Security News

Vast botnet hijacks smart TVs for prime-time cybercrime
2024-01-18 10:15

Security researchers have pinned a DDoS botnet that's infected potentially millions of smart TVs and set-top boxes to an eight-year-old cybercrime syndicate called Bigpanzi. "The potential for Bigpanzi-controlled TVs and STBs to broadcast violent, terroristic, or pornographic content, or to employ increasingly convincing AI-generated videos for political propaganda, poses a significant threat to social order and stability," said researchers at Chinese security biz Qianxin.

Hacker hijacks Orange Spain RIPE account to cause BGP havoc
2024-01-03 19:44

Orange Spain suffered an internet outage today after a hacker breached the company's RIPE account to misconfigure BGP routing and an RPKI configuration. "Resource Public Key Infrastructure is a cryptographic method of signing records that associate a BGP route announcement with the correct originating AS number," explains a Cloudflare article on RPKI. By enabling RPKI with a routing body such as ARIN or RIPE, a network can cryptographically certify that only routers under their control can advertise an AS number and their associated IP addresses.

Stealthy KV-botnet hijacks SOHO routers and VPN devices
2023-12-13 22:47

The Chinese state-sponsored APT hacking group known as Volt Typhoon has been linked to a sophisticated botnet named 'KV-botnet' since at least 2022 to attack SOHO routers in high-value targets. Volt Typhoon commonly targets routers, firewalls, and VPN devices to proxy malicious traffic so it blends with legitimate traffic to remain undetected.

Thousands of Juniper Junos firewalls still open to hijacks, exploit code available to all
2023-09-18 22:30

About 79 percent of public-facing Juniper SRX firewalls remain vulnerable to a single security flaw can allow an unauthenticated attacker to remotely execute code on the devices, according to threat intelligence platform provider VulnCheck. Juniper revealed and addressed five flaws, which affect all versions of Junos OS on SRX firewalls and EX Series switches, in an out-of-cycle security bulletin on August 17.

Mirai Botnet Variant 'Pandora' Hijacks Android TVs for Cyberattacks
2023-09-07 09:47

A Mirai botnet variant called Pandora has been observed infiltrating inexpensive Android-based TV sets and TV boxes and using them as part of a botnet to perform distributed denial-of-service attacks. Doctor Web said the compromises are likely to occur either during malicious firmware updates or when applications for viewing pirated video content are installed.

W3LL phishing kit hijacks thousands of Microsoft 365 accounts, bypasses MFA
2023-09-06 10:33

A threat actor known as W3LL developed a phishing kit that can bypass multi-factor authentication along with other tools that compromised more than 8,000 Microsoft 365 corporate accounts. In ten months, security researchers discovered that W3LL's utilities and infrastructure were used to set up about 850 phishing that targeted credentials for more than 56,000 Microsoft 365 accounts.

Ransomware gang hijacks university alert system to issue threats
2023-05-04 15:21

Bluefield University is a small private university in Bluefield, Virginia, with roughly 900 students. The incident took a nasty turn on May 1st, 2023, with the Avos threat actors still having access to the University's RamAlert system, an emergency alert system used to warn students and staff via email and text of campus emergencies or threats.

Researcher hijacks popular Packagist PHP packages to get a job
2023-05-03 15:30

The researcher reached out to BleepingComputer stating that by hijacking these packages he hopes to get a job. Yesterday, a researcher with the pseudonym 'neskafe3v1' reached out to BleepingComputer stating he had taken over fourteen Packagist packages, with one of them having over 500 million installs.

New QBot Banking Trojan Campaign Hijacks Business Emails to Spread Malware
2023-04-17 16:06

A new QBot malware campaign is leveraging hijacked business correspondence to trick unsuspecting victims into installing the malware, new findings from Kaspersky reveal. QBot is a banking trojan that's known to be active since at least 2007.

Fake ChatGPT for Google extension hijacks Facebook accounts
2023-03-23 14:29

A new Chrome extension promising to augment users' Google searches with ChatGPT also leads to hijacked Facebook accounts, Guardio Labs researchers have found. In this case, when searching for ChatGPT via Google Search, users are served with a malicious sponsored ad that first redirects them to a fake ChatGPT for Google landing page, and then to the malicious extension on the official Chrome Store.