Newsletter compiled by Jon Munshaw.
Welcome to this week’s Threat Source newsletter — the perfect place to get caught up on all things Talos from the past week.
Obviously, COVID-19 is dominating headlines everywhere, and for good reason. We hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy and making the appropriate decisions when it comes to traveling and working.
In certainly less serious news, we have our monthly Microsoft Patch Tuesday post and the accompanying Snort rules out. There is also a large Vulnerability Spotlight out on several vulnerabilities we discovered in WAGO products, a popular producer of automation software.
And, as always, we have the latest Threat Roundup where we go through the top threats we saw — and blocked — over the past week.
Upcoming public engagements
Event: “Everyone's Advanced Now: The evolution of actors on the threat landscape” at Interop Tokyo 2020
Location: Makuhari Messe, Tokyo, Japan
Date: June 10 - 12
Speakers: Nick Biasini
Synopsis: In the past, there were two clear classes of adversary an enterprise would face: sophisticated and basic. These basic threats were commodity infections that would require simple triage and remediation. Today, these commodity infections can quickly turn into enterprise-crippling ransomware attacks, costing organizations millions of dollars to recover. Now more than ever, organizations need every advantage they can get — and threat intelligence is a big part of it. Having visibility into your own environment and attacks around the globe are equally vital to success. This talk will cover these trends and show how the gap between the sophisticated and the basic adversary is quickly disappearing.
Cyber Security Week in Review
- With COVID-19 (more colloquially known as the coronavirus) dominating the headlines, threat actors are trying to capitalize. A recent wave of spam emails and ads promising to show maps about where the virus is spreading are stealing users’ login credentials and credit card numbers.
- Another security threat that the coronavirus poses: working from home. More companies are encouraging their employees to work remotely, which requires them to connect to a VPN often, opening them to man-in-the-middle attacks and snooping.
- Many security conferences are being canceled or postponed as a result of coronavirus-related mitigations and travel restrictions. Among them are multiple BSides locations and Kaspersky’s SAS.
- Microsoft spearheaded a takedown of the Necurs botnet, one of the largest spam and malware distributors in the world. The company took control of many sites controlled by Necurs’ creators and is preventing the botnet from adding new ones.
- The company behind providing water and electricity in Los Angeles are accused of covering up gaps in their security. An independent third-party firm found that the company’s IT network contained an “extremely high number of unpatched vulnerabilities.”
- Intel patched 10 high-severity vulnerabilities in some of its graphics drivers for Windows. One of the bugs, identified as CVE-2020-0551, bypasses all transient-related mitigations already in place to protect against exploits like Meltdown and Spectre.
- Mozilla released a security update for its Firefox browser, including patching a bug that could allow an attacker to steal information through a user’s Apple AirPods. There are also five other bugs rated with high severity.
- Attackers are exploiting a patched vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange’s Control Panel. Although Microsoft released an update for the software in February, there are still unpatched versions in the wild that could allow an adversary to obtain System-level privileges.
- A Russian threat actor is expected to be behind ransomware attacks on two local governments in North Carolina — likely even the same group that went after New Orleans last year.