Catégorie : Actualités

The number of phishing websites tied to domain name registrar Freenom dropped precipitously in the months surrounding a recent lawsuit from social networking giant Meta, which alleged the free domain name provider has a long history of ignoring abuse complaints about phishing websites while monetizing traffic to those abusive domains. The volume of phishing websites registered through Freenom dropped considerably since the registrar was sued by Meta. Image: Interisle Consulting. Freenom is the domain name registry service provider for five so-called “country code top level domains” (ccTLDs), including .cf for the Central African Republic; .ga for Gabon; .gq for Equatorial Guinea; .ml for Mali; and .tk for Tokelau. Freenom has always waived the registration fees for domains in these country-code domains, but the registrar also reserves the right to take…

David Kluge, Technical Program Manager, and Andy Warner, Product Manager Nobody likes preventable site errors, but they happen disappointingly often.  The last thing you want your customers to see is a dreaded 'Your connection is not private' error instead of the service they expected to reach. Most certificate errors are preventable and one of the best ways to help prevent issues is by automating your certificate lifecycle using the ACME standard. Google Trust Services now offers our ACME API to all users with a Google Cloud account (referred to as “users” here), allowing them to automatically acquire and renew publicly-trusted TLS certificates for free. The ACME API has been available as a preview and over 200 million certificates have been issued already, offering the same compatibility as major Google services…

Brandon Lum and Mihai Maruseac, Google Open Source Security Team Today, we are announcing the launch of the v0.1 version of Graph for Understanding Artifact Composition (GUAC). Introduced at Kubecon 2022 in October, GUAC targets a critical need in the software industry to understand the software supply chain. In collaboration with Kusari, Purdue University, Citi, and community members, we have incorporated feedback from our early testers to improve GUAC and make it more useful for security professionals. This improved version is now available as an API for you to start developing on top of, and integrating into, your systems. The need for GUAC High-profile incidents such as Solarwinds, and the recent 3CX supply chain double-exposure, are evidence that supply chain attacks are getting more sophisticated. As highlighted by the U.S.…

Posted by Chrome Root Program, Chrome Security Team What is the Chrome Root Program? A root program is one of the foundations for securing connections to websites. The Chrome Root Program was announced in September 2022. If you missed it, don’t worry - we’ll give you a quick summary below! Chrome Root Program: TL;DR Chrome uses digital certificates (often referred to as “certificates,” “HTTPS certificates,” or “server authentication certificates”) to ensure the connections it makes for its users are secure and private. Certificates are issued by trusted entities called “Certification Authorities” (CAs). The collection of digital certificates, CA systems, and other related online servicews is the foundation of HTTPS and is often referred to as the “Web PKI.” Before issuing a certificate to a website, the CA must verify that…

Social networks are constantly battling inauthentic bot accounts that send direct messages to users promoting scam cryptocurrency investment platforms. What follows is an interview with a Russian hacker responsible for a series of aggressive crypto spam campaigns that recently prompted several large Mastodon communities to temporarily halt new registrations. According to the hacker, their spam software has been in private use until the last few weeks, when it was released as open source code. Renaud Chaput is a freelance programmer working on modernizing and scaling the Mastodon project infrastructure — including joinmastodon.org, mastodon.online, and mastodon.social. Chaput said that on May 4, 2023, someone unleashed a spam torrent targeting users on these Mastodon communities via “private mentions,” a kind of direct messaging on the platform. The messages said recipients had earned…

Posted by Sarah Jacobus, Vulnerability Rewards Team As technology continues to advance, so do efforts by cybercriminals who look to exploit vulnerabilities in software and devices. This is why at Google and Android, security is a top priority, and we are constantly working to make our products more secure. One way we do this is through our Vulnerability Reward Programs (VRP), which incentivize security researchers to find and report vulnerabilities in our operating system and devices. We are pleased to announce that we are implementing a new quality rating system for security vulnerability reports to encourage more security research in higher impact areas of our products and ensure the security of our users. This system will rate vulnerability reports as High, Medium, or Low quality based on the level of…

A Russian man identified by KrebsOnSecurity in January 2022 as a prolific and vocal member of several top ransomware groups was the subject of two indictments unsealed by the Justice Department today. U.S. prosecutors say Mikhail Pavolovich Matveev, a.k.a. “Wazawaka” and “Boriselcin” worked with three different ransomware gangs that extorted hundreds of millions of dollars from companies, schools, hospitals and government agencies. An FBI wanted poster for Matveev. Indictments returned in New Jersey and the District of Columbia allege that Matveev was involved in a conspiracy to distribute ransomware from three different strains or affiliate groups, including Babuk, Hive and LockBit. The indictments allege that on June 25, 2020, Matveev and his LockBit co-conspirators deployed LockBit ransomware against a law enforcement agency in Passaic County, New Jersey. Prosecutors say that…

Countless smartphones seized in arrests and searches by police forces across the United States are being auctioned online without first having the data on them erased, a practice that can lead to crime victims being re-victimized, a new study found. In response, the largest online marketplace for items seized in U.S. law enforcement investigations says it now ensures that all phones sold through its platform will be data-wiped prior to auction. Researchers at the University of Maryland last year purchased 228 smartphones sold “as-is” from PropertyRoom.com, which bills itself as the largest auction house for police departments in the United States. Of phones they won at auction (at an average of $18 per phone), the researchers found 49 had no PIN or passcode; they were able to guess an additional…

Dongge Liu, Jonathan Metzman and Oliver Chang, Google Open Source Security Team Google’s Open Source Security Team recently sponsored a fuzzing competition as part of ISCE’s Search-Based and Fuzz Testing (SBFT) Workshop. Our goal was to encourage the development of new fuzzing techniques, which can lead to the discovery of software vulnerabilities and ultimately a safer open source ecosystem.  The competitors’ fuzzers were judged on code coverage and their ability to discover bugs:  HasteFuzz took the $11,337 prize for code coverage PASTIS and AFLrustrust tied for bug discovery and split the $11,337 prize Competitors were evaluated using FuzzBench, Google’s open source platform for testing and comparing fuzzers. The platform boasts a wide range of real world benchmarks and vulnerabilities, allowing researchers to test their fuzzers in an authentic environment. We…

Juan José López Jaimez, Security Researcher and Meador Inge, Security Engineer Today, we are announcing Buzzer, a new eBPF Fuzzing framework that aims to help hardening the Linux Kernel. What is eBPF and how does it verify safety? eBPF is a technology that allows developers and sysadmins to easily run programs in a privileged context, like an operating system kernel. Recently, its popularity has increased, with more products adopting it as, for example, a network filtering solution. At the same time, it has maintained its relevance in the security research community, since it provides a powerful attack surface into the operating system. While there are many solutions for fuzzing vulnerabilities in the Linux Kernel, they are not necessarily tailored to the unique features of eBPF. In particular, eBPF has many…