Cyber Defense Advisors

Month: January 2025

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  • January 4, 2025

PLAYFULGHOST Delivered via Phishing and SEO Poisoning in Trojanized VPN Apps

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new malware called PLAYFULGHOST that comes with a wide range of information-gathering features like keylogging, screen capture, audio capture, remote shell, and file transfer/execution. The backdoor, according to Google’s Managed Defense team, shares functional overlaps with a known remote administration tool referred to as Gh0st RAT, which had its source […]

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  • January 4, 2025

U.S. Sanctions Chinese Cybersecurity Firm for State-Backed Hacking Campaigns

The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Friday issued sanctions against a Beijing-based cybersecurity company known as Integrity Technology Group, Incorporated for orchestrating several cyber attacks against U.S. victims. These attacks have been publicly attributed to a Chinese state-sponsored threat actor tracked as Flax Typhoon (aka Ethereal Panda or RedJuliett), which […]

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  • January 3, 2025

Friday Squid Blogging: Anniversary Post

I made my first squid post nineteen years ago this week. Between then and now, I posted something about squid every week (with maybe only a few exceptions). There is a lot out there about squid, even more if you count the other meanings of the word. Blog moderation policy. Tags: squid Sidebar photo of […]

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  • January 3, 2025

ShredOS

ShredOS is a stripped-down operating system designed to destroy data. GitHub page here.  

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  • January 3, 2025

New AI Jailbreak Method ‘Bad Likert Judge’ Boosts Attack Success Rates by Over 60%

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new jailbreak technique that could be used to get past a large language model’s (LLM) safety guardrails and produce potentially harmful or malicious responses. The multi-turn (aka many-shot) attack strategy has been codenamed Bad Likert Judge by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers Yongzhe Huang, Yang Ji, Wenjun […]

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  • January 3, 2025

LDAPNightmare PoC Exploit Crashes LSASS and Reboots Windows Domain Controllers

A proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit has been released for a now-patched security flaw impacting Windows Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) that could trigger a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. The out-of-bounds reads vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2024-49113 (CVSS score: 7.5). It was addressed by Microsoft as part of Patch Tuesday updates for December 2024, alongside CVE-2024-49112 (CVSS score: […]

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  • January 3, 2025

Critical Deadline: Update Old .NET Domains Before January 7, 2025 to Avoid Service Disruption

Microsoft has announced that it’s making an “unexpected change” to the way .NET installers and archives are distributed, requiring developers to update their production and DevOps infrastructure. “We expect that most users will not be directly affected, however, it is critical that you validate if you are affected and to watch for downtime or other […]

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  • January 3, 2025

Apple to Pay Siri Users $20 Per Device in Settlement Over Accidental Siri Privacy Violations

Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a proposed class action lawsuit that accused the iPhone maker of invading users’ privacy using its voice-activated Siri assistant. The development was first reported by Reuters. The settlement applies to U.S.-based individuals current or former owners or purchasers of a Siri-enabled device who had their confidential […]

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  • January 2, 2025

Google Is Allowing Device Fingerprinting

Lukasz Olejnik writes about device fingerprinting, and why Google’s policy change to allow it in 2025 is a major privacy setback. Tags: data collection, fingerprints, Google, identification, privacy, tracking Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.  

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