Learning from the huge expenses Atlanta and Baltimore incurred by refusing to pay ransomware, the Florida City of Riveria Beach decided to pay up. The ransom amount of almost $600,000 is a lot, but much cheaper than the alternative. Powered by WPeMatico
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In 2017, some Android phones came with a backdoor pre-installed: Criminals in 2017 managed to get an advanced backdoor preinstalled on Android devices before they left the factories of manufacturers, Google researchers confirmed on Thursday. Triada first came to light in 2016 in articles published by Kaspersky here and here, the first of which said … Read More “Backdoor Built into Android Firmware” »
The International Committee of the Red Cross has just published a report: “The Potential Human Cost of Cyber-Operations.” It’s the result of an “ICRC Expert Meeting” from last year, but was published this week. Here’s a shorter blog post if you don’t want to read the whole thing. And commentary by one of the authors. … Read More “The Human Cost of Cyberattacks” »
Last month, Kaspersky discovered that Asus’s live update system was infected with malware, an operation it called Operation Shadowhammer. Now we learn that six other companies were targeted in the same operation. As we mentioned before, ASUS was not the only company used by the attackers. Studying this case, our experts found other samples that … Read More “More Attacks against Computer Automatic Update Systems” »
Evil Clippy is a tool for creating malicious Microsoft Office macros: At BlackHat Asia we released Evil Clippy, a tool which assists red teamers and security testers in creating malicious MS Office documents. Amongst others, Evil Clippy can hide VBA macros, stomp VBA code (via p-code) and confuse popular macro analysis tools. It runs on … Read More “Malicious MS Office Macro Creator” »
FireEye is releasing much more information about the Triton malware that attacks critical infrastructure. It has been discovered in more places. This is also a good — but older — article on Triton. We don’t know who wrote it. Initial speculation was Iran; more recent speculation is Russia. Both are still speculations. Fireeye report. BoingBoing … Read More “More on the Triton Malware” »
Flame was discovered in 2012, linked to Stuxnet, and believed to be American in origin. It has recently been linked to more modern malware through new analysis tools that find linkages between different software. Seems that Flame did not disappear after it was discovered, as was previously thought. (Its controllers used a kill switch to … Read More “New Version of Flame Malware Discovered” »
Kaspersky has released details about a sophisticated nation-state spyware it calls TajMahal: The TajMahal framework’s 80 modules, Shulmin says, comprise not only the typical keylogging and screengrabbing features of spyware, but also never-before-seen and obscure tricks. It can intercept documents in a printer queue, and keep track of “files of interest,” automatically stealing them if … Read More “TajMahal Spyware” »
This is an interesting story of a serious vulnerability in a Huawei driver that Microsoft found. The vulnerability is similar in style to the NSA’s DOUBLEPULSAR that was leaked by the Shadow Brokers — believed to be the Russian government — and it’s obvious that this attack copied that technique. What is less clear is … Read More “NSA-Inspired Vulnerability Found in Huawei Laptops” »
Kaspersky Labs is reporting on a new supply chain attack they call “Shadowhammer.” In January 2019, we discovered a sophisticated supply chain attack involving the ASUS Live Update Utility. The attack took place between June and November 2018 and according to our telemetry, it affected a large number of users. […] The goal of the … Read More “Malware Installed in Asus Computers through Hacked Update Process” »