Weekly Cyber Security News 05/01/2018

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. Why are you here reading this? Go away and patch now! Seriously, the year has really started badly with possibly the most significant vulnerability ever and everyone should be rushing around either buying new hardware or patching (and suffering the potential side-effects).

Exploits are already out there, some more likely than others so stay alert folks for any odd things even though the actual attack won’t leave any IOCs:

• Hackers Expected to Remotely Exploit CPU Vulnerabilities

The background for this debacle:

• Critical Microprocessor Flaws Affect Nearly Every Machine Researchers release details of ‘Meltdown’ and ‘Spectre’ attacks that allow programs to steal sensitive data.

• Intel Patches CPUs Against Meltdown, Spectre Exploits

• Tech Giants Address Critical CPU Vulnerabilities

• Meltdown & Spectre: Microsoft releases emergency patches, US-CERT says to replace CPU

• Mitigations Prepared for Critical Flaw in Intel CPUs

Another potential pot of nastiness which appears to be showing signs of becoming a ‘thing’: 

• Backdoored Captcha Plugin Hits 300,000 WordPress Sites

 

Other things have actually happened and here are a selection to fill in the time waiting for patches to apply….

• 27,000 UnEncrypted Credit Cards left in shared Database by Thefly.com CWN reports

• California Voter Data Stolen from Insecure MongoDB Database

• Internet-connected Sonos Speakers Leak User Information

• New Database Botnet Leveraged for Bitcoin Mining

• Nissan Canada Finance Alerts 1.13 Million Customers of Data Breach

• Australia Police Accidentally Broadcast Arrest Plans on Social Media

• ‘Starwars’ Debuts on List of Worst Passwords of 2017

• 19 M California Voter Records Held for Ransom in MongoDB Attack The records were first exposed in an unsecured MongoDB database, continuing a cyber-extortion trend.

• Andromeda Botnet to Die Slow, Painful Death After Takedown

• Crypto-Miner Botnet Spreads over SSH

• Exposed File From Ancestry’s RootsWeb.com Contains Data on 300,000 Users

• How Life in 123 Million American Households Was Exposed Online Dan O’Sullivan reports

• Lazarus Group Targets Bitcoin Company

• South Korea Cryptocurrency Exchange Shuts Down After Hacking

• The truth about RFID credit card fraud

• Google Apps Script Allowed Hackers to Automate Malware Downloads

• Necurs Botnet Fuels Massive Year-End Ransomware Attacks

• Botnet’s Huawei Router Exploit Code Now Public

• Google Researcher Finds Critical Flaw in Keeper Password Manager

• Hacker Targeted Huawei Router 0-Day in Attempt to Create New Mirai Botnet Thousands of attempts have been made to exploit a zero-day vulnerability in the Huawei home router HG532.

• Hackers Go on a Magento Attack Spree Using a Helpdesk Extension Rafia Shaikh reports

• New TelegramRAT Exploits Recently Patched Office Vulnerability

• Researcher drops 15-year-old macOS zero-day that leads to full system compromise

• vBulletin to Patch Disclosed Code Execution, File Deletion Flaws