A ransomware group called Dark Angels made headlines this past week when it was revealed the crime group recently received a record $75 million data ransom payment from a Fortune 50 company. Security experts say the Dark Angels have been around since 2021, but the group doesn’t get much press because they work alone and maintain a low profile, picking one target at a time and favoring mass data theft over disrupting the victim’s operations.
Microsoft Corp. today released software updates to quash 130 security bugs in its Windows operating systems and related software, including at least five flaws that are already seeing active exploitation. Meanwhile, Apple customers have their own zero-day woes again this month: On Monday, Apple issued (and then quickly pulled) an emergency update to fix a zero-day vulnerability that is being exploited on MacOS and iOS devices.
Microsoft has released its final monthly batch of security updates for 2022, fixing more than four dozen security holes in its various Windows operating systems and related software. The most pressing patches include a zero-day vulnerability in a Windows feature that tries to flag malicious files from the Web, a critical bug in PowerShell, and a dangerous flaw in Windows 11 systems that was detailed publicly prior to this week’s Patch Tuesday.
Conti — one of the most ruthless and successful Russian ransomware groups — publicly declared during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic that it would refrain from targeting healthcare providers. But new information confirms this pledge was always a lie, and that Conti has launched more than 200 attacks against hospitals and other healthcare facilities since first surfacing in 2018 under the name “Ryuk.”
Security experts are poring over thousands of new Coronavirus-themed domain names registered each day, but this often manual effort struggles to keep pace with the flood of domains invoking the virus to promote malware and phishing sites, as well as non-existent healthcare products and charities. As a result, domain name registrars are under increasing pressure to do more to combat scams and misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Microsoft has disabled its controversial Wi-Fi Sense feature, a component embedded in Windows 10 devices that shares access to WiFi networks to which you connect with any contacts you may have listed in Outlook and Skype — and, with an opt-in — your Facebook friends.
Hardly a week goes by when I don’t hear from some malware researcher or reader who’s discovered what appears to be a new sample of malicious software or nasty link that invokes this author’s name or the name of this blog. I’ve compiled this post to document a few of these examples, some of which are quite funny.
I recently returned from San Francisco, which last week hosted the annual RSA Security conference. I had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion on Raising the Costs of Compromise with some very smart guys, and also shared a stage with several security authors who were recognized for their contributions to infosec media.
The Los Angeles Times has scrubbed its Web site of malicious code that served browser exploits and malware to potentially hundreds of thousands of readers over the past six weeks.
The author of Blackhole, an exploit kit that booby-traps hacked Web sites to serve malware, has done so well for himself renting his creation to miscreants that the software has emerged as perhaps the most notorious and ubiquitous crimeware product in the Underweb. Recently, however, the author has begun buying up custom exploits to bundle into a far more closely-held and expensive exploit pack, one that appears to be fueling a wave of increasingly destructive online extortion schemes.
