Interesting social-engineering attack vector: McAfee released a report on a new LUA malware loader distributed through what appeared to be a legitimate Microsoft GitHub repository for the “C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS,” known as vcpkg. The attacker is exploiting a property of GitHub: comments to a particular repo can contain files, and … Read More “Using Legitimate GitHub URLs for Malware” »
Category: social engineering
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After the XZ Utils discovery, people have been examining other open-source projects. Surprising no one, the incident is not unique: The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping GitHub-associated emails. These emails implored OpenJS to take action to update one of its popular … Read More “Other Attempts to Take Over Open Source Projects” »
Last week, the internet dodged a major nation-state attack that would have had catastrophic cybersecurity repercussions worldwide. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen, so it won’t get much attention—but it should. There’s an important moral to the story of the attack and its discovery: The security of the global internet depends on countless obscure pieces … Read More “Backdoor in XZ Utils That Almost Happened” »
The cybersecurity world got really lucky last week. An intentionally placed backdoor in xz Utils, an open-source compression utility, was pretty much accidentally discovered by a Microsoft engineer—weeks before it would have been incorporated into both Debian and Red Hat Linux. From ArsTehnica: Malicious code added to xz Utils versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 modified the … Read More “xz Utils Backdoor” »
World of Warcraft players wrote about a fictional game element, “Glorbo,” on a subreddit for the game, trying to entice an AI bot to write an article about it. It worked: And it…worked. Zleague auto-published a post titled “World of Warcraft Players Excited For Glorbo’s Introduction.” […] That is…all essentially nonsense. The article was left … Read More “Fooling an AI Article Writer” »
It’s big: The breach appeared to have compromised many of Uber’s internal systems, and a person claiming responsibility for the hack sent images of email, cloud storage and code repositories to cybersecurity researchers and The New York Times. “They pretty much have full access to Uber,” said Sam Curry, a security engineer at Yuga Labs … Read More “Massive Data Breach at Uber” »
Roger Grimes on why multifactor authentication isn’t a panacea: The first time I heard of this issue was from a Midwest CEO. His organization had been hit by ransomware to the tune of $10M. Operationally, they were still recovering nearly a year later. And, embarrassingly, it was his most trusted VP who let the attackers … Read More “Problems with Multifactor Authentication” »
The problem with spear phishing it that it takes time and creativity to create individualized enticing phishing emails. Researchers are using GPT-3 to attempt to solve that problem: The researchers used OpenAI’s GPT-3 platform in conjunction with other AI-as-a-service products focused on personality analysis to generate phishing emails tailored to their colleagues’ backgrounds and traits. … Read More “Using AI to Scale Spear Phishing” »
News article: Most troublingly, Activision says that the “cheat” tool has been advertised multiple times on a popular cheating forum under the title “new COD hack.” (Gamers looking to flout the rules will typically go to such forums to find new ways to do so.) While the report doesn’t mention which forum they were posted … Read More “Malware Hidden in Call of Duty Cheating Software” »
This is a longish video that describes a profitable computer banking scam that’s run out of call centers in places like India. There’s a lot of fluff about glitterbombs and the like, but the details are interesting. The scammers convince the victims to give them remote access to their computers, and then that they’ve mistyped … Read More “Details of a Computer Banking Scam” »