January, 2022

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IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access

Krebs on Security

If you created an online account to manage your tax records with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), those login credentials will cease to work later this year. The agency says that by the summer of 2022, the only way to log in to irs.gov will be through ID.me , an online identity verification service that requires applicants to submit copies of bills and identity documents, as well as a live video feed of their faces via a mobile device.

Access 364
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500M Avira Antivirus Users Introduced to Cryptomining

Krebs on Security

Many readers were surprised to learn recently that the popular Norton 360 antivirus suite now ships with a program which lets customers make money mining virtual currency. But Norton 360 isn’t alone in this dubious endeavor: Avira antivirus — which has built a base of 500 million users worldwide largely by making the product free — was recently bought by the same company that owns Norton 360 and is introducing its customers to a service called Avira Crypto.

Mining 362
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REvil Ransomware Gang Arrests Trigger Uncertainty, Concern in Cybercrime Forums

Dark Reading

Threat actors from Eastern Europe seen expressing some concern about Russia being a safe place for them to continue operating, researchers say.

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A bug in McAfee Agent allows running code with Windows SYSTEM privileges

Security Affairs

McAfee addressed a security flaw in its McAfee Agent software for Windows that allows running arbitrary code with SYSTEM privileges. McAfee (now Trellix) has addressed a high-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-0166 , that resides in McAfee Agent software for Windows. An attacker can exploit this flaw to escalate privileges and execute arbitrary code with SYSTEM privileges.

Security 364
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State of AI in Sales & Marketing 2025

AI adoption is reshaping sales and marketing. But is it delivering real results? We surveyed 1,000+ GTM professionals to find out. The data is clear: AI users report 47% higher productivity and an average of 12 hours saved per week. But leaders say mainstream AI tools still fall short on accuracy and business impact. Download the full report today to see how AI is being used — and where go-to-market professionals think there are gaps and opportunities.

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Norton Put a Cryptominer in Its Antivirus Software

WIRED Threat Level

Plus: NFT thefts, a ransomware wave in schools, and more of the week’s top security news.

IT 362

More Trending

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Open Source Sabotage Incident Hits Software Supply Chain

eSecurity Planet

An astonishing incident in recent days highlights the risks of widespread dependence on open source software – while also highlighting the free labor corporations benefit from by using open source software. Marak Squires, an open source coder and maintainer, sabotaged his repository to protest against unpaid work and his failed attempts to monetize faker.js and color.js , two major NPM packages used by a huge range of other packages and projects.

Libraries 145
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Norton 360 Now Comes With a Cryptominer

Krebs on Security

Norton 360 , one of the most popular antivirus products on the market today, has installed a cryptocurrency mining program on its customers’ computers. Norton’s parent firm says the cloud-based service that activates the program and allows customers to profit from the scheme — in which the company keeps 15 percent of any currencies mined — is “opt-in,” meaning users have to agree to enable it.

Mining 351
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The Cybersecurity Measures CTOs Are Actually Implementing

Dark Reading

Companies look to multifactor authentication and identity and access management to block attacks, but hedge their bets with disaster recovery.

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MoonBounce UEFI implant spotted in a targeted APT41 attack

Security Affairs

Researchers have spotted China-linked APT41 cyberespionage group using a UEFI implant, dubbed MoonBounce, to maintain persistence. Kaspersky researchers spotted the China-linked APT41 cyberespionage group using a UEFI implant , dubbed MoonBounce, to maintain persistence. At the end of 2021, researchers discovered a UEFI firmware-level compromise by analyzing logs from its Firmware Scanner.

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How to Achieve High-Accuracy Results When Using LLMs

Speaker: Ben Epstein, Stealth Founder & CTO | Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO, Aggregage

When tasked with building a fundamentally new product line with deeper insights than previously achievable for a high-value client, Ben Epstein and his team faced a significant challenge: how to harness LLMs to produce consistent, high-accuracy outputs at scale. In this new session, Ben will share how he and his team engineered a system (based on proven software engineering approaches) that employs reproducible test variations (via temperature 0 and fixed seeds), and enables non-LLM evaluation m

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6 Ways to Delete Yourself From the Internet

WIRED Threat Level

You’ll never be able to get a clean slate—but you can significantly downsize your digital footprint.

Privacy 350
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MY TAKE: What if Big Data and AI could be intensively focused on health and wellbeing?

The Last Watchdog

Might it be possible to direct cool digital services at holistically improving the wellbeing of each citizen of planet Earth? Related: Pursuing a biological digital twin. A movement aspiring to do just that is underway — and it’s not being led by a covey of tech-savvy Tibetan monks. This push is coming from the corporate sector. Last August, NTT , the Tokyo-based technology giant, unveiled its Health and Wellbeing initiative – an ambitious effort to guide corporate, political and community

Big data 279
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UK Government to Launch PR Campaign Undermining End-to-End Encryption

Schneier on Security

Rolling Stone is reporting that the UK government has hired the M&C Saatchi advertising agency to launch an anti-encryption advertising campaign. Presumably they’ll lean heavily on the “think of the children!” rhetoric we’re seeing in this current wave of the crypto wars. The technical eavesdropping mechanisms have shifted to client-side scanning, which won’t actually help — but since that’s not really the point, it’s not argued on its merits.

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Crime Shop Sells Hacked Logins to Other Crime Shops

Krebs on Security

Up for the “Most Meta Cybercrime Offering” award this year is Accountz Club , a new cybercrime store that sells access to purloined accounts at services built for cybercriminals, including shops peddling stolen payment cards and identities, spamming tools, email and phone bombing services, and those selling authentication cookies for a slew of popular websites.

Passwords 342
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Zero Trust Mandate: The Realities, Requirements and Roadmap

The DHS compliance audit clock is ticking on Zero Trust. Government agencies can no longer ignore or delay their Zero Trust initiatives. During this virtual panel discussion—featuring Kelly Fuller Gordon, Founder and CEO of RisX, Chris Wild, Zero Trust subject matter expert at Zermount, Inc., and Principal of Cybersecurity Practice at Eliassen Group, Trey Gannon—you’ll gain a detailed understanding of the Federal Zero Trust mandate, its requirements, milestones, and deadlines.

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Easily Exploitable Linux Flaw Exposes All Distributions: Qualys

eSecurity Planet

An easily exploited flaw in a program found in every major Linux distribution is the latest serious security issue that has arisen in the open-source space in recent weeks. Researchers at cybersecurity vendor Qualys this week disclosed the memory corruption vulnerability in polkit’s pkexec, which if exploited by a bad actor can enable an unprivileged user to gain full root privileges on a system, giving the unprivileged user administrative rights.

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Is White Rabbit ransomware linked to FIN8 financially motivated group?

Security Affairs

A new ransomware gang named White Rabbit appeared in the threat landscape, experts believe it is linked to the FIN8 hacking group. A new ransomware gang called ‘White Rabbit’ launched its operations and according to the experts, it is likely linked to the FIN8 financially motivated group. In December the popular malware researcher Michael Gillespie, first mentioned the group and called to action the experts to hunt the new threat.

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North Korean Hackers Stole Nearly $400M in Crypto Last Year

WIRED Threat Level

The regime had a “banner year,” thanks to skyrocketing cryptocurrency values and a new generation of vulnerable startups.

Security 241
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GUEST ESSAY: Addressing data leaks and other privacy, security exposures attendant to M&As

The Last Watchdog

Merger and acquisition (M&A) activity hit record highs in 2021, and isn’t expected to slow down anytime soon. Related: Stolen data used to target mobile services. Many attribute this steady growth to the increase in work-from-home models and adoption of cloud services since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Such consolidation across markets is good news for customers and vendors alike in terms of market growth and maximizing security investments.

Privacy 265
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Prevent Data Breaches With Zero-Trust Enterprise Password Management

Keeper Security is transforming cybersecurity for people and organizations around the world. Keeper’s affordable and easy-to-use solutions are built on a foundation of zero-trust and zero-knowledge security to protect every user on every device. Our next-generation privileged access management solution deploys in minutes and seamlessly integrates with any tech stack to prevent breaches, reduce help desk costs and ensure compliance.

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Microsoft Kicks Off 2022 With 96 Security Patches

Dark Reading

Nine of the Microsoft patches released today are classified as critical, 89 are Important, and six are publicly known.

Security 145
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Who Wrote the ALPHV/BlackCat Ransomware Strain?

Krebs on Security

In December 2021, researchers discovered a new ransomware-as-a-service named ALPHV (a.k.a. “ BlackCat “), considered to be the first professional cybercrime group to create and use a ransomware strain written in the Rust programming language. In this post, we’ll explore some of the clues left behind by a developer who was reputedly hired to code the ransomware variant.

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China’s Olympics App Is Horribly Insecure

Schneier on Security

China is mandating that athletes download and use a health and travel app when they attend the Winter Olympics next month. Citizen Lab examined the app and found it riddled with security holes. Key Findings: MY2022, an app mandated for use by all attendees of the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing, has a simple but devastating flaw where encryption protecting users’ voice audio and file transfers can be trivially sidestepped.

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Experts warn of attacks using a new Linux variant of SFile ransomware

Security Affairs

The operators of the SFile ransomware (aka Escal) have developed a Linux version of their malware to expand their operations. SFile ransomware (aka Escal), has been active since 2020 , it was observed targeting only Windows systems. Some variants of the ransomware append the English name of the target company to the filenames of the encrypted files.

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Optimizing The Modern Developer Experience with Coder

Many software teams have migrated their testing and production workloads to the cloud, yet development environments often remain tied to outdated local setups, limiting efficiency and growth. This is where Coder comes in. In our 101 Coder webinar, you’ll explore how cloud-based development environments can unlock new levels of productivity. Discover how to transition from local setups to a secure, cloud-powered ecosystem with ease.

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Why the Belarus Railways Hack Marks a First for Ransomware

WIRED Threat Level

The politically motivated attack represents a new frontier for hacktivists—and won’t be the last of its kind.

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MY TAKE: Why companies had better start taking the security pitfalls of API proliferation seriously

The Last Watchdog

APIs are putting business networks at an acute, unprecedented level of risk – a dynamic that has yet to be fully acknowledged by businesses. Related: ‘SASE’ framework extends security to the network edge. That said, APIs are certain to get a lot more attention by security teams — and board members concerned about cyber risk mitigation — in 2022.

Security 260
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Let's Play! Raising the Stakes for Threat Modeling With Card Games

Dark Reading

On a recent Friday night, three security experts got together to play custom games that explore attack risks in an engaging way.

Risk 144
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Fake Investor John Bernard Sinks Norwegian Green Shipping Dreams

Krebs on Security

Several articles here have delved into the history of John Bernard , the pseudonym used by a fake billionaire technology investor who tricked dozens of startups into giving him tens of millions of dollars. Bernard’s latest victim — a Norwegian company hoping to build a fleet of environmentally friendly shipping vessels — is now embroiled in a lawsuit over a deal gone bad, in which Bernard falsely claimed to have secured $100 million from six other wealthy investors, including t

IT 312
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15 Modern Use Cases for Enterprise Business Intelligence

Large enterprises face unique challenges in optimizing their Business Intelligence (BI) output due to the sheer scale and complexity of their operations. Unlike smaller organizations, where basic BI features and simple dashboards might suffice, enterprises must manage vast amounts of data from diverse sources. What are the top modern BI use cases for enterprise businesses to help you get a leg up on the competition?

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San Francisco Police Illegally Spying on Protesters

Schneier on Security

Last summer, the San Francisco police illegally used surveillance cameras at the George Floyd protests. The EFF is suing the police: This surveillance invaded the privacy of protesters, targeted people of color, and chills and deters participation and organizing for future protests. The SFPD also violated San Francisco’s new Surveillance Technology Ordinance.

Privacy 144
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High-Severity flaw in 3 WordPress plugins impacts 84,000 websites

Security Affairs

Researchers discovered a high-severity vulnerability in three different WordPress plugins that impact over 84,000 websites. Researchers from WordPress security company Wordfence discovered a high-severity vulnerability that affects three different WordPress plugins that impact over 84,000 websites. The vulnerability tracked as CVE-2022-0215 is a cross-site request forgery ( CSRF ) issue that received a CVSS score of 8.8.

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A Teen Took Control of Teslas by Hacking a Third-Party App

WIRED Threat Level

Plus: Open source sabotage, Ukrainian website hacks, and more of the week's top security news.

Security 240