Security News

Installing a smart doorbell on your abode could actually increase your home's attractiveness to burglars, researchers from Britain's Cranfield University have said. Instead, he said in a summary of a research paper published on the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats' website, smart doorbells and smart locks could actually make things worse.

Researchers have now disclosed more information on how they were able to breach multiple websites of the Indian government. Last month, researchers from the Sakura Samurai hacking group had partially disclosed that they had breached cyber systems of Indian government after finding a large number of critical vulnerabilities.

A team of researchers from universities in the United States, Australia and Israel has demonstrated that attackers could launch browser-based side-channel attacks that do not require JavaScript, and they've tested the method on a wide range of platforms, including devices that use Apple's recently introduced M1 chip. The researchers - representing the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the University of Michigan and the University of Adelaide - have published a paper on what they have described as the first browser side-channel attack that uses only CSS and HTML, and works even if JavaScript is completely disabled.

Cybersecurity researchers on Wednesday shed light on a new sophisticated backdoor targeting Linux endpoints and servers that's believed to be the work of Chinese nation-state actors. RedXOR's name comes from the fact that it encodes its network data with a scheme based on XOR, and that it's compiled with a legacy GCC compiler on an old release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, suggesting that the malware is deployed in targeted attacks against legacy Linux systems.

FireEye and Microsoft on Thursday said they discovered three more malware strains in connection with the SolarWinds supply-chain attack, including a "Sophisticated second-stage backdoor," as the investigation into the sprawling espionage campaign continues to yield fresh clues about the threat actor's tactics and techniques. Dubbed GoldMax, GoldFinder, and Sibot, the new set of malware adds to a growing list of malicious tools such as Sunspot, Sunburst, Teardrop, and Raindrop that were stealthily delivered to enterprise networks by alleged Russian operatives.

The exploitation of bitsquatted domains tends to be automatic when a DNS request is being made from a computer impacted by a hardware error, solar flare, or cosmic rays, thereby flipping one of the bits of the legitimate domain names. Researacher sees real windows.com traffic coming to his domains!

SunCrypt, a ransomware strain that went on to infect several targets last year, may be an updated version of the QNAPCrypt ransomware, which targeted Linux-based file storage systems, according to new research. "While the two ransomware [families] are operated by distinct different threat actors on the dark web, there are strong technical connections in code reuse and techniques, linking the two ransomware to the same author," Intezer Lab researcher Joakim Kennedy said in a malware analysis published today revealing the attackers' tactics on the dark web.

For public health officials, contact tracing remains critical to managing the spread of the coronavirus - particularly as it appears that variants of the virus could be more transmissible. The need for widespread contact tracing at the start of the pandemic led tech giants Apple and Google to announce a plan to turn iOS and Android phones into mobile "Beacons" that alert users who opt in of potential exposure to COVID-19.

At nearly a year old, the invitation-only, audio-based social-media platform ClubHouse is grappling with security issues on multiple fronts, but the consensus among researchers is coming into focus: Assume your ClubHouse conversations are being recorded. Another user, located in mainland China, meanwhile wrote code that allows anyone to listen in on ClubHouse conversations without the required invitation code, and posted it on GitHub, Silicon Angle reported.

The Dark Web allows cybercriminals to create a Cyber Attacks-as-a-Service ecosystem that outmaneuvers security defenses. Cybersecurity researchers Keman Huang, Michael Siegel, Keri Pearlson and Stuart Madnick in their paper Casting the Dark Web in a New Light, published in the MIT Sloan Management Review, asked whether attackers-who more often than not are one or two steps ahead of cyberdefenders-are more technically adept, or is it something else? The paper was written in 2019, but the material is as relevant now as it was then, and maybe even more so.