Security News
Cybersecurity researchers have demonstrated a new attack technique that makes it possible to leverage a device's Bluetooth component to directly extract network passwords and manipulate traffic on a Wi-Fi chip. The novel attacks work against the so-called "Combo chips," which are specialized chips that are equipped to handle different types of radio wave-based wireless communications, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and LTE. "We provide empirical evidence that coexistence, i.e., the coordination of cross-technology wireless transmissions, is an unexplored attack surface," a group of researchers from the Technical University of Darmstadt's Secure Mobile Networking Lab and the University of Brescia said in a new paper.
The Department of Homeland Security has launched a new bug bounty program dubbed "Hack DHS" that allows vetted cybersecurity researchers to find and report security vulnerabilities in external DHS systems. "The Hack DHS program incentivizes highly skilled hackers to identify cybersecurity weaknesses in our systems before they can be exploited by bad actors. This program is one example of how the Department is partnering with the community to help protect our Nation's cybersecurity."
Researchers from cybersecurity firm Cybereason has released a "Vaccine" that can be used to remotely mitigate the critical 'Log4Shell' Apache Log4j code execution vulnerability running rampant through the Internet.Early this morning, researchers released a proof-of-concept exploit for a zero-day remote code execution vulnerability in Apache Log4j tracked as CVE-2021-44228 and dubbed 'Log4Shell.
IT security researchers from Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences have discovered 14 new types of 'XS-Leak' cross-site leak attacks against modern web browsers, including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Safari, and Mozilla Firefox. These types of side-channel attacks are called 'XS-Leaks,' and allow attacks to bypass the 'same-origin' policy in web browsers so that a malicious website can steal info in the background from a trusted website where the user enters information.
A Pakistani threat actor successfully socially engineered a number of ministries in Afghanistan and a shared government computer in India to steal sensitive Google, Twitter, and Facebook credentials from its targets and stealthily obtain access to government portals. Malwarebytes' latest findings go into detail about the new tactics and tools adopted by the APT group known as SideCopy, which is so-called because of its attempts to mimic the infection chains associated with another group tracked as SideWinder and mislead attribution.
Socially engineered SMS messages are being used to install malware on Android devices as part of a widespread phishing campaign that impersonates the Iranian government and social security services to make away with credit card details and steal funds from victims' bank accounts. "The malicious application not only collects the victim's credit card numbers, but also gains access to their 2FA authentication SMS, and turn[s] the victim's device into a bot capable of spreading similar phishing SMS to other potential victims," Check Point researcher Shmuel Cohen said in a new report published Wednesday.
Overcoming Google Play app restrictions, attackers have successfully racked up more than 300,000 banking trojan installations over just the past four months in the official Android app marketplace. Researchers from Threat Fabric reported that these threat groups have honed their ability to use Google Play to propagate banking trojans by shrinking the footprint of their dropper apps, eliminating the number of permissions they ask for, boosting the overall quality of the attack with better code and standing up convincing companion websites.
The TrickBot malware operators have been using a new method to check the screen resolution of a victim system to evade detection of security software and analysis by researchers. Last year, the TrickBot gang added a new feature to their malware that terminated the infection chain if a device was using non-standard screen resolutions of 800x600 and 1024x768.
A local elevation of privilege vulnerability in the Windows Installer that Microsoft supposedly fixed on November 2021 Patch Tuesday is, according to its discoverer, still exploitable. Abdelhamid Naceri, who reported the flaw through the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative, has analyzed the patch for CVE-2021-41379 and found that the bug was "Not fixed correctly."
A now-patched vulnerability affecting Oracle VM VirtualBox could be potentially exploited by an adversary to compromise the hypervisor and cause a denial-of-service condition. "Easily exploitable vulnerability allows high privileged attacker with logon to the infrastructure where Oracle VM VirtualBox executes to compromise Oracle VM VirtualBox," the advisory reads.