Silensec Newsletter

Russia asks Apple to remove Telegram Messenger from the App Store

Russia asks Apple to remove Telegram Messenger from the App Store

Russia's communications regulator has threatened Apple to face the consequences if the company does not remove secure messaging app Telegram from its App Store.

The Russian government had banned Telegram in the country for the company's refusal to hand over private encryption keys to Russian state security services to access messages sent using the secure service.

However, so far, the Telegram app is still available in the Russian version of Apple's App Store.

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100 Million IoT Devices Possibly Exposed to Z-Wave Attack

100 Million IoT Devices Possibly Exposed to Z-Wave Attack

Researchers have demonstrated that the Z-Wave wireless communications protocol, which is used by more than 100 million Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, is vulnerable to security downgrade attacks.

Z-Wave, a protocol primarily used for home automation, uses low-energy radio waves for wireless communications over distances of up to 100 meters (330 feet).

According to the Z-Wave Alliance, an organization dedicated to advancing Z-Wave, the protocol is currently used by 700 companies in over 2,400 IoT and smart home products, including thermostats, locks and home monitoring systems.

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Beware of the Social Engineering tricks used to target unsuspecting employees

Beware of the Social Engineering tricks used to target unsuspecting employees

Does your organization have cybersecurity defense systems in place? Are your employees trained to recognize some of the most common social engineering tricks? If not your system still has a wide-open gap.

Social engineers are cunning and malicious and they will go to any lengths to get access to information, systems or secure buildings e.t.c for instance phishing, tailgating, crankcall (phone impersonation) and not to mention oversharing by the employees ( social media pretexting)

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Spectre chip security vulnerability strikes again; patches incoming

Spectre chip security vulnerability strikes again; patches incoming

After the first-wave of Spectre and Meltdown attacks were conquered, people relaxed. That was a mistake. Early this year, researchers from several organizations warned that processors from Intel, AMD, ARM and other companies are affected by flaws that allow malicious applications to bypass memory isolation mechanisms and gain access to sensitive data.

Spectre attacks are possible due to CVE-2017-5753/ CVE-2017-5715 (Variant 1 & 2), while Meltdown attacks are possible due to CVE-2017-5754 (Variant 3). Researchers at Google Project Zero & Microsoft recently identified a new method which they have dubbed Variant 4.

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The new Wicked Mirai botnet leverages at least three new exploits

The new Wicked Mirai botnet leverages at least three new exploits

The name Wicked Mirai comes from the strings in the code, the experts discovered that this new variant includes at least three new exploits compared to the original one.

The Mirai botnet was first spotted two years ago by the experts at MalwareMustDie, at the time it was used to power massive DDoS attacks in the wild.

The Mirai's source code was leaked online and since then many other variants emerged in the wild, including Satori, Masuta and Okiru.

According to Fortinet, the author of the Wicked Mirai is the same as the other variants.

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Red Hat Linux DHCP Client affected by a command injection flaw, patch it now!

Red Hat Linux DHCP Client affected by a command injection flaw, patch it now!

Security researchers have gone public with vulnerabilities in some secure mail apps that can be exploited by miscreants to decrypt intercepted PGP-encrypted messages.

Red Hat, opensource solutions provider, recently announced a critical vulnerability in its DHCP client tracked as CVE-2018-1111 that could be exploited by attackers to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges on targeted systems.

Security expert discovered the critical remote command injection vulnerability in the DHCP client implementation of Red Hat Linux, the issue also affects other distros based on it like Fedora.

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