Security News
At the fraud trial of former FTX head Sam Bankman-Fried, prosecutors presented the jury with Python code for the FTX backend that allowed flagged client accounts to spend money they didn't have on the cryptocurrency exchange. Multiple accounts associated with Alameda Research, the hedge fund controlled by Bankman-Fried that allegedly used billions of dollars of customer deposits in FTX as a slush fund, were flagged thus, according to reported accounts of the testimony of FTX co-founder Gary Wang.
A malicious campaign that researchers observed growing more complex over the past half year, has been planting on open-source platforms hundreds of info-stealing packages that counted about 75,000 downloads. The campaign has been monitored since early April by analysts at Checkmarx's Supply Chain Security team, who discovered 272 packages with code for stealing sensitive data from targeted systems.
A new phishing attack is leveraging Facebook Messenger to propagate messages with malicious attachments from a "Swarm of fake and hijacked personal accounts" with the ultimate goal of taking over the targets' accounts. "Originating yet again from a Vietnamese-based group, this campaign uses a tiny compressed file attachment that packs a powerful Python-based stealer dropped in a multi-stage process full of simple yet effective obfuscation methods," Guardio Labs researcher Oleg Zaytsev said in an analysis published over the weekend.
Banking and logistics industries are under the onslaught of a reworked variant of a malware called Chaes. A subsequent analysis from Avast in early 2022 found that the threat actors behind the operation, who call themselves Lucifer, had breached more than 800 WordPress websites to deliver Chaes to users of Banco do Brasil, Loja Integrada, Mercado Bitcoin, Mercado Livre, and Mercado Pago.
Three additional rogue Python packages have been discovered in the Package Index repository as part of an ongoing malicious software supply chain campaign called VMConnect, with signs pointing to the involvement of North Korean state-sponsored threat actors. First disclosed at the start of the month by the company and Sonatype, VMConnect refers to a collection of Python packages that mimic popular open-source Python tools to download an unknown second-stage malware.
Even if you join the Microsoft 365 Insiders Beta channel to test the new feature, there is no guarantee that Python in Excel will be available, as Microsoft is rolling it out slowly to test the feature. The new Python in Excel feature brings a new 'PY' function that allows users to embed Python code directly in a cell to be executed like any macro or regular Excel function.
A high-severity security flaw has been disclosed in the Python URL parsing function that could be exploited to bypass domain or protocol filtering methods implemented with a blocklist, ultimately resulting in arbitrary file reads and command execution. "Urlparse has a parsing problem when the entire URL starts with blank characters," the CERT Coordination Center said in a Friday advisory.
CEO, fresh with funds, lays out the dependency dilemma Interview Open source security biz Socket is extending its source code dependency checker, which previously addressed only JavaScript and...
Python security fixes often happen through "Silent" code commits, without an associated Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures identifier, according to a group of computer security researchers. In a preprint paper titled, "Exploring Security Commits in Python," Shiyu Sun, Shu Wang, Xinda Wang, Yunlong Xing, Kun Sun from George Mason University, and Elisa Zhang from Dougherty Valley High School, all in the United States, propose a remedy: a database of security commits called PySecDB to make Python code repairs more visible to the community.
A new fileless attack dubbed PyLoose has been observed striking cloud workloads with the goal of delivering a cryptocurrency miner, new findings from Wiz reveal. "The attack consists of Python code that loads an XMRig Miner directly into memory using memfd, a known Linux fileless technique," security researchers Avigayil Mechtinger, Oren Ofer, and Itamar Gilad said.