U.S. drugmaker Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech said on Wednesday that documents related to development of their COVID-19 vaccine had been ‘unlawfully accessed’ in a cyberattack on Europe’s medicines regulator. The European Medicines Agency (EMA), which assesses medicines and vaccines for the European Union, said hours earlier it had been targeted in a cyberattack. It gave no further details. It was not immediately clear when or how the attack took place, who was responsible or what other information may have been compromised.…

Earlier this year, Apple patched one of the most breathtaking iPhone vulnerabilities ever: a memory corruption bug in the iOS kernel that gave attackers remote access to the entire device—over Wi-Fi, with no user interaction required at all. Oh, and exploits were wormable—meaning radio-proximity exploits could spread from one nearby device to another, once again, with no user interaction needed. This Wi-Fi packet of death exploit was devised by Ian Beer, a researcher at Project Zero, Google’s vulnerability research arm.…

Operation Disruptor has led to a wave of arrests and seizures, but the dark web drug market has bounced back before. It’s one of the largest global dark web takedowns to date: 179 arrests spread across six countries; 500 kilograms of drugs seized; $6.5 million in cash and cryptocurrency confiscated. And while it was announced this morning, Operation Disruptor traces its roots back to May 3, 2019. That’s the day that German police seized Wall Street Market, the popular underground bazaar that gave international authorities everything they needed to upend the dark web drug trade.…

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has sent out a security alert warning that threat actors are abusing misconfigured SonarQube applications to access and steal source code repositories from US government agencies and private businesses. US officials talk about all the methods the Chinese government and its agents have been using to target US companies and universities to steal intellectual property. Intrusions have taken place since at least April 2020, the FBI said inan alertsent out last month and made public this week on its website.…

Companies House has forced a company to change its name after it belatedly realised it could pose a security risk. The company now legally known as “THAT COMPANY WHOSE NAME USED TO CONTAIN HTML SCRIPT TAGS LTD” was set up by a British software engineer, who says he did it purely because he thought it would be “a fun playful name” for his consulting business. He now says he didn’t realise that Companies House was actually vulnerable to the extremely simple technique he used, known as “cross-site scripting”, which allows an attacker to run code from one website on another.…

A code error in the NHS Covid-19 app meant users had to be next to a highly infectious patient for five times as long as the NHS had decided was risky before being instructed to self-isolate, the Guardian has learned. Source: theguardian.com…

Tesla’s Autopilot system relies on vision rather than LIDAR, which means it can be tricked by messages on billboards and projections created by hackers. Security researchers have demonstrated how Tesla’s Autopilot driver-assistance systems can be tricked into changing speed, swerving or stopping abruptly, simply by projecting fake road signs or virtual objects in front of them. Their hacks worked on both a Tesla running HW3, which is the latest version of the company’s Autopilot driver-assistance system, and the previous generation, HW2.…

Guardicore has discovered FritzFrog, a sophisticated peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet which has been actively breaching SSH servers since January 2020. Golang-Based Malware: FritzFrog executes a worm malware which is written in Golang, and is modular, multi-threaded and fileless, leaving no trace on the infected machine’s disk. Actively Targeting Government, Education, Finance and more: FritzFrog has attempted to brute force and propagate to tens of millions of IP addresses of governmental offices, educational institutions, medical centers, banks and numerous telecom companies.…

I haven’t written an “attack of the week” post in a while, and it’s been bumming me out. This is not because there’s been a lack of attacks, but mostly because there hasn’t been an attack on something sufficiently widely-used that it can rouse me out of my blogging torpor. But today brings a beautiful attack called ReVoLTE, on a set of protocols that I particularly love to see get broken: namely, cellular protocols.…

Gangs of cybercriminals forced British companies to pay out more than £200 million in ransoms last year, experts have revealed. The extortionists, many from Russia or Eastern European countries, are targeting well-known businesses with malicious software and then charging them tens of millions of pounds to regain access to networks. Companies fearful of public embarrassment, lost data and fines from regulators are now showing “more willingness to pay the ransom”, experts said.…

Cybercrime rewards innovative organizations. These can innovate at the tactical level (e.g. new or updated tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP)), the strategic level (e.g. new monetisation methods), or at the operational level—the management of resources and personnel to achieve strategic objectives. This is operational art. Source: okta.com…

A spam group has picked up a pretty clever trick that has allowed it to bypass email filters and security systems and land in more inboxes than usual. The trick relies on a quirk inRFC791— a standard that describes the Internet Protocol (IP). Among the various technical details, RFC791 is also the standard that describes how IP addresses look. We mostly know them in their most prevalent form of dotted-decimal address (for example, 192.…

Below you can find the most important security and privacy features your iOS device now has that it didn’t have before. Make sure you check them as soon as you’ve got iOS 14 on your iPhone or iPad. Apps on iOS have to explicitly ask for your permission to use the camera and microphone, and from iOS 14 onwards, you’ll also see an indicator dot in the top right of the screen when these functions are being used.…

Prosecutors allege the group paid handsome bribes to give clients a competitive advantage. According to the indictment, issued by a Grand Jury in the Western District of Washington, the six conspired to pay Amazon employees over $100,000 to secure an ‘unfair competitive advantage’ on Amazon Marketplace. The bribery bill is steep, but in return, the fraud carried a commercial worth and sales revenue of up to $100 million, the DoJ claims.…

The incident marks the first recorded casualty as a consequence of cyberattacks on critical healthcare facilities, which has ramped up in recent months. The attack, which exploited a Citrix ADCCVE-2019-19781vulnerability to cripple the hospital systems on September 10, is said to have been ‘misdirected’ in that it was originally intended for Heinrich Heine University, according to an extortion note left by the perpetrators. After law enforcement contacted the threat actors and informed them that they had encrypted a hospital, the operators behind the attack withdrew the ransom demand and provided the decryption key.…

Updated Switzerland-based IT consultant Tillie Kottmann on Thursday published a trove of confidential Intel technical material, code, and documents related to various processors and chipsets. A spokesperson for Intel told us the information was likely taken from its Resource and Design Center, which is a private library of resources for computer manufacturers and the like to build systems using Intel’s silicon. Access to this center is not open to the public as its content is intended to be used, for instance, to craft firmware and design motherboards compatible with Chipzilla’s microprocessors.…

A Twitter hacking scheme that targeted political, corporate and cultural elites this week began with a teasing message between two hackers late Tuesday on the online messaging platform Discord. “yoo bro,” wrote a user named “Kirk,” according to a screenshot of the conversation shared with The New York Times. “i work at twitter / don’t show this to anyone / seriously. ”He then demonstrated that he could take control of valuable Twitter accounts — the sort of thing that would require insider access to the company’s computer network.…

The Senate Intelligence Committee wants the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense to create a comprehensive, unclassified report concerning unidentified aerial phenomena upon the passing of a Senate appropriations bill initiated by Senator Marco Rubio, Motherboard has learned. A recent Senate Intelligence Committee report on the bill, which concerns funding the government’s intelligence activities, recommended its passing. It also asked for a “detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data and intelligence reporting collected or held by the Office of Naval Intelligence, including data and intelligence reporting held by the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.…

Malwarebytes experts observed crooks hiding a software skimmer in the EXIF metadata of an image that was surreptitiously loaded by compromised online stores. While investigating a Magecart attack, experts found an e-skimmer code hidden in the EXIF metadata of an image file and surreptitiously loaded by compromised online stores. The malicious script detected by the researchers was loaded from an e-store running the WooCommerce plugin for WordPress. The scripts allow threat actors to steal credit card data and other sensitive information that users enter on compromised e-commerce websites, then to send the collected info to the attackers.…

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terrorist organization is reportedly moving away from Bitcoin (BTC) with ISIS-associated news website ditching the world’s oldest crypto and moving on with monero (XMR) as a currency of choice for public donations, claims blockchain intelligence company Whitestream. According to Whitestream, a website affiliated with the jihadist movement no longer accepts bitcoin and has moved on with monero donations as of June 21.…