Cyber Bites

Researchers are presenting with a malware that not only modifies CT scan results, it also does them with such realism that it manages to fool professionals into misdiagnosing the presence or absence of cancer. A blind study that involved 70 altered CT lung scans showed proved that both radiologists and a lung-cancer screening software were consistently duped into thinking there were cancerous nodes in a scan when the original actually had none. Conversely, scans that...

The number of medium and large businesses with cyber insurance policies is increasing, as a new government report revealed the average cost of a cyber breach increased by a third.The Cyber Breaches Survey 2019 found where an attack resulted in the loss of data or assets, the average cost rose by more than £1,000 since 2018 to £4,180.The average was over £9,000 for larger organisations. Source: InsuranceTimes

Two Secaucus, N.J., high school freshmen have been accused of allegedly knocking their school’s WiFi system offline possibly using a malware as a service deal to create the situation.The two 14-year-old boys were arrested last week and charged with computer criminal activity and conspiracy to commit computer criminal activity, according to CBS New York. School officials confirmed to CBS the WiFi system was down and although the details on how this was accomplished are not...

The Bashlight IoT malware has been updated with cryptomining and backdoor commands targeting WeMo devices.The malware initially gained notoriety for its use in large scale DDoS attacks in 2014 but has recently switched over to infecting IoT devices and has even been known to exploit Shellshock to gain a foothold into vulnerable devices.Bashlight only needs to check if the device is enabled with the WeMo UPnP API to target the device and doesn’t need to...

Researchers have uncovered over a dozen servers, unusually registered in the United States, which are hosting ten different malware families spread through phishing campaigns potentially tied to the Necurs botnet.On Thursday, researchers from Bromium said they have monitored scams connected to this infrastructure during the May 2018 to March 2019 time period.Five families of banking Trojans -- Dridex, Gootkit, IcedID, Nymaim, and Trickbot -- two ransomware variants, Gandcrab and Hermes, as well as three information...

A configuration mistake in the Microsoft News app caused Window 10 users to receive strange test notifications, which caused them to think they were infected. Last Friday, users on Reddit began posting about strange notifications they were receiving in the Windows 10 action center. These notifications indicated they were from the Microsoft News app, but were labeled as coming from Microsoft Movies.Even stranger, these notifications contained messages stating "Test Notification, "thsi test notification", and "this...

Code and infrastructure from two known malware families have been observed with a new threat named Xwo, which helps operators of the MongoLock ransomware discover unprotected web services reachable over the internet.MongoLock targets unprotected MongoDB databases, wiping them from the server and demanding a ransom to restore them. Xwo is a Python-based bot scanner intended for reconnaissance activity. Based on IP ranges received from a command and control (C2) server, the utility probes for default...

Security researchers have found hundreds of millions of Facebook  user records sitting on an inadvertently public storage server.The two batches of user records were collected and exposed from two third-party companies, according to researchers at security firm UpGuard, who found the data. In the researchers’ write-up, Mexico-based digital media company Cultura Colectiva left more than 540 million records — including comments, likes, reactions, account names and more — stored on the Amazon S3 storage server...

The public posts made by Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg on his personal Facebook profile have been deleted; it included some of the critical updates and important announcements made by the company. All the information shared by Zuckerberg in the year 2007 and 2008 has also vanished.On being enquired, a spokesperson of Facebook said that these posts which included the major announcements like the one regarding the acquisition of Instagram were erased mistakenly because of some...

Homograph attacks are not just an issue for web browsers – they have been shown to cause headaches for users of mobile messaging apps, too.Researchers at Blaze Security have demonstrated bugs against Signal, Telegram, and the Tor browser that might be used as part of social engineering attacks – pushing users towards hacker-controlled sites that host either malicious code, or a phishing attack aiming to hoodwink prospective marks into handing over their login details. Hackers...