Security News
Nearly all of the FBI's technical intelligence on malicious "Cyber actors" in the first half of this year was obtained via Section 702 searches, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray. With the controversial FISA amendment set to expire at the end of the year, unless Congress reauthorizes the snooping clause, Wray has been making the rounds and delivering the same message: the FBI "Cannot afford to lose" Section 702.
State-sponsored North Korean hacker group Kimsuky has been impersonating journalists and academics for spear-phishing campaigns to collect intelligence from think tanks, research centers, academic institutions, and various media organizations. Kimsuky hackers meticulously plan and execute their spear-phishing attacks by using email addresses that closely resemble those of real individuals and by crafting convincing, realistic content for the communication with the target.
False alarm: despite a patch notes suggesting otherwise, that mysterious blob of microcode released for many Intel microprocessors last week was not a security update, the x86 giant says. In an email Monday, an Intel spokesperson told The Register that microcode-20230512, which popped up on the manufacturer's GitHub page "Does not contain any security updates and the note, , is meant to convey that there are no applicable security updates in the package."
Intel is investigating reports that BootGuard private keys, used to protect PCs from hidden malware, were leaked when data belonging to Micro-Star International was stolen and dumped online. It's understood the private keys were generated by MSI to use with Intel's BootGuard technology, and were among internal source code and other materials taken from the computer parts maker's IT systems last month - at least some of which has since been shared on the internet.
Intel is investigating the leak of alleged private keys used by the Intel Boot Guard security feature, potentially impacting its ability to block the installation of malicious UEFI firmware on MSI devices. On Friday, Alex Matrosov, the CEO of firmware supply chain security platform Binarly, warned that the leaked source code contains the image signing private keys for 57 MSI products and Intel Boot Guard private keys for 116 MSI products.
The cybercriminals who breached Taiwanese multinational MSI last month have apparently leaked the company's private code signing keys on their dark web site. MSI is a corporation that develops and sells computers and computer hardware.
A new side-channel attack impacting multiple generations of Intel CPUs has been discovered, allowing data to be leaked through the EFLAGS register. Instead of relying on the cache system like many other side-channel attacks, this new attack leverages a flaw in transient execution that makes it possible to extract secret data from user memory space through timing analysis.
Security researchers and analysts can now search Microsoft's Threat Intelligence Defender database using file hashes and URLs when pulling together information for network intrusion investigations and whatnot. "Often, analysts must go to multiple repositories to obtain the critical data sets they need to assess a suspicious domain, host, or IP address," Redmond wrote earlier about Defender Threat Intelligence, aka Defender TI. "DNS data, WHOIS information, malware, and SSL certificates provide important context to indicators of compromise, but these repositories are widely distributed and don't always share a common data structure, making it difficult to ensure analysts have all relevant data needed to make a proper and timely assessment of suspicious infrastructure."
Microsoft has released out-of-band security updates for 'Memory Mapped I/O Stale Data' information disclosure vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs.The Mapped I/O side-channel vulnerabilities were initially disclosed by Intel on June 14th, 2022, warning that the flaws could allow processes running in a virtual machine to access data from another virtual machine.
These cover a wide range of Intel products including Xeon processors, network adapters, and also software. One, CVE-2022-38090, has a severity rating of medium and affects a number of Intel processors, including the 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable server chips, which have only recently been superseded by the 4th Gen "Sapphire Rapids" products.