Showing only posts in Ars Technica. Show all posts.

Supply-chain attack using invisible code hits GitHub and other repositories

Source

Researchers say they’ve discovered a supply-chain attack flooding repositories with malicious packages that contain invisible code, a technique that’s flummoxing traditional defenses designed to detect such threats. The researchers, from firm Aikido Security, said Friday that they found 151 malicious packages that were uploaded to GitHub from …

The who, what, and why of the attack that has shut down Stryker's Windows network"

Source

Within hours of the US and Israel launching airstrikes on Iran two weeks ago, security professionals warned organizations around the world to be on heightened watch for destructive retaliatory hacks. On Wednesday, the predictions appeared to come true as Stryker, a multinational maker of medical devices, confirmed a cyberattack …

14,000 routers are infected by malware that's highly resistant to takedowns

Source

Researchers say they have uncovered a takedown-resistant botnet of 14,000 routers and other network devices—primarily made by Asus—that have been conscripted into a proxy network that anonymously carries traffic used for cybercrime. The malware—dubbed KadNap—takes hold by exploiting vulnerabilities that have gone unpatched by …

Feds take notice of iOS vulnerabilities exploited under mysterious circumstances

Source

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has ordered federal agencies to patch three critical iOS vulnerabilities that were exploited over a 10-month span in hacking campaigns conducted by three distinct groups. The hacking campaigns came to light on Thursday in a report published by Google. All three campaigns used …

LLMs can unmask pseudonymous users at scale with surprising accuracy

Source

Burner accounts on social media sites can increasingly be analyzed to identify the pseudonymous users who post to them using AI in research that has far-reaching consequences for privacy on the Internet, researchers said. The finding, from a recently published research paper, is based on results of experiments correlating …

Google quantum-proofs HTTPS by squeezing 15kB of data into 700-byte space

Source

Google on Friday unveiled its plan for its Chrome browser to secure HTTPS certificates against quantum computer attacks without breaking the Internet. The objective is a tall order. The quantum-resistant cryptographic data needed to transparently publish TLS certificates is roughly 40 times bigger than the classical cryptographic material used …

New AirSnitch attack breaks Wi-Fi encryption in homes, offices, and enterprises

Source

It’s hard to overstate the role that Wi-Fi plays in virtually every facet of life. The organization that shepherds the wireless protocol says that more than 48 billion Wi-Fi-enabled devices have shipped since it debuted in the late 1990s. One estimate pegs the number of individual users at …

New AirSnitch attack bypasses Wi-Fi encryption in homes, offices, and enterprises

Source

It’s hard to overstate the role that Wi-Fi plays in virtually every facet of life. The organization that shepherds the wireless protocol says that more than 48 billion Wi-Fi-enabled devices have shipped since it debuted in the late 1990s. One estimate pegs the number of individual users at …

Password managers' promise that they can't see your vaults isn't always true

Source

Over the past 15 years, password managers have grown from a niche security tool used by the technology savvy into an indispensable security tool for the masses, with an estimated 94 million US adults—or roughly 36 percent of them—having adopted them. They store not only passwords for …

Once-hobbled Lumma Stealer is back with lures that are hard to resist

Source

Last May, law enforcement authorities around the world scored a key win when they hobbled the infrastructure of Lumma, an infostealer that infected nearly 395,000 Windows computers over just a two-month span leading up to the international operation. Researchers said Wednesday that Lumma is once again “back at …

Malicious packages for dYdX cryptocurrency exchange empties user wallets

Source

Open source packages published on the npm and PyPI repositories were laced with code that stole wallet credentials from dYdX developers and backend systems and, in some cases, backdoored devices, researchers said. “Every application using the compromised npm versions is at risk....” the researchers, from security firm Socket, said …

Microsoft releases urgent Office patch. Russian-state hackers pounce.

Source

Russian-state hackers wasted no time exploiting a critical Microsoft Office vulnerability that allowed them to compromise the devices inside diplomatic, maritime, and transport organizations in more than half a dozen countries, researchers said Wednesday. The threat group, tracked under names including APT28, Fancy Bear, Sednit, Forest Blizzard, and Sofacy …

The rise of Moltbook suggests viral AI prompts may be the next big security threat

Source

On November 2, 1988, graduate student Robert Morris released a self-replicating program into the early Internet. Within 24 hours, the Morris worm had infected roughly 10 percent of all connected computers, crashing systems at Harvard, Stanford, NASA, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The worm exploited security flaws in Unix …

Notepad++ users take note: It's time to check if you're hacked

Source

Infrastructure delivering updates for Notepad++—a widely used text editor for Windows—was compromised for six months by suspected China-state hackers who used their control to deliver backdoored versions of the app to select targets, developers said Monday. “I deeply apologize to all users affected by this hijacking,” the …

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

Source

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

Source

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

Source

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?

Source

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"

Source

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

Source

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

Source

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

Source

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”

Source

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

Source

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

Source

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 …

page 1 | older articles »