PC maker powerhouse Dell announced today a flurry of new enterprise security solutions for the company's line of enterprise products. From a report: The new services can be grouped into two categories, with (1) new solutions meant to protect the supply chain of Dell products while in transit to their customers and (2) new features meant to improve the security of Dell products while in use. While Dell has previously invested in securing its customers' supply chains, the company has announced today three new services. The first is named SafeSupply Chain Tamper Evident Services and, as its name implies, involves Dell adding anti-tampering seals to its devices, transport boxes, and even entire pallets before they leave Dell factories. The anti-tampering seals will allow buyers of Dell equipment to determine if any intermediary agents or transporters have opened boxes or devices to alter physical components. The second supply chain security offering, named the Dell SafeSupply Chain Data Sanitization Services, is meant for tampering made at the storage level.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IBM's cyber-security division says that hackers are targeting companies associated with the storage and transportation of COVID-19 vaccines using temperature-controlled environments -- also known as the COVID-19 vaccine cold chain. From a report: The attacks consisted of spear-phishing emails seeking to collect credentials for a target's internal email and applications. While IBM X-Force analysts weren't able to link the attacks to a particular threat actor, they said the phishing campaign showed the typical "hallmarks of nation-state tradecraft." Targets of the attacks included a wide variety of companies, sectors, and government organizations alike.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation says that cyber-criminals are increasingly relying on email forwarding rules in order to disguise their presence inside hacked email accounts. From a report: In a PIN (Private Industry Notification) alert sent last week and made public today, the FBI says the technique has been seen and abused in recent BEC (Business Email Compromise) attacks reported over the summer. The hackers' technique relies on a feature found in some email services called "auto-forwarding email rules." As its name implies, the feature allows the owner of an email address to set up "rules" that forward (redirect) an incoming email to another address if a certain criteria is met. Threat actors absolutely love email auto-forwarding rules as they allow them to receive copies of all incoming emails without having to log into an account each day -- and be at risk of triggering a security warning for a suspicious login.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The security team behind the "npm" repository for JavaScript libraries removed two npm packages this Monday for containing malicious code that installed a remote access trojan (RAT) on the computers of developers working on JavaScript projects. From a report: The name of the two packages was jdb.js and db-json.js., and both were created by the same author and described themselves as tools to help developers work with JSON files typically generated by database applications. Both packages were uploaded on the npm package registry last week and were downloaded more than 100 times before their malicious behavior was detected by Sonatype, a company that scans package repositories on a regular basis. According to Sonatype's Ax Sharma, the two packages contained a malicious script that executed after web developers imported and installed any of the two malicious libraries. The post-install script performed basic reconnaissance of the infected host and then attempted to download and run a file named patch.exe that later installed njRAT, also known as Bladabindi, a very popular remote access trojan that has been used in espionage and data theft operations since 2015.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan Goodin, writing for ArsTechnica: Earlier this year, Apple patched one of the most breathtaking iPhone vulnerabilities ever: a memory corruption bug in the iOS kernel that gave attackers remote access to the entire device -- over Wi-Fi, with no user interaction required at all. Oh, and exploits were wormable -- meaning radio-proximity exploits could spread from one nearby device to another, once again, with no user interaction needed. This Wi-Fi packet of death exploit was devised by Ian Beer, a researcher at Project Zero, Google's vulnerability research arm. In a 30,000-word post published on Tuesday afternoon, Beer described the vulnerability and the proof-of-concept exploit he spent six months developing single-handedly. Almost immediately, fellow security researchers took notice. "This is a fantastic piece of work," Chris Evans, a semi-retired security researcher and executive and the founder of Project Zero, said in an interview. "It really is pretty serious. The fact you don't have to really interact with your phone for this to be set off on you is really quite scary. This attack is just you're walking along, the phone is in your pocket, and over Wi-Fi someone just worms in with some dodgy Wi-Fi packets." Beer's attack worked by exploiting a buffer overflow bug in a driver for AWDL, an Apple-proprietary mesh networking protocol that makes things like Airdrop work. Because drivers reside in the kernel -- one of the most privileged parts of any operating system -- the AWDL flaw had the potential for serious hacks. And because AWDL parses Wi-Fi packets, exploits can be transmitted over the air, with no indication that anything is amiss.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Companies need millions more cybersecurity professionals to fill roles around the world, but researchers say outlandish job requirements are the problem, rather than a lack of workers. From a report: Around 3.1 million professionals are needed to bridge the cybersecurity talent gap, a trade association for cybersecurity professionals estimated in a November report. The International Information System Security Certification Consortium, known as ISC2, said world-wide employment in the field would need to grow 89% to meet security requirements. However, excessive requirements for years of experience and professional certifications plus inflated expectations for junior roles aren't uncommon, said Chase Cunningham, principal analyst at research firm Forrester. He said that results in the perpetual problem of such positions going unfilled because companies often target overqualified candidates who can command greater salaries than these jobs tend to offer.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A wave of damaging attacks on hospitals upended the lives of patients with cancer and other ailments. From a report: At lunchtime on Oct. 28, Colleen Cargill was in the cancer center at the University of Vermont Medical Center, preparing patients for their chemotherapy infusions. A new patient will sometimes be teary and frightened, but the nurses try to make it welcoming, offering trail mix and a warm blanket, a seat with a view of a garden. Then they work with extreme precision: checking platelet and white blood cell counts, measuring each dosage to a milligram per square foot of body area, before settling the person into a port and hooking them up to an IV. That day, though, Ms. Cargill did a double-take: When she tried to log in to her work station, it booted her out. Then it happened again. She turned to the system of pneumatic tubes used to transport lab work. What she saw there was a red caution symbol, a circle with a cross. She walked to the backup computer. It was down, too. "I wasn't panicky," she said, "and then I noticed my cordless phone didn't work." That was, she said, the beginning of the worst 10 days of her career. Cyberattacks on America's health systems have become their own kind of pandemic over the past year as Russian cybercriminals have shut down clinical trials and treatment studies for the coronavirus vaccine and cut off hospitals' access to patient records, demanding multimillion-dollar ransoms for their return. Complicating the response, President Trump last week fired Christopher Krebs, the director of CISA, the cybersecurity agency responsible for defending critical systems, including hospitals and elections, against cyberattacks, after Mr. Krebs disputed Mr. Trump's baseless claims of voter fraud. The attacks have largely unfolded in private, as hospitals scramble to restore their systems -- or to quietly pay the ransom -- without releasing information that could compromise an F.B.I. investigation. [...] The latest wave of attacks, which hit about a dozen hospitals in the United States, was believed to have been conducted by a particularly powerful group of Russian-speaking hackers that deployed ransomware via TrickBot, a vast network of infected computers used for cyberattacks, according to security researchers who are tracking the attacks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. Fertility, one of the largest networks of fertility clinics in the United States, has confirmed it was hit by a ransomware attack and that data was taken. From a report: The company was formed in May as a partnership between Shady Grove Fertility, a fertility clinic with dozens of locations across the U.S. east coast, and Amulet Capital Partners, a private equity firm that invests largely in the healthcare space. As a joint venture, U.S. Fertility now claims 55 locations across the U.S., including California. In a statement, U.S. Fertility said that the hackers "acquired a limited number of files" during the month that they were in its systems, until the ransomware was triggered on September 14. That's a common technique of data-stealing ransomware, which steals data before encrypting the victim's network for ransom. Some ransomware groups publish the stolen files on their websites if their ransom demand isn't paid. U.S. Fertility said some personal information, like names and addresses, were taken in the attack. Some patients also had their Social Security numbers taken. But the company warned that the attack may have involved protected health information.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UK-based cyber-security vendor Sophos is currently notifying customers via email about a security breach the company suffered earlier this week. From a report: "On November 24, 2020, Sophos was advised of an access permission issue in a tool used to store information on customers who have contacted Sophos Support," the company said in an email sent to customers and obtained by ZDNet. Exposed information included details such as customer first and last names, email addresses, and phone numbers (if provided).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Security researchers have discovered a major security flaw in cPanel, a popular software suite used by web hosting companies to manage websites for their customers. The bug, discovered by security researchers from Digital Defense, allows attackers to bypass two-factor authentication (2FA) for cPanel accounts. These accounts are used by website owners to access and manage their websites and underlying server settings. Access to these accounts is critical, as once compromised, they grant threat actors full control over a victim's site. On its website, cPanel boasts that its software is currently used by hundreds of web hosting companies to manage more than 70 million domains across the world. But in a press release today, Digital Defense says that the 2FA implementation on older cPanel & WebHost Manager (WHM) software was vulnerable to brute-force attacks that allowed threat actors to guess URL parameters and bypass 2FA -- if 2FA was enabled for an account. While brute-forcing attacks, in general, usually take hours or days to execute, in this particular case, the attack required only a few minutes, Digital Defense said today. Exploiting this bug also requires that attackers have valid credentials for a targeted account, but these can be obtained from phishing the website owner. The good news is that Digital Defense has privately reported the bug, tracked as SEC-575, to the cPanel team, which has already released patches last week.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.K.-based security company NCC Group and consumer advocacy group Which? have found vulnerabilities in 11 "smart" doorbells sold on popular platforms like Amazon and eBay. CyberScoop reports: One flaw could allow a remote attacker to break into the wireless network by swiping login credentials. Another critical bug, which has been around for years, could enable attackers to intercept and manipulate data on the network. The investigation focused on doorbells made by often obscure vendors, but which nonetheless earned top reviews and featured prominently on Amazon and eBay. The researchers raised concerns that some of the devices were storing sensitive data, including location data and audio and video captured by the doorbell's camera, on insecure servers. One device made by a company called Victure, for example, sent a user's wireless name and password, unencrypted, to servers in China, according to the researchers. In a statement, Amazon said it requires products sold on its site to be compliant with applicable laws and regulations, and that it has tools to detect "unsafe or non-compliant products from being listed in our stores." eBay said it takes down listings that violate its safety standards, but that the devices flagged by the researchers did not meet that threshold. Victure did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The NCC Group-Which? team said they tried to contact the various vendors of the vulnerable smart doorbells, with mixed success. The unnamed vendor of one device, for example, removed an online listing for the product after the researchers shared their findings.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bernard Meyer, reporting for CyberNews: In a collaboration between CyberNews Sr. Information Security Researcher Mantas Sasnauskas and researchers James Clee and Roni Carta, suspicious backdoors have been discovered in a Chinese-made Jetstream router, sold exclusively at Walmart as their new line of "affordable" wifi routers. This backdoor would allow an attacker the ability to remotely control not only the routers, but also any devices connected to that network. CyberNews reached out to Walmart for comment and to understand whether they were aware of the Jetstream backdoor, and what they plan to do to protect their customers. After we sent information about the affected Jetstream device, a Walmart spokesperson informed CyberNews: "Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We are looking into the issue to learn more. The item in question is currently out of stock and we do not have plans to replenish it." Besides the Walmart-exclusive Jetstream router, the cybersecurity research team also discovered that low-cost Wavlink routers, normally sold on Amazon or eBay, have similar backdoors. The Wavlink routers also contain a script that lists nearby wifi and has the capability to connect to those networks. We have also found evidence that these backdoors are being actively exploited, and there's been an attempt to add the devices to a Mirai botnet. Mirai is malware that infects devices connected to a network, turns them into remotely controlled bots as part of a botnet, and uses them in large-scale attacks. The most famous of these is the 2016 Dyn DNS cyberattack, which brought down major websites like Reddit, Netflix, CNN, GitHub, Twitter, Airbnb and more.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A team of academics has detailed this week novel research that converted a smart vacuum cleaner into a microphone capable of recording nearby conversations. Named LidarPhone, the technique works by taking the vacuum's built-in LiDAR laser-based navigational component and converting it into a laser microphone. [...] They tested the LidarPhone attack with various objects, by varying the distance between the robot and the object, and the distance between the sound origin and the object. Tests focused on recovering numerical values, which the research team said they managed to recover with a 90% accuracy. But academics said the technique could also be used to identify speakers based on gender or even determine their political orientation from the music played during news shows, captured by the vacuum's LiDAR. But while the LidarPhone attack sounds like a gross invasion of privacy, users need not panic for the time being. This type of attack revolves around many prerequisites that most attacks won't bother. There are far easier ways of spying on users than overwriting a vacuum's firmware to control its laser navigation system, such as tricking the user on installing malware on their phone. The LidarPhone attack is merely novel academic research that can be used to bolster the security and design of future smart vacuum robots. In fact, the research team's main recommended countermeasure for smart vacuum cleaning robot makers is to shut down the LiDAR component if it's not rotating. Additional details about the research are available in a research paper titled "Spying with Your Robot Vacuum Cleaner: Eavesdropping via Lidar Sensors."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers have uncovered a massive hacking campaign that's using sophisticated tools and techniques to compromise the networks of companies around the world. The hackers, most likely from a well-known group that's funded by the Chinese government, are outfitted with both off-the-shelf and custom-made tools. One such tool exploits Zerologon, the name given to a Windows server vulnerability, patched in August, that can give attackers instant administrator privileges on vulnerable systems. Symantec uses the code name Cicada for the group, which is widely believed to be funded by the Chinese government and also carries the monikers of APT10, Stone Panda, and Cloud Hopper from other research organizations. The group has been active in espionage-style hacking since at least 2009 and almost exclusively targets companies linked to Japan. While the companies targeted in the recent campaign are located in the United States and other countries, all of them have links to Japan or Japanese companies. The attacks make extensive use of DLL side-loading, a technique that occurs when attackers replace a legitimate Windows dynamic-link library file with a malicious one. Attackers use DLL side-loading to inject malware into legitimate processes so they can keep the hack from being detected by security software. The campaign also makes use of a tool that's capable of exploiting Zerologon. Exploits work by sending a string of zeros in a series of messages that use the Netlogon protocol, which Windows servers use to let users log into networks. People with no authentication can use Zerologon to access an organization's crown jewels -- the Active Directory domain controllers that act as an all-powerful gatekeeper for all machines connected to a network. Microsoft patched the critical privilege-escalation vulnerability in August, but since then attackers have been using it to compromise organizations that have yet to install the update. Both the FBI and Department of Homeland Security have urged that systems be patched immediately. Among the machines compromised during attacks discovered by Symantec were domain controllers and file servers. Company researchers also uncovered evidence of files being exfiltrated from some of the compromised machines.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Forget all the rules about uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols; your password just needs to be at least 12 characters, and it needs to pass a real-time strength test" developed by the passwords research group in Carnegie Mellon's CyLab Security and Privacy Institute (according to the Lab's web site). CNET reports: After a user has created a password of at least 10 characters, the meter will start giving suggestions, such as breaking up common words with slashes or random letters, to make your password stronger... One of the problems with many passwords is that they tick all the security checks but are still easy to guess because most of us follow the same patterns, the lab found. Numbers? You'll likely add a "1" at the end. Capital letters? You'll probably make it the first one in the password. And special characters? Frequently exclamation marks... In an experiment, users created passwords on a system that simply required them to enter 10 characters. Then the system rated the passwords with the lab's password strength meter and gave tailored suggestions for stronger passwords. Test subjects were able to come up with secure passwords that they could recall up to five days later. It worked better than showing users preset lists of rules or simply banning known bad passwords (I'm looking at you "StarWars")... Lorrie Cranor, director of the CyLab Usable Security and Privacy Laboratory at CMU, says the best way to create and remember secure passwords is to use a password manager. Those aren't widely adopted, and they come with some trade-offs. Nonetheless, they allow you to create a random, unique password for each account, and they remember your passwords for you.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The Nov. 3rd election was the most secure in American history," state and federal election officials said in a statement Thursday. "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised." Bloomberg reports: The statement acknowledged the "many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections" and urged Americans to turn to election administrators and officials for accurate information. The statement was signed by officials from the Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council, which shares information among state, local and federal officials, and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council, which includes election infrastructure owners and operators. Among the 10 signatories were Benjamin Hovland, who chairs the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and Bob Kolasky, the assistant director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security. Key officials at the cybersecurity agency, including its head, Christopher Krebs, are stepping down or expecting to get fired as Trump refuses to concede. Krebs, who has enjoyed bipartisan support for his role in helping run secure U.S. elections in 2018 and 2020, has told associates he expects to be dismissed, according to three people familiar with internal discussions. His departure would follow the resignation of Bryan Ware, assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA, who resigned on Thursday morning after about two years at the agency. In addition, Valerie Boyd, the assistant secretary for international affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CISA, has also left, according to two other people. Krebs and Ware are both Trump appointees.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

chicksdaddy shares a report from The Security Ledger: Millions of Android smart television sets from the Chinese vendor TCL Technology Group Corporation contained gaping software security holes that researchers say could have allowed remote attackers to take control of the devices, steal data or even control cameras and microphones to surveil the set's owners. The security holes appear to have been patched by the manufacturer in early November. However the manner in which the holes were closed is raising further alarm among the researchers about whether the China-based firm is able to access and control deployed television sets without the owner's knowledge or permission, according to a report published on Monday by two security researchers. The report describes two serious software security holes affecting TCL brand television sets. First, a vulnerability in the software that runs TCL Android Smart TVs allowed an attacker on the adjacent network to browse and download sensitive files over an insecure web server running on port 7989. That flaw, CVE-2020-27403, would allow an unprivileged remote attacker on the adjacent network to download most system files from the TV set up to and including images, personal data and security tokens for connected applications. The flaw could lead to serious critical information disclosure, the researchers warned. Second, the researchers found a vulnerability in the TCL software that allowed a local unprivileged attacker to read from and write to critical vendor resource directories within the TV's Android file system, including the vendor upgrades folder. That flaw was assigned the identifier CVE-2020-28055. The researchers, John Jackson, an application security engineer for Shutter Stock, and the independent researcher known by the handle "Sick Codes," said the flaws amount to a "back door" on any TCL Android smart television. "Anybody on an adjacent network can browse the TV's file system and download any file they want," said Sick Codes in an interview via the Signal platform. That would include everything from image files to small databases associated with installed applications, location data or security tokens for smart TV apps like Gmail. If the TCL TV set was exposed to the public Internet, anyone on the Internet could connect to it remotely, he said, noting that he had located a handful of such TCL Android smart TVs using the Shodan search engine.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica : In 2008, researcher Dan Kaminsky revealed one of the more severe Internet security threats ever: a weakness in the domain name system that made it possible for attackers to send users en masse to imposter sites instead of the real ones belonging to Google, Bank of America, or anyone else. With industrywide coordination, thousands of DNS providers around the world installed a fix that averted this doomsday scenario. Now, Kaminsky's DNS cache poisoning attack is back. Researchers on Wednesday presented a new technique that can once again cause DNS resolvers to return maliciously spoofed IP addresses instead of the site that rightfully corresponds to a domain name. On Wednesday, researchers from Tsinghua University and the University of California, Riverside presented a technique that, once again, makes cache poisoning feasible. Their method exploits a side channel that identifies the port number used in a lookup request. Once the attackers know the number, they once again stand a high chance of successfully guessing the transaction ID. The side channel in this case is the rate limit for ICMP, the abbreviation for the Internet Control Message Protocol. To conserve bandwidth and computing resources, servers will respond to only a set number of requests from other servers. After that, servers will provide no response at all. Until recently, Linux always set this limit to 1,000 per second. To exploit this side channel, the new spoofing technique floods a DNS resolver with a high number of responses that are spoofed so they appear to come from the name server of the domain they want to impersonate. Each response is sent over a different port. When an attacker sends a response over the wrong port, the server will send a response that the port is unreachable, which drains the global rate limit by one. When the attacker sends a request over the right port, the server will give no response at all, which doesn't change the rate limit counter. If the attacker probes 1,000 different ports with spoofed responses in one second and all of them are closed, the entire rate limit will be drained completely. If, on the other hand, one out of the 1,000 ports is open, then the limit will be drained to 999. Subsequently, the attacker can use its own non-spoofed IP address to measure the remaining rate limit. And if the server responds with one ICMP message, the attacker knows one of the previously probed 1,000 ports must be open and can further narrow down to the exact port number. Linux kernel developers responded by introducing a change that causes the rate limit to randomly fluctuate between 500 and 2,000 per second, preventing the new technique from working. Cloudflare also introduced a fix where its DNS service will fall back to TCP, "which is much more difficult to spoof," reports Ars. The researchers' press release is available here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Swiss intelligence service has known since at least 1993 that Switzerland-based encryption device maker Crypto AG was actually a front for the CIA and its German counterpart, according to a new report released by the Swiss Parliament, but Swiss leaders were in the dark until last year. From a report: Switzerland's intra-governmental information gap is unlikely to be welcome news in Europe, which already looks warily upon the U.S.' expansive surveillance practices. Still, Crypto AG provided information of incalculable value to U.S. policymakers over many decades. Crypto AG was controlled from 1970 on by the CIA and the West German BND intelligence agency. It sold encryption devices -- often employed in diplomatic communications -- that were used by over 120 countries through the 2000s.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.