News

Staff at the Australian National University (ANU) have been sent a warning after receiving a scam email claiming new cases of COVID-19 had been recorded on campus. Professor Jodie Bradbury sent a screenshot of the email to his colleagues alerting them of the scam, which was given the subject line "New positive positive COVID-19 cases among staffs" and included a link for the readers to follow. The event was described as a "really serious and...

Mimecast have announced that one of their authentication certificates used by Microsoft 365 Exchange Web Services has been "compromised by a sophisticated threat actor". Mimecast secure emails for customers using email services such as Microsoft 365. Users can apply Mimecast's security services to their emails by creating a connection to Mimecast’s server. The Mimecast certificate that has been compromised is used to authenticate and verify the connection made to Mimecast's Continuity Monitor, Sync and Recover,...

New research by Google's Project Zero has recently discovered two exploit servers which were being used as watering hole attacks. The Project Zero report says "a highly sophisticated actor" who uses a complex targeting infrastructure is responsible for the attacks.  The Project Zero researchers said "they are well-engineered, complex code with a variety of novel exploitation methods, mature logging, sophisticated and calculated post-exploitation techniques, and high volumes of anti-analysis and targeting checks," and that "we believe...

As a result of a demanding market, developers have often foregone security for speed with security teams typically tagged on at the very end of the development lifecycle. This, however, is an unsustainable, if not unacceptable stance, in today’s environment. The future requires organisations to integrate security from the beginning when the application is built. They need to be able to adapt efficiently to protect new architectures as well as consistently improve on performance. Those...

Researchers at Kaspersky have recently discovered considerable similarities between the Sunburst and Kazuar backdoors. The similarities potentially link the Sunburst backdoors, used in the SolarWinds supply-chain attack, to a previously known Turla weapon. Kazuar, a malware written using the .NET framework, was first reported in 2017. These have been used in unison throughout various breaches over the past three years. Kaspersky claims that the Russian threat-actor, Turla (also known as Snake, Venomous Bear, Waterbug or...

After rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol last Wednesday, a hacker on Twitter archived the Trump supporters' posts on Parler to piece together the role the platform played in the insurgency. The hacker, who goes by @donk_enby on Twitter, claims her goal was to store every post relating to the assault before Parler was taken down. According to the Atlantic Council, Parler was used by conservatives and right wing extremists to plan the riot on January 6th....

Around 318 million social media account records, from platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn have been leaked online after SocialArks experience a cloud misconfiguration. Over 400GB of private and public data from 214 million social-media profiles has been exposed, with details of celebrities and social media influencers from all over the world being leaked. The data leak is the result of a misconfigured ElasticSearch database owned by SocialArks, a Chinese social-media management company. SocialArks...

Bitdefender, a Romanian cybersecurity firm, has released a free DarkSide ransomware decryptor which allows victims to recover their stole files without the need to pay a ransom. DarkSide is a ransomware that has been targeting organisations since August 2020 and since then has received a number of payouts, with a spike in its usage between October and December 2020. The decryptor by Bitdefender allows victims of DarkSide ransomware to scan their entire system in order...

37-year-old Russian Hacker, Andrei Tyurin was sentenced to 12 years in prison for the theft of personal information from several financial institutions, brokerage firms, financial news publishers and other large American companies. Among these was J.P. Morgan, which, as a result, suffered one of the largest thefts of U.S. customer data. More than 80 million J.P. Morgan Chase customers were affected. Tyurin was charged with computer intrusion, wire fraud, bank fraud, and illegal online gambling...

New Zeland's central bank, The Reserve Bank of New Zealand, has recently been hacked, with both personally and commercially sensitive information being stolen in the hack. News of the hack was first revealed on Sunday, and it has been reported that it was due to the breach of a third-party file sharing service which the bank use to store and share sensitive information. Fortunately, it's been reported that the hack did not affect the bank's...