Category: AI in news

New details are emerging about a breach at National Public Data (NPD), a consumer data broker that recently spilled hundreds of millions of Americans’ Social Security Numbers, addresses, and phone numbers online. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that another NPD data broker which shares access to the same consumer records inadvertently published the passwords to its back-end…

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Aug 19, 2024Ravie LakshmananThreat Intelligence / Cryptocurrency A new type of malware called UULoader is being used by threat actors to deliver next-stage payloads like Gh0st RAT and Mimikatz. The Cyberint Research Team, which discovered the malware, said it’s distributed in the form of malicious installers for legitimate applications targeting Korean and Chinese speakers. There…

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According to recent research on employee offboarding, 70% of IT professionals say they’ve experienced the negative effects of incomplete IT offboarding, whether in the form of a security incident tied to an account that wasn’t deprovisioned, a surprise bill for resources that aren’t in use anymore, or a missed handoff of a critical resource or…

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The State of Ransomware Palo Alto Networks published its semi-annual report on ransomware. From the Executive Summary: Unit 42 monitors ransomware and extortion leak sites closely to keep tabs on threat activity. We reviewed compromise announcements from 53 dedicated leak sites in the first half of 2024 and found 1,762 new posts. This averages to…

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Aug 19, 2024Ravie LakshmananCloud Security / Threat Intelligence Malicious actors are using a cloud attack tool named Xeon Sender to conduct SMS phishing and spam campaigns on a large scale by abusing legitimate services. “Attackers can use Xeon to send messages through multiple software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers using valid credentials for the service providers,” SentinelOne security…

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Ironically, the answer on updates is in large part because many enterprises have historically found CrowdStrike’s quality to be quite high. “We trusted them too far because they have been really good for too long,” Zalewski said, stressing that the decision was also made because enterprise IT was cutting back extensively. “We didn’t have the…

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Aug 19, 2024Ravie LakshmananVulnerability / Zero-Day A newly patched security flaw in Microsoft Windows was exploited as a zero-day by Lazarus Group, a prolific state-sponsored actor affiliated with North Korea. The security vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-38193 (CVSS score: 7.8), has been described as a privilege escalation bug in the Windows Ancillary Function Driver (AFD.sys) for…

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At one time, Microsoft created a custom version of Windows 10 in order to comply with and respond to the Chinese government’s concerns. There were rumors that Microsoft was slowly moving AI researchers out of China to Canada, but it’s unclear if that is what is truly going on. Almost every device has software at…

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Aug 19, 2024Ravie LakshmananCybercrime / Network Security Cybersecurity researchers have discovered new infrastructure linked to a financially motivated threat actor known as FIN7. The two clusters of potential FIN7 activity “indicate communications inbound to FIN7 infrastructure from IP addresses assigned to Post Ltd (Russia) and SmartApe (Estonia), respectively,” Team Cymru said in a report published…

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Lateral movement inside AWS environments In the hands of knowledgeable hackers, leaked secrets can be very powerful and dangerous. For example, the attackers behind this operation exhibited advanced knowledge of AWS APIs.After obtaining an AWS access key the attackers used it to run a GetCallerIdentity API call to verify the identity or role assigned to…

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