Author: HackWatchit

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has frozen all of its election security work and is reviewing everything it has done to help state and local officials secure their elections for the past eight years, WIRED has learned. The move represents the first major example of the country’s cyber defense agency accommodating President Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud and online censorship.In a memo sent Friday to all CISA employees and obtained by WIRED, CISA’s acting director, Bridget Bean, said she was ordering “a review and assessment” of every position at the agency related to election security and countering…

Authored by Wenfeng Yu and ZePeng Chen As smartphones have become an integral part of our daily lives, malicious apps have grown increasingly deceptive and sophisticated. Recently, we uncovered a seemingly harmless app called “BMI CalculationVsn” on the Amazon App Store, which is secretly stealing the package name of installed apps and incoming SMS messages under the guise of a simple health tool. McAfee reported the discovered app to Amazon, which took prompt action, and the app is no longer available on Amazon Appstore. Figure 1. Application published on Amazon Appstore   Superficial Functionality: Simple BMI Calculation On the surface,…

A 48-year-old woman from Arizona has pleaded guilty to charges related to a criminal scheme which saw North Korean IT workers employed remotely by hundreds of US companies.Christian Marie Chapman, of Litchfield Park, Arizona, is said to have helped generate over US $17 million for North Korea after over 300 US companies unwittingly hired staff believing them to be US citizens.Chapman was arrested in May 2024, and charged alongside Ukrainian Oleksandr Didenko (27), for helping three unidentified foreign nationals, in a sophisticated fraud scheme that saw skilled IT workers from North Korea and elsewhere secure remote IT positions within US…

In today’s world, security is more important than ever. As organizations increasingly rely on technology to drive business, digital threats are becoming more sophisticated, varied, and difficult to defend against. One of the most effective ways to safeguard an organization’s digital assets is through penetration testing (or just “pen testing” for short). In this blog, we will explore what penetration testing is, why it’s vital for modern businesses, and how it fits into an organization’s overall security strategy. A Penetration Tester What is Penetration Testing? Penetration testing is a method used to evaluate security by simulating an attack from malicious…

Attackers are now targeting an authentication bypass vulnerability affecting SonicWall firewalls shortly after the release of proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code. This security flaw (CVE-2024-53704), tagged by CISA as critical severity and found in the SSLVPN authentication mechanism, impacts SonicOS versions 7.1.x (up to 7.1.1-7058), 7.1.2-7019, and 8.0.0-8035, used by multiple models of Gen 6 and Gen 7 firewalls and SOHO series devices. Successful exploitation enables remote attackers to hijack active SSL VPN sessions without authentication, which grants them unauthorized access to targets’ networks. SonicWall urged customers to immediately upgrade their firewalls’ SonicOS firmware to prevent exploitation in an email sent…

China-linked APT Salt Typhoon breached telecoms by exploiting Cisco router flaws Pierluigi Paganini February 14, 2025 China-linked APT Salt Typhoon has breached more U.S. telecommunications providers via unpatched Cisco IOS XE network devices. China-linked APT group Salt Typhoon is still targeting telecommunications providers worldwide, and according to a new report published by Recorded Future’s Insikt Group, the threat actors has breached more U.S. telecommunications providers by exploiting unpatched Cisco IOS XE network devices. Insikt Group researchers reported that the Chinese hacked have exploited two Cisco flaws, tracked as CVE-2023-20198 and CVE-2023-20273. In October 2023, Cisco warned customers of the zero-day vulnerability CVE-2023-20198 (CVSS score…

A phishing attack dubbed DEEP#DRIVE is targeting South Korean entities, with thousands already affected. North Korean hackers from the Kimsuky group are the prime suspects behind this cyber espionage campaign. Securonix has shared its investigation into the DEEP#DRIVE attack campaign, a multi-stage operation targeting South Korean businesses, government entities, and cryptocurrency users since September 2024. The attack’s primary objective is most likely espionage to gather sensitive information from South Korean entities and has already claimed thousands of victims. The investigation shared with Hackread.com ahead of its publishing, reveals that attackers employed tailored phishing lures written in Korean and disguised as…

This original research is the result of close collaboration between AI security researchers from Robust Intelligence, now a part of Cisco, and the University of Pennsylvania including Yaron Singer, Amin Karbasi, Paul Kassianik, Mahdi Sabbaghi, Hamed Hassani, and George Pappas. Executive Summary This article investigates vulnerabilities in DeepSeek R1, a new frontier reasoning model from Chinese AI startup DeepSeek. It has gained global attention for its advanced reasoning capabilities and cost-efficient training method. While its performance rivals state-of-the-art models like OpenAI o1, our security assessment reveals critical safety flaws. Using algorithmic jailbreaking techniques, our team applied an automated attack methodology…

Introduction: The Critical Role of Service Levels in Managed Security Today’s managed service providers (MSPs) play a crucial role in safeguarding businesses against cyber threats. As the complexity and frequency of these threats increase exponentially, it’s becoming critical for MSPs to both establish and maintain robust service levels. This is where professional services automation (PSA) and remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools come into play: to assist MSPs to track and report service levels back to customers. Once the right tools are in place, the next critical step for an MSP is to define service level agreements (SLAs) for each…