Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: cybercrime/malcode – Page 95

Twitter hacked, 200 million user email addresses leaked, researcher says

Hackers stole the email addresses of more than 200 million Twitter users and posted them on an online hacking forum, a security researcher said Wednesday.

The breach “will unfortunately lead to a lot of hacking, targeted phishing and doxxing,” Alon Gal, co-founder of Israeli cybersecurity-monitoring firm Hudson Rock, wrote on LinkedIn. He called it “one of the most significant leaks I’ve seen.”

Twitter has not commented on the report, which Gal first posted about on social media on Dec. 24, nor responded to inquiries about the breach since that date. It was not clear what action, if any, Twitter has taken to investigate or remediate the issue.

Ransomware impacts over 200 govt, edu, healthcare orgs in 2022

Ransomware attacks in 2022 impacted more than 200 hundred larger organizations in the U.S. public sector in the government, educational, and healthcare verticals.

Data collected from publicly available reports, disclosure statements, leaks on the dark web, and third-party intelligence show that hackers stole data in about half of these ransomware attacks.

North Korean hackers are posing as VC firms to steal crypto — and a blockchain expert says 2023 could bring more cyberattacks than ever

North Korea’s infamous Lazarus Group is mimicking venture capital firms and banks to steal cryptocurrency, according to a report from cybersecurity company Kaspersky.

The state-sponsored cybercrime group, which was was behind the $625 million Axie Infinity hack in April, is creating domains that present themselves as well-known Japanese, US and Vietnamese companies.

Kaspersky said Lazarus’ BlueNoroff subgroup is using new types of malware delivery methods that bypass security warnings about downloading content. They can then “intercept large cryptocurrency transfers, changing the recipient’s address, and pushing the transfer amount to the limit, essentially draining the account in a single transaction.”

Researcher Uncovers Potential Wiretapping Bugs in Google Home Smart Speakers

A security researcher was awarded a bug bounty of $107,500 for identifying security issues in Google Home smart speakers that could be exploited to install backdoors and turn them into wiretapping devices.

The flaws “allowed an attacker within wireless proximity to install a ‘backdoor’ account on the device, enabling them to send commands to it remotely over the internet, access its microphone feed, and make arbitrary HTTP requests within the victim’s LAN,” the researcher, who goes by the name Matt, disclosed in a technical write-up published this week.

In making such malicious requests, not only could the Wi-Fi password get exposed, but also provide the adversary direct access to other devices connected to the same network. Following responsible disclosure on January 8, 2021, the issues were remediated by Google in April 2021.

Perception vs reality: How to really prepare for ransomware

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

It appears that most IT environments have not connected the dots when it comes to ransomware and the importance of a good protection system. It’s easy to infer this when reading a recent IDC survey of more than 500 CIOs from 20-plus industries around the world.

The most headline-grabbing statistic from IDC’s report is that 46% of respondents were successfully attacked by ransomware in the last three years. That means that ransomware has leaped past natural disasters to become the primary reason one must be good at performing large data restores. Many years ago, the main reason for such restores was hardware failure because the failure of a disk system often meant a complete restore from scratch.

New info-stealer malware infects software pirates via fake cracks sites

A new information-stealing malware named ‘RisePro’ is being distributed through fake cracks sites operated by the PrivateLoader pay-per-install (PPI) malware distribution service.

RisePro is designed to help attackers steal victims’ credit cards, passwords, and crypto wallets from infected devices.

The malware was spotted by analysts at Flashpoint and Sekoia this week, with both cybersecurity firms confirming that RisePro is a previously undocumented information stealer now being distributed via fake software cracks and key generators.