Security News
A new extension for Google Chrome has made explicit how most popular sites on the internet load resources from one or more of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. The extension, Big Tech Detective, shows the extent to which websites exchange data with these four companies by reporting on them.
Leading technology companies said Tuesday that a months-long breach of corporate and government networks was so sophisticated, focused and labor-intensive that a nation had to be behind it, with all the evidence pointing to Russia. In the first congressional hearing on the breach, representatives of technology companies involved in the response described a hack of almost breathtaking precision, ambition and scope.
People returning to work following the long pandemic will find an array of tech-infused gadgetry to improve workplace safety but which could pose risks for long-term personal and medical privacy. Tech giants and startups are offering solutions which include computer vision detection of vital signs to wearables which can offer early indications of the onset of Covid-19 and apps that keep track of health metrics.
Any mis-step in the curation of any of the packages you rely upon, by any one of the hundreds or even thousands of coders in the community whose programming, testing and software publishing skills you have implicitly chosen to trust, could lead to a security disaster. Worse still, updated packages that are fetched and installed by your dependency manager can introduce malware into the heart of your coding ecosystem even if the source code in the package itself remains the exactly the same.
These npm packages are identical to the proof-of-concept packages created by Alex Birsan, the researcher who had recently managed to infiltrate over major 35 tech firms and walk away with over six-figures in bug bounty rewards. Birsan tells BleepingComputer he is not behind these copycat "Research" packages, although he did admit to uploading a few more packages today under his real npm account.
These npm packages are identical to the proof-of-concept packages created by Alex Birsan, the researcher who had recently managed to infiltrate over major 35 tech firms and walk away with over six-figures in bug bounty rewards. Birsan tells BleepingComputer he is not behind these copycat "Research" packages, although he did admit to uploading a few more packages today under his real npm account.
For globally operating tech companies, these developments point to a future where data privacy will become a compliance minefield. With an incoming Vice President who has a strong record of promoting consumer privacy protection legislation and a substantial political mandate for change, more stringent privacy laws are a question of when rather than if.
A researcher managed to breach over 35 major companies' internal systems, including Microsoft, Apple, PayPal, Shopify, Netflix, Yelp, Tesla, and Uber, in a novel software supply chain attack. Unlike traditional typosquatting attacks that rely on social engineering tactics or the victim misspelling a package name, this particular supply chain attack is more sophisticated as it needed no action by the victim, who automatically received the malicious packages.
Claroty said 25% more vulnerabilities were reported in 2020 than in 2019, 70% of which had high or critical CVSS scores. Industrial cybersecurity company, Claroty, has released its biannual industrial control systems risk and vulnerability report, which found that the number of reported vulnerabilities increased by 25% when compared to 2019, with critical infrastructure areas like manufacturing, energy, water, and commercial facilities being most affected.
European companies that accelerate both their digital and sustainability transitions are likely to recover faster and emerge stronger from the COVID-19 crisis, according to a report from Accenture. The report indicates that companies leading in both digital adoption and sustainable practices are nearly three times more likely than other companies to be among "Tomorrow's leaders," thereby recovering faster and emerging stronger from the crisis.