Showing only posts by Dan Goodin. Show all posts.

County pays $600,000 to pentesters it arrested for assessing courthouse security

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Two security professionals who were arrested in 2019 after performing an authorized security assessment of a county courthouse in Iowa will receive $600,000 to settle a lawsuit they brought alleging wrongful arrest and defamation. The case was brought by Gary DeMercurio and Justin Wynn, two penetration testers who …

Site catering to online criminals has been seized by the FBI

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RAMP—the predominantly Russian-language online bazaar that billed itself as the “only place ransomware allowed”—had its dark web and clear web sites seized by the FBI as the agency tries to combat the growing scourge threatening critical infrastructure and organizations around the world. Visits to both sites on …

There's a rash of scam spam coming from a real Microsoft address

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There are reports that a legitimate Microsoft email address—which Microsoft explicitly says customers should add to their allow list—is delivering scam spam. The emails originate from [email protected], an address tied to Power BI. The Microsoft platform provides analytics and business intelligence from various sources that …

Why has Microsoft been routing example.com traffic to a company in Japan?

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From the Department of Bizarre Anomalies: Microsoft has suppressed an unexplained anomaly on its network that was routing traffic destined to example.com—a domain reserved for testing purposes—to a maker of electronics cables located in Japan. Under the RFC2606 —an official standard maintained by the Internet Engineering …

Overrun with AI slop, cURL scraps bug bounties to ensure "intact mental health"

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The project developer for one of the Internet’s most popular networking tools is scrapping its vulnerability reward program after being overrun by a spike in the submission of low-quality reports, much of it AI-generated slop. “We are just a small single open source project with a small number …

Millions of people imperiled through sign-in links sent by SMS

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Websites that authenticate users through links and codes sent in text messages are imperiling the privacy of millions of people, leaving them vulnerable to scams, identity theft, and other crimes, recently published research has found. The links are sent to people seeking a range of services, including those offering …

Mandiant releases rainbow table that cracks weak admin password in 12 hours

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Security firm Mandiant has released a database that allows any administrative password protected by Microsoft’s NTLM.v1 hash algorithm to be hacked in an attempt to nudge users who continue using the deprecated function despite known weaknesses. The database comes in the form of a rainbow table, which …

A single click mounted a covert, multistage attack against Copilot

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Microsoft has fixed a vulnerability in its Copilot AI assistant that allowed hackers to pluck a host of sensitive user data with a single click on a URL. The hackers in this case were white-hat researchers from security firm Varonis. The net effect of their multistage attack was that …

Never-before-seen Linux malware is “far more advanced than typical”

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Researchers have discovered a never-before-seen framework that infects Linux machines with a wide assortment of modules that are notable for the range of advanced capabilities they provide to attackers. The framework, referred to as VoidLink by its source code, features more than 30 modules that can be used to …

ChatGPT falls to new data-pilfering attack as a vicious cycle in AI continues

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There’s a well-worn pattern in the development of AI chatbots. Researchers discover a vulnerability and exploit it to do something bad. The platform introduces a guardrail that stops the attack from working. Then, researchers devise a simple tweak that once again imperils chatbot users. The reason more often …

The nation’s strictest privacy law just took effect, to data brokers’ chagrin

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Californians are getting a new, supercharged way to stop data brokers from hoarding and selling their personal information, as a recently enacted law that’s among the strictest in the nation took effect at the beginning of the year. According to the California Privacy Protection Agency, more than 500 …

Supply chains, AI, and the cloud: The biggest failures (and one success) of 2025

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In a roundup of the top stories of 2024, Ars included a supply-chain attack that came dangerously close to inflicting a catastrophe for thousands—possibly millions—of organizations, which included a large assortment of Fortune 500 companies and government agencies. Supply-chain attacks played prominently again this year, as a …

Browser extensions with 8 million users collect extended AI conversations

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Browser extensions with more than 8 million installs are harvesting complete and extended conversations from users’ AI conversations and selling them for marketing purposes, according to data collected from the Google and Microsoft pages hosting them. Security firm Koi discovered the eight extensions, which as of late Tuesday night …

Microsoft will finally kill obsolete cipher that has wreaked decades of havoc

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Microsoft is killing off an obsolete and vulnerable encryption cipher that Windows has supported by default for 26 years following more than a decade of devastating hacks that exploited it and recently faced blistering criticism from a prominent US senator. When the software maker rolled out Active Directory in …

Admins and defenders gird themselves against maximum-severity server vuln

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Security defenders are girding themselves in response to the disclosure of a maximum-severity vulnerability disclosed Wednesday in React Server, an open-source package that’s widely used by websites and in cloud environments. The vulnerability is easy to exploit and allows hackers to execute malicious code on servers that run …

Maximum-severity vulnerability threatens 6% of all websites

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Security defenders are girding themselves in response to the disclosure of a maximum-severity vulnerability disclosed Wednesday in React Server, an open source package that’s widely used by websites and in cloud environments. The vulnerability is easy to exploit and allows hackers to execute malicious code on servers that …

Fraudulent gambling network may actually be something more nefarious

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A sprawling infrastructure that has been bilking unsuspecting people through fraudulent gambling websites for 14 years is likely a dual operation run by a nation-state-sponsored group that is targeting government and private-industry organizations in the US and Europe, researchers said Wednesday. Researchers have previously tracked smaller pieces of the …

Oops. Cryptographers cancel election results after losing decryption key.

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One of the world’s premier security organizations has canceled the results of its annual leadership election after an official lost an encryption key needed to unlock results stored in a verifiable and privacy-preserving voting system. The International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR) said Friday that the votes were …

How to know if your Asus router is one of thousands hacked by China-state hackers

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Thousands of Asus routers have been hacked and are under the control of a suspected China-state group that has yet to reveal its intentions for the mass compromise, researchers said. The hacking spree is either primarily or exclusively targeting seven models of Asus routers, all of which are no …

Critics scoff after Microsoft warns AI feature can infect machines and pilfer data

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Microsoft’s warning on Tuesday that an experimental AI agent integrated into Windows can infect devices and pilfer sensitive user data has set off a familiar response from security-minded critics: Why is Big Tech so intent on pushing new features before their dangerous behaviors can be fully understood and …

5 plead guilty to laptop farm and ID theft scheme to land North Koreans US IT jobs

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Five men have pleaded guilty to running laptop farms and providing other assistance to North Koreans to obtain remote IT work at US companies in violation of US law, federal prosecutors said. The pleas come amid a rash of similar schemes orchestrated by hacking and threat groups backed by …

Researchers question Anthropic claim that AI-assisted attack was 90% autonomous

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Researchers from Anthropic said they recently observed the “first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign” after detecting China-state hackers using the company’s Claude AI tool in a campaign aimed at dozens of targets. Outside researchers are much more measured in describing the significance of the discovery. Anthropic published the …

ClickFix may be the biggest security threat your family has never heard of

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Over the past year, scammers have ramped up a new way to infect the computers of unsuspecting people. The increasingly common method, which many potential targets have yet to learn of, is quick, bypasses most endpoint protections, and works against both macOS and Windows users. ClickFix often starts with …

Wipers from Russia’s most cut-throat hackers rain destruction on Ukraine

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One of the world’s most ruthless and advanced hacking groups, the Russian state-controlled Sandworm, launched a series of destructive cyberattacks in the country’s ongoing war against neighboring Ukraine, researchers reported Thursday. In April, the group targeted a Ukrainian university with two wipers, a form of malware that …

5 AI-developed malware families analyzed by Google fail to work and are easily detected

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Google on Wednesday revealed five recent malware samples that were built using generative AI. The end results of each one were far below par with professional malware development, a finding that shows that vibe coding of malicious wares lags behind more traditional forms of development, which means it still …

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