Microsoft has rolled out its Patch Tuesday for April to address security issues in Internet Explorer (IE), Edge, ChakraCore, Visual Studio, Microsoft Office and Office Services and Web Apps, and Malware Protection Engine. Of the 67 listed vulnerabilities, 24 were rated critical. Eight of these were disclosed through Trend Micro’s ZDI program.
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Tropic Trooper (also known as KeyBoy) levels its campaigns against Taiwanese, Philippine, and Hong Kong targets, focusing on their government, healthcare, transportation, and high-tech industries. Its operators are believed to be very organized and develop their own cyberespionage tools that they fine-tuned in their recent campaigns. Many of the tools they use now feature new behaviors, including a change in the way they maintain a foothold in the targeted network.
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Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday for March is an eventful one, with updates that comprise fixes for 75 security issues and a change of tack in its patch deployment process for Windows 10. Of the vulnerabilities Microsoft patched for this month, 14 were rated as Critical and 61 Important. Six of these were disclosed through Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative: CVE-2018-0815, CVE-2018-0816, CVE-2018-0878, CVE-2018-0889, CVE-2018-0929, and CVE-2018-0977.
Read More We worked on a detection technique for attacks that exploit Meltdown and Spectre by utilizing performance counters available in Intel processors. They measure cache misses — the state where data that an application requests for processing is not found in the cache memory — that can be used to detect attacks that exploit Meltdown and Spectre.
We hope this can complement how system administrators and information security professionals implement their patching strategies. It can also serve as an alternative mitigation method, particularly for systems whose patches may cause stability or performance issues.
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Will cryptocurrency-mining malware be the new ransomware? The popularity and increasing real-world significance of cryptocurrencies are also drawing cybercriminal attention — so much so that it appears to keep pace with ransomware’s infamy in the threat landscape. In fact, cryptocurrency mining was the most detected network event in devices connected to home routers in 2017.
What started out in mid-2011 as an afterthought to main payloads such as worms and backdoors has evolved into such an effective way to profit that even cyberespionage and ransomware operators, and organized hacking groups are joining the bandwagon.
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