01 Dec 2023
By Mary

InfoSec News Nuggets 12/01/2023

  Suspected China-based hackers target Uzbekistan gov’t, South Koreans, Cisco says  Hackers believed to be based in China are targeting the Uzbekistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as people in South Korea, with a strain of malware called SugarGh0st, according to a new report. Cisco published a blog on Thursday spotlighting the malware — which they believe is a variant of Gh0st RAT, an infamous tool used for more than a decade by a range…
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16 May 2023
By Mary

InfoSec News Nuggets 05/16/2023

Airline exposes passenger info to others due to a 'technical error'  airBaltic, Latvia's flag carrier has acknowledged that a 'technical error' exposed reservation details of some of its passengers to other airBaltic passengers. Passengers also reported receiving unexpected emails which addressed them by the name of another customer. The Riga-based airline, incorporated as AS Air Baltic Corporation operates flights to 80 destinations and is 97% government-owned. Although the air carrier says the leak impacts a small percentage of its customers…
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09 May 2023
By Mary

InfoSec News Nuggets 05/09/2023

WhatsApp could disappear from UK over privacy concerns, ministers told  The UK government risks sleepwalking into a confrontation with WhatsApp that could lead to the messaging app disappearing from Britain, ministers have been warned, with options for an amicable resolution fast running out. At the centre of the row is the online safety bill, a vast piece of legislation that will touch on almost every aspect of online life in Britain. More than four years in the making, with eight…
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23 Jan 2023
By Mary

InfoSec News Nuggets 01/23/2023

EU watchdogs agree on how to handle certain cookie consent dark patterns  Cookie consent banners that use blatant design tricks to try to manipulate web users into agreeing to hand over their data for behavioral advertising, instead of giving people a free and fair choice to refuse this kind of creepy tracking, are facing a coordinated pushback from the European Union’s data protection regulators. A taskforce of several DPAs, led by France’s CNIL along with Austria’s…
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25 Nov 2022
By Mary

InfoSec News Nuggets 11/25/2022

U.S. govt seizes domains used in 'pig butchering' scams For the first time, the U.S. Department of Justice seized seven domains that hosted websites linked to "pig butchering" scams, where fraudsters trick victims of romance scams into investing in cryptocurrency via fake investment platforms. The list of domains seized includes simexcbr.com, simexlua.com, simexwim.com, simexarts.com, simexrue.com, simexvtn.com, and simexbiz.com, all of them spoofing the one used by the Singapore International Monetary Exchange (SIMEX). While originating from…
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03 Jun 2022
By Mary

InfoSec News Nuggets 06/03/2022

Hackers steal WhatsApp accounts using call forwarding trick There’s a trick that allows attackers to hijack a victim’s WhatsApp account and gain access to personal messages and contact list. The method relies on the mobile carriers’ automated service to forward calls to a different phone number, and WhatsApp’s option to send a one-time password (OTP) verification code via voice call. Rahul Sasi, the founder and CEO of digital risk protection company CloudSEK, posted some details…
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29 Apr 2022
By Mary

InfoSec News Nuggets 04/29/2022

Millions of Java Apps Remain Vulnerable to Log4Shell Four months after the discovery of the zero-day Log4Shell critical flaw, millions of Java applications still remain vulnerable to compromise, researchers have found. Researchers at security firm Rezilion analyzed the current potential attack surface for the vulnerability in the popular open-source Apache Log4j framework that threatened to break the internet when it was discovered in December. The flaw in the ubiquitous Java logging library Apache Log4j is easily exploitable and…
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13 Sep 2021
By Mary

InfoSec News Nuggets 09/13/2021

Grayfly: Chinese Threat Actor Uses Newly-discovered Sidewalk Malware Symantec, part of Broadcom Software, has linked the recently discovered Sidewalk backdoor to the China-linked Grayfly espionage group. The malware, which is related to the older Crosswalk backdoor (Backdoor.Motnug) has been deployed in recent Grayfly campaigns against a number of organizations in Taiwan, Vietnam, the United States, and Mexico. A feature of this recent campaign was that a large number of targets were in the telecoms sector. The…
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11 Aug 2021
By Mary

InfoSec News Nuggets 08/11/2021

WhatsApp CEO calls out Apple over Child Safety tools announcement Ever since Apple introduced the new protection tools for child safety this week, it instantly divided opinions. While some think this is a huge deal to protect children, others believe it will just create a backdoor for governments to access people’s iPhones. Now, WhatsApp CEO Will Cathcart is the latest to join those who think the new Child Safety tools from Apple could be bad. It’s not…
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02 Jun 2021
By Mary

InfoSec News Nuggets 06/02/2021

1 - Hackers are targeting employees returning to the post-COVID office With COVID-19 restrictions lifting and employees starting to make their way back into offices, hackers are being forced to change tack. While remote workers have been scammers’ main target for the past 18 months due to the mass shift to home working necessitated by the pandemic, a new phishing campaign is attempting to exploit those who have started to return to the physical workplace.…
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22 Feb 2021
By Mary

InfoSec News Nuggets 02/22/2021

Clubhouse under scrutiny for sending data to Chinese servers Clubhouse was launched about a year ago and was initially only used by Silicon Valley’s rich and famous. It is different from other social media in that it focuses on the spoken word. Clubhouse members can enter virtual rooms to listen in or participate in live conversations. The conversations can only be joined when they are live and the people having the conversation determine who is…
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07 Jan 2021
By Mary

InfoSec News Nuggets 01/07/2021

Watch a Robot Dog Learn How to Deftly Fend Off a Human STUDY HARD ENOUGH, kids, and maybe one day you’ll grow up to be a professional robot fighter. A few years ago, Boston Dynamics set the standard for the field by having people wielding hockey sticks try to keep Spot the quadrupedal robot from opening a door. Previously, in 2015, the far-out federal research agency Darpa hosted a challenge in which it forced clumsy humanoid robots to…
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05 Nov 2020
By Mary

InfoSec News Nuggets 11/05/2020

WhatsApp now lets you post ephemeral messages, which disappear after 7 days Facebook recently announced that WhatsApp passed the whopping milestone of 100 billion messages sent per day, but not everyone wants those chats to stick around forever. Now, Facebook’s wildly popular messaging app with 2 billion users is adding a feature to give people more control on how their words and pictures live within the app. From today, messages — including photos and videos…
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19 Mar 2020
By Mary

InfoSec News Nuggets 3/19/2020

1 - Brave accuses Google of using 'hopelessly vague' privacy policies that breach GDPR Google has been accused of breaching one of the General Data Protection Regulation's (GDPR) principles surrounding consent that requires companies to provide a specific purpose for collecting and processing user personal data.  In a complaint [PDF] filed to the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), Chromium-based browser Brave alleges that Google's privacy policy infringes the GDPR "purpose limitation" principle as it "does not transparently…
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04 Oct 2019
By Mary

InfoSec News Nuggets 10/04/2019

Researchers Say They Uncovered Uzbekistan Hacking Operations Due to Spectacularly Bad OPSEC Nation-state spy agencies are only as good as their operational security—the care they take to keep their digital spy operations from being discovered. But occasionally a government threat actor appears on the scene that gets it all wrong. This is the case with a threat actor recently discovered by Kaspersky Lab that it’s calling SandCat—believed to be Uzbekistan’s repressive and much-feared intelligence agency, the State…
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