Lifeboat Foundation

DALLAS (AP) — It was the start of a steamy Friday two Augusts ago when Jason Whisler settled in for a working breakfast at the Coffee Ranch restaurant in the Texas Panhandle city of Borger. The most pressing agenda item for city officials that morning: planning for a country music concert and anniversary event.

Then Whisler’s phone rang. Borger’s computer system had been hacked.

Workers were frozen out of files. Printers spewed out demands for money. Over the next several days, residents couldn’t pay water bills, the government couldn’t process payroll, police officers couldn’t retrieve certain records. Across Texas, similar scenes played out in nearly two dozen communities hit by a cyberattack officials ultimately tied to a Russia-based criminal syndicate.

Making deepfakes is getting easier, and they’re more convincing than ever. Cybercriminals are using video and audio deepfakes to extort money from victims by adding a credible “fake authenticity” to their scams.

Ever since the first person said “the camera never lies,” there have been people out to prove otherwise. Creative photographers in the late 19th century used simple tricks to create faked images.

Continue reading “How Deepfakes Are Powering a New Type of Cyber Crime” »

The XLoader Windows infostealer malware has now been upgraded to attack macOS users.

Researchers warn about a new malware that hides among Windows Defender’s exclusions to evade detection by the antivirus program.

Stealth recon and intrusion

On Wednesday, France’s National Agency for Information Systems Security—abbreviated as ANSSI—warned national businesses and organizations that the group was behind a massive attack campaign that was using hacked routers prior to carrying out reconnaissance and attacks as a means to cover up the intrusions.

“ANSSI is currently handling a large intrusion campaign impacting numerous French entities,” an ANSSI advisory warned. “Attacks are still ongoing and are led by an intrusion set publicly referred to as APT31. It appears from our investigations that the threat actor uses a network of compromised home routers as operational relay boxes in order to perform stealth reconnaissance as well as attacks.”

The UK, US and EU have accused China of carrying out a major cyber-attack earlier this year on Microsoft Exchange email servers.

The attack affected at least 30000 organisations globally.

Continue reading “China accused of cyber-attack on Microsoft — BBC News” »

Military-grade spyware licensed by an Israeli firm to governments for tracking terrorists and criminals was used in attempted and successful hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, human rights activists, business executives and two women close to murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, according to an investigation by The Washington Post and 16 media partners.

The phones appeared on a list of more than 50000 numbers that are concentrated in countries known to engage in surveillance of their citizens and also known to have been clients of the Israeli firm, NSO Group, a worldwide leader in the growing and largely unregulated private spyware industry, the investigation found.

The list does not identify who put the numbers on it, or why, and it is unknown how many of the phones were targeted or surveilled. But forensic analysis of the 37 smartphones shows that many display a tight correlation between time stamps associated with a number on the list and the initiation of surveillance, in some cases as brief as a few seconds.

Facepalm: Microsoft is once again advising its customers to disable Windows print spooler, after a new vulnerability that allows hackers to execute malicious code on machines has emerged. While a patch fixing the flaw will be released in due course, the most effective workaround currently on the table is to stop and disable the print spooler service entirely.

This is the third print spooler vulnerability to emerge in just five weeks. While a critical flaw was originally identified and patched in June, a similar flaw – dubbed PrintNightmare – came to light shortly after and was subsequently patched (with mixed success).

Continue reading “Disable Windows print spooler or you could be hacked, says Microsoft” »

Hackers were targeting SolarWinds’ Serv-U software.

Microsoft reported Tuesday that it identified a zero-day exploit in SolarWinds’ software. The zero-day originated from a group of Chinese hackers trying to reach the US defense industry. SolarWinds has since patched the exploit.