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Today β€” May 3rd 2024The Register - Security

It may take decade to shore up software supply chain security, says infosec CEO

Sure, we're waking to the risk, but we gotta get outta bed, warns Endor Labs founder Varun Badhwar

interview The more cybersecurity news you read, the more often you seem to see a familiar phrase: Software supply chain (SSC) vulnerabilities. Varun Badhwar, founder and CEO at security firm Endor Labs, doesn't believe that's by coincidence. …

Europol op shutters 12 scam call centers and cuffs 21 suspected fraudsters

Cops prevented crims from bilking victims out of more than €10m - but couldn't stop crime against art

A Europol-led operation dubbed β€œPandora” has shut down a dozen phone scam centers, and arrested 21 suspects. The cops reckon the action prevented criminals from bilking victims out of more than €10 million (Β£8.6 million, $11 million).…

Indonesia sneakily buys spyware, claims Amnesty International

A 'murky' web sees many purchases run through Singapore in a way that hides potential users

Indonesia has acquired spyware and surveillance technologies through a "murky network" that extends into Israel, Greece, Singapore and Malaysia for equipment sourcing, according to Amnesty International.…

Chinese government website security is often worryingly bad, say Chinese researchers

Bad configurations, insecure versions of jQuery, and crummy cookies are some of myriad problems

Exclusive Five Chinese researchers examined the configurations of nearly 14,000 government websites across the country and found worrying lapses that could lead to malicious attacks, according to a not-yet-peer-reviewed study released last week.…

Microsoft, Google do a victory lap around passkeys

Windows giant extends passwordless tech to everyone else

Microsoft today said it will now let us common folk β€” not just commercial subscribers β€” signΒ into their Microsoft accounts and apps using passkeys with their face, fingerprint, or device PIN.…

Yesterday β€” May 2nd 2024The Register - Security

Florida man gets 6 years behind bars for flogging fake Cisco kit to US military

Operation busted after dodgy devices ended up at Air Force

Miami resident Onur Aksoy has been sentenced to six and a half years in prison for running a multi-million-dollar operation selling fake Cisco equipment that ended up in the US military.…

Patch up – 4 critical bugs in ArubaOS lead to remote code execution

Ten vulnerabilities in total for admins to apply

Network admins are being urged to patch a bundle of critical vulnerabilities in ArubaOS that lead to remote code execution as a privileged user.…

Federal frenzy to patch gaping GitLab account takeover hole

Warning comes exactly a year after the vulnerability was introduced

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is forcing all federal agencies to patch a critical vulnerability in GitLab's Community and Enterprise editions, confirming it is very much under "active exploit."…

Think tank: China's tech giants refine and define Beijing's propaganda push

Taking down TikTok won't stop the CCP's attempt to control global narratives

Chinese tech companies that serve as important links in the world's digital supply chains are helping Beijing to execute and refine its propaganda strategy, according to an Australian think tank.…

REvil ransomware scum sentenced to almost 14 years inside, ordered to pay $16 million

After extorting $700 million from thousands of victims

A Ukrainian man has been sentenced to almost 14 years in prison and ordered to pay more than $16 million in restitution for his role in infecting thousands of victims with REvil ransomware.…

A million Australian pubgoers wake up to find personal info listed on leak site

Man arrested and blackmail charges expected after allegations of unpaid contractors and iffy infosec

Updated Over a million records describing Australians who visited local pubs and clubs have apparently been posted online.…

Dropbox dropped the ball on security, haemorrhaging customer and third-party info

Only from its digital doc-signing service, which is isolated from its cloudy storage

Dropbox has revealed a major attack on its systems that saw customers' personal information accessed by unknown and unauthorized entities.…

Block accused of mass compliance failures that saw digi-dollars reach terrorists

Developer of Square and Cash App reportedly has big back-end problems it was slow to fix

Fintech biz Block is reportedly under investigation by US prosecutors over claims by a former employee that lax compliance checks mean its Square and Cash App services may have been used by terrorists – or in countries that US orgs are not permitted to do business.…

Before yesterdayThe Register - Security

Infosec biz boss accused of BS'ing the world about his career, anti-crime product, customers

Intrusion investors went through Blount farce trauma, says SEC

Jack Blount, the now-ex CEO of Intrusion, has settled with the SEC over allegations he made false and misleading statements about his infosec firm's product as well as his own background and experience.…

US charges 16 over 'depraved' grandparent scams

Vulnerable elderly people tricked into paying tens of thousands over fake car accidents

Sixteen people are facing charges from US prosecutors for allegedly preying on the elderly and scamming them out of millions of dollars.…

Qantas app glitch sees boarding passes fly to other accounts

Issue now resolved and isn't thought to be the work of criminals

Aussie airline Qantas says its app is now stable following a data breach that saw boarding passes take off from passengers' accounts.…

Open source programming language R patches gnarly arbitrary code exec flaw

An ACE in the hole for miscreants

Updated The open source R programming language – popular among statisticians and data scientists for performing visualization, machine learning, and suchlike – has patched an arbitrary code execution hole that scored a preliminary CVSS severity rating of 8.8 out of 10.…

Cyber-bastard jailed for stealing psychotherapy files, blackmailing patients

Vastaamo villain more than doubled reported crime in Nordic nation

A cyber-thief who snatched tens of thousands of patients' sensitive records from a psychotherapy clinic before blackmailing them and then leaking their files online has been caged for six years and three months.…

UnitedHealth CEO: 'Decision to pay ransom was mine'

Congress to hear how Citrix MFA snafu led to massive data theft, $870M+ loss

Updated UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty will tell US lawmakers Wednesday the cybercriminals who hit Change Healthcare with ransomware used stolen credentials to remotely access a Citrix portal that didn't have multi-factor authentication enabled.…

NSA guy who tried and failed to spy for Russia gets 262 months in the slammer

Tried to sell top secret docs for the low, low price of $85K

A former NSA employee has been sentenced to 262 months in prison for attempting to freelance as a Russian spy.…

European Commission starts formal probe of Meta over election misinformation

Europe takes action after Facebook parent withdraws monitoring tool

The European Commission has launched formal proceedings against Meta, alleging failure to properly monitor distribution by "foreign actors" of political misinformation before June's European elections.…

Apple's 'incredibly private' Safari is not so private in Europe

Infosec eggheads find iGiant left EU iOS 17 users open to being tracked around the web

Apple's grudging accommodation of European antitrust rules by allowing third-party app stores on iPhones has left users of its Safari browser exposed to potential web activity tracking.…

AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile US fined $200M for selling off people's location info

Carriers claim real culprits are getting away with it - the data brokers

The FCC on Monday fined four major US telcos almost $200 million for "illegally" selling subscribers' location information to data brokers.…

Google blocked 2.3M apps from Play Store last year for breaking the G law

Third of a million developer accounts kiboshed, too

Google says it stopped 2.28 million Android apps from being published in its official Play Store last year because they violated security rules.…

London Drugs closes all of its pharmacies following 'cybersecurity incident'

Canadian stores shuttered 'until further notice'

Updated Canadian pharmacy chain London Drugs closed all of its stores over the weekend until further notice following a "cybersecurity incident."…

France willing to buy key Atos assets to keep them French

Finance minister says government has interests in IT giant's 'sovereign activities'

The French government has tabled an offer to buy key assets of ailing IT giant Atos after the company late last week almost doubled its estimate of the cash it will need to stay afloat in the near future.…

UK lays down fresh legislation banning crummy default device passwords

New laws mean vendors need to make clear how long you'll get updates too

Smart device manufacturers will have to play by new rules in the UK as of today, with laws coming into force to make it more difficult for cybercriminals to break into hardware such as phones and tablets.…

Watchdog reveals lingering Google Privacy Sandbox worries

Ad tech rewrite to replace web cookies still not to regulatory taste

The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) still has privacy and competition concerns about Google's Privacy Sandbox advertising toolkit, which explains why the ad giant recently again delayed its plan to drop third-party cookies in Chrome until 2025.…

The next step up for high-impact identity authorization

How SSH Communications Security cuts through the hype around Zero Trust to secure the connections that matter

Sponsored Feature As business enters the 2020s, organizations find themselves protecting fast-expanding digital estates using security concepts that are decades old.…

Discord dismantles Spy.pet site that snooped on millions of users

ALSO: Infostealer spotted hiding in CDN cache, antivirus update hijacked to deliver virus, and some critical vulns

Updated - Infosec in brief They say sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that appears to have been true in the case of Discord data harvesting site Spy.pet – as it was recently and swiftly dismantled after its existence and purpose became known.…

Kaiser Permanente handed over 13.4M people's data to Microsoft, Google, others

Ouch!

Millions of Kaiser Permanente patients' data was likely handed over to Google, Microsoft Bing, X/Twitter, and other third-parties, according to the American healthcare giant.…

Second time lucky for Thoma Bravo, which scoops up Darktrace for $5.3B

Analysts brand deal a 'nail in the coffin' for UK tech investment

Private equity investor Thoma Bravo has successfully completed a second acquisition attempt of UK-based cybersecurity company Darktrace in a $5.3 billion deal.…

UK's Investigatory Powers Bill to become law despite tech world opposition

Only minor changes from original proposals that kicked up privacy storm

The UK's contentious Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Bill (IPB) 2024 has officially received the King's nod of approval and will become law.…

Four trends to top the CISO’s packed agenda

Check out the SANS CISO Primer for tips on hardening your organisation’s security posture in 2024

Sponsored Post Ever get nostalgic for the good old days of cybersecurity protection? When attacks were for the most part amateurish and infrequent, and perhaps more in the nature of an occasional nuisance rather than a daily existential threat?…

Flaws in Chinese keyboard apps leave 750 million users open to snooping, researchers claim

Huawei is OK, but Xiaomi, OPPO, and Samsung are in strife. And Honor isn't living its name

Many Chinese keyboard apps, some from major handset manufacturers, can leak keystrokes to determined snoopers, leaving perhaps three quarters of a billion people at risk according to research from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.…

Cops cuff man for allegedly framing colleague with AI-generated hate speech clip

Athletics boss accused of deep-faking Baltimore school principal

Baltimore police have arrested Dazhon Leslie Darien, the former athletic director of Pikesville High School (PHS), for allegedly impersonating the school's principal using AI software to make it seem as if he made racist and antisemitic remarks.…

Ring dinged for $5.6M after, among other claims, rogue insider spied on 'pretty girls'

Cash to go out as refunds to punters

The FTC today announced it would be sending refunds totaling $5.6 million to Ring customers, paid from the Amazon subsidiary's coffers.…

Two cuffed in Samourai Wallet crypto dirty money sting

Suspects in Portugal and the US said to have laundered over $100M

Two men alleged to be co-founders of cryptocurrency biz Samourai Wallet face serious charges and potentially decades in US prison over claims they owned a product that facilitated the laundering of over $100 million in criminal cash.…

Russia, Iran pose most aggressive threat to 2024 elections, say infoseccers

Google security crew reveal β€˜the four Ds’ to be on the watch for

It may come as a surprise to absolutely nobody that experts say, in revealing the most prevalent and likely tactics to meddle with elections this year, that state-sponsored cybercriminals pose the biggest threat.…

What to do in the age of the critical breach

Why the triple threat of ransomware, data breaches, and extortion is a cybersecurity crisis

Webinar The UK government could be forgiven for wanting to forget March 2024 ever happened.…

Indian bank’s IT is so shabby it’s been banned from opening new accounts

After two years of warnings, and outages, regulators ran out of patience with Kotak Mahindra Bank

India’s central bank has banned Kotak Mahindra Bank from signing up new customers for accounts or credit cards through its online presence and app.…

Australia’s spies and cops want β€˜accountable encryption’ - aka access to backdoors

And warn that AI is already being used by extremists to plot attacks

The director general of Australia’s lead intelligence agency and the commissioner of its Federal Police yesterday both called for social networks to offer more assistance to help their investigators work on cases involving terrorism, child exploitation, and racist nationalism.…

Governments issue alerts after 'sophisticated' state-backed actor found exploiting flaws in Cisco security boxes

Don't get too comfortable: 'Line Dancer' malware may be targeting other vendors, too

A previously unknown and "sophisticated" nation-state group compromised Cisco firewalls as early as November 2023 for espionage purposes β€” and possibly attacked network devices made by other vendors including Microsoft, according to warnings from the networking giant and three Western governments.…

Shouldn't Teams, Zoom, Slack all interoperate securely for the Feds? Wyden is asking

Doctorow: 'The most amazing part is that this isn't already the way it's done'

Collaboration software used by federal government agencies β€” this includes apps from Microsoft, Zoom, Slack, and Google β€” will be required to work together and be securely end-to-end encrypted, if legislation proposed by US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) passes.…

Microsoft cannot keep its own security in order, so what hope for its add-ons customers?

Secure-by-default... if your pockets are deep enough

Microsoft has come under fire for charging for security add-ons despite the company's own patchy record when it comes to vulnerabilities and breaches.…

Management company settles for $18.4M after nuclear weapons plant staff fudged their timesheets

The firm 'fessed up to staff misconduct and avoided criminal liability

A company contracted to manage an Amarillo, Texas nuclear weapons facility has to pay US government $18.4 million in a settlement over allegations that its atomic technicians fudged their timesheets to collect more money from Uncle Sam.…

Google cools on cookie phase-out while regulators chew on plans

Privacy Sandbox slips into 2025 after challenges from UK authorities

Google's plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome is being postponed to 2025 amid wrangling with the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).…

US charges Iranians with cyber snooping on government, companies

Their holiday options are now far more restricted

The US has charged and sanctioned four Iranian nationals for their alleged roles in various attacks on US companies and government departments, all of whom are claimed to have worked for fake companies linked to Iran's military.…

If Britain is so bothered by China, why do these .gov.uk sites use Chinese ad brokers?

One wonders why are there adverts on public-sector portals at all

Exclusive At least 18 public-sector websites in the UK and US send visitor data in some form to various web advertising brokers – including an ad-tech biz in China involved in past privacy controversies, a security firm claims.…

Mandiant: Orgs are detecting cybercriminals faster than ever

The 'big victory for the good guys' shouldn't be celebrated too much, though

The average time taken by global organizations to detect cyberattacks has dropped to its lowest-ever level of ten days, Mandiant revealed today.…

UnitedHealth admits IT security breach could 'cover substantial proportion of people in America'

That said, good ol' American healthcare system so elaborately costly, some are forced to avoid altogether

UnitedHealth Group, the parent of ransomware-struck Change Healthcare, delivered some very unwelcome news for customers today as it continues to recover from the massively expensive side and disruptive digital break-in.…

Leicester streetlights take ransomware attack personally, shine on 24/7

City council says it lost control after shutting down systems

It's become somewhat clichΓ© in cybersecurity reporting to speculate whether an organization will have the resources to "keep the lights on" after an attack. But the opposite turns out to be true with Leicester City Council following its March ransomware incident.…

Over a million Neighbourhood Watch members exposed through web app bug

Unverified users could scoop up data on high-value individuals without any form of verification process

Neighbourhood Watch (NW) groups across the UK can now rest easy knowing the developers behind a communications platform fixed a web app bug that leaked their data en masse.…

Misconfigured cloud server leaked clues of North Korean animation scam

Outsourcers outsourced work for the BBC, Amazon, and HBO Max to the hermit kingdom

A misconfigured cloud server that used a North Korean IP address has led to the discovery that film production studios including the BBC, Amazon, and HBO Max could be inadvertently using workers from the hermit kingdom for animation projects.…

Old Windows print spooler bug is latest target of Russia's Fancy Bear gang

Putin's pals use 'GooseEgg' malware to launch attacks you can defeat with patches or deletion

Russian spies are exploiting a years-old Windows print spooler vulnerability and using a custom tool called GooseEgg to elevate privileges and steal credentials across compromised networks, according to Microsoft Threat Intelligence.…

FBI and friends get two more years of warrantless FISA Section 702 snooping

Senate kills reform amendments, Biden swiftly signs bill into law

US lawmakers on Saturday reauthorized a contentious warrantless surveillance tool for another two years β€” and added a whole bunch of people and organizations to the list of those who can be compelled to spy for Uncle Sam.…

Europol now latest cops to beg Big Tech to ditch E2EE

Don't bore us, get to the chorus: You need less privacy so we can protect the children

Yet another international cop shop has come out swinging against end-to-end encryption - this time it's Europol which is urging an end to implementation of the tech for fear police investigations will be hampered by protected DMs.…

Germany arrests trio accused of trying to smuggle naval military tech to China

Prosecutors believe one frikkin' laser did make its way to Beijing

Germany has arrested three citizens who allegedly tried to transfer military technology to China, a violation of the country's export rules.…

Watchdog tells Dutch govt: 'Do not use Facebook if there is uncertainty about privacy'

Meta insists it's just misunderstood and it's safe to talk to citizens over FB

The Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP) has warned that government organizations should not use Facebook to communicate with the country's citizens unless they can guarantee the privacy of data.…

US House passes fresh TikTok ban proposal to Senate

Sadly no push to end stupid TikTok dances, but ByteDance would have year to offload app stateside

Fresh US legislation to force the sale of TikTok locally was passed in Washington over the weekend after an earlier version stalled in the Senate.…

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