Multinational technology giant Fujitsu confirmed a cyberattack in a statement Friday, and warned that hackers may have stolen personal data and customer information. From a report: "We confirmed the presence of malware on multiple work computers at our company, and as a result of an internal investigation, we discovered that files containing personal information and customer information could be illegally taken out," said Fujitsu in its statement on its website, translated from Japanese. Fujitsu said it disconnected the affected systems from its network, and is investigating how its network was compromised by malware and "whether information has been leaked." The tech conglomerate did not specify what kind of malware was used, or the nature of the cyberattack. Fujitsu also did not say what kind of personal information may have been stolen, or who the personal information pertains to -- such as its employees, corporate customers, or citizens whose governments use the company's technologies.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Biden administration on Tuesday warned the nation's governors that drinking water and wastewater utilities in their states are facing "disabling cyberattacks" by hostile foreign nations that are targeting mission-critical plant operations. "Disabling cyberattacks are striking water and wastewater systems throughout the United States," Jake Sullivan, assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, and Michael S. Regan, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, wrote in a letter. "These attacks have the potential to disrupt the critical lifeline of clean and safe drinking water, as well as impose significant costs on affected communities." [...] "Drinking water and wastewater systems are an attractive target for cyberattacks because they are a lifeline critical infrastructure sector but often lack the resources and technical capacity to adopt rigorous cybersecurity practices," Sullivan and Regan wrote in Tuesday's letter. They went on to urge all water facilities to follow basic security measures such as resetting default passwords and keeping software updated. They linked to this list of additional actions, published by CISA and guidance and tools jointly provided by CISA and the EPA. They went on to provide a list of cybersecurity resources available from private sector companies. The letter extended an invitation for secretaries of each state's governor to attend a meeting to discuss better securing the water sector's critical infrastructure. It also announced that the EPA is forming a Water Sector Cybersecurity Task Force to identify vulnerabilities in water systems. The virtual meeting will take place on Thursday. "EPA and NSC take these threats very seriously and will continue to partner with state environmental, health, and homeland security leaders to address the pervasive and challenging risk of cyberattacks on water systems," Regan said in a separate statement.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: On Sunday, the world of video games was shaken by a hacking and cheating scandal. During a competitive esports tournament of Apex Legends, a free-to-play shooter video game played by hundreds of thousands of players daily, hackers appeared to insert cheats into the games of two well-known streamers -- effectively hacking the players midgame. "Wait, what the fuck? I'm getting hacked, I'm getting hacked bro, I'm getting hacked," said one of the players allegedly compromised during a livestream of the gameplay. The incidents forced the organizers of the Apex Legends Global Series tournament, which has a $5 million total prize pool, to postpone the event indefinitely "due to the competitive integrity of this series being compromised." As the midgame hacks were underway, the game's chatbot displayed messages on-screen that appeared to come from the hackers: "Apex hacking global series, by Destroyer2009 &R4andom," the messages read. In an interview with TechCrunch, the hacker Destroyer2009 took credit for the hacks, saying that he did it "just for fun," and with the goal of forcing the Apex Legends' developers to fix the vulnerability he exploited. The hacks sent the Apex Legends community into a frenzy, with countless streamers reacting to the incidents, and some players suggesting Apex Legends is not safe to play, because every player could be at risk of getting hacked not only in-game, but potentially having their computers hacked, too. Destroyer2009 declined to provide details of how he allegedly pulled off hacking the two players midgame, or what specific vulnerabilities he exploited. "I really don't want to go into the details until everything is fully patched and everything goes back to normal," the hacker said. The only thing Destroyer2009 said regarding the technique he used was that the vulnerability "has nothing to do with the server and I've never touched anything outside of the Apex process," and that he did not hack the two players' computers directly. The hacks "never went outside of the game," he said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: UnitedHealth Group said Monday that it's paid out more than $2 billion to help health-care providers who have been affected by the cyberattack on subsidiary Change Healthcare. "We continue to make significant progress in restoring the services impacted by this cyberattack," UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty said in a press release. "We know this has been an enormous challenge for health care providers and we encourage any in need to contact us." UnitedHealth disclosed nearly a month ago that a cyber threat actor breached part of Change Healthcare's information technology network. The fallout has wreaked havoc across the U.S. health-care system. Change Healthcare offers e-prescription software and tools for payment management, so the interruptions left many providers temporarily unable to fill medications or get reimbursed for their services by insurers. UnitedHealth, which provides care for 152 million people, said on Monday that it began releasing medical claims preparation software, which will be available to thousands of customers in the next several days. The company called it "an important step in the resumption of services." On Friday, UnitedHealth said it restored Change Healthcare's electronic payments platform, after rebooting 99% of its pharmacy network services earlier this month. It also introduced a temporary funding assistance program to help health-care providers experiencing cash flow trouble because of the attack. UnitedHealth said the advances will not need to be repaid until claims flows return to normal. Federal agencies like the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services have introduced additional options to ensure that states and other stakeholders can make interim payments to providers, according to a release.

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"There is a new side channel attack against Apple 'M' series CPUs that does not appear to be fixable without a major performance hit," writes Slashdot reader EncryptedSoldier. SecurityWeek reports: A team of researchers representing several universities in the United States has disclosed the details of a new side-channel attack method that can be used to extract secret encryption keys from systems powered by Apple CPUs. The attack method, dubbed GoFetch, has been described as a microarchitectural side-channel attack that allows the extraction of secret keys from constant-time cryptographic implementations. These types of attacks require local access to the targeted system. The attack targets a hardware optimization named data memory-dependent prefetcher (DMP), which attempts to prefetch addresses found in the contents of program memory to improve performance. The researchers have found a way to use specially crafted cryptographic operation inputs that allow them to infer secret keys, guessing them bits at a time by monitoring the behavior of the DMP. They managed to demonstrate end-to-end key extraction attacks against several crypto implementations, including OpenSSL Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange, Go RSA, and the post-quantum CRYSTALS-Kyber and CRYSTALS-Dilithium. The researchers have conducted successful GoFetch attacks against systems powered by Apple M1 processors, and they have found evidence that the attack could also work against M2 and M3 processors. They have also tested an Intel processor that uses DMP, but found that it's 'more robust' against such attacks. The experts said Apple is investigating the issue, but fully addressing it does not seem trivial. The researchers have proposed several countermeasures, but they involve hardware changes that are not easy to implement or mitigations that can have a significant impact on performance. Apple told SecurityWeek that it thanks the researchers for their collaboration as this work advances the company's understanding of these types of threats. The tech giant also shared a link to a developer page that outlines one of the mitigations mentioned by the researchers. The researchers have published a paper (PDF) detailing their work. Ars Technica's Dan Goodin also reported on the vulnerability.

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BleepingComputer reports on "a new denial-of-service attack dubbed 'Loop DoS' targeting application layer protocols." According to their article, the attack "can pair network services into an indefinite communication loop that creates large volumes of traffic." Devised by researchers at the CISPA Helmholtz-Center for Information Security, the attack uses the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and impacts an estimated 300,000 host and their networks. The attack is possible due to a vulnerability, currently tracked as CVE-2024-2169, in the implementation of the UDP protocol, which is susceptible to IP spoofing and does not provide sufficient packet verification. An attacker exploiting the vulnerability creates a self-perpetuating mechanism that generates excessive traffic without limits and without a way to stop it, leading to a denial-of-service (DoS) condition on the target system or even an entire network. Loop DoS relies on IP spoofing and can be triggered from a single host that sends one message to start the communication. According to the Carnegie Mellon CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) there are three potential outcomes when an attacker leverages the vulnerability: — Overloading of a vulnerable service and causing it to become unstable or unusable. — DoS attack on the network backbone, causing network outages to other services. — Amplification attacks that involve network loops causing amplified DOS or DDOS attacks. CISPA researchers Yepeng Pan and Professor Dr. Christian Rossow say the potential impact is notable, spanning both outdated (QOTD, Chargen, Echo) and modern protocols (DNS, NTP, TFTP) that are crucial for basic internet-based functions like time synchronization, domain name resolution, and file transfer without authentication... The researchers warned that the attack is easy to exploit, noting that there is no evidence indicating active exploitation at this time. Rossow and Pan shared their findings with affected vendors and notified CERT/CC for coordinated disclosure. So far, vendors who confirmed their implementations are affected by CVE-2024-2169 are Broadcom, Cisco, Honeywell, Microsoft, and MikroTik. To avoid the risk of denial of service via Loop DoS, CERT/CC recommends installing the latest patches from vendors that address the vulnerability and replace products that no longer receive security updates. Using firewall rules and access-control lists for UDP applications, turning off unnecessary UDP services, and implementing TCP or request validation are also measures that can mitigate the risk of an attack. Furthermore, the organization recommends deploying anti-spoofing solutions like BCP38 and Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (uRPF), and using Quality-of-Service (QoS) measures to limit network traffic and protect against abuse from network loops and DoS amplifications. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schneidafunk for sharing the article.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from The Register: Chinese spies exploited a couple of critical-severity bugs in F5 and ConnectWise equipment earlier this year to sell access to compromised U.S. defense organizations, UK government agencies, and hundreds of other entities, according to Mandiant. The Google-owned threat hunters said they assess, "with moderate confidence," that a crew they track as UNC5174 was behind the exploitation of CVE-2023-46747, a 9.8-out-of-10-CVSS-rated remote code execution bug in the F5 BIG-IP Traffic Management User Interface, and CVE-2024-1709, a path traversal flaw in ConnectWise ScreenConnect that scored a perfect 10 out of 10 CVSS severity rating. UNC5174 uses the online persona Uteus, and has bragged about its links to China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) — boasts that may well be true. The gang focuses on gaining initial access into victim organizations and then reselling access to valuable targets... Just last month, Mandiant noticed the same combination of tools, believed to be unique to this particular Chinese gang, being used to exploit the ConnectWise flaw and compromise "hundreds" or entities, mostly in the U.S. and Canada. Also between October 2023 and February 2024, UNC5174 exploited CVE-2023-22518 in Atlassian Confluence, CVE-2022-0185 in Linux kernels, and CVE-2022-3052, a Zyxel Firewall OS command injection vulnerability, according to Mandiant. These campaigns included "extensive reconnaissance, web application fuzzing, and aggressive scanning for vulnerabilities on internet-facing systems belonging to prominent universities in the U.S., Oceania, and Hong Kong regions," the threat intel team noted. More details from The Record. "One of the strangest things the researchers found was that UNC5174 would create backdoors into compromised systems and then patch the vulnerability they used to break in. Mandiant said it believes this was an 'attempt to limit subsequent exploitation of the system by additional unrelated threat actors attempting to access the appliance.'"

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The U.S. State Department has offered up to $10 million for information on the "Blackcat" ransomware gang who hit the UnitedHealth Group's tech unit and snarled insurance payments across America. From a report: "The ALPHV Blackcat ransomware-as-a-service group compromised computer networks of critical infrastructure sectors in the United States and worldwide," the department said in a statement announcing the reward offer. UnitedHealth said last week it was beginning to clear a medical claims backlog of more than $14 billion as it brought its services back online following the cyberattack, which caused wide-ranging disruption starting in late February. UnitedHealth's tech unit, Change Healthcare, plays a critical role in processing payments from insurance companies to practitioners, and the outage caused by the cyberattack has in some cases left patients and doctors out of pocket. The toll on the community health centers that serve more than 30 million poor and uninsured patients has been especially harsh.

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BrianFagioli shares a report from BetaNews: In a recent security announcement, Red Hat's Information Risk and Security and Product Security teams have identified a critical vulnerability in the latest versions of the 'xz' compression tools and libraries. The affected versions, 5.6.0 and 5.6.1, contain malicious code that could potentially allow unauthorized access to systems. Fedora Linux 40 users and those using Fedora Rawhide, the development distribution for future Fedora builds, are at risk. The vulnerability, designated CVE-2024-3094, impacts users who have updated to the compromised versions of the xz libraries. Red Hat urges all Fedora Rawhide users to immediately cease using the distribution for both work and personal activities until the issue is resolved. Plans are underway to revert Fedora Rawhide to the safer xz-5.4.x version, after which it will be safe to redeploy Fedora Rawhide instances. Although Fedora Linux 40 builds have not been confirmed to be compromised, Red Hat advises users to downgrade to a 5.4 build as a precautionary measure. An update reverting xz to 5.4.x has been released and is being distributed to Fedora Linux 40 users through the normal update system. Users can expedite the update by following instructions provided by Red Hat. Further reader submissions: xz/liblzma Backdoored, Facilitating ssh Compromise; Malicious Code Discovered in Popular XZ Utils.

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The Record reports: Ross Anderson, a professor of security engineering at the University of Cambridge who is widely recognized for his contributions to computing, passed away at home on Thursday according to friends and colleagues who have been in touch with his family and the University. Anderson, who also taught at Edinburgh University, was one of the most respected academic engineers and computer scientists of his generation. His research included machine learning, cryptographic protocols, hardware reverse engineering and breaking ciphers, among other topics. His public achievements include, but are by no means limited to, being awarded the British Computer Society's Lovelace Medal in 2015, and publishing several editions of the Security Engineering textbook. Anderson's security research made headlines throughout his career, with his name appearing in over a dozen Slashdot stories... 2023: Researchers Warn of 'Model Collapse' As AI Trains On AI-Generated Content 2021: 'Trojan Source' Bug Threatens the Security of All Code 2015: Factory Reset On Millions of Android Devices Doesn't Wipe Storage 2012: UK Web Snooping Plan Invades Privacy, Despite Claims To the Contrary 2010: Why "Verified By Visa" System Is Insecure 2008: Researchers Expose New Credit Card Fraud Risk 2006: "Security Engineering" Is Now Online. [The link from that 2006 post still works. Slashdot called Anderson's book "arguably the best information security book ever written" in one of two reviews, published in 2002 and 2010.] 2002:Security of Open vs. Closed Source Software. 2002: Analyzing Palladium My favorite story? UK Banks Attempt To Censor Academic Publication. "Cambridge University has resisted the demands and has sent a response to the bankers explaining why they will keep the page online..."

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Bill Toulas reports via BleepingComputer: Firmware security firm Binarly has released a free online scanner to detect Linux executables impacted by the XZ Utils supply chain attack, tracked as CVE-2024-3094. CVE-2024-3094 is a supply chain compromise in XZ Utils, a set of data compression tools and libraries used in many major Linux distributions. Late last month, Microsoft engineer Andres Freud discovered the backdoor in the latest version of the XZ Utils package while investigating unusually slow SSH logins on Debian Sid, a rolling release of the Linux distribution. The backdoor was introduced by a pseudonymous contributor to XZ version 5.6.0, which remained present in 5.6.1. However, only a few Linux distributions and versions following a "bleeding edge" upgrading approach were impacted, with most using an earlier, safe library version. Following the discovery of the backdoor, a detection and remediation effort was started, with CISA proposing downgrading the XZ Utils 5.4.6 Stable and hunting for and reporting any malicious activity. Binarly says the approach taken so far in the threat mitigation efforts relies on simple checks such as byte string matching, file hash blocklisting, and YARA rules, which could lead to false positives. This approach can trigger significant alert fatigue and doesn't help detect similar backdoors on other projects. To address this problem, Binarly developed a dedicated scanner that would work for the particular library and any file carrying the same backdoor. [...] Binarly's scanner increases detection as it scans for various supply chain points beyond just the XZ Utils project, and the results are of much higher confidence. Binarly has made a free API available to accomodate bulk scans, too.

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It's the world's most widely used vulnerability database, reports SC Magazine, offering standards-based data on CVSS severity scores, impacted software and platforms, contributing weaknesses, and links to patches and additional resources. But "there is a growing backlog of vulnerabilities" submitted to America's National Vulnerability Database and "requiring analysis", according to a new announcement from the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards. "This is based on a variety of factors, including an increase in software and, therefore, vulnerabilities, as well as a change in interagency support." From SC Magazine: According to NIST's website, the institute analyzed only 199 of 3370 CVEs it received last month. [And this month another 677 came in — of which 24 have been analyzed.] Other than a short notice advising it was working to establish a new consortium to improve the NVD, NIST had not provided a public explanation for the problems prior to a statement published [April 2]... "Currently, we are prioritizing analysis of the most significant vulnerabilities. In addition, we are working with our agency partners to bring on more support for analyzing vulnerabilities and have reassigned additional NIST staff to this task as well." NIST, which had its budget cut by almost 12% this year by lawmakers, said it was committed to continuing to support and manage the NVD, which it described as "a key piece of the nation's cybersecurity infrastructure... We are also looking into longer-term solutions to this challenge, including the establishment of a consortium of industry, government and other stakeholder organizations that can collaborate on research to improve the NVD," the statement said. "We will provide more information as these plans develop..." A group of cybersecurity professionals have signed an open letter to Congress and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo in which they say the enrichment issue is the result of a recent 20% cut in NVD funding. The article also cites remarks from NVD program manager Tanya Brewer (reported by Infosecurity Magazine) from last week's VulnCon conference on plans to establish a NVD consortium. "We're not going to shut down the NVD; we're in the process of fixing the current problem. And then, we're going to make the NVD robust again and we'll make it grow." Thanks to Slashdot reader spatwei for sharing the article.

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Zack Whittaker and Carly Page report via TechCrunch: Microsoft has resolved a security lapse that exposed internal company files and credentials to the open internet. Security researchers Can Yoleri, Murat Ozfidan and Egemen Kochisarli with SOCRadar, a cybersecurity company that helps organizations find security weaknesses, discovered an open and public storage server hosted on Microsoft's Azure cloud service that was storing internal information relating to Microsoft's Bing search engine. The Azure storage server housed code, scripts and configuration files containing passwords, keys and credentials used by the Microsoft employees for accessing other internal databases and systems. But the storage server itself was not protected with a password and could be accessed by anyone on the internet. Yoleri told TechCrunch that the exposed data could potentially help malicious actors identify or access other places where Microsoft stores its internal files. Identifying those storage locations "could result in more significant data leaks and possibly compromise the services in use," Yoleri said. The researchers notified Microsoft of the security lapse on February 6, and Microsoft secured the spilling files on March 5. It's not known for how long the cloud server was exposed to the internet, or if anyone other than SOCRadar discovered the exposed data inside.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hardware sold for years by the likes of Intel and Lenovo contains a remotely exploitable vulnerability that will never be fixed. The cause: a supply chain snafu involving an open source software package and hardware from multiple manufacturers that directly or indirectly incorporated it into their products. Researchers from security firm Binarly have confirmed that the lapse has resulted in Intel, Lenovo, and Supermicro shipping server hardware that contains a vulnerability that can be exploited to reveal security-critical information. The researchers, however, went on to warn that any hardware that incorporates certain generations of baseboard management controllers made by Duluth, Georgia-based AMI or Taiwan-based AETN are also affected. BMCs are tiny computers soldered into the motherboard of servers that allow cloud centers, and sometimes their customers, to streamline the remote management of vast fleets of servers. They enable administrators to remotely reinstall OSes, install and uninstall apps, and control just about every other aspect of the system -- even when it's turned off. BMCs provide what's known in the industry as "lights-out" system management. AMI and AETN are two of several makers of BMCs. For years, BMCs from multiple manufacturers have incorporated vulnerable versions of open source software known as lighttpd. Lighttpd is a fast, lightweight web server that's compatible with various hardware and software platforms. It's used in all kinds of wares, including in embedded devices like BMCs, to allow remote administrators to control servers remotely with HTTP requests. [...] "All these years, [the lighttpd vulnerability] was present inside the firmware and nobody cared to update one of the third-party components used to build this firmware image," Binarly researchers wrote Thursday. "This is another perfect example of inconsistencies in the firmware supply chain. A very outdated third-party component present in the latest version of firmware, creating additional risk for end users. Are there more systems that use the vulnerable version of lighttpd across the industry?" The vulnerability makes it possible for hackers to identify memory addresses responsible for handling key functions. Operating systems take pains to randomize and conceal these locations so they can't be used in software exploits. By chaining an exploit for the lighttpd vulnerability with a separate vulnerability, hackers could defeat this standard protection, which is known as address space layout randomization. The chaining of two or more exploits has become a common feature of hacking attacks these days as software makers continue to add anti-exploitation protections to their code. Tracking the supply chain for multiple BMCs used in multiple server hardware is difficult. So far, Binarly has identified AMI's MegaRAC BMC as one of the vulnerable BMCs. The security firm has confirmed that the AMI BMC is contained in the Intel Server System M70KLP hardware. Information about BMCs from ATEN or hardware from Lenovo and Supermicro aren't available at the moment. The vulnerability is present in any hardware that uses lighttpd versions 1.4.35, 1.4.45, and 1.4.51. "A potential attacker can exploit this vulnerability in order to read memory of Lighttpd Web Server process," Binarly researchers wrote in an advisory. "This may lead to sensitive data exfiltration, such as memory addresses, which can be used to bypass security mechanisms such as ASLR." Advisories are available here, here, and here.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said today it is investigating a breach at business intelligence company Sisense, whose products are designed to allow companies to view the status of multiple third-party online services in a single dashboard. CISA urged all Sisense customers to reset any credentials and secrets that may have been shared with the company, which is the same advice Sisense gave to its customers Wednesday evening. New York City based Sisense has more than 1,000 customers across a range of industry verticals, including financial services, telecommunications, healthcare and higher education. On April 10, Sisense Chief Information Security Officer Sangram Dash told customers the company had been made aware of reports that "certain Sisense company information may have been made available on what we have been advised is a restricted access server (not generally available on the internet.)" In its alert, CISA said it was working with private industry partners to respond to a recent compromise discovered by independent security researchers involving Sisense. Sisense declined to comment when asked about the veracity of information shared by two trusted sources with close knowledge of the breach investigation. Those sources said the breach appears to have started when the attackers somehow gained access to the company's code repository at Gitlab, and that in that repository was a token or credential that gave the bad guys access to Sisense's Amazon S3 buckets in the cloud. Both sources said the attackers used the S3 access to copy and exfiltrate several terabytes worth of Sisense customer data, which apparently included millions of access tokens, email account passwords, and even SSL certificates. The incident raises questions about whether Sisense was doing enough to protect sensitive data entrusted to it by customers, such as whether the massive volume of stolen customer data was ever encrypted while at rest in these Amazon cloud servers. It is clear, however, that unknown attackers now have all of the credentials that Sisense customers used in their dashboards. The breach also makes clear that Sisense is somewhat limited in the clean-up actions that it can take on behalf of customers, because access tokens are essentially text files on your computer that allow you to stay logged in for extended periods of time -- sometimes indefinitely. And depending on which service we're talking about, it may be possible for attackers to re-use those access tokens to authenticate as the victim without ever having to present valid credentials. Beyond that, it is largely up to Sisense customers to decide if and when they change passwords to the various third-party services that they've previously entrusted to Sisense. "If they are hosting customer data on a third-party system like Amazon, it better damn well be encrypted," said Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at University of California, Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and lecturer at UC Davis. "If they are telling people to rest credentials, that means it was not encrypted. So mistake number one is leaving Amazon credentials in your Git archive. Mistake number two is using S3 without using encryption on top of it. The former is bad but forgivable, but the latter given their business is unforgivable."

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An anonymous reader shared this report from BleepingComputer: Researchers have demonstrated the "first native Spectre v2 exploit" for a new speculative execution side-channel flaw that impacts Linux systems running on many modern Intel processors. Spectre V2 is a new variant of the original Spectre attack discovered by a team of researchers at the VUSec group from VU Amsterdam. The researchers also released a tool that uses symbolic execution to identify exploitable code segments within the Linux kernel to help with mitigation. The new finding underscores the challenges in balancing performance optimization with security, which makes addressing fundamental CPU flaws complicated even six years after the discovery of the original Spectre.... As the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) disclosed yesterday, the new flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-2201, allows unauthenticated attackers to read arbitrary memory data by leveraging speculative execution, bypassing present security mechanisms designed to isolate privilege levels. "An unauthenticated attacker can exploit this vulnerability to leak privileged memory from the CPU by speculatively jumping to a chosen gadget," reads the CERT/CC announcement. "Current research shows that existing mitigation techniques of disabling privileged eBPF and enabling (Fine)IBT are insufficient in stopping BHI exploitation against the kernel/hypervisor." "For a complete list of impacted Intel processors to the various speculative execution side-channel flaws, check this page updated by the vendor."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Shakeeb Ahmed, a cybersecurity engineer convicted of stealing around $12 million in crypto, was sentenced on Friday to three years in prison. In a press release, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced the sentence. Ahmed was accused of hacking into two cryptocurrency exchanges, and stealing around $12 million in crypto, according to prosecutors. Adam Schwartz and Bradley Bondi, the lawyers representing Ahmed, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. When Ahmed was arrested last year, the authorities described him as "a senior security engineer for an international technology company." His LinkedIn profile said he previously worked at Amazon. But he wasn't working there at the time of his arrest, an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch. While the name of one of his victims was never disclosed, Ahmed reportedly hacked into Crema Finance, a Solana-based crypto exchange, in early July 2022.

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The U.S. government is warning that smart locks securing entry to an estimated 50,000 dwellings nationwide contain hard-coded credentials that can be used to remotely open any of the locks. Krebs on SecurityL: The lock's maker Chirp Systems remains unresponsive, even though it was first notified about the critical weakness in March 2021. Meanwhile, Chirp's parent company, RealPage, Inc., is being sued by multiple U.S. states for allegedly colluding with landlords to illegally raise rents. On March 7, 2024, the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned about a remotely exploitable vulnerability with "low attack complexity" in Chirp Systems smart locks. "Chirp Access improperly stores credentials within its source code, potentially exposing sensitive information to unauthorized access," CISA's alert warned, assigning the bug a CVSS (badness) rating of 9.1 (out of a possible 10). "Chirp Systems has not responded to requests to work with CISA to mitigate this vulnerability." Matt Brown, the researcher CISA credits with reporting the flaw, is a senior systems development engineer at Amazon Web Services. Brown said he discovered the weakness and reported it to Chirp in March 2021, after the company that manages his apartment building started using Chirp smart locks and told everyone to install Chirp's app to get in and out of their apartments.

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Roku has made two-factor authentication (2FA) mandatory for all users following two credential stuffing attacks that compromised approximately 591,000 customer accounts and led to unauthorized purchases in fewer than 400 cases. The Register reports: Credential stuffing and password spraying are both fairly similar types of brute force attacks, but the former uses known pairs of credentials (usernames and passwords). The latter simply spams common passwords at known usernames in the hope one of them leads to an authenticated session. "There is no indication that Roku was the source of the account credentials used in these attacks or that Roku's systems were compromised in either incident," it said in an update to customers. "Rather, it is likely that login credentials used in these attacks were taken from another source, like another online account, where the affected users may have used the same credentials." All accounts now require 2FA to be implemented, whether they were affected by the wave of compromises or not. Roku has more than 80 million active accounts, so only a minority were affected, and these have all been issued mandatory password resets. Compromised or not, all users are encouraged to create a strong, unique password for their accounts, consisting of at least eight characters, including a mix of numbers, symbols, and letter cases. [...] Roku also asked users to remain vigilant to suspicious activity regarding its service, such as phishing emails or clicking on dodgy links to rest passwords -- the usual stuff. "In closing, we sincerely regret that these incidents occurred and any disruption they may have caused," it said. "Your account security is a top priority, and we are committed to protecting your Roku account."

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