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By Tarik Saleh, Senior Security Engineer at DomainTools Advanced Persistent Threats are long term patterns of network exploitation that go undetected for extended periods of time and are usually aimed at high profile targets such as governments, higher education institutions, political activists, and companies. They are often motivated by economic, political, and financial reasons, and the attacks tend to be highly targeted, resourceful, and risk tolerant.   The typical APT involves several phases:   Infiltration/Initial compromise:  This...

A leak at Autoclerk, a reservations management system recently acquired by the Western Hotel & Resorts Group, exposed personal and travel information on hotel guests, including members of the U.S. government, military and Department of Homeland Security. “Our team viewed highly sensitive data exposing the personal details of government and military personnel, and their travel arrangements to locations around the world, both past and future,” according to a blog post by vpnMentor, whose researchers, led by Noam Rotem and...

Eight Amazon Alexa and Google Home apps were approved for official app stores even though their actual purposes were eavesdropping and phishing. "Alexa, steal my passwords." It's not a phrase a user is likely to utter, but security researchers in Germany have shown that it's possible for malicious apps — Alexa "skills" and Google Home "actions" — to launch phishing attacks on users, forward the compromised credentials to criminals, and do it all in apps...

When Doug Varey clicked on a pop-up ad offering computer security protection for 12 years for £556, he signed up. "I had no reason to suspect it wasn't genuine," he says. That was a mistake. Mr Varey was a victim of a common online scam known as computer software service fraud, which ended up costing him some £4,000. Indian police have now shut two call centres and arrested seven people suspected of involvement in the...

NordVPN, a virtual private network provider that promises to “protect your privacy online,” has confirmed it was hacked. The admission comes following rumors that the company had been breached. It first emerged that NordVPN had an expired internal private key exposed, potentially allowing anyone to spin out their own servers imitating NordVPN. Source: Tech Crunch

Hackers can abuse Amazon Alexa and Google Home smart assistants to eavesdrop on user conversations without users' knowledge, or trick users into handing over sensitive information.  The attacks aren't technically new. Security researchers have previously found similar phishing and eavesdropping vectors impacting Amazon Alexa in April 2018; Alexa and Google Home devices in May 2018; and again Alexa devices in August 2018. Both Amazon and Google have deployed countermeasures every time, yet newer ways to exploit smart assistants...

Jane Manchun Wong has an incessant need to know every single feature of every single app on her smartphone. Wong, a 25-year-old software engineer in Hong Kong, checks every new line of code any time one of her Android smartphone’s apps get an update. She locates new code, reverse-engineers it and finds new features before they are announced. “I do it mostly for personal amusement,” Wong told CNBC. “If I see the feature, I check...

The high school students say they just wanted to win a water-gun fight. But officials in their Pennsylvania school district say they took a senior-year tradition way too far, hacking into test scores and personal information of the district’s more than 12,000 students while trying to get the home addresses they say they wanted for a tactical edge. Downingtown Area School District is calling it a crime — and considering whether to press charges in...

Suspected Russia-linked hackers have attacked dozens of countries, including Britain, disguised as Iranian cyber spies, UK and US intelligence agencies have revealed. They have accused the Turla group - allegedly based in Russia - of letting an Iranian hacking outfit take the blame for a spate of cyber espionage after gaining access to its cyber tools and infrastructure and piggybacking on its hacking exploits. Source: Sky News

Hackers infected servers used by the San Bernardino City Unified School District with ransomware, locking faculty and staff out of their e-mails over the weekend and forcing classes to proceed without Wi-Fi and other tech-based tools beginning Monday, Oct. 21. The district’s information technology staff alerted administrators and law enforcement to the attack early Saturday, Oct. 19, SBCUSD Director of Communications and Community Relations Linda Bardere said Sunday. Officials did not disclose what demands the...