Showing only posts tagged social engineering. Show all posts.

Python Developers Targeted with Malware During Fake Job Interviews

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Interesting social engineering attack: luring potential job applicants with fake recruiting pitches, trying to convince them to download malware. From a news article These particular attacks from North Korean state-funded hacking team Lazarus Group are new, but the overall malware campaign against the Python development community has been running …

Using Legitimate GitHub URLs for Malware

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Interesting social-engineering attack vector : McAfee released a report on a new LUA malware loader distributed through what appeared to be a legitimate Microsoft GitHub repository for the “C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS,” known as vcpkg. The attacker is exploiting a property of GitHub: comments to a …

Other Attempts to Take Over Open Source Projects

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After the XZ Utils discovery, people have been examining other open-source projects. Surprising no one, the incident is not unique: The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping GitHub-associated emails. These emails implored OpenJS to take action …

Backdoor in XZ Utils That Almost Happened

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Last week, the internet dodged a major nation-state attack that would have had catastrophic cybersecurity repercussions worldwide. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen, so it won’t get much attention—but it should. There’s an important moral to the story of the attack and its discovery …

xz Utils Backdoor

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The cybersecurity world got really lucky last week. An intentionally placed backdoor in xz Utils, an open-source compression utility, was pretty much accidentally discovered by a Microsoft engineer—weeks before it would have been incorporated into both Debian and Red Hat Linux. From ArsTehnica : Malicious code added to xz …

4 Okta customers hit by campaign that gave attackers super admin control

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Authentication service Okta said four of its customers have been hit in a recent social-engineering campaign that allowed hackers to gain control of super administrator accounts and from there weaken or entirely remove two-factor authentication protecting accounts from unauthorized access. The Okta super administrator accounts …

Massive Data Breach at Uber

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It’s big : The breach appeared to have compromised many of Uber’s internal systems, and a person claiming responsibility for the hack sent images of email, cloud storage and code repositories to cybersecurity researchers and The New York Times. “They pretty much have full access to Uber,” said …

Mac malware spreading for ~14 months installs backdoor on infected systems

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images ) Mac malware known as UpdateAgent has been spreading for more than a year, and it is growing increasingly malevolent as its developers add new bells and whistles. The additions include the pushing of an aggressive second-stage adware payload that installs a persistent backdoor on infected …

Problems with Multifactor Authentication

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Roger Grimes on why multifactor authentication isn’t a panacea : The first time I heard of this issue was from a Midwest CEO. His organization had been hit by ransomware to the tune of $10M. Operationally, they were still recovering nearly a year later. And, embarrassingly, it was his …

Using AI to Scale Spear Phishing

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The problem with spear phishing it that it takes time and creativity to create individualized enticing phishing emails. Researchers are using GPT-3 to attempt to solve that problem: The researchers used OpenAI’s GPT-3 platform in conjunction with other AI-as-a-service products focused on personality analysis to generate phishing emails …

Malware Hidden in Call of Duty Cheating Software

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News article : Most troublingly, Activision says that the “cheat” tool has been advertised multiple times on a popular cheating forum under the title “new COD hack.” (Gamers looking to flout the rules will typically go to such forums to find new ways to do so.) While the report doesn …