Security News
A rendering technique affecting the world's leading messaging and email platforms, including Instagram, iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, and Facebook Messenger, allowed threat actors to create legitimate-looking phishing messages for the past three years. The vulnerabilities are rendering bugs resulting in the apps' interface incorrectly displaying URLs with injected RTLO Unicode control characters, making the user vulnerable to URI spoofing attacks.
Security firm Avanan on Thursday published its latest analysis of a phishing technique that builds on the internet community's familiarity with CAPTCHA challenges to amplify the effectiveness of deceptions designed to capture sensitive data. CAPTCHA puzzles, such as Google's reCAPTCHA, can act as a roadblock for these scanners because the filters can't solve the puzzles.
"The confusion in URL parsing can cause unexpected behavior in the software, and could be exploited by threat actors to cause denial-of-service conditions, information leaks, or possibly conduct remote code execution attacks," the researchers said in a report shared with The Hacker News. With URLs being a fundamental mechanism by which resources - located either locally or on the web - can be requested and retrieved, differences in how the parsing libraries interpret a URL request could pose significant risk for users.
Eight different security vulnerabilities arising from inconsistencies among 16 different URL parsing libraries could allow denial-of-service conditions, information leaks and remote code execution in various web applications, researchers are warning. Multiple Parsers in Use: Whether by design or an oversight, developers sometimes use more than one URL parsing library in projects.
A team of security researchers has discovered serious flaws in the way the modern internet parses URLs: Specifically, that there are too many URL parsers with inconsistent rules, which has created a worldwide web easily exploited by savvy attackers. We don't even need to look very hard to find an example of URL parsing being manipulated in the wild to devastating effect: The late-2021 Log4j exploit is a perfect example, the researchers said in their report.
The Tor Project has released Tor Browser 11.0 with a new user interface design and the removal of support for V2 onion services. You can download the Tor Browser from the Tor Project site, and if you are an existing user, you can upgrade to the latest version by going to the Tor Menu > Help > About Tor Browser.
Vade released its Phishers' Favorites report for H1 2021, which revealed that there has been a major jump in phishing attacks since the start of the year with a 281 percent spike in May and another 284 percent increase in June, for a total of 4.2 billion phishing emails detected by Vade for June alone. In Q2 2021, Crédit Agricole phishing URLs increased 296 percent, while La Banque Postale URLs increased 831 percent, pushing them up 18 spots to #5 on the list.
The Tor Project is auctioning off the first Tor Onion domain ever created, duskgytldkxiuqc6. Onion, as an NFT. The non-profit Tor Project operates the Tor decentralized network running on top of the Internet that allows users to access websites anonymously and special Onion URLs only accessible over Tor.
"Simple" can often be harder than "Complex." When thinking about the trickiest phishing campaigns and their components, URL redirection does not immediately come to mind as the part causing the trouble. URL forwarding is one method that is often abused by cybercriminals to create multi-layered phishing attacks.
Website contact forms and Google URLs are being used to spread the IcedID trojan, according to researchers at Microsoft. Attackers are using "Contact us" forms on websites to send emails targeting organizations with trumped-up legal threats, researchers said.