Displaying items by tag: NSA

Nine vulnerabilities in Microsoft products were among the top 15 routinely exploited flaws in 2021 listed by government security agencies in the Five Eyes countries.

Security firm Mandiant says it has not mentioned any zero-day exploit usage by Western government agencies in a report about incidents in 2021 because it did not find any exploits which it could identify with reasonable confidence as coming from these sources.

Patching of vulnerabilities is the security industry's equivalent of thoughts and prayers, a prominent American security expert has said during a debate on the topic "Patching is useless" at a recent online conference named Hack At The Harbor.

Microsoft has issued patches for 117 CVEs in its April Patch Tuesday release, with nine rated critical and 108 as important, the most it has ever released for a single month since September 2020. Included among these were two zero-day vulnerabilities, one of which was exploited in the wild and reported to Microsoft by the NSA.

Steps to mitigate attacks against industrial control systems, outlined by three US Government entities — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI and the Department of Energy — have come in for some sharp criticism from Robert M. Lee, the chief executive of Dragos, a company that specialises in security for such systems.

Details about a spying tool, claimed to be developed by the American NSA and able to reside in a Linux machine in order to steal information, has been reported by Global Times, a Chinese newspaper which has a pro-government tilt.

In what is an unusual turn of events, a Chinese security firm has revealed details about malware that it says emanated from the portals of the US National Security Agency.

GUEST OPINION: Information and security professionals face the uncomfortable and bleak reality that ransomware will only get worse in 2022: increasing in its sophistication, frequency, and volume. Ransomware continues to be aided by the consistent disruption caused by the pandemic, the adoption of new technologies that increase data generation and information sharing, and the ongoing remote working by millions who are based outside the perimeter defences of their office’s network.

The American news agency Bloomberg has claimed that Chinese telecommunications vendor Huawei used malicious code to spy on Optus in 2012, a claim that the telco has denied. The story in question is replete with dubious assertions, risible claims and quotes that do not match what the reporters say they do.

The world's biggest hotel booking site Booking.com was breached by an American acting on behalf of US intelligence in 2016, who stole details of thousands of reservations in the Middle East, but the site kept it quiet, a new book authored by three Dutch journalists claims.

ANALYSIS A detailed security report from Microsoft somewhat predictably claims that 58% of state-sponsored network attacks in 2020-21 came from Russia.

Telecommunications company Telstra and networking hardware firm Cisco has entered into a five-year agreement to provide advanced connectivity management for IoT services.

Three former American intelligence operatives have agreed to pay a fine of US$1.685 million (A$2.3 million) as part of a deferred prosecution agreement that places conditions on their future employment, after they were found to be working for a hacking company that carried out operations for the UAE Government.

Global networking products manufacturer Juniper Networks in 2008 incorporated a flawed algorithm from the NSA in its NetScreen devices, even though the company was aware of the flaw that was suspected to provide a backdoor.

Promising its “compact indoor solution” delivers dedicated connectivity and capacity, it has a future-proofed modular design that supports both 4G and 5G networks in NSA or SA, with its secure plug and play solution based on a 5G-ready flexible design that “supports evolving consumer and small enterprise applications”.

The head of security firm Kaspersky's Global Research and Analysis Team, Costin Raiu, says in 2019 more than 70 security companies were given samples of malware that was created by the CIA.

The use of infrastructure based in the US by the attackers in the first stage of the SolarWinds supply chain compromise is one factor which has inhibited the investigation into the incident, as this meant it was effectively blocked from being pursued by the NSA, the security firm RiskIQ says.

Once more, the unsupported allegation that Chinese telecoms provider Huawei Technologies was up to no good in some country's network has been aired, this time, by the Guardian.

Microsoft has issued patches for four remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities in its Exchange Server product, a little more than a month after the company warned of four zero-day exploits being used to attack the application.

A former American intelligence analyst and member of the armed forces has pleaded guilty to illegally obtaining classified national defence information and giving it to a reporter.