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A few weeks ago, the 32nd edition of RSA, one of the world's largest cybersecurity conferences, wrapped up in San Francisco. Among the highlights, Kevin Mandia, CEO of Mandiant at Google Cloud, presented a retrospective on  the state of cybersecurity . During his keynote, Mandia stated: "There are clear steps organizations can take beyond common safeguards and security tools to strengthen their defenses and increase their chances of detecting, thwarting or minimizing attack [...] Honeypots , or fake accounts deliberately left untouched by authorized users,  are effective at helping organizations detect intrusions or malicious activities that security products can't stop ". "Build honeypots" was one of his seven pieces of advice to help organizations avoid some of the attacks that might require engagement with Mandiant or other incident response firms. As a reminder, honeypots are  decoy systems  that are set up to lure attackers and divert their attentio

The threat actors behind the ransomware attack on Taiwanese PC maker MSI last month have leaked the company's private code signing keys on their dark website. "Confirmed, Intel OEM private key leaked, causing an impact on the entire ecosystem," Alex Matrosov, founder and CEO of firmware security firm Binarly,  said  in a tweet over the weekend. "It appears that Intel Boot Guard may not be effective on certain devices based on the 11th Tiger Lake, 12th Adler Lake, and 13th Raptor Lake." Present in the leaked data are firmware image signing keys associated with 57 PCs and private signing keys for Intel Boot Guard used on 116 MSI products. The Boot Guard keys from MSI are believed to impact several device vendors, including Intel, Lenovo and Supermicro. Intel Boot Guard is a  hardware-based security technology  that's designed to protect computers against executing tampered UEFI firmware. The development comes a month after MSI  fell victim  to a double

Digital storage giant Western Digital confirmed that an "unauthorized third party" gained access to its systems and stole personal information belonging to the company's online store customers. "This information included customer names, billing and shipping addresses, email addresses and telephone numbers," the San Jose-based company  said  in a disclosure last week. "In addition, the database contained, in encrypted format, hashed and salted passwords and partial credit card numbers. We will communicate directly with impacted customers." The development comes a little over a month after Western Digital  divulged  a "network security incident" on March 26, 2023, prompting the company to take its cloud services offline. A subsequent report from TechCrunch last month  revealed  that the threat actors behind the attack were allegedly in possession of "around 10 terabytes of data" and were negotiating with Western Digital for a ra

Open source media player software provider Kodi has confirmed a data breach after threat actors stole the company's MyBB forum database containing user data and private messages. What's more, the unknown threat actors  attempted to sell  the data dump  comprising 400,635 Kodi users  on the now-defunct  BreachForums  cybercrime marketplace. "MyBB admin logs show the account of a trusted but currently inactive member of the forum admin team was used to access the web-based MyBB admin console twice: on 16 February and again on 21 February," Kodi  said  in an advisory. The threat actors then abused the account to create database backups that were then downloaded and deleted. Also downloaded were existing nightly full backups of the database. The account in question has now been disabled. The nightly backups contained all public forum posts, team forum posts, messages sent through the user-to-user messaging system, and user information such as forum username, email a

A joint international law enforcement operation has dismantled Genesis Market, an illegal online marketplace that specialized in the sale of stolen credentials associated with email, bank accounts, and social media platforms. Coinciding with the infrastructure seizure, the major crackdown, which involved authorities from 17 countries, culminated in 119 arrests and 208 property searches in 13 nations. However, the  .onion mirror of the market  appears to be still up and running . The "unprecedented"  law   enforcement   exercise  has been codenamed  Operation Cookie Monster . Genesis Market, since its inception in March 2018, evolved into a major hub for criminal activities, offering access to data stolen from over 1.5 million compromised computers across the world totaling more than 80 million credentials. A majority of infections associated with Genesis Market related malware have been detected in the U.S., Mexico, Germany, Turkey, Sweden, Italy, France, Spain, Poland,

Every year hundreds of millions of malware attacks occur worldwide, and every year businesses deal with the impact of viruses, worms, keyloggers, and ransomware. Malware is a pernicious threat and the biggest driver for businesses to look for cybersecurity solutions.  Naturally, businesses want to find products that will stop malware in its tracks, and so they search for solutions to do that. But  malware protection  alone is not enough, instead what's needed is a more holistic approach. Businesses need to defend against malware entering the network, and then on top of that have systems and processes in place to restrict the damage that malware can do if it infects a user device.  This approach will not only help stop and mitigate the damage from malware, but defend against other types of threats too, such as credential theft as a result of phishing, insider threats, and supply-chain attacks.  Element 1: Malware Protection and Web Filtering The first and most sensible place to

Data storage devices maker Western Digital on Monday disclosed a "network security incident" that involved unauthorized access to its systems. The  breach  is said to have occurred on March 26, 2023, enabling an unnamed third party to gain access to a "number of the company's systems." Following the discovery of the hack, Western Digital said it has initiated incident response efforts and enlisted the help of cybersecurity and forensic experts to conduct an investigation. It also said it's coordinating with law enforcement agencies on the matter, adding the probe is in its initial stages. The company has taken several of its services offline, noting that the threat actor may have obtained "certain data from its systems" and that it's working on estimating the nature and scope of the data accessed. While Western Digital did not reveal the exact services that are impacted, the  My Cloud status page  shows that cloud, proxy, web, authentica

Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, the 20-year-old founder and the administrator of the now-defunct BreachForums has been  formally charged  in the U.S. with conspiracy to commit access device fraud. If proven guilty, Fitzpatrick, who went by the online moniker "pompompurin," faces a maximum penalty of up to five years in prison. He was  arrested  on March 15, 2023. "Cybercrime victimizes and steals financial and personal information from millions of innocent people," said U.S. Attorney Jessica D. Aber for the Eastern District of Virginia. "This arrest sends a direct message to cybercriminals: your exploitative and illegal conduct will be discovered, and you will be brought to justice." The development comes days after Baphomet, the individual who had taken over the responsibilities of BreachForums,  shut down the website , citing concerns that law enforcement may have obtained access to its backend. The Department of Justice (DoJ) has since confirmed that it co

OpenAI on Friday disclosed that a bug in the Redis open source library was responsible for the exposure of other users' personal information and chat titles in the upstart's ChatGPT service earlier this week. The  glitch , which came to light on March 20, 2023, enabled certain users to view brief descriptions of other users' conversations from the chat history sidebar, prompting the company to temporarily shut down the chatbot. "It's also possible that the first message of a newly-created conversation was visible in someone else's chat history if both users were active around the same time," the company  said . The bug, it further added, originated in the  redis-py library , leading to a scenario where canceled requests could cause connections to be corrupted and return unexpected data from the database cache, in this case, information belonging to an unrelated user. To make matters worse, the San Francisco-based AI research company said it introduce

2022 was the year when inflation hit world economies, except in one corner of the global marketplace – stolen data. Ransomware payments fell by over 40% in 2022 compared to 2021. More organisations chose not to pay ransom demands, according to findings by blockchain firm Chainalysis. Nonetheless, stolen data has value beyond a price tag, and in risky ways you may not expect. Evaluating stolen records is what  Lab 1, a new cyber monitoring platform , believes will make a big difference for long-term cybersecurity resilience. Think of data value this way:  Stolen credentials can become future phishing attacks Logins for adult websites are potential extortion attempts Travel and location data are a risk to VIPs and senior leadership, And so on… Hackers could retaliate for non-payment by simply posting their loot to forums where the data will be available for further enrichment and exploitation.  Shining a light on dark places Even though your company may not have suffered a di

U.S. law enforcement authorities have arrested a 21-year-old New York man in connection with running the infamous BreachForums hacking forum under the online alias " Pompompurin ." The development, first reported by  Bloomberg Law , comes after News 12 Westchester, earlier this week, said that federal investigators "spent hours inside and outside of a home in Peekskill." "At one point, investigators were seen removing several bags of evidence from the house," the New York-based local news service  added . According  to an  affidavit  filed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the suspect identified himself as Conor Brian Fitzpatrick and admitted to being the owner of the BreachForums website. "When I arrested the defendant on March 15, 2023, he stated to me in substance and in part that: a) his name was Conor Brian Fitzpatrick; b) he used the alias 'pompompurin,' and c) he was the owner and administrator of 'BreachForums,&#

Multiple threat actors, including a nation-state group, exploited a critical three-year-old security flaw in Progress Telerik to break into an unnamed federal entity in the U.S. The  disclosure  comes from a  joint advisory  issued by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC). "Exploitation of this vulnerability allowed malicious actors to successfully execute remote code on a federal civilian executive branch (FCEB) agency's Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) web server," the agencies  said . The indicators of compromise (IoCs) associated with the digital break-in were identified from November 2022 through early January 2023. Tracked as  CVE-2019-18935  (CVSS score: 9.8), the issue relates to a .NET  deserialization vulnerability  affecting Progress Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX that, if left unpatched, could  lead to remote code exec

Phishing, the theft of users' credentials or sensitive data using social engineering, has been a significant threat since the early days of the internet – and continues to plague organizations today,  accounting for more than 30% of all known breaches . And with the mass migration to remote working during the pandemic, hackers have ramped up their efforts to steal login credentials as they take advantage of the chaos and lack of in-person user verification.  This has led to the revival of the old-school technique of vishing, which, like phishing online, involves using social engineering over the phone to steal sensitive information. Vishing attacks have  been on the rise  as a result, with 69% of companies experiencing them in 2021, up from 54% in 2020. These attacks often take the form of job or tech support scams and can be incredibly convincing. In August 2020, the  FBI along with the CISA  issued a warning regarding remote users being targeted by attackers spoofing organizati

The massive breach at LastPass was the result of one of its engineers failing to update Plex on their home computer, in what's a sobering reminder of the dangers of failing to keep software up-to-date. The embattled password management service last week  revealed  how unidentified actors leveraged information stolen from an earlier incident that took place prior to August 12, 2022, along with details "available from a third-party data breach and a vulnerability in a third-party media software package to launch a coordinated second attack" between August and October 2022. The intrusion ultimately enabled the adversary to steal partially encrypted password vault data and customer information. The second attack specifically singled out one of the four DevOps engineers, targeting their home computer with a keylogger malware to obtain the credentials and breach the cloud storage environment. This, in turn, is said to have been made possible by exploiting a nearly three-y

LastPass, which in December 2022 disclosed a severe data breach that allowed threat actors to access encrypted password vaults, said it happened as a result of the same adversary launching a second attack on its systems. The company said one of its DevOps engineers had their personal home computer hacked and infected with a keylogger as part of a sustained cyber attack that exfiltrated sensitive data from its Amazon AWS cloud storage servers. "The threat actor leveraged information stolen during the first incident, information available from a third-party data breach, and a vulnerability in a third-party media software package to launch a coordinated second attack," the password management service  said . This intrusion targeted the company's infrastructure, resources, and the aforementioned employee from August 12, 2022, to October 26, 2022. The original incident, on the other hand, ended on August 12, 2022. The  August breach  saw the intruders accessing source cod

The Dutch police announced the arrest of three individuals in connection with a "large-scale" criminal operation involving data theft, extortion, and money laundering. The suspects include two 21-year-old men from Zandvoort and Rotterdam and an 18-year-old man without a permanent residence. The arrests were made on January 23, 2023. It's estimated that the hackers stole personal data belonging to tens of millions of individuals. This comprised names, addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, bank account numbers, credit cards, passwords, license plates, social security numbers, and passport details. The Politie said its cybercrime team started the investigation nearly two years ago, in March 2021, after a large Dutch company suffered a security breach. The name of the company was not disclosed but some of the firms that were hit by a cyber attack around that time included  RDC ,  Shell , and  Ticketcounter , the last of which was also a victim of an extortion att