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Before yesterdayThe Register - Security

Microsoft disarms push notification bombers with number matching in Authenticator

Mandatory measure against attackers who spam MFA folks into submission

Microsoft is hoping to curb a growing threat to multi-factor authentication (MFA) by enforcing a number-matching step for those using Microsoft Authenticator push notifications when signing into services.…

EU proposes spyware Tech Lab to keep Big Brother governments in check

Potential roles for IT pros and lawyers, European city location included

Tired of working for an egomaniacal startup boss or dull enterprise biz? A new org has been proposed called the Tech Lab, where you'd investigate the worst kinds of surveillance by governments on their citizens. In which despotic state, you ask? Surprise! You could base yourself in any European city.…

Beijing raids consultancy, State-sponsored media warns more to come

Retaliation or national security?

Beijing sent a message to foreign businesses this week when it launched an investigation into Shanghai-based Capvision Partners on the grounds of national security, accusing the consultancy firm of failure to prevent espionage.…

FYI: Intel BootGuard OEM private keys leak from MSI cyber heist

Plus: Court-ordered domain seizures of DDoS-for-hire sites

Updated Intel is investigating reports that BootGuard private keys, used to protect PCs from hidden malware, were leaked when data belonging to Micro-Star International (MSI) was stolen and dumped online. …

Western Digital: Customer info stolen in that IT attack

Hard times for buyers of these hard drives

Customer information was stolen from the IT systems of Western Digital in the March security breach we've previously reported, forcing the storage manufacturer to shut down its online store until at least next week.…

WordPress plugin hole puts '2 million websites' at risk

XSS marks the spot

WordPress users with the Advanced Custom Fields plugin on their website should upgrade after the discovery of a vulnerability in the code that could open up sites and their visitors to cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.…

Twitter admits 'security incident' made private Circles not so much

Perhaps one of the thousands of people laid off from the biz could have fixed it, just a thought

Twitter has finally admitted a "security incident" caused some users' semi-private Twitter Circle tweets to show up on others' timelines.…

Modern Auth comes to on-prem Exchange Server gear

Guess this'll have to do while we wait for *checks notes* ES 2025

Microsoft last year said that it was putting off the next version of Exchange Server until the second half of 2025 so engineers could continue bulking up the security of a product that has become a popular target of cybercriminals.…

T-Mobile US suffers second data theft within months

Also, Capita's buckets are leaking, ransomware attackers deliver demands via emergency alert, and this week's critical vulns

in brief We'd say you'll never guess which telco admitted to a security breakdown last week, but you totally will: T-Mobile US, and for the second time (so far) this year.…

DEF CON to set thousands of hackers loose on LLMs

Can't wait to see how these AI models hold up against a weekend of red-teaming by infosec's village people

This year's DEF CON AI Village has invited hackers to show up, dive in, and find bugs and biases in large language models (LLMs) built by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others.…

Dump these insecure phone adapters because we're not fixing them, says Cisco

Security hole ranks 9.8 out of 10 in severity, 0 out of 10 in patch availability

There is a critical security flaw in a Cisco phone adapter, and the business technology giant says the only step to take is dumping the hardware and migrating to new kit.…

A right Royal pain in the Dallas: City IT systems crippled by ransomware

Texas officials preach limited government ... but not this limited

The city of Dallas, Texas, is working to restore city services following a ransomware attack that crippled its IT systems.…

Capita admits some pension data 'likely' to have been accessed in March breach

Weeks after outsourcer admits 'cyber incident' more warnings issued

Capita is telling pension customers that some data contained within its systems was potentially accessed when criminals broke into the outsourcing giant's tech infrastructure earlier this year.…

Users complain over UK state-owned bank's services as Atos eyes the exit

National Savings & Investment contracting for massive tech deals as customers complain of 2FA failure

Updated The UK National Savings and Investment bank is being bombarded with complaints over failing online security and authentication features which customers say have locked them out of their accounts.…

China labels USA 'Empire of hacking' based on old Wikileaks dumps

Pot, meet kettle, both containing weak sauce

The National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center of China and local infosec outfit 360 Total Security have conducted an investigation called "The Matrix" that found the CIA conducts offensive cyber ops, and labelled the United States an "Empire of Hacking".…

Ex-Uber CSO gets probation for covering up theft of data on millions of people

Exec begged judge for leniency – and it worked

Joe Sullivan won't serve any serious time behind bars for his role in covering up Uber's 2016 computer security breach and trying to pass off a ransom payment as a bug bounty.…

Strike three: FTC says Meta still failing to protect user privacy

Deals between Zuckercorp + FTC in 2012 and 2020 are being ignored, so time to get stricter, says commish

The US Federal Trade Commission is preparing to take action against Facebook parent company Meta for a third time over claims it failed to protect user privacy, as required under a 2020 agreement Meta made with the regulator.…

Go ahead, forget that password. Use a passkey instead, says Google

'But they're gonna take my thumbs' hits different in 2023

Google wants to take us further into a passwordless future by allowing personal account holders to login using passkeys rather than using passphrases and multifactor authentication (MFA).…

Meta does the 'We found baddies and crushed them' thing again – this time for AI

Who would have thought crims would try using Facebook to fool people?

Meta says it has shut down over 1,000 links related to ChatGPT that lead its users to malware, as criminals seek to profit from the current craze for generative AI.…

Insurers can't use 'act of war' excuse to avoid Merck's $1.4B NotPetya payout

'The get-out-of-jail-free card option has been removed' as one expert put it

Merck's insurers can't use an "act of war" clause to deny the pharmaceutical giant an enormous payout to clean up its NotPetya infection, a court has ruled.…

Chrome's HTTPS padlock heads to Google Graveyard

As blue check marks start showing up in Gmail

Logowatch Google plans to retire the padlock icon that appears in the Chrome status bar during a secure HTTPS web browsing session because the interface graphic has outlived its usefulness.…

The importance of being certified

New GIAC Security Professional and revamped GIAC Security Expert qualifications offer increased choice and flexibility for cybersecurity pros

Sponsored Post The importance of certifications such as the GIAC (Global Information Assurance Certification) has never been greater for infosec professionals. Because adding them to the CV will not only improve individual skill levels, but also differentiate candidates in an increasingly competitive cyber security industry.…

Apple pushes first-ever 'rapid' patch – and rapidly screws up

Maybe you're just installing it wrong?

Apple on Monday pushed to some iPhones and Macs its first-ever rapid security fix.…

Mirai botnet loves exploiting your unpatched TP-Link routers, CISA warns

Oracle and Apache holes also on Uncle Sam's list of big bad abused bugs

The US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is adding three more flaws to its list of known-exploited vulnerabilities, including one involving TP-Link routers that is being targeted by the operators of the notorious Mirai botnet.…

Apple, Google propose anti-stalking spec for Bluetooth tracker tags

We moved fast and broke things, people got harassed and murdered, so let's revisit privacy

Apple and Google have come together to develop an industry specification to prevent "unwanted tracking," otherwise known as stalking, via Bluetooth location tracking tags.…

288 arrested in multinational Monopoly Market takedown

US tells criminals it 'will find you' and has a particular set of skills

In an international operation 288 people have been arrested across the US, Europe and South America after allegedly selling opioids on the now-shuttered Monopoly Market dark web drug trafficking marketplace, according to US and European law enforcement.…

In the face of data disaster

How to recover from cyber attacks on Microsoft 365

Webinar Every organization needs a full set of data recovery tools. The sort that will get you back up and running quickly after a ransomware attack, outage, or accidental data deletion. And it's best to be prepared in advance rather than deal with the data disaster face to face when it happens.…

Data loss costs are going up – and not just for those who choose to pay thieves

Ransoms, investigations, and breach-related lawsuits are hitting companies in the wallet, law firm says

Data loss – particularly from ransomware attacks – has always been a costly proposition for enterprises. However, the price organizations have to pay is going up, not only in terms of the ransom demanded but also for the cost of investigating attacks and the lawsuits that increasingly follow in the wake of such breaches.…

Russia's APT28 targets Ukraine government with bogus Windows updates

Nasty emails designed to infect systems with info-stealing malware

The Kremlin-backed threat group APT28 is flooding Ukrainian government agencies with email messages about bogus Windows updates in the hope of dropping malware that will exfiltrate system data.…

Feds rethink warrantless search stats and – oh look, a huge drop in numbers

119,000 instances of homeland snooping as the power to do so comes under review

Warrantless searches of US residents' communications by the FBI dropped sharply last year – from about 3.4 million in 2021 to 119,383 in 2022, according to Uncle Sam.…

IT giant Bitmarck shuts down customer, internal systems after cyberattack

Patient data 'was and is never endangered', says medical tech slinger

German IT services provider Bitmarck has shut down all of its customer and internal systems, including entire datacenters in some cases, following a cyberattack. …

Centralized secrets management picks up pace

How cloud migration and machine identities are fueling enterprise demand for secrets management systems

Sponsored Feature There's no question that fast-feedback software delivery offers multiple advantages by streamlining processes for developers. But in software development, as in life, there is no such thing as a free lunch.…

Google adds account sync for Authenticator, without E2EE

Also: Your Salesforce Community site might be leaking; a new CPU side-channel; and this week's critical vunls

in brief You may have heard news this week that Google is finally updating its authenticator app to add Google account synchronization. Before you rush to ensure your two-factor secrets are safe in the event you lose your device, take heed: The sync process isn't end-to-end encrypted.…

Your security failure was so bad we have to close the company … NOT!

There are pranks, and savage pranks, and this prank when the CTO and HR ganged up on a very stressed techie

Who, Me? Welcome once again, gentle reader, to the safe space we call Who, Me? in which Reg readers can confess to the naughty or not-quite-competent things they did at work, knowing they will not be judged.…

China has 50 hackers for every FBI cyber agent, says Bureau boss

Combatting it is going to take more money. Lots of more money.

China has 50 hackers for every one of the FBI's cyber-centric agents, the Bureau's director told a congressional committee last week.…

Online Safety Bill age checks? We won't do 'em, says Wikipedia

World's encyclopedia warns draft law could boot it offline in UK

Wikipedia won't be age-gating its services no matter what final form the UK's Online Safety Bill takes, two senior folks from nonprofit steward the Wikimedia Foundation said this morning.…

Google sues CryptBot slingers, gets court order to shut down malware domains

Hands off those Chrome users, they're ours!

Google said it obtained a court order to shut down domains used to distribute CryptBot after suing the distributors of the info-stealing malware.…

Microsoft is busy rewriting core Windows code in memory-safe Rust

Now that's a C change we can back

Microsoft is rewriting core Windows libraries in the Rust programming language, and the more memory-safe code is already reaching developers.…

Microsoft probes complaints of Edge leaking URLs to Bing

Remember next time Redmond begs you not to install another browser

You might want to think twice before typing anything into Microsoft's Edge browser, as an apparent bug in a recent release of Redmond's Chromium clone appears to be funneling URLs you visit back to the Bing API.…

DoJ, Treasury accuses 3 men of laundering crypto for North Korea

If the DPRK is named, you know it somehow involves Lazarus Group

The US government is aggressively pursuing three men accused of wide-ranging and complex conspiracies of laundering stolen and illicit cryptocurrency that the North Korean regime used to finance its massive weapons programs.…

The good, the bad and the generative AI

ChatGPT is just the beginning: CISOs need to prepare for the next wave of AI-powered attacks

Sponsored Feature Change in the tech industry is usually evolutionary, but perhaps more interesting are the exceptions to this rule – the microprocessor in 1968, the IBM PC in 1981, the web in 1989, the smartphone in 2007. These are the technologies whose appearance began new eras that completely reshaped the industry around them.…

Apache Superset: A story of insecure default keys, thousands of vulnerable systems, few paying attention

Two out of three public-facing app instances open to hijacking

Apache Superset until earlier this year shipped with an insecure default configuration that miscreants could exploit to login and take over the data visualization application, steal data, and execute malicious code.…

Menaced by miscreants, critical infrastructure needs a good ETHOS. Ah, here's one

OT firms construct handy early-warning info-sharing system

RSA Conference A group of some of the largest operational technology companies are using this year's RSA Conference as an opportunity to launch an open source early-threat-warning system designed for OT and industrial control systems (ICS) environments. …

Google's here to boost your cloud security and the magic ingredient? AI, of course

Send in the LLMs

RSA Conference Google Cloud used the RSA 2023 conference to talk about how it's injected artificial intelligence into various corners of its security-related services.…

How fiends abuse an out-of-date Microsoft Windows driver to infect victims

It's like those TV movies where a spy cuts a wire and the whole building's security goes out

Ransomware spreaders have built a handy tool that abuses an out-of-date Microsoft Windows driver to disable security defenses before dropping malware into the targeted systems.…

That 3CX supply chain attack keeps getting worse: Other vendors hit

Also, Finland sentences CEO of breach company to prison (kind of), and this week's laundry list of critical vulns

In Brief We thought it was probably the case when the news came out, but now it's been confirmed: The X_Trader supply chain attack behind the 3CX compromise last month wasn't confined to the telco developer.…

Chinese scientists calculate the Milky Way's mass as 805 billion times that of our Sun

ALSO: Australia says offensive hacking is working; DJI hit with $279m patent suit; Philippines Police leak data; and more

Asia In Brief Chinese scientists have estimated the mass of the Milky Way.…

European air traffic control confirms website 'under attack' by pro-Russia hackers

Another cyber nuisance in support of Putin's war, nothing too serious

Europe's air-traffic agency appears to be the latest target in pro-Russian miscreants' attempts to disrupt air travel.…

Microsoft pushes for more women in cybersecurity

Redmond tops industry average, still got a way to go

Microsoft has partnered with organizations around the globe to bring more women into infosec roles, though the devil is in the details.…

International cops urge Meta not to implement secure encryption for all

Why? Well, think of the children, of course

An international group of law enforcement agencies are urging Meta not to standardize end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger and Instagram, which they say will harm their ability to fight child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online.…

Healthcare organisations urged to improve system security

Patient data covering sensitive areas has long been a high-value target for cybercriminals

Sponsored Post Digital patient medical records now cover a whole gamut of sensitive details such as clinical diagnoses/treatments, prescriptions, personal finances and insurance policies. Which makes keeping them safe more important than ever.…

Thanks for fixing the computer lab. Now tell us why we shouldn’t expel you?

Guessing the admin password is cool. Using it, even for good, is dangerous

On Call It’s always twelve o’clock somewhere, the saying goes, but Friday comes around but once a week and only this day does The Register offer a fresh instalment of On Call, our reader-contributed tales of tech support torture and turmoil.…

Capita has 'evidence' customer data was stolen in digital burglary

Admits criminals accessed 4% of servers from March 22 until it spotted them at month-end

Business process outsourcing and tech services player Capita says there is proof that some customer data was scooped up by cyber baddies that broke into its systems late last month.…

An earlier supply chain attack led to the 3CX supply chain attack, Mandiant says

Threat hunters traced it back to malware-laced Trading Technologies' software

The supply-chain attack against 3CX last month was caused by an earlier supply-chain compromise of a different software firm β€” Trading Technologies β€” according to Mandiant, whose consulting crew was hired by 3CX to help the VoIP biz investigate the intrusion.…

AI defenders ready to foil AI-armed attackers

Operational AI cybersecurity systems have been gaining valuable experience that will enable them to defend against AI-armed opponents.

Sponsored Feature For some time now, alerts concerning the utilisation of AI by cybercriminals have been sounded in specialist and mainstream media alike – with the set-to between AI-armed attackers and AI-protected defenders envisaged in vivid gladiatorial terms.…

Protect the Industrial Control Systems (ICS)

ICS security is fast becoming a frontline defense against hackers intent on causing mayhem

Sponsored Post Some of the most famous cyber attacks in history have been directed against Industrial Control Systems (ICS).…

Medusa ransomware crew brags about spreading Bing, Cortana source code

'Does have a somewhat Lapsus$ish feel' we're told

The Medusa ransomware gang has put online what it claims is a massive leak of internal Microsoft materials, including Bing and Cortana source code.…

Appeals court spares Google from $20m patent payout over Chrome

Chocolate Factory can afford some staples now, or?

Six years after a jury decided otherwise, Google has convinced an appeals court to reverse a $20 million patent judgment against the web giant.…

Spyware slinger QuaDream’s reported demise may be the canary in the coal mine

NSO and others are still out there, but pariahs find it hard to do business

Analysis Israeli spyware shop QuaDream is reportedly shutting down due to financial troubles.…

GitHub debuts pedigree check for npm packages via Actions

Publishing provenance possibly prevents problems

Developers who use GitHub Actions to build software packages for the npm registry can now add a command flag that will publish details about the code's origin.…

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