Microsoft Office 365 due to the use of a weak block cipher mode of operation. Organizations use Office 365 Message Encryption to send or receive emails, both external and internal, to ensure confidentiality of the content from destination to source.
Only a third of PostgreSQL databases connected to the internet use SSL for encrypted messaging, according to a cloud database provider. Bit.io, which offers a drag-and-drop database as a service based on PostgreSQL, searched shodan.io to create a sample of 820,000 PostgreSQL servers connected to the internet over September 1-29.
Matrix decentralized communication platform has published a security warning about two critical-severity vulnerabilities that affect the end-to-end encryption in the software development kit. A threat actor exploiting these flaws could break the confidentiality of Matrix communications and run man-in-the-middle attacks that expose message contents in a readable form.
Four security researchers have identified five cryptographic vulnerabilities in code libraries that can be exploited to undermine Matrix encrypted chat clients. "Our perspective is that these attacks together show a rich attack surface in Matrix from both a protocol and implementation perspective," Benjamin Dowling, a lecturer in cybersecurity, told The Register this week.
Tech companies are throwing their users to the wolves by allowing company employees, cops, and other third parties to access unprotected messages. "After the reversal of Roe v. Wade and with more rights cutbacks on the way, tech companies are throwing their users to the wolves by allowing company employees, cops, and other third parties to access unprotected messages."
The recent attacks bear various signatures linked to TeamTNT and rely on tools previously deployed by the gang, indicating that the threat actor is likely making a comeback. The researchers observed three attack types being used in the allegedly new TeamTNT attacks, with the most interesting one being to use the computational power of hijacked servers to run Bitcoin encryption solvers.