Showing only posts in Ars Technica. Show all posts.

Why a recent supply-chain attack singled out security firms Checkmarx and Bitwarden

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It has been a bad six weeks for security firm Checkmarx. Over the past 40 days, it has been the victim of at least one supply-chain attack that delivered malware to customers on two separate occasions. Now it has been hit by a ransomware attack from prolific fame-seeking hackers …

Open source package with 1 million monthly downloads stole user credentials

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Open source software with more than 1 million monthly downloads was compromised after a threat actor exploited a vulnerability in the developers’ account workflow that gave access to its signing keys and other sensitive information. On Friday, unknown attackers exploited the vulnerability to push a new version of element-data …

Why are top university websites serving porn? It comes down to shoddy housekeeping.

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Websites for some of the world’s most prestigious universities are serving explicit porn and malicious content after scammers exploited the shoddy record-keeping of the site administrators, a researcher found recently. The sites included berkeley.edu, columbia.edu, and washu.edu, the official domains for the University of California …

In a first, a ransomware family is confirmed to be quantum-safe

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A relatively new ransomware family is using a novel approach to hype the strength of the encryption used to scramble files—making, or at least claiming, that it is protected against attacks by quantum computers. Kyber, as the ransomware is called, has been around since at least last September …

Microsoft issues emergency update for macOS and Linux ASP.NET threat

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Microsoft released an emergency patch for its ASP.NET Core to fix a high-severity vulnerability that allows unauthenticated attackers to gain SYSTEM privileges on devices that use the Web development framework to run Linux or macOS apps. The software maker said Tuesday evening that the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-40372 …

Contrary to popular superstition, AES 128 is just fine in a post-quantum world

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With growing focus on the existential threat quantum computing poses to some of the most crucial and widely used forms of encryption, cryptography engineer Filippo Valsorda wants to make one thing absolutely clear: Contrary to popular mythology that refuses to die, AES 128 is perfectly fine in a post-quantum …

US-sanctioned currency exchange says $15 million heist done by "unfriendly states"

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Grinex, a US-sanctioned cryptocurrency exchange registered in Kyrgyzstan, said it’s halting operations after experiencing a $13 million heist carried out by “western special services” hackers. Researchers from TRM, which has confirmed the theft, put the value of stolen assets at $15 million after discovering roughly 70 drained addresses …

Recent advances push Big Tech closer to the Q-Day danger zone

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Sometime around 2010, sophisticated malware known as Flame hijacked the mechanism that Microsoft used to distribute updates to millions of Windows computers around the world. The malware—reportedly jointly developed by the US and Israel—pushed a malicious update throughout an infected network belonging to the Iranian government. The …

Iran-linked hackers disrupt operations at US critical infrastructure sites

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Hackers working on behalf of the Iranian government are disrupting operations at multiple US critical infrastructure sites, likely in response to the country's ongoing war with the US, a half-dozen government agencies are warning. In an advisory published Tuesday, the FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, National Security Agency …

Thousands of consumer routers hacked by Russia's military

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The Russian military is once again hacking home and small office routers in widespread operations that send unwitting users to sites that harvest passwords and credential tokens for use in espionage campaigns, researchers said Tuesday. An estimated 18,000 to 40,000 consumer routers, mostly those made by MikroTik …

OpenClaw gives users yet another reason to be freaked out about security

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For more than a month, security practitioners have been warning about the perils of using OpenClaw, the viral AI agentic tool that has taken the development community by storm. A recently fixed vulnerability provides an object lesson for why. OpenClaw, which was introduced in November and now boasts 347 …

New Rowhammer attacks give complete control of machines running Nvidia GPUs

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The cost of high-performance GPUs, typically $8,000 or more, means they are frequently shared among dozens of users in cloud environments. Two new attacks demonstrate how a malicious user can gain full root control of a host machine by performing novel Rowhammer attacks on high-performance GPU cards made …

Quantum computers need vastly fewer resources than thought to break vital encryption

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Building a utility-scale quantum computer that can crack one of the most vital cryptosystems—elliptic curves—doesn’t require nearly the resources anticipated just a year or two ago, two independently written whitepapers have concluded. In one, researchers demonstrated the use of neutral atoms as reconfigurable qubits that have …

Google bumps up Q Day deadline to 2029, far sooner than previously thought

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Google is dramatically shortening its readiness deadline for the arrival of Q Day, the point at which existing quantum computers can break public-key cryptography algorithms that secure decades' worth of secrets belonging to militaries, banks, governments, and nearly every individual on earth. In a post published on Wednesday, Google …

Self-propagating malware poisons open source software and wipes Iran-based machines

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A new hacking group has been rampaging the Internet in a persistent campaign that spreads a self-propagating and never-before-seen backdoor—and curiously a data wiper that targets Iranian machines. The group, tracked under the name TeamPCP, first gained visibility in December, when researchers from security firm Flare observed it …

Widely used Trivy scanner compromised in ongoing supply-chain attack

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Hackers have compromised virtually all versions of Aqua Security’s widely used Trivy vulnerability scanner in an ongoing supply chain attack that could have wide-ranging consequences for developers and the organizations that use them. Trivy maintainer Itay Shakury confirmed the compromise on Friday, following rumors and a thread, since …

Researchers disclose vulnerabilities in IP KVMs from four manufacturers

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Researchers are warning about the risks posed by a low-cost device that can give insiders and hackers unusually broad powers in compromising networks. The devices, which typically sell for $30 to $100, are known as IP KVMs. Administrators often use them to remotely access machines on networks. The devices …

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

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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"

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 …

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