State-sponsored hackers have breached ICS-Forth, the organization that manages Greece's top-level domain country codes of .gr and .el. From a report: ICS-Forth, which stands for the Institute of Computer Science of the Foundation for Research and Technology, publicly admitted to the security incident in emails it sent to domain owners on April 19. The hackers behind the breach are the same group detailed in a Cisco Talos report from April, which the company named Sea Turtle. The group uses a relatively novel approach to hacking targets. Instead of targeting victims directly, they breach or gain access to accounts at domain registrars and managed DNS providers where they make modifications to a company's DNS settings. By modifying DNS records for internal servers, they redirect traffic meant for a company's legitimate apps or webmail services to clone servers where they carry out man-in-the-middle attacks and intercept login credentials.

The Caps Lock, Num Lock, and Scroll Lock LEDs on a keyboard can be used to exfiltrate data from a secure air-gapped system, academics from an Israeli university have proved. From a report: The attack, which they named CTRL-ALT-LED, is nothing that regular users should worry about but is a danger for highly secure environments such as government networks that store top-secret documents or enterprise networks dedicated to storing non-public proprietary information. he attack requires some pre-requisites, such as the malicious actor finding a way to infect an air-gapped system with malware beforehand. CTRL-ALT-LED is only an exfiltration method. But once these prerequisites are met, the malware running on a system can make the LEDs of an USB-connected keyboard blink at rapid speeds, using a custom transmission protocol and modulation scheme to encode the transmitted data. A nearby attacker can record these tiny light flickers, which they can decode at a later point, using the same modulation scheme used to encode it.

Mozilla today launched Firefox 68 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. Firefox 68 includes a darker reader view, recommended extensions, IT Pro customizations, and more. From a report: As part of this release, Mozilla has curated a list of recommended extensions "that have been thoroughly reviewed for security, usability, and usefulness." You can find the list on the Get Add-ons page in the Firefox Add-ons Manager (about:addons). While Firefox has had dark mode for months, the Reader View's dark contrast only covered the text area. Now, when you change the contrast to dark, all sections of the site (including sidebars and toolbars) will be immersed in dark mode.

With Firefox 60, Mozilla introduced an enterprise version of the browser that employers can customize. This let IT professionals configure Firefox for their organization, either using Group Policy on Windows or a JSON file that works across Windows, Mac, and Linux. With Firefox 68, Mozilla has added more enterprise policies -- to configure or remove the new tab page, turn off search suggestions, and so on.

A security researcher has publicly disclosed new vulnerabilities in the USB dongles (receivers) used by Logitech wireless keyboards, mice, and presentation clickers. New submitter raikoseagle shares a report: The vulnerabilities allow attackers to sniff on keyboard traffic, but also inject keystrokes (even into dongles not connected to a wireless keyboard) and take over the computer to which a dongle has been connected. When encryption is used to protect the connection between the dongle and its paired device, the vulnerabilities also allow attackers to recover the encryption key. Furthermore, if the USB dongle uses a "key blacklist" to prevent the paired device from injecting keystrokes, the vulnerabilities allow the bypassing of this security protection system. Marcus Mengs, the researcher who discovered these vulnerabilities, said he notified Logitech about his findings, and the vendor plans to patch some of the reported issues, but not all.

Security researcher Jonathan Leitschuh has publicly disclosed a serious zero-day vulnerability for the Zoom video conference app on Macs that could allow websites to turn on user cameras without permission. The Verge reports: He has demonstrated that any website can open up a video-enabled call on a Mac with the Zoom app installed. That's possible in part because the Zoom app apparently installs a web server on Macs that accepts requests regular browsers wouldn't. In fact, if you uninstall Zoom, that web server persists and can reinstall Zoom without your intervention. Leitschuh details how he responsibly disclosed the vulnerability to Zoom back in late March, giving the company 90 days to solve the problem. According to Leitschuh's account, Zoom doesn't appear to have done enough to resolve the issue. The vulnerability was also disclosed to both the Chromium and Mozilla teams, but since it's not an issue with their browsers, there's not much those developers can do. The report notes that you can "patch" the vulnerability by making sure the Mac app is up to date and also disabling the setting that allows Zoom to turn your camera on when joining a meeting. "Again, simply uninstalling Zoom won't fix this problem, as that web server persists on your Mac," reports The Verge. "Turning off the web server requires running some terminal commands, which can be found at the bottom of the Medium post."

Microsoft has released a public preview of a new service aimed at helping businesses assess their app-compatibility levels ahead of deploying new Windows 10 feature updates. From a report: It allows for the quick and easy creation of app inventories to make compatibility checks simpler. Brad Anderson, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, says that the tool makes use of machine learning and the cloud to make it easier to deploy and update Windows 10. The aim with Desktop Analytics is to avoid the compatibility problems that stand in the way of keeping machines up to date.

The Microsoft security team has issued a warning today about ongoing malware campaigns that are distributing the Astaroth malware using fileless and living-off-the-land techniques that make it harder for traditional antivirus solutions to spot the ongoing attacks. From a report: The attacks were detected by the team behind Windows Defender ATP, the commercial version of the company's Windows Defender free antivirus. Andrea Lelli, a member of the Windows Defender ATP team said alarms bells sounded at Microsoft's offices when they detected a huge and sudden spike in usage of the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC) tool. This is a legitimate tool that ships with all modern versions of Windows, but the sudden spike in usage suggested a pattern specific to malware campaigns. When Microsoft looked closer, it discovered a malware campaign that consisted of a massive spam operation that was sending out emails with a link to a website hosting a .LNK shortcut file.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has proposed another set of robocall rules, this time to ban malicious calls that spoof caller IDs in text messages and international calls. From a report: The anti-spoofing rules will be voted on by the FCC Aug. 1, and they already have the support of more than 40 state attorneys general, Pai said Monday. These new rules would close the loopholes in targeting international callers, including one-way interconnected VoIP calls, and scammers using text messaging. They are part of the FCC's "multi-pronged approach to battle the noxious intrusion of illegal robocalls, as well as malicious caller ID spoofing," Pai said. Last month, the FCC voted unanimously on a proposal to give mobile phone companies greater power to "aggressively block" unwanted robocalls.

AmiMoJo writes: British Airways is facing a record fine of 183m Pound ($230m) for last year's breach of its security systems. The Information Commissioner's Office said the incident took place after users of British Airways' website were diverted to a fraudulent site. Through this false site, details of around 500,000 customers were harvested by the attackers. The BA penalty amounts to 1.5% of its worldwide turnover in 2017, less than the possible maximum of 4%. The fine amounts to around 10% of BA's profits for that year.

An excerpt from a post on Trail of Bits: From major open source projects to exciting new proprietary software, we've seen it all. But one common denominator in all of these systems is that for some inexplicable reason people still seem to think RSA is a good cryptosystem to use. Let me save you a bit of time and money and just say outright -- if you come to us with a codebase that uses RSA, you will be paying for the hour of time required for us to explain why you should stop using it. RSA is an intrinsically fragile cryptosystem containing countless foot-guns which the average software engineer cannot be expected to avoid. Weak parameters can be difficult, if not impossible, to check, and its poor performance compels developers to take risky shortcuts. Even worse, padding oracle attacks remain rampant 20 years after they were discovered. While it may be theoretically possible to implement RSA correctly, decades of devastating attacks have proven that such a feat may be unachievable in practice.

Remember when the small town of Lake City, Florida paid $460,000 for a ransomware's decryption key?

As they slowly recover 100 years of encrypted municipal records, the New York Times looks at the lessons learned, arguing that cyberattackers have simply found a juicy target: small governments with weak computer protections -- and strong insurance policies. The city had backup files for all its data, but they were on the same network -- and also inaccessible... The city's insurer, the Florida League of Cities, hired a consultant to handle the negotiations with the hackers via the email addresses that had been posted on the city server. The initial demands were refused outright, and city technicians raced to find a workaround. "We tried a lot of different solutions," said Joseph Helfenberger, the city manager. None of them worked. "We were at the end of the day faced with either re-creating the data from scratch, or paying the ransom," he said.

The insurer's negotiator settled on a payment of 42 Bitcoins, or about $460,000, Helfenberger said, of which the city would pay a $10,000 deductible. After the payment, the hackers provided a decryption key, and recovery efforts began in earnest.

As it turned out, recovery would not be simple. Even with the decryption key, each terabyte has taken about 12 hours to recover. Much of the city's data, nearly a month after the onset of the attack, has still not been unlocked... In Lake City, the information technology director, blamed for both failing to secure the network and taking too long to recover the data, wound up losing his job.
Mark A. Orlando, the chief technology officer for Raytheon Intelligence Information and Services, tells the Times it's unrealistic to expect cities to never pay the ransom. "Anyone who said that has never been in charge of a municipality that has half their services down and no choice."

But does that create an ever-widening problem? The FBI knows of at least 1,500 reported ransomware incidents last year, according to the article, although the Illinois computer programmer offering free decryption help at ID Ransomware says he's receiving 1,500 requests for assistance every day.

"Windows 10 continues to be a danger zone," writes Forbes senior contributor Gordon Kelly: Not only have problems been piling up in recent weeks, Microsoft has also been worryingly deceptive about the operation of key services. And now the company has warned millions about another problem. Spotted by the always excellent Windows Latest, Microsoft has told tens of millions of Windows 10 users that the latest KB4501375 update may break the platform's Remote Access Connection Manager (RASMAN). And this can have serious repercussions.

The big one is VPNs. RASMAN handles how Windows 10 connects to the internet and it is a core background task for VPN services to function normally. Given the astonishing growth in VPN usage for everything from online privacy and important work tasks to unlocking Netflix and YouTube libraries, this has the potential to impact heavily on how you use your computer. Interestingly, in detailing the issue Microsoft states that it only affects Windows 10 1903 - the latest version of the platform.

The problem is Windows 10 1903 accounts for a conservative total of at least 50M users.
Microsoft estimates they'll have a solution available "in late July," adding that the issue only occurs "when a VPN profile is configured as an Always On VPN (AOVPN) connection with or without device tunnel. This does not affect manual only VPN profiles or connections." That support page also offers a work-around which involves configuring the default telemetry settings in either the group policy settings or with a registry value.

UPDATE (7/7/2019): ZDNet is strongly criticizing Forbes' article, arguing that the issue affects only a small number of Windows users, "when the diagnostic data level setting is manually configured to the non-default setting of 0." For those who don't understand how unusual that configuration is, note that it applies only to Windows 10 Enterprise and that it can be set only using Group Policy on corporate networks or by manually editing the registry. You can't accidentally enable this setting. And you can't deliberately set it on a system running Windows 10 Home or Pro, because it is for Enterprise edition only.

Trailrunner7 quotes Duo.com's Decipher blog: There's an interesting and troubling attack happening to some people involved in the OpenPGP community that makes their certificates unusable and can essentially break the OpenPGP implementation of anyone who tries to import one of the certificates.

The attack is quite simple and doesn't exploit any technical vulnerabilities in the OpenPGP software, but instead takes advantage of one of the inherent properties of the keyserver network that's used to distribute certificates. Keyservers are designed to allow people to discover the public certificates of other people with whom they want to communicate over a secure channel. One of the properties of the network is that anyone who has looked at a certificate and verified that it belongs to another specific person can add a signature, or attestation, to the certificate. That signature basically serves as the public stamp of approval from one user to another...

Last week, two people involved in the OpenPGP community discovered that their public certificates had been spammed with tens of thousands of signatures -- one has nearly 150,000 -- in an apparent effort to render them useless. The attack targeted [OpenPGP project developers] Robert J. Hansen and Daniel Kahn Gillmor, but the root problem may end up affecting many other people, too...

Matthew Green, a cryptographer and associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, said that the attack points out some of the weaknesses in the entire OpenPGP infrastructure.

"PGP is old and kind of falling apart. There's not enough people maintaining it and it's full of legacy code. There are some people doing the lord's work in keeping it up, but it's not enough," Green said. "Think about like an old hospital that's crumbling and all of the doctors have left but there's still some people keeping the emergency room open and helping patients. At some point you have to ask whether it's better just to let it close and let something better come along.

"I think PGP is preventing the development of better stuff and the person who did this is clearly demonstrating this problem."

On Thursday ZDNet quoted a disturbing blog post from OpenPGP project developer Robert "rjh Hansen, who warned that "given the ease of the attack and the highly publicized success of the attack, it is prudent to believe other certificates will soon be poisoned."

An anonymous reader writes: "The Tor Project is preparing a fix for a bug that has been abused for the past years to launch DDoS attacks against dark web (.onion) websites," reports ZDNet. "Barring any unforeseen problems, the fix is scheduled for the upcoming Tor protocol 0.4.2 release." The bug has been known to Tor developers for years, and has been used to launch Slow Loris-like attacks on the web servers that run the Tor service supporting an .onion site. It works by opening many connections to the server and maxing out the CPU. Since Tor connections are CPU intensive because of the cryptography involved to support the privacy and anonymity of the network, even a a few hundreds connections are enough to bring down dark web portals. A tool to exploit the bug and to automate DDoS attacks has been around for four years, and has been used by hackers to extort dark web marketplaces all spring. At least two markets selling illegal products have shut down after refusing to pay attackers. To get the bug fixed, members of a dark web forum banded together and donated to the Tor Project to sponsor the bug's patch.

App-based services have made our lives easier in so many ways. But when things go awry, they offer few paths to real assistance [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: There's a trade-off between the speed of apps and their ability to provide timely help. Customer service isn't dead, it's just hiding very well, often under a maze of preset menu options that seem designed to make you want to chuck your phone out the window. I recently ordered a Lyft ride from the airport. As the driver loaded my bag into the trunk -- something he didn't seem happy about -- he started talking under his breath. I asked if he was talking to me. His eyes got wide, and he said no, he wasn't. Then he removed my bag and told me I had the wrong car. His license plate matched my app, but he said, "I'm not your ride, baby," before driving off.

Part of me was relieved. But to let Lyft know, I had to spend probably 20 minutes going through endless options for pre-written problems I didn't have. "Something happened during my ride" got me a drop-down menu with a bunch of inapt scenarios: "Demanding cash?" Nope. "Refusing my service animal?" Also no. Lyft can foresee these issues, but not "Acting unprofessional"? [...] Except for safety issues, there's no helpline to get a live person with Uber or Lyft. Ditto Spotify, Instagram and many other apps. Airbnb customer support has a phone number where actual humans answer. Instacart's app has an email address with a field to include details about your problem. It's also got a number you can ring 24/7.

As previously announced, Mozilla has started to tease the launch of a new $5 monthly subscription to a variety of online news publishers that involves no ads. The idea is that a single, low subscription fee gives you access to a number of sites with the ads removed. From a report: You pay a monthly fee to Mozilla, and this money is shared with its partners to help fund an ad-free internet experience. More than this, Mozilla says that the subscription fee will also grant access to audio versions of articles, article synchronization and more. In a page which promises people the chance to "support the sites you love, avoid the ads you hate", Mozilla says: "We've partnered with some of the world's greatest publishers to bring you a better journalism experience. We share your payment directly with the sites you read. They make more money which means they can bring you great content without needing to distract you with ads just to keep the lights on.

Over ten million users have been duped in installing a fake Samsung app named "Updates for Samsung" that promises firmware updates, but, in reality, redirects users to an ad-filled website and charges for firmware downloads. From a report: "I have contacted the Google Play Store and asked them to consider removing this app," Aleksejs Kuprins, malware analyst at the CSIS Security Group, told ZDNet this week in an interview, after publishing a report on the app's shady behavior earlier today. The app takes advantage of the difficulty in getting firmware and operating system updates for Samsung phones, hence the high number of users who have installed it. "It would be wrong to judge people for mistakenly going to the official application store for the firmware updates after buying a new Android device," the security researcher said. "Vendors frequently bundle their Android OS builds with an intimidating number of software, and it can easily get confusing."

Approximately 900 customers of 7-Eleven Japan have lost a collective of $510,000 after hackers hijacked their 7pay app accounts and made illegal charges in their names. From a report: The incident was caused by an appalling security lapse in the design of the company's 7pay mobile payment app, which 7-Eleven Japan launched in the country on Monday, July 1. The 7pay mobile app was designed to show a barcode on the phone's screen when customers reach the 7-Eleven cashier counters. The cashier scans the barcode, and the bought goods are charged to the user's 7pay app and the customer's credit or debit cards that have been saved in the account. However, in a mind-boggling turn of events, the app contained a password reset function that was incredibly poorly designed. It allowed anyone to request a password reset for other people's accounts, but have the password reset link sent to their email address, instead of the legitimate account owner.

The OpenID Foundation, the organization behind the OpenID open standard and decentralized authentication protocol, has penned an open letter to Apple in regards to the company's recently announced "Sign In with Apple" feature. From a report: In its letter, the organization said that Apple has built Sign In with Apple on top of the OpenID Connect platform, but the Cupertino company's implementation is not fully compliant with the OpenID standard, and as a result "exposes users to greater security and privacy risks." "The current set of differences between OpenID Connect and Sign In with Apple reduces the places where users can use Sign In with Apple and exposes them to greater security and privacy risks," said Nat Sakimura, OpenID Foundation Chairman.

The OpenID Foundation published a list of differences between Sign In with Apple and the OpenID Connect platform, which Sakimura urged Apple to address. The OpenID exec said these differences place an unnecessary burden on developers working with both OpenID Connect and Sign In with Apple, who now have to support two different authentication standards and deal with each one's quirks. "By closing the current gaps, Apple would be interoperable with widely-available OpenID Connect Relying Party software," Sakimura said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A 23-year-old man from Utah was sentenced this week to 27 months in prison for a series of DDoS attacks that took down online gaming service providers like Sony's PlayStation Network, Valve's Steam, Microsoft's Xbox, EA, Riot Games, Nintendo, Quake Live, DOTA2, and League of Legends servers, along with many others. Named Austin Thompson, but known online as DerpTrolling, the man is the first hacker who started a trend among other hackers and hacking crews -- namely of launching DDoS attacks against gaming providers during Christmas, which they later justified using ridiculous reasons such as "to spoil everyone's holiday," "to make people spend time with their families," or "for the lulz." The hacker's DDoS attacks were extremely successful at the time, in 2013, in a time when most companies didn't use strong DDoS mitigation services.