Cyber Security News


  • Malware found on laptops given out by UK government

    January 23, 2021

    Some of the laptops given out in England to support vulnerable children home-schooling during lockdown contain malware, BBC News has learned. Teachers shared details on an online forum about suspicious files found on devices sent to a Bradford school. The malware, which they said appeared to be contacting Russian servers, is believed to have been found on ...

  • SolarWinds: How Sunburst Sends Data Back to the Attackers

    January 22, 2021

    In our previous blog we described how the attackers controlled the Sunburst malware, and detailed a variety of commands that will result in data being sent to the threat actors. The next technique to discuss is how Sunburst sends this data to the attackers. If data is being sent to the attacker as a result of ...

  • Network Attack Trends: Internet of Threats

    January 22, 2021

    Unit 42 researchers observed interesting attack trends from August-October 2020. Despite a surge in scanner activities and HTTP directory traversal exploitation attempts, CVE-2012-2311 and CVE-2012-1823, which were the most commonly exploited vulnerabilities in the wild in early summer 2020, are no longer at the top of that list. Several new critical exploits, including but not ...

  • Amazon Kindle RCE Attack Starts with an Email

    January 22, 2021

    Three vulnerabilities in the Amazon Kindle e-reader would have allowed a remote attacker to execute code and run it as root – paving the way for siphoning money from unsuspecting users. Yogev Bar-On, researcher at Realmode Labs, found that it was possible to email malicious e-books to the devices via the “Send to Kindle” feature to ...

  • Cybercriminals kick-off 2021 with sweepstakes, credit card, delivery scams

    January 22, 2021

    Trend Micro researches have predicted that this year, cybercriminals will continue to take advantage of Covid-19-related effects and incidents — such as people’s reliance on online purchases and e-services and the increased need for financial assistance — in order to bait victims and steal critical information. Even though new ways of stealing information regularly arise, ...

  • Windows Remote Desktop servers now used to amplify DDoS attacks

    January 21, 2021

    Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) servers are now being abused by DDoS-for-hire services to amplify Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The Microsoft RDP service is a built-in Windows service running on TCP/3389 and/or UDP/3389 that enables authenticated remote virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) access to Windows servers and workstations. Attacks taking advantage of this new UDP reflection/amplification ...

  • CISA Issues Supply Chain Compromise Alert, Forms Coordination Group with Other Government Agencies

    January 21, 2021

    The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) recently issued an alert regarding an advanced persistent threat (APT) compromising government agencies, critical infrastructures, and private sector organizations. According to CISA, the APT actor is accountable for the compromise of the SolarWinds Orion supply chain. The actor is also responsible for the abuse of commonly used authentication mechanisms. ...

  • NSA urges system administrators to replace obsolete TLS protocols

    January 20, 2021

    The US National Security Agency has issued a security advisory this month urging system administrators in federal agencies and beyond to stop using old and obsolete TLS protocols. “NSA recommends that only TLS 1.2 or TLS 1.3 be used; and that SSL 2.0, SSL 3.0, TLS 1.0, and TLS 1.1 not be used,” the agency ...

  • Hacker leaks full database of 77 million Nitro PDF user records

    January 20, 2021

    A stolen database containing the email addresses, names, and passwords of more than 77 million records of Nitro PDF service users was leaked today for free. The 14GB leaked database contains 77,159,696 records with users’ email addresses, full names, bcrypt hashed passwords, titles, company names, IP addresses, and other system-related information. The massive Nitro PDF data breach ...

  • Raindrop Backdoor: New Malware Discovered in SolarWinds Investigation

    January 20, 2021

    Symantec, a division of Broadcom, has uncovered an additional piece of malware used in the SolarWinds attacks which was used against a select number of victims that were of interest to the attackers. Raindrop (Backdoor.Raindrop) is a loader which delivers a payload of Cobalt Strike. Raindrop is very similar to the already documented Teardrop tool, but ...