Author Archives: Zaid Shoorbajee

Russians’ stealthy ‘LoJax’ malware can infect on the firmware level

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Researchers with cybersecurity company ESET have discovered a malware campaign that is able to compromise a device’s firmware component, which they say in a report published Thursday is the first known instance of such an attack in the wild. ESET says that it found attributes in the malware that link it to the prominent Russian hacking group APT28. The malware, dubbed LoJax, can “serve as a key to the whole computer” by infecting the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) of a device, according to the report. ESET explains that firmware rootkits like LoJax have in the past been demonstrated in theory and are suspected to be in use by some governments, but haven’t been observed in the wild. This kind of malware is hard to detect and has advanced persistence properties, as it’s able to survive a complete operating system reinstall and even a hard drive replacement. If LoJax sounds […]

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Nozomi Networks raises $30 million for ICS security platforms

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Nozomi Networks, a San Francisco-based company that specializes in industrial cybersecurity, announced Thursday that it raised $30 million in its Series C funding round — yet another sign that investors see growth potential in the market for guarding industrial control systems (ICS). The company offers products that use artificial intelligence to give customers visibility into the security of their ICS networks — the technology that helps run factories, refineries and more. The two main platforms, SCADguardian and the Centeral Management Platform, allow ICS operators to keep an eye on their industrial assets and monitor them for risks and threats. ICS security is getting a lot of attention as criminal and state-backed hackers regularly threaten critical infrastructure, which involves increasingly connected operational technology networks. Successful attacks can impact the safety and livelihood of people who work at or depend on, for example, oil and gas plants. Competitors in the ICS security field include Claroty, Dragos, […]

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Darktrace raises $50 million in Series E funding, boasting $1.65 billion valuation

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Darktrace, a company that provides AI-enabled threat detection services, said on Wednesday that it has gotten a $50 million investment in its Series E funding round. Founded in 2013 by mathematicians at the University of Cambridge, Darktrace offers a suite of products that use artificial and machine learning to protect customers’ networks from cyberthreats. Founders also include intelligence experts who came from the CIA and NSA, as well as British intelligence outfits MI5 and GCHQ. Although only in business for five years, Darktrace has earned a reputation as a big player in cyberdefense, with detection and response solutions that cover enterprise and industrial networks, cloud environments and software-as-a-service apps. The funding round was led by Vitruvian Partners with participation from existing investors KKR and 1011 Ventures. “Darktrace has built a unique combination of world-class AI capabilities, deep cyber domain expertise, and a highly effective business model. This has rapidly created […]

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Source Defense raises $10 million for website supply chain solution

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Source Defense, a startup that is promising a remedy for breaches caused by flawed third-party web applications, announced Wednesday that it raised $10 million in Series A funding. The Israeli company says that it provides a first-of-its-kind solution for preventing website supply chain attacks. The company’s product sits on a customer’s website and automatically monitors access and permissions of third-party apps that operate on it. The use of third-party code for web apps on websites has been a salient risk as of late. Several companies, including Newegg, British Airways and Ticketmaster UK, have fallen victim to card skimming schemes at the hands of the threat group Magecart in recent months. The group exploits vulnerable or compromised JavaScript code that companies place on their websites, intending to use it for things like chat clients and payment tools. Source Defense says that its solution is simple to implement — ironically, by having […]

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Snyk gets $22 million for platform that tracks security flaws in open source projects

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Snyk, a startup that aims to make the use of open-source code libraries more secure, announced Tuesday that it raised $22 million in its Series B investment round. The company has a security research team that maintains a database of vulnerabilities found in open source libraries, as well as their patches. Customers using Snyk can be alerted to security flaws in the code they’re using and fix them. Snyk says it’s continuously protecting more than 140,000 projects, which account for about 580,000 vulnerabilities every month. Snyk watches code repositories on platforms like GitHub, Bitbucket and GitLab. In June, the company also announced a container vulnerability management service, entering a field where other startups are trying to specialize. With offices in London, Tel Aviv and Boston, Snyk (pronounced “snick”) boasts “over 200 large enterprise customers” and claims that its revenue has grown by a factor of five in nine months. The company says […]

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Yubico’s latest authentication keys get the jump on a ‘passwordless’ future

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Yubico, the Swedish-American company that helped popularize key-shaped physical authentication tokens, has released a new line of products geared toward passwordless logins that give users secure access to software and online services without typing anything. The company’s fifth generation of YubiKeys work with the new FIDO2 protocol in addition to other authentication methods. The result is that they “can be used alone for strong single-factor authentication, requiring no username or password to login — just tap or touch to authenticate,” Yubico said Monday. Use of FIDO2 is supported by major browsers such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge. YubiKey integration is also available with popular platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter. FIDO was developed by an alliance of technology companies to allow users to simply plug in or tap an authenticator key instead of using a static password. Companies are now slowly adopting the standard into their products. The combination of methods […]

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Cisco patches ‘critical’ credential bug in video surveillance software

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Cisco says it discovered and then issued a patch for a critical vulnerability in its Video Surveillance Manager (VSM) software, which the networking-technology giant markets to schools, airports, businesses and other facilities worldwide. The bug entails hard-coded credentials that attackers can exploit to gain unauthorized access. Cisco says the software, on certain systems, has static credentials for the root account. That means the username and password are set by default and can’t be changed by the user.  An attacker could use those credentials to get unauthorized access to the system. The root account was supposed to be disabled before Cisco installed the software on vulnerable platforms, the company said. “A successful exploit could allow the attacker to log in to the affected system and execute arbitrary commands as the root user,” Cisco’s alert says. The credentials are undocumented, so the attacker would have to somehow independently know them in order […]

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NIST estimates $250 billion economic impact from its encryption standard

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The U.S. government’s standards clearinghouse for science and technology says that an encryption standard it established in 2001 has had an economic impact of a quarter of a trillion dollars over the years, according to a report released Wednesday. The National Institute of Standards and Technology set out in 1997 to find a new encryption algorithm for use in the federal agencies to replace the Data Encryption Standard (DES), the government’s prevailing yet aging standard at the time. The result was the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), an algorithm born of collaboration from the greater cryptography community. According to the report, commissioned by NIST and prepared by RM Advisory Services, AES has added more than $250 billion in value to the economy since it became available. AES is part of the Federal Information Processing Standards, which agencies across the government use to guide their information security and interoperability. The encryption standard is […]

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Judge upholds paperless voting in Georgia, but pressures for change

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A federal judge on Monday denied a request by Georgia voters to have the state refrain from using its paperless voting machines for the midterm elections and use paper ballots statewide. Plaintiffs in the ongoing case had asked for a preliminary injunction on the the use of direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines out of concern that they are easy to hack, since they do not produce a verifiable paper record for each vote. Judge Amy Totenberg of the Northern District of Georgia said in her 46-page opinion that the burden of implementing an entirely different voting system across the state in the few weeks before Election Day outweighed the immediate security concerns associated with DREs. Totenberg nonetheless criticized the state for letting it get to this point. The judge said that the defendants “have delayed in grappling with the heightened critical cybersecurity issues of our era posed for the State’s […]

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Fidelis Cybersecurity gets $25 million investment for detection and response services

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Fidelis Cybersecurity, a company that specializes in automated detection and response, announced Tuesday that it secured $25 million in investor funding. Fidelis has been around since 2002, but the company says the investment is an endorsement of its products and services in an environment where threats are designed “designed to bypass preventive, perimeter-based defenses.” In particular, the company says the investment will go toward scaling its 24×7 Fidelis MDR service, which it announced earlier this year. The service is designed to complement its flagship products by providing round-the-clock access to security experts who can respond to immediate threats. The funding will also go toward strengthening the company’s main security operations platform, Fidelis Elevate, which gives enterprises automated detection and response capabilities on their networks and endpoints. “We are making significant investments in innovation to accelerate how security operations and incident response teams react to, manage and hunt for threats,” said […]

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