Latest Cybersecurity News and Articles

---

English Council Spent $1.4 Million Recovering From Ransomware Attack

The attack, initiated through a spearphishing email, exposed failures in the council's cybersecurity measures, including the lack of a security information and event management system, hindering the investigation and remediation process.

---

WhatsApp's New Secret Code Feature Lets Users Protect Private Chats with Password

Meta-owned WhatsApp has launched a new Secret Code feature to help users protect sensitive conversations with a custom password on the messaging platform. The feature has been described as an "additional way to protect those chats and make them harder to find if someone has access to your phone or you share a phone with someone else." Secret Code builds on another feature

---

Black Basta Ransomware Made Over $100 Million From Extortion

Black Basta has collected over $100 million in ransom payments from over 90 victims since April 2022. High-profile victims targeted by Black Basta include the American Dental Association, Sobeys, Knauf, Yellow Pages Canada, and Rheinmetall.

---

Open-Source LLM Security Scanner Vigil Helps Prevent Prompt Injection

Vigil focuses on identifying prompt injections, jailbreaks, and other potential vulnerabilities. Its creator, Adam M. Swanda, developed the tool to improve security practices around LLM applications.

---

New SugarGh0st RAT Targets Uzbekistan Government and South Korea

The campaign involves the use of Windows Shortcut files embedded with malicious JavaScript to deliver the components of the trojan, and there are indications that a Chinese-speaking threat actor is behind the attacks based on the samples.

---

PoC for Splunk Enterprise RCE flaw released (CVE-2023-46214)

The vulnerability arises from the failure to safely sanitize user-supplied extensible stylesheet language transformations (XSLT), enabling attackers to upload malicious XSLT and gain remote access to Splunk Enterprise instances.

---

Apple Rolls Out iOS, macOS, and Safari Patches for Two Actively Exploited Flaws

The two actively exploited security flaws, CVE-2023-42916 and CVE-2023-42917, were found in the WebKit web browser engine and could leak sensitive information or allow arbitrary code execution.

---

North Texas Water Utility Serving Two Million Hit With Cyberattack

North Texas Municipal Water District (NTMWD) has experienced a cyberattack on its business computer network, but its core water, wastewater, and solid waste services remain unaffected.

---

U.S. Treasury Sanctions North Korean Kimsuky Hackers and 8 Foreign Agents

The U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Thursday sanctioned the North Korea-linked adversarial collective known as Kimsuky as well as eight foreign-based agents who are alleged to have facilitated sanctions evasion. The agents, the Treasury said, helped in "revenue generation and missile-related technology procurement that support the DPRK's

---

Zyxel Releases Patches to Fix 15 Flaws in NAS, Firewall, and AP Devices

Zyxel has released patches to address 15 security issues impacting network-attached storage (NAS), firewall, and access point (AP) devices, including three critical flaws that could lead to authentication bypass and command injection. The three vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2023-35138 (CVSS score: 9.8) - A command injection vulnerability that could allow an

---

Zero-Day Alert: Apple Rolls Out iOS, macOS, and Safari Patches for 2 Actively Exploited Flaws

Apple has released software updates for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and Safari web browser to address two security flaws that it said have come under active exploitation in the wild on older versions of its software. The vulnerabilities, both of which reside in the WebKit web browser engine, are described below - CVE-2023-42916 - An out-of-bounds read issue that could be exploited to

---

Update: Staples Confirms Cyberattack Behind Service Outages, Delivery Issues

Additionally, there are unconfirmed reports that Staples employees have been instructed to avoid logging into Microsoft 365 using single sign-on (SSO) and that call center employees have been sent home for two consecutive days.

---

37% of adults change passwords following a scam

According to a survey by Citi, 27% of U.S. adults have fallen victim to a financial scam despite 90% feeling confident that they could detect scams.

---

Associated Press, ESPN, CBS among top sites serving fake virus alerts

Threat actors dabbles in obfuscation and evasion techniques. However, as previously detailed by Confiant, they are using much more advanced tricks. Their JavaScript uses obfuscation with changing variable names, making identification harder.

---

68% of US Websites Exposed to Bot Attacks

As per DataDome’s report shared with Hackread.com ahead of publication on Tuesday, 72.3% of e-commerce websites and 65.2% of classified ad websites failed the bot tests, whereas 85% of DataDome’s fake Chrome bots remained undetected.

---

NCSC statement following exploitation of Unitronics programmable logic controllers

NCSC supports US advisory regarding exploitation of Unitronics programmable logic controllers used in the water sector.

---

Hackers Using Weaponized Invoice To Deliver LUMMA Malware

Cybersecurity analysts identified that the attacker, posing as a financial services company in this campaign, tricks the target with a fake invoice email. The attacker dodges detection using a fake page and a real link.

---

Booking.com Customers Scammed in Novel Social Engineering Campaign

The scam is proving so fruitful that sales of Booking.com portal credentials are commanding sale prices of up to $2000 in two cybercrime forums, according to the researchers.

---

Thanksgiving Hack on North Carolina City Caused Leak of Employee Data

The attack on Hendersonville is the latest incident affecting a North Carolina government institution since the state became the first in the nation to ban payments to ransomware gangs.

---

Mississippi received the most spam calls per month in 2023

A recent Truecaller report found that Americans receive an average of six spam calls a month, with Mississippi receiving the highest number of calls.