Author: HackWatchit

There was a barrage of updates released the week of June 2025 Patch Tuesday. This included security updates from Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and others. But it has been ‘calm’ the past couple of weeks. The news and message boards were covering the continuing update issues from the past couple of months but there wasn’t a lot of new or exciting information. If this lull in activity continues, maybe we’ll be able to get a break from the grind next week and have an ‘easy’ Patch Tuesday. Already halfway through the year, it would be nice to take a little…

Carrie Roberts // ADVISORY: The techniques and tools referenced within this blog post may be outdated and do not apply to current situations. However, there is still potential for this blog entry to be used as an opportunity to learn and to possibly update or integrate into modern tools and techniques. I learned some new stuff that will make me pay attention to “Asterisk Detection” Nessus informational findings in the future . . . On an external network scan, Nessus reported two hosts running Asterisk SIP services as an informational finding.  When entering the IP address in a browser, only a…

OpenAI has again confirmed that it will unify multiple models into one and create GPT-5, which is expected to ship sometime in the summer. ChatGPT currently has too many capable models for different tasks. While the models are powerful, it can be confusing because all models have identical names. But another issue is that OpenAI maintains an “o” lineup for reasoning capabilities, while the 4o and other models have multi-modality. With GPT-5, OpenAI plans to unify the breakthrough in its lineup and deliver the best of the two worlds. “We’re truly excited to not just make a net new great…

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Toni Wahrstätter, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, have put forth a proposal that will cap the maximum gas a single transaction can use. The proposal, EIP 7983, claims:“By implementing this limit, Ethereum can enhance its resilience against certain DoS [Denial of Service attack] vectors, improve network stability, and provide more predictability to transaction processing costs.”The latest proposal is a modified version of EIP 7825, which was introduced in November last year but has since stagnated.The proposal will limit gas usage for individual transactions to 16.77 million gasThe proposal aims to enforce a maximum limit…

Five months after sanction Zservers, the U.S. Treasury Department targeted Aeza Group, another Russia-based bulletproof hosting services provider for allowing threat actors to host ransomware and other campaigns on its infrastructure, which is resistant to law enforcement demands and investigations. The post Aeza Group Latest BPH Service Provider Sanctioned by U.S. Treasury appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Aegis Authenticator is an open-source 2FA app for Android that helps you manage login codes for your online accounts. The app features strong encryption and the ability to back up your data. It supports both HOTP and TOTP, so it works with thousands of services. It also allows the export or import from a wide variety of 2FA apps, with support for automatic backups. Aegis Authenticator is available for free on GitHub. Must read: Subscribe to the Help Net Security ad-free monthly newsletter to stay informed on the essential open-source cybersecurity tools. Subscribe here!

To aid in wildfire preparedness, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has released a publicly accessible online database of wildfire mitigation plans. The new resource offers a centralized, searchable collection of more than 400 publicly available wildfire mitigation plans developed by 170 utilities across 19 U.S. states. These plans span from 2019 through 2028 and provide a broad overview of how utilities are preparing for wildfire risk. The database is funded by the Department of Energy’s Grid Deployment Office (GDO) and is part of a larger research program focused on establishing credible industry metrics for assessing and mitigating wildfire risk. The database, now live…

I always review the “Info” level “Service Detection” finding reported by Nessus, particularly any web servers that it lists because there are often blatant security issues hidden in there. This is as simple as visiting each host:port combination in a web browser and seeing what the server response is.  To aid me in this effort when there are a lot of results to go through I use a free tool called EyeWitness by Chris Truncer that reads all the protocol, host and port combinations from the Nessus scan and takes a screenshot of each one as if you visited it manually in…

The more online accounts you have, the more likely it is you’ve come across the option of securing them with MFA or 2FA. You may already be using them to help protect your accounts and the sensitive personal data they contain. This is a sensible step to take, particularly with cybersecurity threats on the rise. An increasing number of platforms now require you to implement an extra layer of security to access them. You can often use the terms MFA and 2FA interchangeably, but there’s a slight difference between them. We’ll clearly define both, explain how they differ, and how…