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On Wednesday, cybersecurity researchers disclosed 14 vulnerabilities that affect a common TCP/IP stack, which is used in a large amount of OT devices. These devices are manufactured by less than 200 vendors and utilised in manufacturing plants, power generation, water treatment and critical infrastructure sectors. The vulnerabilities have been labelled "INFRA:HALT" and target NicheStack. If exploited, they could allow attackers to accomplish remote code execution, denial of service, information leaks, TCP spoofing as well as...

On Sunday morning, Italy's Lazio region suffered a ransomware attack, disabling its IT systems and disrupting the COVID-19 vaccination registration portal. The attackers reportedly encrypted every file in the portal's data centre and shut down its IT network. President of the Lazio region, Nicola Zingaretti issued a statement, in which she said: "On the night between Saturday and Sunday the Regione Lazio suffered a first cyber attack of criminal matrix. We don't know who is...

Ransomware attacks have sky-rocketed this year, with H1 2021 already surpassing last year's total of 304.6 million. Attackers are continuously targeting established technology, infrastructure, innocent people and vulnerable institutions, resulting in a 151% year-to-date increase. April and May of this year reached a new record high while June saw 78.4 recorded ransomware attacks. Both the UK and the US have seen massive spikes in incidents with 144% and 185% increases respectively. 64% of all recorded...

Cybereason Nocturnos has published a new report disclosing the discovery of three cyberespionage campaigns that have been targeting major telecommunications companies. The attackers are suspected to be working for "Chinese state interests" and have been tied to the name "DeadRinger". The campaign have been ongoing in Southeast Asia, and have been specifically focused on telcos, similarly to the recent cases of SolarWinds and Kaseya. Cybereason has found overlaps within the tactics and techniques used by...

Proofpoint has uncovered a scheme by a group of Iranian hackers posing as a flirty aerobics instructor to target employees of American defence contractors. The hackers created a fake persona named Marcella Flores to try to dupe employees and compromise their computers, according to Proofpoint researchers. The group, also known as TA456 or Tortoiseshell, has sought out smaller subsidiaries and contractors in an effort to use them as a launching pad to compromise larger defense...

Recent Trend Micro research points to a big problem when it comes to keeping up with patching in legacy IT equipment. It found that nearly a quarter (22%) of exploits sold on cybercriminal underground are more than three years old, indicating the scale of threat from unpatched legacy vulnerabilities. Trend Micro has thus urged organisations to focus patching efforts on the vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk to their organisation, even if they are years old....

US President Biden has signed a national security directive aimed at boosting defences against ransomware attacks and the hacking of critical infrastructure, such as energy, food, water and power systems.   Crucially, the directive sets performance standards for technology and systems used by private companies in these sectors — although it can't force those companies to comply. The memorandum follows a series of high-profile attacks on Colonial Pipeline and the United States' biggest meat supplier....

The Authlogics Password Breach Database has once again revealed the weaknesses in people’s account security, this time shining a light on the effect the Olympics have had on people’s password choices. With the Olympics in full swing, it is clear that sports have been at the top of people’s minds, although when it comes to securing digital identity this can pose a massive danger. An analysis of the 1 billion unique clear text passwords has...

IBM research indicates that the cost of an enterprise data breach reached a record high during the COVID-19 pandemic. IBM has estimated in its new "Cost of a Data Breach" report that the average data breach now runs upward of $4 million. In fact, in 2021, a typical data breach experienced by companies now costs $4.24 million per incident, with expenses incurred now 10% higher than in 2020 when 1,000 - 100,000 records are involved....

An APT group dubbed Praying Mantis or TG1021, by researchers from incident response firm Sygnia, has hit IIS web servers with deserialization flaws and memory-resident malware. It says Praying Mantis group is likely a nation-state threat actor using custom malware that is especially good at avoiding detection to compromise major public and private organisations over the past year. It exploits deserialization flaws in public-facing ASP.NET applications to deploy evasive fileless malware. This custom malware toolset...