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Microsoft today issued software updates to fix at least five dozen security holes in Windows and supported software, including patches for two zero-day vulnerabilities that are already being exploited. Also, Adobe, Google Chrome and Apple iOS users may have their own zero-day patching to do. On Sept. 7, researchers at Citizen Lab warned they were seeing active exploitation of a “zero-click,” zero-day flaw to install spyware on iOS devices without any interaction from the victim. “The exploit chain was capable of compromising iPhones running the latest version of iOS (16.6) without any interaction from the victim,” the researchers wrote. According to Citizen Lab, the exploit uses malicious images sent via iMessage, an embedded component of Apple’s iOS that has been the source of previous zero-click flaws in iPhones and iPads.…

In November 2022, the password manager service LastPass disclosed a breach in which hackers stole password vaults containing both encrypted and plaintext data for more than 25 million users. Since then, a steady trickle of six-figure cryptocurrency heists targeting security-conscious people throughout the tech industry has led some security experts to conclude that crooks likely have succeeded at cracking open some of the stolen LastPass vaults. Taylor Monahan is founder and CEO of MetaMask, a popular software cryptocurrency wallet used to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. Since late December 2022, Monahan and other researchers have identified a highly reliable set of clues that they say connect recent thefts targeting more than 150 people, Collectively, these individuals have been robbed of more than $35 million worth of crypto. Monahan said virtually…

Domain names ending in “.US” — the top-level domain for the United States — are among the most prevalent in phishing scams, new research shows. This is noteworthy because .US is overseen by the U.S. government, which is frequently the target of phishing domains ending in .US. Also, .US domains are only supposed to be available to U.S. citizens and to those who can demonstrate that they have a physical presence in the United States. .US is the “country code top-level domain” or ccTLD of the United States. Dozens of countries have their own ccTLDs: .MX for Mexico, for example, or .CA for Canada. But few other major countries in the world have anywhere near as many phishing domains each year as .US. That’s according to The Interisle Consulting Group,…

The U.S. government today announced a coordinated crackdown against QakBot, a complex malware family used by multiple cybercrime groups to lay the groundwork for ransomware infections. The international law enforcement operation involved seizing control over the botnet’s online infrastructure, and quietly removing the Qakbot malware from tens of thousands of infected Microsoft Windows computers. Qakbot/Qbot was once again the top malware loader observed in the wild in the first six months of 2023. Source: Reliaquest.com. In an international operation announced today dubbed “Duck Hunt,” the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said they obtained court orders to remove Qakbot from infected devices, and to seize servers used to control the botnet. “This is the most significant technological and financial operation ever led by the Department…

Posted by Jon Bottarini and Hamzeh Zawawy, Android Security Fuzzing is an effective technique for finding software vulnerabilities. Over the past few years Android has been focused on improving the effectiveness, scope, and convenience of fuzzing across the organization. This effort has directly resulted in improved test coverage, fewer security/stability bugs, and higher code quality. Our implementation of continuous fuzzing allows software teams to find new bugs/vulnerabilities, and prevent regressions automatically without having to manually initiate fuzzing runs themselves. This post recounts a brief history of fuzzing on Android, shares how Google performs fuzzing at scale, and documents our experience, challenges, and success in building an infrastructure for automating fuzzing across Android. If you’re interested in contributing to fuzzing on Android, we’ve included instructions on how to get started, and…

Security consulting giant Kroll disclosed today that a SIM-swapping attack against one of its employees led to the theft of user information for multiple cryptocurrency platforms that are relying on Kroll services in their ongoing bankruptcy proceedings. And there are indications that fraudsters may already be exploiting the stolen data in phishing attacks. Cryptocurrency lender BlockFi and the now-collapsed crypto trading platform FTX each disclosed data breaches this week thanks to a recent SIM-swapping attack targeting an employee of Kroll — the company handling both firms’ bankruptcy restructuring. In a statement released today, New York City-based Kroll said it was informed that on Aug. 19, 2023, someone targeted a T-Mobile phone number belonging to a Kroll employee “in a highly sophisticated ‘SIM swapping’ attack.” “Specifically, T-Mobile, without any authority from…

In large metropolitan areas, tourists are often easy to spot because they’re far more inclined than locals to gaze upward at the surrounding skyscrapers. Security experts say this same tourist dynamic is a dead giveaway in virtually all computer intrusions that lead to devastating attacks like data theft and ransomware, and that more organizations should set simple virtual tripwires that sound the alarm when authorized users and devices are spotted exhibiting this behavior. In a blog post published last month, Cisco Talos said it was seeing a worrisome “increase in the rate of high-sophistication attacks on network infrastructure.” Cisco’s warning comes amid a flurry of successful data ransom and state-sponsored cyber espionage attacks targeting some of the most well-defended networks on the planet. But despite their increasing complexity, a great…

You’ve probably never heard of “16Shop,” but there’s a good chance someone using it has tried to phish you. A 16Shop phishing page spoofing Apple and targeting Japanese users. Image: Akamai.com. The international police organization INTERPOL said last week it had shuttered the notorious 16Shop, a popular phishing-as-a-service platform launched in 2017 that made it simple for even complete novices to conduct complex and convincing phishing scams. INTERPOL said authorities in Indonesia arrested the 21-year-old proprietor and one of his alleged facilitators, and that a third suspect was apprehended in Japan. The INTERPOL statement says the platform sold hacking tools to compromise more than 70,000 users in 43 countries. Given how long 16Shop has been around and how many paying customers it enjoyed over the years, that number is almost…

Dongge Liu, Jonathan Metzman, Oliver Chang, Google Open Source Security Team  Since 2016, OSS-Fuzz has been at the forefront of automated vulnerability discovery for open source projects. Vulnerability discovery is an important part of keeping software supply chains secure, so our team is constantly working to improve OSS-Fuzz. For the last few months, we’ve tested whether we could boost OSS-Fuzz’s performance using Google’s Large Language Models (LLM).  This blog post shares our experience of successfully applying the generative power of LLMs to improve the automated vulnerability detection technique known as fuzz testing (“fuzzing”). By using LLMs, we’re able to increase the code coverage for critical projects using our OSS-Fuzz service without manually writing additional code. Using LLMs is a promising new way to scale security improvements across the over 1,000…

Elie Bursztein, cybersecurity and AI research director, Fabian Kaczmarczyck, software engineer As part of our effort to deploy quantum resistant cryptography, we are happy to announce the release of the first quantum resilient FIDO2 security key implementation as part of OpenSK, our open source security key firmware. This open-source hardware optimized implementation uses a novel ECC/Dilithium hybrid signature schema that benefits from the security of ECC against standard attacks and Dilithium’s resilience against quantum attacks. This schema was co-developed in partnership with the ETH Zürich and won the ACNS secure cryptographic implementation workshop best paper. Quantum processor As progress toward practical quantum computers is accelerating, preparing for their advent is becoming a more pressing issue as time passes. In particular, standard public key cryptography which was designed to protect against…