White House set to lead 30 nations in ransomware discussions, sans Russia
The White House on Wednesday and Thursday will convene meetings with representatives from more than 30 countries to discuss how to counter ransomware, leaving out the country the president most frequently criticizes for hosting gangs of hackers: Russia. "Participants will cover everything from efforts to improve national resilience, to experiences addressing the misuse of virtual currency to launder ransom payments" a senior administration official told reporters on Tuesday. READ MORE...
Office 365 Spy Campaign Targets US Military Defense
A new threat actor, dubbed DEV-0343, has been spotted attacking U.S. and Israeli defense technology companies, Persian Gulf ports of entry and global maritime transportation companies with ties to the Middle East. The threat actor's goal is Microsoft Office 365 account takeovers. Microsoft, which began tracking the activity in late July 2021, detailed the attacks in an alert released Monday, adding that the culprits appear to be bent on espionage and have ties to Iran. READ MORE...
Verizon digital carrier Visible customer accounts were hacked
Visible, a US digital wireless carrier owned by Verizon, admitted that some customer accounts were hacked after dealing with technical problems in the past couple of days. The announcement was made on Visible's official sub-reddit by an employee who said the company is investigating an incident that led to a small number of accounts being breached. READ MORE...
Chinese hackers use Windows zero-day to attack defense, IT firms
A Chinese-speaking hacking group exploited a zero-day vulnerability in the Windows Win32k kernel driver to deploy a previously unknown remote access trojan (RAT). The malware, known as MysterySnail, was found by Kaspersky security researchers on multiple Microsoft Servers between late August and early September 2021. They also found an elevation of privilege exploit targeting the Win32k driver security flaw tracked as CVE-2021-40449 and patched by Microsoft today, as part of this month's Patch Tuesday. READ MORE...
Microsoft Azure Hit by 2.4 Tbps DDoS Attack
Microsoft on Monday revealed that an Azure customer was targeted in late August in a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 2.4 Tbps (terabytes per second). Originating from roughly 70,000 sources worldwide and lasting for more than 10 minutes, with very short bursts, the attack consisted of UDP traffic, employed reflection, and was 1.4 times larger than the largest attack previously mitigated by Azure. READ MORE...
Patch Tuesday, October 2021 Edition
Microsoft today issued updates to plug more than 70 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, including one vulnerability that is already being exploited. This month's Patch Tuesday also includes security fixes for the newly released Windows 11 operating system. Separately, Apple has released updates for iOS and iPadOS to address a flaw that is being actively attacked. READ MORE...
Update now! Apple patches another privilege escalation bug in iOS and iPadOS
Apple has released a security update for iOS and iPad that addresses a critical vulnerability reportedly being exploited in the wild. The update has been made available for iPhone 6s and later, iPad Pro (all models), iPad Air 2 and later, iPad 5th generation and later, iPad mini 4 and later, and iPod touch (7th generation). Publicly disclosed computer security flaws are listed in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database. READ MORE...
SAP Patches Critical Vulnerabilities in Environmental Compliance
On Tuesday, its October 2021 Security Patch Day, SAP announced the release of 13 new security notes and an update for a previously released note. Three of the notes are rated Hot News. The most important of SAP's security notes deals with two critical vulnerabilities in SAP Environmental Compliance. Tracked as CVE-2020-10683 and CVE-2021-23926 (CVSS score of 9.8), the bugs are potential XML external entity (XXE) injection issues. READ MORE...
- ...in 1775, The Continental Congress authorizes construction of two warships, thus instituting an American naval force.
- ...in 1941, singer-songwriter Paul Simon ("50 Ways to Leave Your Lover", "Bridge Over Troubled Water") is born in Newark, NJ.
- ...in 1958, Michael Bond's children's book "A Bear Called Paddington" is first published, introducing the classic title character.
- ...in 2010, all 33 Chilean miners trapped by a cave-in are rescued, after spending more than 69 days underground.
