Security

“The [intelligence community] is confident that the Iranians have through social engineering and other efforts sought access to individuals with direct access to the presidential campaigns of both political parties,” according to a joint ODNI, FBI, and CISA statement.

The program, which paid security researchers up to $20,000 to locate vulnerabilities in popular Android apps, is being shuttered after seven years due to “a decrease in the number of actionable vulnerabilities reported.”

As reported by Bleeping Computer, Google is testing a new experimental flag that can hide sensitive content while “screen sharing, screen recording and similar actions” in regular tabs — redacting the user’s entire screen if things like credit card details or passwords are detected.

Specifically, about $60 million — a hefty civil penalty to settle allegations that the telecom giant failed to report incidents of unauthorized access to sensitive data, violating a national security agreement it made to acquire Sprint in 2020.

Citizen Lab and Access Now linked a “sophisticated spear phishing campaign” to a group associated with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). The campaign has allegedly targeted exiled opposition figures as well as non-governmental organization staff in the US and Europe. Threat actors would allegedly email their targets, pretending to be a colleague or funder, the groups say.

Trump adviser Roger Stone told The Washington Post that “a couple” of his personal email accounts had been compromised.

Just weeks after the NYT profiled Blake Benthall about his Silk Road 2.0 role and post-prison endeavors, 404 Media has identified a co-founder, Thomas White, as its “Dread Pirate Roberts 2.0.”

The vulnerability deals with how browsers deal with queries to the IP address 0.0.0.0, as reported by Forbes and the security startup Oligo. Apple tells Forbes that it is making changes to the macOS Sequoia beta to fix the issue, while Google has plans to fix it in Chrome.

CrowdStrike blamed testing software for taking down 8.5 million Windows machines last month, but now a full root cause analysis offers more details. The main issue was a mismatch between the input fields expected by CrowdStrike’s Falcon driver and the ones supplied in a content update. CrowdStrike is now promising to better test updates and is using two independent third-party software security vendors to review its sensor code and release processes.

If you update to macOS Sequoia, you’ll have to go to Settings > Security & Privacy and approve the app on first open, because Apple is taking away the current right-click (ctrl-click) workaround.

BleepingComputer points out the notes for this month’s Android security patch, with fixes for flaws that could allow someone to take over your device. The 2024-08-05 patch level specifically addresses a kernel flaw tagged CVE-2024-36971 which “may be under limited, targeted exploitation” already, so be sure to update your devices ASAP.

Level, Chamberlain, Moen, Aqara, and Lutron are just some of the manufacturers the publication reports lack a dedicated way for security researchers to flag vulnerabilities — meaning a malicious hacker could potentially take advantage of a flaw before the company knows about it.

This was mandated for all federal agencies back in March, so expect more of these kinds of announcements.

Along with CrowdStrike’s post incident review, this has Microsoft telemetry data and some explanations (performance, tamper resistance) for the kernel driver architecture that crashed millions of Windows systems.

Microsoft made Secure Boot a requirement for Windows 11, and has been pushing to use the technology to secure against BIOS rootkits for years. Now, researchers have found that Secure Boot has been compromised on more than 200 device models from Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and more. Ars Technica reports that an important cryptographic key was published on GitHub in 2022, by “someone working for multiple US-based device manufacturers.”

“However, we understand our work is not yet complete, and we remain committed to restoring every impacted system.,” CEO George Kurtz continued in his post on LinkedIn.

As reported by TechCrunch and in some social media posts, even if it seems a little light for a global outage affecting millions of systems (and codes that in some cases, didn’t work). In a statement sent to The Verge, spokesperson Kevin Benacci said: