Security News

The NSA released the advisory this week informing people of the various ways mobile phones, by design, give up location information-which go beyond the well-known Location Services feature that people use on a regular basis. Most people are aware that location services on devices can pinpoint where they are so people can have access to services in the area, as well as share their location with friends via mobile apps such as WhatsApp, among other useful activities.

The United States National Security Agency has issued new advice on securing mobile devices that says location services create a security risk for staff who work in defence or national security. The new guide [PDF], titled "Limiting Location Data Exposure", notes that smartphones, tablets and fitness trackers "Store and share device geolocation data by design."

The U.S. National Security Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have issued an alert warning that adversaries could be targeting critical infrastructure across the U.S. Separately, ICS-CERT issued an advisory on a critical security bug in the Schneider Electric Triconex TriStation and Tricon Communication Module. Corresponding with the NSA/CISA alert is an ICS-CERT advisory about a handful of bugs, one critical and ranking 10 out of 10 on the CvSS vulnerability-severity scale, in Triconex SIS equipment from Schneider.

The U.S. National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have issued a joint alert urging critical infrastructure operators to take immediate measures to reduce the exposure of operational technology systems to cyberattacks. The NSA and CISA say it's imperative that critical infrastructure asset owners and operators secure industrial control systems and other OT systems due to the high risk of cyberattacks launched by foreign threat actors.

The NSA's Cybersecurity Directorate - that's the part that's supposed to work on defense - has released two documents on securing virtual private networks. Some of it is basic, but it contains good information.

Citrix has issued patches for 11 CVE-listed security vulnerabilities in its various networking products. Affected gear includes the Citrix Application Delivery Controller, Citrix Gateway, and Citrix SD-WAN WANOP. So far there have been no reports of any of the bugs being targeted in the wild, though Rob Joyce, former head of the NSA's Tailored Access Operations elite hacking team, urged admins to apply the patches - right after fixes emerged for vulns in F5 and Palo Alto networking gear, too.

A senior NSA official speaking to reporters last week said that telework infrastructure like VPNs have become a focus for malicious actors, which led the NSA to release a formal advisory on how to secure VPNs from cyberattacks. "VPN gateways tend to be directly accessible from the internet and are prone to network scanning, brute force attacks, and zero-day vulnerabilities," the NSA bulletin said.

Used within organizations of all sizes for remote connection to assets and for telework, VPNs can deliver the expected level of security if strong cryptography is employed and if admins perform regular assessments to identify and eliminate misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. Thus, the NSA recommends that network administrators avoid default settings and reduce the attack surface of VPN gateways, ensure that only CNSSP 15-compliant cryptographic algorithms are used, remove unused or non-compliant cryptography, and keep both VPN gateways and clients up to date.

The Russia-linked APT group Sandworm has been spotted exploiting a vulnerability in the internet's top email server software, according to the National Security Agency. Exim is the default MTA included on some Linux distros like Debian and Red Hat, and Exim-based mail servers in general run almost 57 percent of the internet's email servers, according to a survey last year.

The U.S. National Security Agency on Thursday published information on the targeting of Exim mail servers by the Russia-linked threat actor known as Sandworm Team. The open-source Exim mail transfer agent is used broadly worldwide, powering more than half of the Internet's email servers and also being pre-installed in some Linux distributions.