Cyber Defense Advisors

Year: 2024

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  • February 8, 2024

Tooth be told: Toothbrush DDoS attack claim was lost in translation, claims Fortinet

After hundreds of media outlets worldwide repeated the false claim that a botnet of three million toothbrushes attacked a Swiss company, the cybersecurity firm at the centre of the story has now issued a statement. 

Cyber News
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  • February 8, 2024

Kimsuky’s New Golang Stealer ‘Troll’ and ‘GoBear’ Backdoor Target South Korea

The North Korea-linked nation-state actor known as Kimsuky is suspected of using a previously undocumented Golang-based information stealer called Troll Stealer. The malware steals “SSH, FileZilla, C drive files/directories, browsers, system information, [and] screen captures” from infected systems, South Korean cybersecurity company S2W said in a new technical report. Troll Stealer’s links to Kimsuky stem […]

Cyber News
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  • February 8, 2024

Critical Patches Released for New Flaws in Cisco, Fortinet, VMware Products

Cisco, Fortinet, and VMware have released security fixes for multiple security vulnerabilities, including critical weaknesses that could be exploited to perform arbitrary actions on affected devices. The first set from Cisco consists of three flaws – CVE-2024-20252 and CVE-2024-20254 (CVSS score: 9.6) and CVE-2024-20255 (CVSS score: 8.2) – impacting Cisco Expressway Series that could allow […]

Cyber News
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  • February 8, 2024

Smashing Security podcast #358: Hong Kong hijinks, pig butchers, and poor ransomware gangs

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? A company in Hong Kong suffers a sophisticated deepfake duping, be one your guard from pig butchers as Valentine’s Day approaches, and spare a moment to feel sorry for poor ransomware gangs. All this and much much more is discussed in the latest edition of the […]

Cyber News
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  • February 7, 2024

The toothbrush DDoS attack: How misinformation spreads in the cybersecurity world

No, three million smart toothbrushes didn’t launch a DDoS attack against a Swiss company. 

Cyber News
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  • February 7, 2024

From Cybercrime Saul Goodman to the Russian GRU

In 2021, the exclusive Russian cybercrime forum Mazafaka was hacked. The leaked user database shows one of the forum’s founders was an attorney who advised Russia’s top hackers on the legal risks of their work, and what to do if they got caught. A review of this user’s hacker identities shows that during his time […]

Cyber News
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  • February 7, 2024

After FBI Takedown, KV-Botnet Operators Shift Tactics in Attempt to Bounce Back

The threat actors behind the KV-botnet made “behavioral changes” to the malicious network as U.S. law enforcement began issuing commands to neutralize the activity. KV-botnet is the name given to a network of compromised small office and home office (SOHO) routers and firewall devices across the world, with one specific cluster acting as a covert […]

Cyber News
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  • February 7, 2024

Critical Boot Loader Vulnerability in Shim Impacts Nearly All Linux Distros

The maintainers of shim have released version 15.8 to address six security flaws, including a critical bug that could pave the way for remote code execution under specific circumstances. Tracked as CVE-2023-40547 (CVSS score: 9.8), the vulnerability could be exploited to achieve a Secure Boot bypass. Bill Demirkapi of the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) […]

Cyber News
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  • February 7, 2024

Teaching LLMs to Be Deceptive

Interesting research: “Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training“: Abstract: Humans are capable of strategically deceptive behavior: behaving helpfully in most situations, but then behaving very differently in order to pursue alternative objectives when given the opportunity. If an AI system learned such a deceptive strategy, could we detect it and remove […]

Cyber News