Cyber Bites

In a warning given by the US Cyber Command, it said that foreign state-sponsored hacking groups were likely to exploit a major security bug disclosed in PAN-OS, the operating system running on firewalls and enterprise VPN appliances from Palo Alto Networks. "Please patch all devices affected by CVE-2020-2021 immediately, especially if SAML is in use," US Cyber Command said in a tweet today. "Foreign APTs will likely attempt exploit soon," the agency added, referring to...

Reaching its 30th anniversary of reaching royal assent, a group of cybersecurity organisations have issued an open letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, asking for an update to the Computer Misuse Act (CMA) to make it fit for the digital age. “In 1990, when the CMA became law, only 0.5% of the UK population used the internet, and the concept of cybersecurity and threat intelligence research did not yet exist,” the letter read. “Now, 30...

Researchers at vpnMentor say that an improperly-secured online database belonging to OneClass has left the private information of more than a million students exposed.  The tool lets students share class notes and study guides. vpnMentor researchers discovered the database while performing a series of routine Internet scans and estimates that the exposed OneClass database included nearly 9 million total records. Its total size was around 27GB, enough to store more than 2 million full pages of...

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) says it paid cybercriminals $1.14 million (£1 million) to decrypt a “limited number of servers” in its School of Medicine that was hit by Netwalker ransomware earlier this month. The University – which has 10 campuses around California —  was hit by the ransomware attack on June 1. It said that it had “successfully isolated the incident from the core UCSF network…" and believed that the malware encrypted its...

Threat actors are continuing to use Coronavirus lures and adapting their techniques to the current situation depending on the state of businesses in each region. In places where the Coronavirus is still spreading, cybercriminals use COVID-19 lures. In other regions where the pandemic is under control, they are targeting people returning to the workplace by sending messages that claim to provide employee coronavirus training resources. Source: Security Week

Cyber-security researchers at Barracuda have identified a new variant of cryptominer malware called Golang, which is being used by China-based hackers to target both Windows and Linux machines. The new malware variant tries to mine Monero, an open-source cryptocurrency and researchers have spotted seven IP addresses linked to this it so far, all based out of China. Source: Outlook India

According to the Singapore Cyber Landscape 2019 report released Friday by the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA), cybercrime accounted for 26.8% of all crimes last year with e-commerce scams being the most popular. In 2018, there were a total of 6,215 cybercrime cases. Last year, this increased to 9,430 cases. Typically, victims of e-commerce scams were lured by attractive online deals on items such as electronic gadgets and event tickets. Source: ZD Net

Two UK-based companies, a technology/software vendor as well as a major financial institution, have been forced by a Chinese bank to install tax software on their systems. However, the software was compromised with malware. "Discussions with our client revealed that was part of their bank's required tax software," Trustwave said today. "They informed us that upon opening operations in China, their local Chinese bank required that they install a software package called Intelligent Tax produced...

A European bank has fallen victim to a huge distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that sent to its networking gear a flood of 809 million packets per second (PPS). This attack is potentially the largest one to have ever occurred with a relatively small footprint of just 418Gbps. DDoS attack differentiates depending on the method used. Their intensity is measured in bits per second (BPS), packets for second (PPS), or requests per second (RPS). BPS attacks...

Coronavirus training resources are being used as a phishing ploy as COVID-19 restrictions lift and employees begin returning to the workplace. This phishing campaign leverages new training programs that are required for employees to undertake, in order to comply with coronavirus regulations. Specifically, the campaign targets Office 365 users and sends a fraudulent link for registration. According to a report by Check Point Research, the link redirects users and asks for them to input their...