Cyber Defense Advisors

Month: March 2024

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  • March 22, 2024

Google Pays $10M in Bug Bounties in 2023

BleepingComputer has the details. It’s $2M less than in 2022, but it’s still a lot. The highest reward for a vulnerability report in 2023 was $113,337, while the total tally since the program’s launch in 2010 has reached $59 million. For Android, the world’s most popular and widely used mobile operating system, the program awarded […]

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  • March 22, 2024

U.S. Justice Department Sues Apple Over Monopoly and Messaging Security

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), along with 16 other state and district attorneys general, on Thursday accused Apple of illegally maintaining a monopoly over smartphones, thereby undermining, among other things, the security and privacy of users when messaging non-iPhone users. “Apple wraps itself in a cloak of privacy, security, and consumer preferences to justify […]

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  • March 22, 2024

Russian Hackers May Have Targeted Ukrainian Telecoms with Upgraded ‘AcidPour’ Malware

The data wiping malware called AcidPour may have been deployed in attacks targeting four telecom providers in Ukraine, new findings from SentinelOne show. The cybersecurity firm also confirmed connections between the malware and AcidRain, tying it to threat activity clusters associated with Russian military intelligence. “AcidPour’s expanded capabilities would enable it to better disable embedded […]

Cyber News
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  • March 21, 2024

Russia Hackers Using TinyTurla-NG to Breach European NGO’s Systems

The Russia-linked threat actor known as Turla infected several systems belonging to an unnamed European non-governmental organization (NGO) in order to deploy a backdoor called TinyTurla-NG (TTNG). “The attackers compromised the first system, established persistence and added exclusions to antivirus products running on these endpoints as part of their preliminary post-compromise actions,” Cisco Talos said […]

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  • March 21, 2024

Over 800 npm Packages Found with Discrepancies, 18 Exploit ‘Manifest Confusion’

New research has discovered over 800 packages in the npm registry which have discrepancies from their registry entries, out of which 18 have been found to exploit a technique called manifest confusion. The findings come from cybersecurity firm JFrog, which said the issue could be exploited by threat actors to trick developers into running malicious […]

Cyber News
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  • March 21, 2024

AndroxGh0st Malware Targets Laravel Apps to Steal Cloud Credentials

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a tool referred to as AndroxGh0st that’s used to target Laravel applications and steal sensitive data. “It works by scanning and taking out important information from .env files, revealing login details linked to AWS and Twilio,” Juniper Threat Labs researcher Kashinath T Pattan said. “Classified as an SMTP cracker, […]

Cyber News
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  • March 21, 2024

How to Accelerate Vendor Risk Assessments in the Age of SaaS Sprawl

In today’s digital-first business environment dominated by SaaS applications, organizations increasingly depend on third-party vendors for essential cloud services and software solutions. As more vendors and services are added to the mix, the complexity and potential vulnerabilities within the SaaS supply chain snowball quickly. That’s why effective vendor risk management (VRM) is a critical strategy […]

Cyber News
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  • March 21, 2024

Public AI as an Alternative to Corporate AI

This mini-essay was my contribution to a round table on Power and Governance in the Age of AI.  It’s nothing I haven’t said here before, but for anyone who hasn’t read my longer essays on the topic, it’s a shorter introduction. The increasingly centralized control of AI is an ominous sign. When tech billionaires and […]

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  • March 21, 2024

GitHub Launches AI-Powered Autofix Tool to Assist Devs in Patching Security Flaws

GitHub on Wednesday announced that it’s making available a feature called code scanning autofix in public beta for all Advanced Security customers to provide targeted recommendations in an effort to avoid introducing new security issues. “Powered by GitHub Copilot and CodeQL, code scanning autofix covers more than 90% of alert types in JavaScript, Typescript, Java, […]

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