#blog

The FBI and authorities in The Netherlands this week seized a number of servers and domains for a hugely popular spam and malware dissemination service operating out of Pakistan. The proprietors of the service, who use the collective nickname "The Manipulaters," have been the subject of three stories published here since 2015. The FBI said the main clientele are organized crime groups that try to trick victim companies into making payments to a third party.

In an effort to blend in and make their malicious traffic tougher to block, hosting firms catering to cybercriminals in China and Russia increasingly are funneling their operations through major U.S. cloud providers. Research published this week on one such outfit -- a sprawling network tied to Chinese organized crime gangs and aptly named "Funnull" -- highlights a persistent whac-a-mole problem facing cloud services.

About Remote Code Execution – 7-Zip (CVE-2025-0411) vulnerability. 7-Zip is a popular, free, open-source archiver widely used by organizations as a standard tool for managing archives. The vulnerability is a bypass of the Mark-of-the-Web mechanism. 🔹 If you download and run a suspicious executable file on Windows, Microsoft Defender’s SmartScreen will block it from executing […]

President Trump last week issued a flurry of executive orders that upended a number of government initiatives focused on improving the nation's cybersecurity posture. The president fired all advisors from the Department of Homeland Security's Cyber Safety Review Board, called for the creation of a strategic cryptocurrency reserve, and voided a Biden administration action that sought to reduce the risks that artificial intelligence poses to consumers, workers and national security.

About Authentication Bypass – FortiOS (CVE-2024-55591) vulnerability. A critical flaw allows remote attackers to gain super-admin privileges via crafted requests to the Node.js websocket module. Affected systems include Fortinet devices running FortiOS (e.g., FortiGate NGFW) and FortiProxy. 🔹 On January 10, Arctic Wolf reported attacks on Fortinet devices that began in November 2024. Attackers create […]

About Remote Code Execution – Windows OLE (CVE-2025-21298) vulnerability. The vulnerability is from the January Microsoft Patch Tuesday. OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) is a technology for linking and embedding objects into other documents and objects, developed by Microsoft. A common use of this technology is embedding an Excel table in a Word document. What […]

The payment card giant MasterCard just fixed a glaring error in its domain name server settings that could have allowed anyone to intercept or divert Internet traffic for the company by registering an unused domain name. The misconfiguration persisted for nearly five years until a security researcher spent $300 to register the domain and prevent it from being grabbed by cybercriminals.

I have finalized the list of trending vulnerabilities for 2024 according to Positive Technologies. Last year, 74 vulnerabilities were classified as trending (to compare the scale, just over 40,000 were added to NVD in 2024). All trending vulnerabilities are found in Western commercial products and open source projects. This year, the vulnerabilities of domestic Russian […]

January Linux Patch Wednesday. Out of 424 total vulnerabilities, 271 are in the Linux Kernel. None show signs of exploitation in the wild, but 9 have public exploits. 🔸 RCE – Apache Tomcat (CVE-2024-56337). Based on the description, the vulnerability affects “case-insensitive file systems” like Windows or MacOS. However, Debian lists it as affecting tomcat9 […]

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.