Meta adverse to internet mercenaries using its social networks to help governments violate human rights Facebook successor Meta on Thursday said it canceled 1,500 social media accounts used by seven surveillance-for-hire firms to conduct online attacks against government critics and members of civil society.... [...]
Export controls aren't enough, Dems say: Bring on the Global Magnitsky Act Eighteen US Democratic lawmakers have asked the Treasury Department and State Department to punish Israel-based spyware maker NSO Group and three other surveillance software firms for enabling human rights abuses.... [...]
Reuters claims nine State Department employees outside the US had their devices hacked The Apple iPhones of at least nine US State Department officials were compromised by an unidentified entity using NSO Group's Pegasus spyware, according to a report published Friday by Reuters.... [...]
Alleged scheme said to have netted $20m since 2017 The US Attorney's Office of Arizona on Wednesday announced the indictment of two men on charges that they defrauded musicians and associated companies by claiming more than $20m in royalty payments for songs played on YouTube.... [...]
Badger, badger, badger, coin theft, coin theft! BadgerDAO, maker of a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, said on Wednesday that it is investigating reports that millions in user funds have been stolen.... [...]
And a bunch of bank-account-raiding trojans also identified FluBot, a family of Android malware, is circulating again via SMS messaging, according to authorities in Finland.... [...]
Boffins measure the black hole of dubious certs and find it troubling Security researchers have checked the web's public key infrastructure and have measured a long-known but little-analyzed security threat: hidden root Certificate Authorities.... [...]
Smartphones now have lasers so we're gonna use them to find voyeurs Recent model smartphones can be smarter still about finding hidden cameras in their vicinity, if they take advantage of time-of-flight (ToF) sensors.... [...]
GitHub: 'Credentials exposed by our users are not in scope' Thousands of Firefox cookie databases containing sensitive data are available on request from GitHub repositories, data potentially usable for hijacking authenticated sessions.... [...]
Ongoing typosquatting attacks target kids as Discord drags its feet Since early September, Josh Muir and five other maintainers of the noblox.js package, have been trying to prevent cybercriminals from distributing ransomware through similarly named code libraries.... [...]
Testing times for Chipzilla as it emits patches to protect PCs, equipment Certain Intel processors can be slipped into a test mode, granting access to low-level keys that can be used to, say, unlock encrypted data stored in a stolen laptop or some other device.... [...]
Blacksmith is latest hammer horror Boffins at ETH Zurich, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and Qualcomm Technologies have found that varying the order, regularity, and intensity of rowhammer attacks on memory chips can defeat defenses, thereby compromising security on any device with DRAM.... [...]
DoubleX static analyzer is doubleplusgood Security researchers from Germany's CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security have developed software to help identify Chrome extensions that are vulnerable to exploitation by malicious webpages and other extensions.... [...]
Light load has infosec bods wondering what awaits next month Patch Tuesday As the US season of giving thanks and turkey carnage approaches, let us reflect upon Microsoft's November Patch Tuesday, which has bestowed 55 CVEs and the promise of continued employment for the IT admins who have to …
US appeals court allows legal battle to resume, says it will be an 'easy case' Spyware maker NSO Group cannot use its government clients to shield itself from litigation, a US appeals court ruled on Monday, a decision that allows WhatsApp's lawsuit against the Israel-based firm to resume.... [...]
American, European officials announce raft of arrests, indictments, sanctions, rewards In a major ransomware bust US and European authorities on Monday announced separate but related indictments and arrests linked to extortionware attacks on IT service provider Kaseya and other firms.... [...]
Mechanisms taken for granted on x86 vanish in WASM land, says trio WebAssembly has been promoted for its security benefits, though researchers in Belgium and New Zealand contend applications built in this binary format lack important protections.... [...]
Yeah, that ought to do the trick The US government's Dept of Commerce on Wednesday sanctioned four companies in Israel, Russia, and Singapore for selling software used to break into computer systems and by foreign governments to suppress dissent.... [...]
Third time's the unlucky charm for loan outfit Decentralized finance biz Cream Finance became further decentralized on Wednesday with the theft of $130m worth of crypto assets from its Ethereum lending protocol.... [...]
Subverted libraries likely intended as a prank but should be taken seriously, say security researchers Yet another NPM library has turned up infected with malware. Security firm Sonatype on Wednesday said it had spotted two related malicious NPM libraries that were named so they might be mistaken for a …
It's 2021 and of course code with classic buffer overflows is still shipping A mere two weeks after its most recent set of security patches, Adobe has issued another 14 security bulletins covering 92 CVE-listed bugs.... [...]
Unique fingerprints lurk in radio signals more often than not, it seems Over the past few years, mobile devices have become increasingly chatty over the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol and this turns out to be a somewhat significant privacy risk.... [...]
Surveillance tech faces trade limits as America syncs policy with treaty obligations More than six years after proposing export restrictions on "intrusion software," the US Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has formulated a rule that it believes balances the latitude required to investigate cyber threats with …
Intel duo propose fresh use of, yes, SGX but also Arm's TrustZone and similar TEEs Two Intel staffers believe web services can be made more secure by not only carrying out computations in remote trusted execution environments, or TEEs, but by also verifying for clients that this was done …
Michigan man arrested for borrowing costly textbooks and selling them A 36-year-old man from Portage, Michigan, was arrested on Thursday for allegedly renting thousands of textbooks from Amazon and selling them rather than returning them.... [...]