Jeff Stone – Page 56 – WindowsTechs.com

Hide it well or market it well: Two reports show how point-of-sale malware has users in mind

Posted on March 14, 2019 by Jeff Stone

Sometimes the little things can help cybercriminals separate their wares from the pack. It could be an uncommon feature in the malware itself, or it could just be a new way to market a familiar strategy. In unrelated reports Wednesday, cybersecurity companies detailed DMSniff, which takes a new approach to remaining stealthy as it steals point-of-sale (POS) information from consumers, as well as GlitchPOS, which steals credit-card information in a familiar way but comes with an instructional video from its creators. Threat intelligence company Flashpoint reports that DMSniff has quietly been in active use since 2016 thanks in part to a domain generation algorithm, which allows hackers to continue siphoning data from a web page even after police or researchers have taken hackers’ domain pages offline. Flashpoint notes that the use of such an algorithm is “rarely seen” in the smash-and-grab world of POS malware, where thieves typically distribute malware to as many sites as possible and […]

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Microsoft patches two zero-days exploited by FruityArmor, SandCat hacking groups

Posted on March 13, 2019 by Jeff Stone

Microsoft has released security updates for two vulnerabilities that researchers say have been exploited by suspected nation-state hacking groups dubbed FruityArmor and SandCat. The March edition of Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday — when the company introduces fixes for reported security problems — includes 64 updates, 17 of which were rated as “critical.” Attackers already have leveraged at least two of the bugs, CVE-2019-0808 and CVE-2019-0797, according to researchers from Google and Russian security vendor Kaspersky Lab. Both bugs are known as elevation of privilege vulnerabilities, and could allow outsiders to manipulate Windows machines into authorizing an action that should not be allowed. “An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could run arbitrary code in kernel mode,” Microsoft wrote in a security bulletin about the vulnerabilities. “An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights.” The warning is not just theoretical. Kaspersky […]

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Backdoor discovered in Swiss voting system would have allowed hackers to alter votes

Posted on March 12, 2019 by Jeff Stone

A team of cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday revealed technical flaws in the Swiss government’s electronic voting system that could enable outsiders to replace legitimate votes with fraudulent ones. The issue is related to the way Switzerland’s voting system receives and counts votes. Anyone familiar with the sequence of “shuffle proofs” — the cryptographic protocol the system relies on to verify votes — could manipulate ballots that would pass the system’s authentication test, according to a paper published by Sarah Jamie Lewis, Olivier Pereira and Vanessa Teague. Swiss Post, the country’s national postal service, which developed the system along with Scytyl, a Spanish company, said Tuesday the issue had been resolved. But researchers say this flaw personifies the kind of worst-case scenario election security experts have warned about as more governments move toward paperless voting. “This system as apparently been audited multiple times, and both Scytl and Swiss Post have not been […]

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Nearly 6,000 Twitter accounts magnified recent far-right messaging on Brexit, F-Secure says

Posted on March 12, 2019 by Jeff Stone

Far-right Twitter accounts apparently originating in the U.S. amplified pro-Brexit propaganda between December and February and December, according to research published Tuesday by F-Secure, a Finnish cybersecurity company. An analysis of 24 million tweets related to Brexit from 1.65 million users uncovered “inorganic” activity on both sides of the debate, though disinformation was “far more” frequent in among supporters of the United Kingdom’s scheduled withdrawal from the European Union. “At the very least, our research shows there’s a global effort amongst the far-right to amplify the ‘leave’ side of the debate,” Andy Patel, a senior researcher with F-Secure’s Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence, said in a statement Tuesday. Researchers determined that several separate accounts retweeted messages from @Brexiteer30, @UnityNewsNet and @JackBMontgomery, an editor with the alt-right Breitbart News. Nearly 6,000 accounts magnified messages from those three far-right accounts, F-Secure found. Many of those pages also included some version of #MakeAmericaGreatAgain […]

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Lawyers for alleged LinkedIn hacker appear ready to fight results of psychiatric evaluation

Posted on March 11, 2019 by Jeff Stone

The ongoing court case tied to an accused Russian hacker took another turn last week when the results of his psychiatric evaluation became a topic of contention. Now court deliberations in the case of Yevgeniy Nikulin, an alleged hacker accused of breaching LinkedIn, are scheduled to continue after a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation sought to determine whether he was fit to stand trial. Nikulin, a Russian national, is set to be tried in U.S. court for allegedly hacking into LinkedIn and other websites in 2012, when prosecutors say some 117 million usernames and passwords were stolen. Nikulin has not communicated about the case with the attorneys representing him, a defense lawyer told CyberScoop, since meeting with Russian consulate officials shortly after his arrival in the U.S. in March 2018. Judge William Alsup ordered Nikulin to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, as CyberScoop reported in November. The results of that evaluation now are in and, […]

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Can Google’s security push overcome the public’s eroded trust?

Posted on March 11, 2019 by Jeff Stone

Google in the coming months will embark on a marketing campaign to raise awareness about a service the company says will better protect people accessing new websites. They just need users to trust them first, a tall order when roughly half of Americans polled by the Pew Research Center said they were “not at all” or “not too confident” tech firms would protect their data. Tech executives now are beginning to publicly reflect on the ramifications – specifically an erosion of trust – that occurs after big time data breaches, or scandals such as Facebook’s sharing data about 87 million users with Cambridge Analytica. It’s still early, and conversations are awkward, but the topic was a big theme at the Davos World Economic Forum in January as corporate bigwigs consider what it might mean if users stop trusting them with their information, said Justin Harvey, global incident response leader at Accenture Security. “There’s no litmus test for trust. […]

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How China used Western social media for a late-2018 charm offensive

Posted on March 6, 2019 by Jeff Stone

More than 40,000 English-language social media posts that originated with six state-run Chinese media agencies reached millions of users on Instagram and other services over a span of four months concluding in January, according to research published Wednesday by the threat intelligence company Recorded Future. Xinhua, People’s Daily and others sought to subtly manipulate public opinion in the U.S. by promoting flattering images of Chinese culture, including tourist destinations and panda bears, rather than copying the hard-line rhetoric typically found in the Chinese-language versions of the same outlets, according to Recorded Future. Verified Instagram accounts run by both of those services posted roughly 26 times a day, reaching more than 5 million users between October 2018 and January. The effect is to overwhelm social media users in the West with positive images about China, potentially eroding their ability to think critically about a government that has been accused of committing […]

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Think of satellites as big, vulnerable IoT devices, researcher says

Posted on March 6, 2019 by Jeff Stone

Orbiting hunks of metal make it possible for billions of earthlings to benefit from marvels of the digital age, from GPS signals and weather monitoring systems to the communication protocols for credit card authorizations and other complex transactions. Humans take these satellite connections for granted, but new research suggests we’ll need to take important steps to keep it way. As of January there were at least 1,957 satellites in orbit, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, some of which are vulnerable to various levels of snooping and disruption, including jammed communications, data interception, data hijacking and outright takeovers. The issue is especially urgent now because of the coming wave of connected devices and the evolution of 5G cellular networks, said Bill Malik, vice president of infrastructure technologies at the security vendor Trend Micro, who presented research on satellite security Wednesday at the RSA cybersecurity conference. “We didn’t think about this much until the popularization of […]

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