A malvertising operation known under the codename of Tag Barnakle has breached more than 120 ad servers over the past year and inserted malicious code into legitimate ads that redirected website visitors to sites promoting scams and malware.

Security firm Confiant first reported on this campaign last year, in April 2020, when it said it found 60 ad servers that were left unpatched and compromised by the Tag Barnakle gang.

One year later, Confiant said that despite exposing the group’s tactics and raising an alarm in the online advertising industry, the Tag Barnakle group has continued to operate unchecked and has doubled the number of servers it breached.

The REvil gang posted 21 screenshots depicting Macbook schematics and threatened to publish new data every day until Apple or Quanta paid the ransom demand.

Threat actors known as DoppelPaymer claim to have attacked the Illinois Attorney General’s Office. And on April 13, the AG’s office acknowledged that they were investigating a network compromise: [...]

The National Risk Management Act would require the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to conduct a five-year national risk management cycle. This would involve CISA identifying and compiling the major risks to critical infrastructure in a report sent to the president and Congress, with the president then detailing to Congress how the administration was tackling these threats.

Attackers are exploiting the ProxyLogon Microsoft Exchange Server flaws to co-opt vulnerable machines to a cryptocurrency botnet named Prometei, according to new research.

"Prometei exploits the recently disclosed Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities associated with the HAFNIUM attacks to penetrate the network for malware deployment, credential harvesting and more," Boston-based cybersecurity firm Cybereason said in an analysis summarizing its findings.

First documented by Cisco Talos in July 2020, Prometei is a multi-modular botnet, with the actor behind the operation employing a wide range of specially-crafted tools and known exploits such as EternalBlue and BlueKeep to harvest credentials, laterally propagate across the network and "increase the amount of systems participating in its Monero-mining pool."

Cybercriminals are using the Prometei botnet to exploit Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities CVE-2021-27065 and CVE-2021-26858, according to Cybereason. Both vulnerabilities have been linked to Hafnium, a state-sponsored threat actor used in Exchange Server attacks reported in March 2021.

A recently discovered security vulnerability potentially affecting at least 100 million Internet of Things (“IoT”) devices[1] highlights the importance of the newly enacted IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020 (the “IoT Act”). Researchers at the security firms Forescout Research Labs and JSOF Research Labs have jointly published a report detailing a security vulnerability known as “NAME:WRECK.” This is exactly the type of issue that the new IoT Act was and is designed to address at the governmental level, because the vulnerability can detrimentally affect the security of millions of interconnected IoT devices. As our recent blog “New Internet of Things (IoT) Cybersecurity Law’s Far Reaching Impacts” discussed, this is the type of cybersecurity risk that all organizations should consider and factor in to their supply chain risk assessments and mitigation measures. If your organization directly uses IoT devices, or contracts with vendors who supply IoT devices or software/systems using IoT devices, whether in the healthcare, manufacturing, retail, financial services, hospitality or employment context, you should be evaluating your cybersecurity programs for protecting IoT devices.

Google Chrome version 90 will default to HTTPS for incomplete URLS. For example, Chrome will load “https://domain.com” when a user types “domain.com.” (And if the HTTPS fails because a site lacks SSL/TLS, it’ll revert to using HTTP.)

It’s no secret that using HTTPS to serve up your website is faster and more secure than using the default HTTP protocol. And Google, recognizing that many browser users don’t type in complete URLs when accessing websites, decided to bridge the gap between user experience and security this year. Their latest browser update, version 90, is expected to use HTTPS by default when a user types in a website address without specifying the protocol.

In reality, this is a logical move considering that the latest data from Google’s Transparency Report shows that 95% of sites across Google already use encryption to protect their traffic. But when and why are they implementing this update? Is Chrome forcing HTTPS? And what does this change mean for your website?