News

The production systems at Nine Network, an Australian TV network went offline for 24 hours, as a result of a suspected state-backed attack. Following the system shut down early on Sunday morning, all the staff were ordered to work from home indefinitely while the teams deal with the repercussions. Vanessa Morley, Nine Entertainment's people and culture director sent out an email stating: “Our IT teams are working around the clock to fully restore our systems, which...

Positive Technologies employees Mark Ermolov and Dmitry Sklyarov, together with independent researcher Maxim Goryachi discovered two undocumented instructions in Intel processors. These can be used to change the microcode, allowing for attackers to take control of the processor and the entire system. According to the data that has been published, the vulnerabilities were left undocumented by the manufacturer. Receiving access to the two vulnerabilities opens up a special mode, which is normally only available to...

An analysis published on Friday reveals that at least three major companies have been recent victims of the Hades ransomware. The analysis was published by Accenture's Cyber Investigation & Forensic Response (CIFR) and Cyber Threat Intelligence (ACTI) teams. Accenture claims that the threat actors are targeting organisations that generate at least $1 billion in annual revenue. Reportedly Forward Air was one of the victims. The attackers have been taking a hands-on approach, using a mix...

Microsoft has recently started a brand new bug bounty program for their Teams desktop application. The bug bounty program is offering up to $30,000 as a reward for finding security vulnerabilities, with the highest payouts going to whoever has the ability to expose the most Teams user data. The program manager, Lynn Miyashita, said, “The Teams desktop client is the first in-scope application under the new Apps Bounty Program, we look forward to sharing updates...

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has issued a statement about the Mamba ransomware, also known as HDDCryptor, as a weakness has been found in the ransomware's encryption process. This weakness means that organisations targeted by the ransomware can recover from an attack without having to pay the ransom. The weakness has been found in the open-source software solution, called DiskCryptor, that Mamba uses to encrypt victim's computers using a key defined by the attacker....

An information leakage can result in grave consequences. Consider the recent SolarWinds supply chain attack which transpired from the exposure of a critical, and inanely simple, internal password (solarwinds123). In this way, making the recent findings by the Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center (CyRC) especially troubling. The analysis of over 3,000 popular Android mobile apps showed information leakage to be commonplace. Passwords, user credentials, email addresses and tokens are among the information found. With this information,...

Two vulnerabilities were discovered across the Legacy Themes and plugins in the popular suite of tools for WordPress websites from the marketing platform Thrive Themes.  The purpose of Thrive Themes is to help WordPress websites "convert visitors into leads and customers." The suite of products affected is called Thrive Suite, in which the Legacy Themes tools are included, along with various other plugins. The flaws discovered could be chained together to allow attackers to upload...

Security engineer Rob Dyke recently reported a data leak to the Apperta Foundation, which is a non-profit, supported by NHS England and NHS Digital. The organisation thanked him for responsible reporting, however later 'thanked him' with legal correspondence and police intervention. Dyke discovered an exposed GitHub repository earlier this month, which was exposing passwords, API keys and sensitive financial records belonging to the Apperta Foundation. The repository had been public since at least 2019. The...

On Wednesday, Facebook revealed that it has blocked a group of hackers based in China, known as Evil Eye or Earth Empusa, from using the platform to spy on Uighurs living abroad. The hackers were using Facebook to trick Uighurs into clicking on links infected with malware which enabled them to spy on the victim's devices. Facebook has said that the hacker group were targetting journalists, activists and dissidents who were predominantly Uighurs. In an...

FatFace, a British fashion retailer, suffered a cyber attack in January which may have resulted in both employees' and customers' data being compromised. Yesterday FatFace sent customers an email informing them that their personal data could have possibly been compromised in the hack. In the email FatFace also asked customers to keep the details of the hack "strictly private and confidential". However, a number of angry customers tweeted about how it took two months for...