Nobel Foundation site hit by DDoS attack on award day
The Nobel Foundation and the Norwegian Nobel Institute have disclosed a cyber-attack that unfolded during the award ceremony on December 10, 2021. Nobel is an annual prize awarded to people whose work in physics, chemistry, physiology, medicine, literature, and peace, has been exceptional and is deemed particularly beneficial to humanity. At present, there is no information on who could be behind this cyberattack, but there are several potential candidates. READ MORE...
Ozzy Osbourne NFTs Used to Bite Off Chunk of Crypto Coin
Ozzy Osbourne and his famously enterprising wife and manager Sharon decided to launch a new non-fungible token (NFT) collection called CryptoBatz, but the rollout was clouded by scammers who used an abandoned vanity Discord URL to drain users' crypto wallets out of at least $150,000 worth of Ethereum. But a tweak to the CryptoBatz vanity URL by the company behind the project, Sutter Systems, mistakenly left the old URL active, along with old tweets referencing the abandoned URL. READ MORE...
QNAP warns of new DeadBolt ransomware encrypting NAS devices
QNAP is warning customers again to secure their Internet-exposed Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices to defend against ongoing and widespread attacks targeting their data with the new DeadBolt ransomware strain. "DeadBolt has been widely targeting all NAS exposed to the Internet without any protection and encrypting users' data for Bitcoin ransom," the company said in a statement issued today. READ MORE...
Let's Encrypt is revoking lots of SSL certificates in two days
Let's Encrypt will begin revoking certain SSL/TLS certificates issued within the last 90 days starting January 28, 2022. The move could impact millions of active Let's Encrypt certificates. As a non-profit certificate authority run by Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), Let's Encrypt provides X.509 certificates for Transport Layer Security encryption at no cost. READ MORE...
Tax scam emails are alive and well as US tax season starts
Many countries have taxation forms with names that have entered the general vocabulary, notably the abbreviations of documents that employers are obliged to provide to their staff to show how much money they were paid - and, most importantly, how much tax was already witheld and paid in on the employee's behalf. Here at Naked Security, we know the names of these forms, amongst numerous others, because they often show up in tax scam emails, presumably to give those messages an air of realism. READ MORE...
A bug lurking for 12 years gives attackers root on every major Linux distro
Linux users on Tuesday got a major dose of bad news-a 12-year-old vulnerability in a system tool called Polkit gives attackers unfettered root privileges on machines running any major distribution of the open source operating system. Previously called PolicyKit, Polkit manages system-wide privileges in Unix-like OSes. It provides a mechanism for nonprivileged processes to safely interact with privileged processes. READ MORE...
Booby-trapped sites delivered potent new backdoor trojan to macOS users
Researchers have uncovered advanced, never-before-seen macOS malware that was installed using exploits that were almost impossible for most users to detect or stop once the users landed on a malicious website. The malware was a full-featured backdoor that was written from scratch, an indication that the developers behind it have significant resources and expertise. READ MORE...
AdSanity, AccessPress Plugins Open Scads of WordPress Sites to Takeover
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is offering admins more headaches this week, thanks to a pair of disparate but concerning security problems in add-ons for the platform. The first issue affects the WordPress AdSanity plugin. It's a critical security vulnerability that could allow remote code execution (RCE) and full site takeovers. The second problem concerns a classic supply-chain attack, in which cybercriminals compromised 40 themes and 53 plugins in order to inject them with a webshell. READ MORE...
- ...in 1925, film actor, director, and charitable entrepreneur Paul Newman ("Cool Hand Luke", "The Sting") is born in Shaker Heights, OH.
- ...in 1961, NHL leading scorer Wayne Gretzky -- "The Great One" -- is born in Brantford, Ontario.
- ...in 1978, the Great Blizzard of '78 arrives with 100 mph winds, burying Ohio and much of the Midwest in up to 36" of snow.
- ...in 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin announces that Russia will stop targeting US cities with nuclear weapons.
