Week 48 in Information Security, 2018

Sennheiser's HeadSetup software is installing a root certificate into the OS Trusted CA Certificate store.
They have also put a private key on a device, the same one for all users, which allows any user to perform a man-in-the-middle SSL attacks against SSL communication.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/sennheiser-headset-software-could-allow-man-in-the-middle-ssl-attacks/

German chat platform Knuddels.de (Cuddles) has been fined 20k€ for storing user passwords in plain text.
What is interesting is that the regional GDPR data watchdog wanted to avoid bankrupting the company. "The overall financial burden on the company was taken into account in addition to other circumstances".
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/23/knuddels_fined_for_plain_text_passwords/

Crooks are using new attack vector to spread malware, they are requesting maintainer access to a widely-used open source projects on github, then pushing compromised version to millions of people.
https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream/issues/116

Two international cybercriminal Rings dismantled and eight defendants indicted for causing tens of millions of dollars in losses in the digital advertising fraud.
They have produced Boaxxe/Miuref & Kovter malware.
https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA18-331A

Cisco Talos has discovered DNSpionage malware targeting governments and companies in the Middle East using phishing attack.
https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2018/11/dnspionage-campaign-targets-middle-east.html

The U.S. Treasury Department has sanctioned two Iranians allegedly involved in Bitcoin ransomware scheme SamSam.
They have basically put Bitcoin addresses on the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) sanctions list.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm556

Scammers are changing the contact details for banks on Google Maps.
http://blog.abhijittomar.com/2018/10/19/google-business-claim-scam/

Almost all VPN browser extensions are in fact just a proxy and are vulnerable to a different level of IP leaks and DNS leaks.
https://blog.innerht.ml/vpn-extensions-are-not-for-privacy/

Google, Mozilla are working on letting web apps edit local user files despite warning it could be really dangerous.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/google-mozilla-working-on-letting-web-apps-edit-files-despite-warning-it-could-be-abused-in-terrible/

The German Federal Office for Information Security, BSI, publishes Microsoft Windows 10 telemetry analysis.
https://www.ghacks.net/2018/11/23/german-federal-office-bsi-publishes-telemetry-analysis/

BlackBerry purchased Cylance, the machine-learning based anti-malware company for $1.4 billion dollars.
They plans to integrate Cylance's anti-malware solution into the BlackBerry Spark platform.
https://www.csoonline.com/article/3321746/security/blackberrys-acquisition-of-cylance-raises-eyebrows-in-the-security-community.html

The Sequoia team introduced the first release of a new Rust implementation of the OpenPGP licensed under GPL 3.0.
https://sequoia-pgp.org/blog/2018/11/26/initial-release/

​

Source: malgregator.com