Cyber Defense Advisors

Year: 2024

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  • February 15, 2024

On the Insecurity of Software Bloat

Good essay on software bloat and the insecurities it causes. The world ships too much code, most of it by third parties, sometimes unintended, most of it uninspected. Because of this, there is a huge attack surface full of mediocre code. Efforts are ongoing to improve the quality of code itself, but many exploits are […]

Cyber News
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  • February 15, 2024

How Nation-State Actors Target Your Business: New Research Exposes Major SaaS Vulnerabilities

With many of the highly publicized 2023 cyber attacks revolving around one or more SaaS applications, SaaS has become a cause for genuine concern in many boardroom discussions. More so than ever, considering that GenAI applications are, in fact, SaaS applications. Wing Security (Wing), a SaaS security company, conducted an analysis of 493 SaaS-using companies […]

Cyber News
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  • February 15, 2024

North Korea successfully hacks email of South Korean President’s aide, gains access to sensitive information

The office of South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol has confirmed that North Korea hacked into the personal emails of one of its staff members. Read more in my article on the Hot for Security blog. 

Cyber News
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  • February 15, 2024

Chinese Hackers Using Deepfakes in Advanced Mobile Banking Malware Attacks

A Chinese-speaking threat actor codenamed GoldFactory has been attributed to the development of highly sophisticated banking trojans, including a previously undocumented iOS malware called GoldPickaxe that’s capable of harvesting identity documents, facial recognition data, and intercepting SMS. “The GoldPickaxe family is available for both iOS and Android platforms,” Singapore-headquartered Group-IB said in an extensive report […]

Cyber News
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  • February 15, 2024

Critical Exchange Server Flaw (CVE-2024-21410) Under Active Exploitation

Microsoft on Wednesday acknowledged that a newly disclosed critical security flaw in Exchange Server has been actively exploited in the wild, a day after it released fixes for the vulnerability as part of its Patch Tuesday updates. Tracked as CVE-2024-21410 (CVSS score: 9.8), the issue has been described as a case of privilege escalation impacting […]

Cyber News
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  • February 15, 2024

Smashing Security podcast #359: Declaring war on ransomware gangs, mobile muddles, and AI religion

Holy mackerel! AI is jumping on the religion bandwagon, ransomware gangs target hospitals, and what’s happened to your old mobile phone number? All this and much much more is discussed in the latest edition of the “Smashing Security” podcast by cybersecurity veterans Graham Cluley and Carole Theriault, joined this week by “Ransomware Sommelier” Allan Liska. 

Cyber News
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  • February 14, 2024

See me speak at webinar about data security for financial services

Join me and Metomic CEO Richard Vibert for a discussion about some of the cybersecurity challenges faced by the financial services industry, and how you can best protect your organisations. Sign up now for the free event on February 29 2024. 

Cyber News
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  • February 14, 2024

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I’m speaking at the Munich Security Conference (MSC) 2024 in Munich, Germany, on Friday, February 16, 2024. I’m giving a keynote on “AI and Trust” at Generative AI, Free Speech, & Public Discourse. The symposium will be held at Columbia University […]

Cyber News
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  • February 14, 2024

U.S. Internet Leaked Years of Internal, Customer Emails

The Minnesota-based Internet provider U.S. Internet Corp. has a business unit called Securence, which specializes in providing filtered, secure email services to businesses, educational institutions and government agencies worldwide. But until it was notified last week, U.S. Internet was publishing more than a decade’s worth of its internal email — and that of thousands of […]

Cyber News