Cyber Defense Advisors

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‘Tis the Season for Holiday Scams

This time of year, the air not only gets chillier but a bit cheerier for everyone … including online scammers. Holiday scams are a quick way to make a buck, and cybercriminals employ several holiday-themed schemes to weasel money and personally identifiable information (PII) from gift givers.  Here are three common holiday scams to watch […]

Cyber News, Cyber Threat Trends
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  • December 3, 2022

Google Rolls Out New Chrome Browser Update to Patch Yet Another Zero-Day Vulnerability

Search giant Google on Friday released an out-of-band security update to fix a new actively exploited zero-day flaw in its Chrome web browser. The high-severity flaw, tracked as CVE-2022-4262, concerns a type confusion bug in the V8 JavaScript engine. Clement Lecigne of Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has been credited with reporting the issue on November […]

Cyber News, Cyber Threat Trends
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  • December 2, 2022

Apple pushes out iOS security update that’s more tight-lipped than ever

We grabbed the update, based on no information at all, just in case we came across a reason to advise you not to. So far, so good…

Cyber News, Cyber Threat Trends

Friday Squid Blogging: Legend of the Indiana Oil-Pit Squid

At a GMC plant. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here.

Cyber News, Cyber Threat Trends

Existential Risk and the Fermi Paradox

We know that complexity is the worst enemy of security, because it makes attack easier and defense harder. This becomes catastrophic as the effects of that attack become greater. In A Hacker’s Mind (coming in February 2023), I write: Our societal systems, in general, may have grown fairer and more just over the centuries, but […]

Cyber News, Cyber Threat Trends
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  • December 2, 2022

Researchers Disclose Supply-Chain Flaw Affecting IBM Cloud Databases for PostgreSQL

IBM has fixed a high-severity security vulnerability affecting its Cloud Databases (ICD) for PostgreSQL product that could be potentially exploited to tamper with internal repositories and run unauthorized code. The privilege escalation flaw (CVSS score: 8.8), dubbed “Hell’s Keychain” by cloud security firm Wiz, has been described as a “first-of-its-kind supply-chain attack vector impacting a

Cyber News, Cyber Threat Trends
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  • December 2, 2022

The Value of Old Systems

Old technology solutions – every organization has a few of them tucked away somewhere.  It could be an old and unsupported storage system or a tape library holding the still-functional backups from over 10 years ago.  This is a common scenario with software too. For example, consider an accounting software suite that was extremely expensive […]

Cyber News, Cyber Threat Trends
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  • December 2, 2022

CISA Warns of Multiple Critical Vulnerabilities Affecting Mitsubishi Electric PLCs

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) this week released an Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisory warning of multiple vulnerabilities in Mitsubishi Electric GX Works3 engineering software. “Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow unauthorized users to gain access to the MELSEC iQ-R/F/L series CPU modules and the MELSEC iQ-R series OPC UA server

Cyber News, Cyber Threat Trends
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  • December 2, 2022

Hackers Sign Android Malware Apps with Compromised Platform Certificates

Platform certificates used by Android smartphone vendors like Samsung, LG, and MediaTek have been found to be abused to sign malicious apps. The findings were first discovered and reported by Google reverse engineer Łukasz Siewierski on Thursday. “A platform certificate is the application signing certificate used to sign the ‘android’ application on the system image,” a report […]

Cyber News, Cyber Threat Trends