News

Move fast - miscreants compromised a domain controller in 17 hours

Gootloader JavaScript malware, commonly used to deliver ransomware, is back in action after a period of reduced activity.…

Plus 2 new critical vulns - patch now

Cisco warned customers about another wave of attacks against its firewalls, which have been battered by intruders for at least six months. It also patched two critical bugs in its Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) software that aren't under active exploitation - yet.…

Most of you still can't do better than 123456?

123456. admin. password. For years, the IT world has been reminding users not to rely on such predictable passwords. And yet here we are with another study finding that those sorts of quickly-guessable, universally-held-to-be-bad passwords are still the most popular ones.…

Spies, not crooks, were behind digital heist – damage stopped at the backups, says US cybersec biz

SonicWall has blamed an unnamed, state-sponsored collective for the September break-in that saw cybercriminals rifle through a cache of firewall configuration backups.…

Stolen creds let miscreants waltz into 17K employees' chats, spilling info on staff and partners

Japanese media behemoth Nikkei has admitted to a data breach after miscreants slipped into its internal Slack workspace, exposing the personal details of more than 17,000 employees and business partners.…

Strongly-worded emails to staff telling them to be more careful aren't going to cut it anymore

Partner Content  UK GDPR Article 32 mandates "appropriate security measures". The ICO has defined what that means: multi-million-pound fines for password failures. The violations that trigger them? Small, familiar, and happening in your organization right now.…

Second time's the charm for after Wiz rejected Google's $23B offer last year

Google's second attempt to acquire cloud security firm Wiz is going a lot better than the first, with the Department of Justice clearing the $32 billion deal, which ranks as Google's largest-ever acquisition.…

Local privileges required to exploit flaw in Ryzen and Epyc CPUs. Some patches available, more on the way

AMD will issue a microcode patch for a high-severity vulnerability that could weaken cryptographic keys across Epyc and Ryzen CPUs.…

Meanwhile, others tried to social-engineer the chatbot itself

Nation-state goons and cybercrime rings are experimenting with Gemini to develop a "Thinking Robot" malware module that can rewrite its own code to avoid detection, and build an AI agent that tracks enemies' behavior, according to Google Threat Intelligence Group.…

Retailer's tech systems aren’t down anymore, but the same can’t be said for its rocky financials

Marks & Spencer says its April cyberattack will cost around £136 million ($177.2 million) in total.…

A ‘three-letter person’ experiments with the new type-safe C, and is impressed

Famed mathematician, cryptographer and coder Daniel J. Bernstein has tried out the new type-safe C/C++ compiler, and he's given it a favorable report.…

After a £312M upgrade to the retiring OS, Defra still has 24,000 devices to replace

The UK's Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) has spent £312 million (c $407 million) modernizing its IT estate, including replacing tens of thousands of Windows 7 laptops with Windows 10 – which officially reached end of support last month.…

DHS rule would expand biometric collection to immigrants and some citizens linked to them

If you're filing an immigration form - or helping someone who is - the Feds may soon want to look in your eyes, swab your cheek, and scan your face. The US Department of Homeland Security wants to greatly expand biometric data collection for immigration applications, covering immigrants and even some US citizens tied to those cases.…

Curly COMrades strike again

Russia's Curly COMrades is abusing Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor in compromised Windows machines to create a hidden Alpine Linux-based virtual machine that bypasses endpoint security tools, giving the spies long-term network access to snoop and deploy malware.…

Security program fails to meet federal standards as government cuts drain resources

The infosec program run by the US' Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) "is not effective," according to a fresh audit published by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG).…

Check Point lifts lid on a quartet of Teams vulns that made it possible to fake the boss, forge messages, and quietly rewrite history

Microsoft Teams, one of the world's most widely used collaboration tools, contained serious, now-patched vulnerabilities that could have let attackers impersonate executives, rewrite chat history, and fake notifications or calls – all without users suspecting a thing.…

France-based victims hit especially hard, while UK named most-targeted country generally

Researchers are seeing a "dramatic" increase in cybercrime involving physical violence across Europe, with at least 18 cases reported since the start of the year.…

Redmond uncovers SesameOp, a backdoor hiding its tracks by using OpenAI’s Assistants API as a command channel

Hackers have found a new use for OpenAI's Assistants API – not to write poems or code, but to secretly control malware.…

South Korea's president laughed, so perhaps it was funny? Unlike China's censorship and snooping

Chinese president Xi Jinping has joked that smartphones from Xiaomi might include backdoors.…

55 cuffed last week after court ruled sting operation was legal

Australian police last week made 55 arrests using evidence gathered with a backdoored messaging app that authorities distributed in the criminal community.…