The Register

Nothing under exploit… Is this the calm before the storm?

Patch Tuesday  Microsoft rang in the New Year with a relatively calm Patch Tuesday: Just 49 Windows security updates including fixes for two critical-rated bugs, plus four high-severity Chrome flaws in Microsoft Edge.…

Buy the hype, sell the, wait, what do we do now?!

The SEC today said its Twitter account was hijacked to wrongly claim it had approved hotly anticipated Bitcoin ETFs, causing the cryptocurrency to spike and then slip in price.…

Petty officer Wenheng Zhao admitted to taking as many as 14 payoffs in return for non-public military information

A US Naval sailor will face more than two years behind bars after pleading guilty to taking bribes from Chinese spies in exchange for sensitive military information.…

Experts' job made 'straightforward' by crooks failing to update encryption schema after three years

Security researchers have put out an updated decryptor for the Babuk ransomware family, providing a free solution for victims of the Tortilla variant.…

Issue has been patched so be sure to check your implementations

SonicWall says it has observed thousands of daily attempts to exploit an Apache OFBiz zero-day for nearly a fortnight.…

Authors continue to lose out on owed payments as rebuild of digital services drags on

The British Library is denying reports suggesting the recovery costs for its 2023 ransomware attack may reach highs of nearly $9 million as work to restore services remains ongoing.…

Also: Twitter hijackings, BEC arrest, and critical vulnerabilities

Infosec in brief  We gather everyone's still easing themselves into the New Year. Deleting screens of unread emails, putting on a brave face in meetings, and slowly getting up to speed. While you're recovering from the Christmas break, Meta has been busy introducing fresh ways to monetize your web surfing habits while dressing it up as a user experience improvement.…

Won't stop the chaos, may lead to attacks with more dire consequences

Opinion  A general ban on ransomware payments, as was floated by some this week, sounds like a good idea. Eliminate extortion as a source of criminal income, and the attacks are undoubtedly going to drop. …

Remember the good old days when ransomware crooks vowed not to infect medical centers?

Extortionists are now threatening to swat hospital patients — calling in bomb threats or other bogus reports to the police so heavily armed cops show up at victims' homes — if the medical centers don't pay the crooks' ransom demands.…

Fitzpatrick faces potentially decades in prison later this month, so may as well get some foreign Netflix in beforehand

The cybercriminal behind BreachForums was this week arrested for violating the terms of his pretrial release and will now be held in custody until his sentencing hearing.…

'Almost everything' wiped in the telecom attack, says Ukraine's top cyber spy

Russia's Sandworm crew appear to have been responsible for knocking out mobile and internet services to about 24 million users in Ukraine last month with an attack on telco giant Kyivstar.…

Miscreants mock Google-owned security house: 'Change password please'

Miscreants took over security giant Mandiant's Twitter account for several hours on Wednesday in an attempt to steal cryptocurrency, then trolled the Google-owned security shop, telling its admins to change the password.…

Users apparently at fault after reusing credentials the company didn't check were already compromised

23andMe users' godawful password practices were supposedly to blame for the biotech company's October data disaster, according to its legal reps.…

No 2FA or special characters to prevent database takeover and BGP hijack

A weak password exposed by infostealer malware is being blamed after a massive outage at Orange Spain disrupted around half of its network's traffic.…

Headline-grabbing takedowns are nice, but long-term solutions require short-term sacrifices

Comment  In some ways, the ransomware landscape in 2023 remained unchanged from the way it looked in previous years. Vendor reports continue to show a rise in attacks, major organizations are still getting hit, and the inherent issues that enable it as a business model remain unaddressed.…

Also: Remember that balloon over the US last February? It might have used a US internet provider

Four Chinese balloons have reportedly floated over the Taiwan Strait, three of them crossing over the island's land mass and near its Ching-Chuan-Kang air base before disappearing, according to the Taiwan's defense ministry.…

Unpleasant Christmas package lets malware down the chimney

Microsoft has disabled a protocol that allowed the installation of Windows apps after finding that miscreants were abusing the mechanism to install malware.…

Pay up, or just refuse to submit?

One of America's biggest private freight shippers, Estes Express Lines, has told more than 20,000 customers that criminals may have stolen their personal information.…

IT service company's latest move to clear its maturing debts

French IT services provider Atos has entered talks with Airbus to sell its tech security division in an effort to ease its financial burdens.…

Company’s removal from ransomware gang’s leak blog could mean negotiations underway

Xerox has officially confirmed that a cyber baddie broke into the systems of its US subsidiary - a week after INC Ransom claimed to have exfiltrated data from the copier and print giant.…