Security News

A cyberespionage group dubbed "FamousSparrow" by researchers has taken flight, targeting hotels, governments and private organizations around the world with a custom backdoor called, appropriately, "SparrowDoor." It's one of the advanced persistent threats that targeted the ProxyLogon vulnerabilities earlier this year, according to ESET, though its activity has only recently come to light. According to the firm, the backdoor's malicious actions include the ability to: rename or delete files; create directories; shut down processes; send information such as file attributes, file size and file write time; exfiltrate the content of a specified file; write data to a specified file; or establish an interactive reverse shell.

It's not entirely certain that FamousSparrow represents a wholly new APT group. While the SparrowDoor tool appears to be exclusive and suggests a new player, the researchers found potential links between FamousSparrow and existing APT groups - including the use of the Motnug loader known to have been used by a group dubbed SparklingGoblin and a SparrowDoor-compromised machine seen to be connecting to a command and control server connected to the DRDControl group.

After a year off due to a certain virus, the Black Hat and DEF CON security conferences returned to Las Vegas last week, just in time for the US government's attempts to foster more collaboration across the infosec industry. The newly appointed Security Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency Jen Easterly took to the virtual Black Hat stage last week and announced the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, which she claimed would be a true public/private partnership to try to lock down security incidents by sharing data and skills.

LAS VEGAS - A series of vulnerabilities in internet of things devices often found in connected hotel rooms allowed a researcher to take control of multiple rooms' amenities - and punish a loud neighbor. In an effort to make up for space constraints, these kinds of digs tend to offer a few electronic bells and whistles, and according to Supa, this particular hotel was no different.

The backdoor - dubbed "ModPipe" - impacts Oracle MICROS Restaurant Enterprise Series 3700 POS systems, a widely used software suite in restaurants and hospitality establishments to efficiently handle POS, inventory, and labor management. A majority of the identified targets are primarily located in the US. "What makes the backdoor distinctive are its downloadable modules and their capabilities, as it contains a custom algorithm designed to gather RES 3700 POS database passwords by decrypting them from Windows registry values," ESET researchers said in an analysis.

A widely used hotel reservation platform has exposed 10 million files related to guests at various hotels around the world, thanks to a misconfigured Amazon Web Services S3 bucket. Many of the records contain data for multiple hotel guests that were grouped together on a single reservation; thus, the number of people exposed is likely well over the 10 million, researchers said.

Britain's data privacy watchdog on Friday said it has fined US hotels group Marriott over a data breach affecting millions of customers worldwide. The UK Information Commissioner's Office said in a statement it fined Marriott £18.4 million for breaches of data that included personal information such as passport numbers since March 2018.

Your name, address, phone number, email address, passport number, date of birth, and sex are worth just £0.05 in the eyes of the UK Information Commissioner's Office, which has fined Marriott £18.4m after 339 million people's data was stolen from the hotel chain. Within the exposed data were 5.25 million guests' passport numbers, stored without encryption, as well as 18.5 million encrypted passport numbers and 9.1 million encrypted credit card numbers.

While hotel Wi-Fi is convenient, security is not the priority, federal government says.

Wi-Fi networks in hotels typically favor guest convenience over strong security practices, says the FBI. As the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown have forced a shift to remote work, many people are working not just from home but from public locations. In a new warning about hotel Wi-Fi, the FBI provides several tips on how to protect yourself when using such a public network.