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Residents across the United States are being inundated with text messages purporting to come from toll road operators like E-ZPass, warning that recipients face fines if a delinquent toll fee remains unpaid. Researchers say the surge in SMS spam coincides with new features added to a popular commercial phishing kit sold in China that makes it simple to set up convincing lures spoofing toll road operators in multiple U.S. states.

Seven system recovery programs contained what amounted to a backdoor for injecting any untrusted file into the system startup process.

It's an especially brazen form of malvertising, researchers say, striking at the heart of Google's business; the tech giant says it's aware of the issue and is working quickly to address the problem.

CVE-2024-44243, a critical macOS vulnerability discovered recently by Microsoft, can allow attackers to bypass Apple’s System Integrity Protection…

Emergent macOS vulnerability lets adversaries circumvent Apple's System Integrity Protection (SIP) by loading third-party kernels.

Microsoft has shed light on a now-patched security flaw impacting Apple macOS that, if successfully exploited, could have allowed an attacker running as "root" to bypass the operating system's System Integrity Protection (SIP) and install malicious kernel drivers by loading third-party kernel extensions. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2024-44243 (CVSS score: 5.5), a medium-severity bug

Swift ASN.1 can be caused to crash when parsing certain BER/DER constructions. This crash is caused by a confusion in the ASN.1 library itself which assumes that certain objects can only be provided in either constructed or primitive forms, and will trigger a `preconditionFailure` if that constraint isn't met. Importantly, these constraints are actually required to be true in DER, but that correctness wasn't enforced on the early node parser side so it was incorrect to rely on it later on in decoding, which is what the library did. These crashes can be triggered when parsing any DER/BER format object. There is no memory-safety issue here: the crash is a graceful one from the Swift runtime. The impact of this is that it can be used as a denial-of-service vector when parsing BER/DER data from unknown sources, e.g. when parsing TLS certificates. Many thanks to @baarde for reporting this issue and providing the fix.

In times of unprecedented change, innovative mindsets and attentiveness of startup culture make for a community everyone can leverage to understand the world and guard against its dangers.

Threat actors are targeting people searching for pirated or cracked software with fake downloaders that include infostealing malware such as Lumma and Vidar.

This week on the Lock and Code podcast, we speak with Mallory Knodel about whether AI assistants are compatible with encrypted messaging apps.