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October 20, 2022 by Vertical Axion
After a source code leak was posted by an unidentified third party on 4chan and GitHub last week, the technology giant Intel has confirmed that confidential source code related to its Alder Lake CPUs has been leaked. The disclosed information comprises UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) code for the company’s 12th-generation CPUs that were released […]
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October 18, 2022 by Vertical Axion
Turnstile, an ambitious new project from Cloudflare, aims to do away with the CAPTCHAs that are now being used on the internet to confirm users are not robots. Turnstile utilizes a revolving set of “browser challenges” to verify that visits to a website are not, in fact, bots. This service is free for all website […]
October 17, 2022 by Vertical Axion
Some major U.S. airports’ websites were inaccessible early on Monday, October 10, 2022, due to a coordinated denial-of-service assault orchestrated by professional hackers. However, officials said flights were unaffected. The assaults, in which participants bombard sites with garbage data, were planned by a mysterious organization named Killnet. The group posted a target list on its […]
October 15, 2022 by Vertical Axion
On October 4th, 2022 a cybersecurity incident has disrupted CommonSpirit Hospitals. With more than 150,000 employees, 20,000 physicians, and serving 21 million patients, CommonSpirit Hospitals is the second-largest nonprofit hospital system in the nation. In 21 states, CommonSpirit operates more than 1,000 care sites and 140 hospitals. CommonSpirit Hospitals announced it is investigating an “IT […]
October 13, 2022 by Vertical Axion
This year, security experts have found three updated versions of Prilex malware that target point-of-sale systems. In 2014, Prilex was a type of malware that targeted ATMs. It switched to PoS (point of sale) devices in 2016, but it wasn’t until 2020 that the malware reached its peak. After that, it faded away in 2021. […]
September 30, 2022 by Vertical Axion
Recently, researchers at Mitiga have sounded the alarm about a new Business Email Compromise (BEC) campaign. They discovered evidence of the campaign responding to another incident and have watched the campaign grow in scope and scale over time. Here’s how the attack works: The individual targeted by the campaign receives an email that appears to […]
September 29, 2022 by Vertical Axion
Based on a recent survey conducted by the folks at Titaniam, a solid majority of organizations have robust security tools in place. Yet nearly 40 percent of them have fallen victim to a ransomware attack in the past year. How can this be? With conventional tools in place, how can this still be happening? The […]
September 28, 2022 by Vertical Axion
In June, Wiz engineers discovered and reported #AttachMe, a critical cloud isolation flaw in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Due to its potential to affect all OCI customers, the #AttachMe cloud vulnerability is one of the most severe vulnerabilities discovered to date. The majority of the time, cloud isolation flaws only impact a single cloud service. […]
September 26, 2022 by Vertical Axion
DuckDuckGo has a reputation for protecting the privacy of its users far more than most other companies. Last year, the tiny search engine announced that they were experimenting with a free service designed to dodge email trackers as a means of further protecting the privacy of its users. The company’s Email Protection service works by […]
September 23, 2022 by Vertical Axion
Microsoft Teams is a part of the 365 product family and is used by more than 270 million people for exchanging text messages, videoconferencing, and file storage. In August of 2022, the team at Vectra Protect discovered a post-exploitation vulnerability in the plaintext storage disk used by Microsoft Teams while conducting research for a client. […]
September 22, 2022 by Vertical Axion
Lenovo issued a security notice informing customers of multiple serious BIOS vulnerabilities affecting hundreds of Lenovo devices across various models (Desktop, All in One, IdeaCentre, Legion, ThinkCentre, ThinkPad, ThinkAgile, ThinkStation, ThinkSystem). Exploiting the vulnerabilities might result in the disclosure of sensitive information, an increase in privileges, a denial of service, and possibly even the execution […]
September 21, 2022 by Vertical Axion
An unknown hacker, who claims to be eighteen years old, acquired administrative access to Uber’s corporate network and proprietary internal tools on Thursday, September 15, 2022. On September 15, 2022, at 6:25 pm PT, Uber issued a statement on Twitter that it was “responding to a cybersecurity incident.” An attacker gained access to the account […]
September 20, 2022 by Vertical Axion
Tech giant Google recently announced that it’s closing the doors on its IoT Core service. Their stated reason for doing so was that their strategic partners can better manage customers’ IoT services and devices. Time will tell if the company’s decision was a good one. Another tech giant, Microsoft, is wasting no time and is […]
September 17, 2022 by Vertical Axion
Smaller companies often struggle to develop and invest in robust IT security systems, which can leave them relatively more vulnerable to cyber attacks. If that’s the situation you’re in and you’re trying to decide what to invest in and where to use the money that you have to spend on IT security, here’s a quick […]
September 15, 2022 by Vertical Axion
Even if you don’t consistently install Microsoft’s security patches as soon as they’re released, the September 2022 patch released this week deserves immediate attention. Dozens of bugs, flaws, and vulnerabilities were addressed in this iteration, including fixes for: *30 Remote Code Execution vulnerabilities 18 Elevation of Privilege vulnerabilities 16 Edge/Chromium vulnerabilities 7 Information Disclosure […]
September 14, 2022 by Vertical Axion
Hackers are increasingly adopting practices that legitimate business owners will immediately recognize. Recently, a new PhaaS (Phishing as a Service) operation has surfaced that specifically targets major banks. These banks include Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank, Capital One, PNC, US Bank, Lloyds Bank, Santander, and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Snarkily named “Robin Banks,” […]
September 9, 2022 by Vertical Axion
A small but important feature was recently incorporated by the Windows 11 design team. A new Account Lockout Policy enabled by default has been added. This policy automatically locks user accounts (including Admin accounts) after ten failed sign-in attempts. The account remains in a locked state for ten minutes, requiring users to wait that amount […]
September 8, 2022 by Vertical Axion
There’s a new threat to be aware of if you own an android device. Microsoft recently warned that their researchers had spotted a new toll fraud malware strain wreaking havoc in the Android ecosystem. Toll fraud is a form of billing fraud. It is a scheme whereby bad actors attempt to trick unsuspecting victims into […]
September 6, 2022 by Vertical Axion
Researchers at Defiant authored the popular Wordfence security solution for WordPress users and they have detected a massive campaign that has seen hackers actively scanning for websites employing the Kaswara Modern WPBakery Page Builder plugin. The plugin was recently abandoned by the creative team behind it before receiving a patch for a critical security flaw. […]
September 2, 2022 by Vertical Axion
If you eat out or are in the habit of ordering take-out on a regular basis, be aware. Recently, a large, well-organized web-skimming campaign has been uncovered that allowed hackers to swipe the payment card details for more than 300 restaurants, impacting more than 50,000 customers. Web-skimmers are sometimes called Magecart malware and they are […]
August 31, 2022 by Vertical Axion
According to ongoing research by Group-IB, a massive phishing campaign is currently underway. This is a campaign that has impacted no less than 130 organizations across a broad range of industries. These include but are not limited to professional recruiting firms and companies connected to finance and technology. Some of the companies targeted include giants […]
August 30, 2022 by Vertical Axion
Do you make use of the “MyChart” portal to refill prescriptions, contact your healthcare providers or make appointments? If so, you should know that recently, the healthcare giant Novant disclosed a data breach that impacted more than 1.3 million patients. Impacted patients had their personal information collected by a Meta Pixel ad tracking script. Meta […]
August 29, 2022 by Vertical Axion
Using different passwords on every website and storing them in a secure password manager is a standard best practice in data security. It’s generally good advice, but what happens when the makers of password vaults get hacked? That’s what the more than twenty-five million users of LastPass are now finding out. LastPass is one of […]
August 27, 2022 by Vertical Axion
Do you have the Kali Linux distribution running on one of the machines you own? If you’re not sure what that is, then you almost certainly don’t. Kali is a Linux distro used mostly by “ethical hackers” who use it mainly to perform security audits, cybersecurity research, penetration testing and the like. Offensive Security has […]
