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Asra Ali, Razieh Behjati, Tiziano Santoro, Software Engineers Every day, personal data, such as location information, images, or text queries are passed between your device and remote, cloud-based services. Your data is encrypted when in transit and at rest, but as potential attack vectors grow more sophisticated, data must also be protected during use by the service, especially for software systems that handle personally identifiable user data. Toward this goal, Google’s Project Oak is a research effort that relies on the confidential computing paradigm to build an infrastructure for processing sensitive user data in a secure and privacy-preserving way: we ensure data is protected during transit, at rest, and while in use. As an assurance that the user data is in fact protected, we’ve open sourced Project Oak code, and…

The U.S. government agency in charge of improving the nation’s cybersecurity posture is ordering all federal civilian agencies to take new measures to restrict access to Internet-exposed networking equipment. The directive comes amid a surge in attacks targeting previously unknown vulnerabilities in widely used security and networking appliances. Under a new order from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), federal agencies will have 14 days to respond to any reports from CISA about misconfigured or Internet-exposed networking equipment. The directive applies to any networking devices — such as firewalls, routers and load balancers — that allow remote authentication or administration. The order requires federal departments to limit access so that only authorized users on an agency’s local or internal network can reach the management interfaces of these devices. CISA’s…

Tamás Koczka, Security Engineer In 2020, we integrated kCTF into Google's Vulnerability Rewards Program (VRP) to support researchers evaluating the security of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and the underlying Linux kernel. As the Linux kernel is a key component not just for Google, but for the Internet, we started heavily investing in this area. We extended the VRP's scope and maximum reward in 2021 (to $50k), then again in February 2022 (to $91k), and finally in August 2022 (to $133k). In 2022, we also summarized our learnings to date in our cookbook, and introduced our experimental mitigations for the most common exploitation techniques. In this post, we'd like to share our learnings and statistics about the latest Linux kernel exploit submissions, how effective our mitigations are against them, what we…

Microsoft Corp. today released software updates to fix dozens of security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. This month’s relatively light patch load has another added bonus for system administrators everywhere: It appears to be the first Patch Tuesday since March 2022 that isn’t marred by the active exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft’s products. June’s Patch Tuesday features updates to plug at least 70 security holes, and while none of these are reported by Microsoft as exploited in-the-wild yet, Redmond has flagged several in particular as “more likely to be exploited.” Top of the list on that front is CVE-2023-29357, which is a “critical” bug in Microsoft SharePoint Server that can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker on the same network. This SharePoint flaw earned…

It’s not often that a zero-day vulnerability causes a network security vendor to urge customers to physically remove and decommission an entire line of affected hardware — as opposed to just applying software updates. But experts say that is exactly what transpired this week with Barracuda Networks, as the company struggled to combat a sprawling malware threat which appears to have undermined its email security appliances in such a fundamental way that they can no longer be safely updated with software fixes. The Barracuda Email Security Gateway (ESG) 900 appliance. Campbell, Calif. based Barracuda said it hired incident response firm Mandiant on May 18 after receiving reports about unusual traffic originating from its Email Security Gateway (ESG) devices, which are designed to sit at the edge of an organization’s network…

One of the most expensive aspects of any cybercriminal operation is the time and effort it takes to constantly create large numbers of new throwaway email accounts. Now a new service offers to help dramatically cut costs associated with large-scale spam and account creation campaigns, by paying people to sell their email account credentials and letting customers temporarily rent access to a vast pool of established accounts at major providers. The service in question — kopeechka[.]store — is perhaps best described as a kind of unidirectional email confirmation-as-a-service that promises to “save your time and money for successfully registering multiple accounts.” “Are you working on large volumes and are costs constantly growing?” Kopeechka’s website asks. “Our service will solve all your problems.” As a customer of this service, you don’t…

Amy Ressler, Chrome Security Team on behalf of the Chrome VRP For 13 years, a key pillar of the Chrome Security ecosystem has included encouraging security researchers to find security vulnerabilities in Chrome browser and report them to us, through the Chrome Vulnerability Rewards Program. Starting today and until 1 December 2023, the first security bug report we receive with a functional full chain exploit, resulting in a Chrome sandbox escape, is eligible for triple the full reward amount. Your full chain exploit could result in a reward up to $180,000 (potentially more with other bonuses). Any subsequent full chains submitted during this time are eligible for double the full reward amount! We have historically put a premium on reports with exploits – “high quality reports with a functional exploit”…

Code-signing certificates are supposed to help authenticate the identity of software publishers, and provide cryptographic assurance that a signed piece of software has not been altered or tampered with. Both of these qualities make stolen or ill-gotten code-signing certificates attractive to cybercriminal groups, who prize their ability to add stealth and longevity to malicious software. This post is a deep dive on “Megatraffer,” a veteran Russian hacker who has practically cornered the underground market for malware focused code-signing certificates since 2015. One of Megatraffer’s ads on an English-language cybercrime forum. A review of Megatraffer’s posts on Russian crime forums shows this user began peddling individual stolen code-signing certs in 2015 on the Russian-language forum Exploit, and soon expanded to selling certificates for cryptographically signing applications and files designed to run…

Posted by Ashish Pujari, Chrome Security Team Introduction Chrome is trusted by millions of business users as a secure enterprise browser. Organizations can use Chrome Browser Cloud Management to help manage Chrome browsers more effectively. As an admin, they can use the Google Admin console to get Chrome to report critical security events to third-party service providers such as Splunk® to create custom enterprise security remediation workflows. Security remediation is the process of responding to security events that have been triggered by a system or a user. Remediation can be done manually or automatically, and it is an important part of an enterprise security program. Why is Automated Security Remediation Important? When a security event is identified, it is imperative to respond as soon as possible to prevent data exfiltration…

A number of Discord communities focused on cryptocurrency have been hacked this past month after their administrators were tricked into running malicious Javascript code disguised as a Web browser bookmark. This attack involves malicious Javascript that is added to one’s browser by dragging a component from a web page to one’s browser bookmarks. According to interviews with victims, several of the attacks began with an interview request from someone posing as a reporter for a crypto-focused news outlet online. Those who take the bait are sent a link to a Discord server that appears to be the official Discord of the crypto news site, where they are asked to complete a verification step to validate their identity. As shown in this Youtube video, the verification process involves dragging a button…