Back in October 2022, Kaspersky GReAT was looking into a peculiar advertisement on a hacking forum. A cybercriminal had been advertising a UEFI bootkit, dubbed BlackLotus, that could bypass Secure Boot, for $5,000. Given the low price for such powerful capabilities, the cybersecurity community initially took this advertisement with a grain of salt. As no BlackLotus samples were found in the wild, no one could at the time verify the claims made in the forum post.
However, about half a year later, in March 2023, ESET confirmed that the BlackLotus advertisement was genuine. The researchers tracked down samples of this bootkit and confirmed that it can indeed bypass Secure Boot through a vulnerability called Baton Drop (CVE-2022-21894). As this vulnerability was still exploitable in 2023, Microsoft had to release multiple security updates to address it.
Read more…
Source: Kaspersky
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- FBI Releases the Internet Crime Complaint Center 2020 Internet Crime Report, Including COVID-19 Scam Statistics
March 17, 2021
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center has released its annual report. The 2020 Internet Crime Report includes information from 791,790 complaints of suspected internet crime—an increase of more than 300,000 complaints from 2019—and reported losses exceeding $4.2 billion. State-specific statistics have also been released and can be found within the 2020 Internet Crime Report and ...
- $4,000 COVID-19 ‘Relief Checks’ Cloak Dridex Malware
March 17, 2021
Cybercriminals have wasted no time in hopping on the American Rescue Plan – the COVID-19 relief legislation just signed into law – as a lure for email-based scams. According to researchers at Cofense, a campaign began circulating in March that capitalized on Americans’ interest in the forthcoming $1,400 relief payments and other aid. The emails impersonate ...
- FBI warns of rise in PYSA ransomware operators targeting US, UK schools
March 17, 2021
The FBI has warned of a surge in attacks against schools in which ransomware operators are stealing data to pile on the pressure for payment. In a joint FBI and DHS-CISA flash industry alert (.PDF) this week, law enforcement said a recent increase in attacks leveraging PYSA ransomware, also known as Mespinoza, has been traced to ...
- Cisco Plugs Security Hole in Small Business Routers
March 17, 2021
A popular line of small business routers made by Cisco Systems are vulnerable to a high-severity vulnerability. If exploited, the flaw could allow a remote – albeit authenticated – attacker to execute code or restart affected devices unexpectedly. Cisco issued fixes on Wednesday for the flaw in its RV132W ADSL2+ Wireless-N VPN routers and RV134W VDSL2 ...
- China-linked TA428 Continues to Target Russia and Mongolia IT Companies
March 17, 2021
Recorded Future’s Insikt Group recently identified renewed activity attributed to the suspected Chinese threat activity group TA428. The identified activity overlaps with a TA428 campaign previously reported by Proofpoint as “Operation LagTime IT”, which targeted Russian and East Asian government information technology agencies in 2019. Based on the infrastructure, tactics, and victim organization identified, we ...
- Cybercriminals Are Making, and Demanding, More Money Than Ever
March 17, 2021
Ransomware is one of the top threats in cybersecurity and a focus area for Palo Alto Networks. The global threat intelligence team (Unit 42) and incident response team (The Crypsis Group) have partnered to create the 2021 Unit 42 Ransomware Threat Report to provide the latest insights on the top ransomware variants, ransomware payment trends ...
