Cybersecurity

Chinese state-sponsored spies have been spotted inside a global engineering firm's network, having gained initial entry using an admin portal's default credentials on an IBM AIX server.

In an exclusive interview with The Register, Binary Defense's Director of Security Research John Dwyer said the cyber snoops first compromised one of the victim's three unmanaged AIX servers in March, and remained inside the US-headquartered manufacturer's IT environment for four months while poking around for more boxes to commandeer.

It's a tale that should be a warning to those with long- or almost-forgotten machines connected to their networks; those with shadow IT deployments; and those with unmanaged equipment. While the rest of your environment is protected by whatever threat detection you have in place, these legacy services are perfect starting points for miscreants.

The authorities infiltrated Ghost’s distribution channel and modified updates to gain access to subscribers’ phones.

Hackers are brute-forcing passwords for highly privileged accounts on exposed Foundation accounting servers, widely used in the construction industry, to breach corporate networks.

​CISA and the FBI urged technology manufacturing companies to review their software and ensure that future releases are free of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities before shipping.

Roughly nine percent of tested firmware images use non-production cryptographic keys that are publicly known or leaked in data breaches, leaving many Secure Boot devices vulnerable to UEFI bootkit malware attacks.

Hacktivists love to target financial services companies, and their attacks are growing both larger and longer.

Attackers could have exploited a dependency confusion vulnerability dubbed "CloudImposer" affecting various Google Cloud services to execute a sprawling supply chain attack via just one malicious Python code package.

What do you guys think? I don't think there's a lot of depth to the arguments, myself. It reads more like an threadbare op-ed with a provocative title. But I'd like to hear you opinions on the impact of automated testing solutions on the role of pen-testers in the industry.

Infection corrals devices running AOSP-based firmware into a botnet.