The mad lads at watchTowr are back with their unique blend of zany humor and impressive security research. And this time, it’s the curious case of backdoors within popular backdoors, and the list of unclaimed domains that malicious software would just love to contact. OK, that needs some explanation. We’re mainly talking about web shells […]
Claroty’s TEAM82 has a report on a new malware strain, what they’re calling IOCONTROL. It’s a Linux malware strain aimed squarely at embedded devices. One of the first targets of this malware, surprisingly, is the Iraeli made Orpak gas station pumps. There’s a bit of history here, as IOCONTROL is believed to be used by […]
We’re covering two weeks of news today, which is handy, because the week between Christmas and New Years is always a bit slow. And up first is the inevitable problem with digital license plates. Unless very carefully designed to be bulletproof, they can be jailbroken, and the displayed number can be changed. And the Reviver […]
Steve Ballmer famously called Linux “viral”, with some not-entirely coherent complaints about the OS. In a hilarious instance of life imitating art, Windows machines are now getting attacked through malicious Linux VM images distributed through phishing emails. This approach seems to be intended to fool any anti-malware software that may be running. The VM includes […]
Wired has a fascinating story this week, about the length Sophos has gone to for the last 5 years, to track down a group of malicious but clever security researchers that were continually discovering vulnerabilities and then using those findings to attack real-world targets. Sophos believes this adversary to be overlapping Chinese groups known as […]
Depending on who you ask, the big news this week is that quantum computing researchers out of China have broken RSA. (Here’s the PDF of their paper.) And that’s true… sort of. There are multiple caveats, like the fact that this proof of concept is only factoring a 22-bit key. The minimum RSA size in […]
The Internet Archive has been hacked. This is an ongoing story, but it looks like this started at least as early as September 28, while the site itself was showing a creative message on October 9th, telling visitors they should be watching for their email addresses to show up on Have I Been Pwnd. Hi […]
Up first this week is a warning for the few of us still brave enough to host our own email servers. If you’re running Zimbra, it’s time to update, because CVE-2024-45519 is now being exploited in the wild. That vulnerability is a pretty nasty one, though thankfully requires a specific change from default settings to […]
It looks like there’s finally hope for sane password policies. The US National Institue of Standards and Technology, NIST, has released a draft of SP 800-63-4, the Digital Identity Guideline. There’s password guidance in there, like “SHALL NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types) for passwords” and “SHALL NOT require […]