Google Rolls out E2EE For Android Messages App
Google announced end-to-end encryption is now available in Android, but only for one-on-one conversations between users of the Messages app. “No matter who you’re messaging with, the information you share is personal. End-to-end encryption in Messages helps keep your conversations more secure while sending. It ensures that no one can read the content of your…
Email Security Firm Tessian Raises $65 Million at $500 Million Valuation
The London, United Kingdom-based company leverages machine learning to prevent attacks that rely on email and social engineering. It describes its solution as “human layer security.” The company builds behavioral models for all employees and uses them to automatically detect security threats. Furthermore, by notifying employees of these issues, it aims to help improve individual…
Ongoing Bitcoin Scams Demonstrate Power of Social Engineering Triggers
On May 17, 2021, the FTC announced, “Since October 2020, reports have skyrocketed, with nearly 7,000 people reporting losses of more than $80 million on these scams.” It describes two scam methods. The first is to lure targets to bogus websites that look genuine and offer investment opportunities. The second is effectively a celebrity scam,…
Microsoft Warns of Attacks on Aerospace, Travel Sectors
The attacks start with spear-phishing messages that employ lures relevant to the targeted organizations, such as aviation, travel, and cargo, and deliver an image that pretends to be a PDF file and which contains an embedded link. The attackers abuse legitimate web services and they leverage a newly identified loader dubbed Snip3 for the delivery…
Alaska Courts Restore Email, Lack Answers on Cyber Attack
The court system, in a statement, said it doesn’t know who was behind the attack, why the court system was targeted or how long it will be before services are fully back online. It says it does not believe personal or confidential data was taken from the courts’ computer systems and says no credit card…
Diplomatic Entities Targeted with New ‘Moriya’ Windows Rootkit
Dubbed Moriya, the rootkit provides the threat actor with the ability to intercept network traffic and hide commands sent to the infected machines, thus allowing the attackers to stay hidden within the compromised networks for months. The rootkit is part of the toolkit used by TunnelSnake, an unknown actor that deploys backdoors onto public servers…
FBI Agents Secretly Deleted Web Shells From Hacked Microsoft Exchange Servers
After a wave of major in-the-wild zero-day attacks against Exchange Server installations that occurred globally in January, savvy organizations scrambled to lock down vulnerable Microsoft email servers and remove web shells that were installed by attackers. In early attacks observed by Microsoft, attackers were able to exploit a series of vulnerabilities to access on-premises Exchange…
VMware Patches Critical Flaw in Carbon Black Cloud Workload
Tracked as CVE-2021-21982 and featuring a CVSS score of 9.1, the recently addressed vulnerability resides in the administrative interface for the appliance and exists because attackers could bypass authentication through manipulation of a URL on the interface. “A malicious actor with network access to the administrative interface of the VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload appliance…
AP Sources: SolarWinds Hack Got Emails of Top DHS Officials
The intelligence value of the hacking of then-acting Secretary Chad Wolf and his staff is not publicly known, but the symbolism is stark. Their accounts were accessed as part of what’s known as the SolarWinds intrusion and it throws into question how the U.S. government can protect individuals, companies and institutions across the country if…
Purple Fox Malware Squirms Like a Worm on Windows
The malware campaign, dubbed Purple Fox, has been active since at least 2018 and the discovery of the new worm-like infection vector is yet another sign that consumer-grade malware continues to reap profits for cybercriminals. According to Guardicore researcher Amit Serper, the Purple Fox operators primarily used exploit kits and phishing emails to build botnets…
