Security News
A cybersecurity researcher at ESET today published an analysis of a new piece of malware, a sample of which they spotted on the Virustotal malware scanning engine and believe the hacker behind it is likely interested in some high-value computers protected behind air‑gapped networks. Dubbed 'Ramsay,' the malware is still under development with two more variants spotted in the wild and doesn't yet appear to be a complex attacking framework based upon the details researcher shared.
Security researchers at Comparitech have reported that an estimated 24,000 Android apps are leaking user data because of misconfigured Firebase databases. Data is secured using rules which "Work by matching a pattern against database paths, and then applying custom conditions to allow access to data at those paths", according to the docs.
Researchers from cybersecurity firm Trend Micro and the Polytechnic University of Milan have analyzed the possible entry points and vectors for attacks targeting smart manufacturing environments, and they discovered several new vulnerabilities in the process. It's not uncommon for traditional malware to make its way into industrial environments and in many cases they are detected by existing security solutions, but sophisticated attackers looking to target industrial organizations are more likely to launch attacks that specifically target operational technology systems to make their attack more efficient and less likely to be detected.
Not only can malicious people make airliners climb and dive without pilot input - they can also control where and when they do so, research from Pen Test Partners has found. TCAS spoofing, the practice of fooling collision detection systems aboard airliners, can be controlled to precisely determine whether an airliner fitted with TCAS climbs or descends - and even to produce climb rates of up to 3,000ft/min.
A researcher has earned $20,000 from GitLab after reporting a critical vulnerability that could have been exploited to obtain sensitive information from a server and to execute arbitrary code. The vulnerability was discovered in March by William Bowling, who noticed that an attacker could obtain arbitrary files from a server when moving an issue from one GitLab project to another.
Google Project Zero security researchers have discovered multiple vulnerabilities in ImageIO, the image parsing API used by Apple's iOS and macOS operating systems. The bugs in image parsing code, some of which impact open source image libraries and not the ImageIO framework itself, can be triggered through popular messenger applications by sending specially crafted image files to the targeted user.
A study of vulnerabilities - bugs that can be a gateway for malware or allow privilege escalation by an intruder - shows that Windows platforms have the most by far, but that they also tend to be fixed quickly, compared to Linux systems or appliances like routers, printers and scanners. The assets analysed mostly exclude mobile devices, leaving the top five most common platforms as Windows 10, Linux, Cisco, Windows 7 and Windows 2012.
Researchers have uncovered a potential means to profile and track online users using a novel approach that combines device identifiers with their biometric information. The details come from a newly published research titled "Nowhere to Hide: Cross-modal Identity Leakage between Biometrics and Devices" by a group of academics from the University of Liverpool, New York University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and University at Buffalo SUNY. "Prior studies on identity theft only consider the attack goal for a single type of identity, either for device IDs or biometrics," Chris Xiaoxuan Lu, Assistant Professor at the University of Liverpool, told The Hacker News in an email interview.
Researchers have uncovered a potential means to profile and track online users using a novel approach that combines device identifiers with their biometric information. The details come from a newly published research titled "Nowhere to Hide: Cross-modal Identity Leakage between Biometrics and Devices" by a group of academics from the University of Liverpool, New York University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and University at Buffalo SUNY. "Prior studies on identity theft only consider the attack goal for a single type of identity, either for device IDs or biometrics," Chris Xiaoxuan Lu, Assistant Professor at the University of Liverpool, told The Hacker News in an email interview.
Most antivirus software performs a "Real time scan" of unknown files saved to disk and, if considered suspicious, these files are either moved to a secure location to be quarantined, or deleted from the system. The issue, the researchers say, resides in the fact that there's a small time window between the file scan and the cleanup operation, and that almost all antivirus software performs operations with the highest level of authority within the operating system.