Security News

The first edition of Pwn2Own Automotive has ended with competitors earning $1,323,750 for hacking Tesla twice and demoing 49 zero-day bugs in multiple electric car systems between January 24 and January 26.After a zero-day vulnerability is exploited and reported to vendors during Pwn2Own, they have 90 days to release security patches before Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative discloses it publicly.

Security researchers hacked the Tesla infotainment system and demoed 24 more zero-days on the second day of the Pwn2Own Automotive 2024 hacking competition. On the first day of Pwn2Own Automotive 2024, Synacktiv also collected another $295,000 after getting root on a Tesla Modem and hacking Ubiquiti Connect EV and JuiceBox 40 Smart EV Charging Stations using three chains, exploiting a total of seven zero-days.

Security researchers hacked a Tesla Modem and collected awards of $722,500 on the first day of Pwn2Own Automotive 2024 for three bug collisions and 24 unique zero-day exploits. Synacktiv Team took home $100,000 after successfully chaining three zero-day bugs to get root permissions on a Tesla Modem.

Attackers are weaponizing an old Microsoft Office vulnerability as part of phishing campaigns to distribute a strain of malware called Agent Tesla. The infection chains leverage decoy Excel...

A new variant of the Agent Tesla malware has been observed delivered via a lure file with the ZPAQ compression format to harvest data from several email clients and nearly 40 web browsers. "ZPAQ...

A sophisticated phishing campaign is using a Microsoft Word document lure to distribute a trifecta of threats, namely Agent Tesla, OriginBotnet, and OriginBotnet, to gather a wide range of information from compromised Windows machines. "A phishing email delivers the Word document as an attachment, presenting a deliberately blurred image and a counterfeit reCAPTCHA to lure the recipient into clicking on it," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin said.

An ex-Tesla staffer has filed a proposed class action lawsuit that blames poor access control at the carmaker for a data leak, weeks after Tesla itself sued the alleged leakers, two former employees. As a result of Defendant's inadequate data security and inadequate or negligent training of its employees, on or around May 10, 2023, a foreign media outlet, Handelsblatt, informed Tesla that it had obtained Tesla confidential information.

The Iranian threat actor tracked as APT34 has been linked to a new phishing attack that leads to the deployment of a variant of a backdoor called SideTwist. "APT34 has a high level of attack technology, can design different intrusion methods for different types of targets, and has supply chain attack capability," NSFOCUS Security Labs said in a report published last week.

The incident, Tesla disclosed in a data breach notification with the state of Maine and accompanying letter [PDF] to those affected, was the fault of two Tesla employees whom it alleged stole the info before sharing it with German business news outlet Handelsblatt. The 100GB of data it received from the leakers, which Handelsblatt has dubbed the "Tesla files," includes an "Abundance" of customer data, and PII for more than 100,000 Tesla employees - including Elon Musk.

Researchers from the Technical University of Berlin have developed a method to jailbreak the AMD-based infotainment systems used in all recent Tesla car models and make it run any software they choose. The hack allows the researchers to extract the unique hardware-bound RSA key that Tesla uses for car authentication in its service network, as well as voltage glitching to activate software-locked features such as seat heating and 'Acceleration Boost' that Tesla car owners normally have to pay for.