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On Thursday evening, KrebsOnSecurity was the subject of a rather massive (and mercifully brief) distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The assault came from “Meris,” the same new “Internet of Things” (IoT) botnet behind record-shattering attacks against Russian search giant Yandex this week and internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare earlier this summer. Cloudflare recently wrote about its attack, which clocked in at 17.2 million bogus requests-per-second. To put that in perspective, Cloudflare serves over 25 million HTTP requests per second on average. In its Aug. 19 writeup, Cloudflare neglected to assign a name to the botnet behind the attack. But on Thursday DDoS protection firm Qrator Labs identified the culprit — “Meris” — a new IoT monster that first emerged at the end of June 2021. Qrator says Meris has launched even bigger…

Posted by Suzanne Frey, VP, Product, Android & Play Security and Privacy We introduced Android’s Private Compute Core in Android 12 Beta. Today, we're excited to announce a new suite of services that provide a privacy-preserving bridge between Private Compute Core and the cloud. Recap: What is Private Compute Core? Android’s Private Compute Core is an open source, secure environment that is isolated from the rest of the operating system and apps. With each new Android release we’ll add more privacy-preserving features to the Private Compute Core. Today, these include: Live Caption, which adds captions to any media using Google’s on-device speech recognition Now Playing, which recognizes music playing nearby and displays the song title and artist name on your device’s lock screen Smart Reply, which suggests relevant responses based…

Microsoft Corp. warns that attackers are exploiting a previously unknown vulnerability in Windows 10 and many Windows Server versions to seize control over PCs when users open a malicious document or visit a booby-trapped website. There is currently no official patch for the flaw, but Microsoft has released recommendations for mitigating the threat. According to a security advisory from Redmond, the security hole CVE-2021-40444 affects the “MSHTML” component of Internet Explorer (IE) on Windows 10 and many Windows Server versions. IE been slowly abandoned for more recent Windows browsers like Edge, but the same vulnerable component also is used by Microsoft Office applications for rendering web-based content. “An attacker could craft a malicious ActiveX control to be used by a Microsoft Office document that hosts the browser rendering engine,” Microsoft…

In May 2015, KrebsOnSecurity briefly profiled “The Manipulaters,” the name chosen by a prolific cybercrime group based in Pakistan that was very publicly selling spam tools and a range of services for crafting, hosting and deploying malicious email. Six years later, a review of the social media postings from this group shows they are prospering, while rather poorly hiding their activities behind a software development firm in Lahore that has secretly enabled an entire generation of spammers and scammers. The Web site in 2015 for the “Manipulaters Team,” a group of Pakistani hackers behind the dark web identity “Saim Raza,” who sells spam and malware tools and services. The Manipulaters’ core brand in the underground is a shared cybercriminal identity named “Saim Raza,” who for the past decade across dozens…

Some of the most successful and lucrative online scams employ a “low-and-slow” approach — avoiding detection or interference from researchers and law enforcement agencies by stealing small bits of cash from many people over an extended period. Here’s the story of a cybercrime group that compromises up to 100,000 email inboxes per day, and apparently does little else with this access except siphon gift card and customer loyalty program data that can be resold online. The data in this story come from a trusted source in the security industry who has visibility into a network of hacked machines that fraudsters in just about every corner of the Internet are using to anonymize their malicious Web traffic. For the past three years, the source — we’ll call him “Bill” to preserve his…

Over the past 15 years, a cybercrime anonymity service known as VIP72 has enabled countless fraudsters to mask their true location online by routing their traffic through millions of malware-infected systems. But roughly two week ago, VIP72’s online storefront — which ironically enough has remained at the same U.S.-based Internet address for more than a decade — simply vanished. Like other anonymity networks marketed largely on cybercrime forums online, VIP72 routes its customers’ traffic through computers that have been hacked and seeded with malicious software. Using services like VIP72, customers can select network nodes in virtually any country, and relay their traffic while hiding behind some unwitting victim’s Internet address. The domain Vip72[.]org was originally registered in 2006 to “Corpse,” the handle adopted by a Russian-speaking hacker who gained infamy…

Posted by Eric Brewer and Dan LorencYesterday, we were honored to participate in President Biden’s White House Cyber Security Summit where we shared recommendations to advance the administration’s cybersecurity agenda. This included our commitment to invest $10 billion over the next five years to expand zero-trust programs, help secure the software supply chain, and enhance open-source security.At Google, we’ve long advocated for securing the software supply chain both through our internal best practices and industry efforts that enhance the integrity and security of software. That’s why we're thrilled to collaborate with the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to support and develop a new framework that will help to improve the security and integrity of the technology supply chain.This builds on our previous work in…