Information Technology Security

By Bill Toulas,  Bleeping Computer A massive phishing campaign dubbed "EchoSpoofing" exploited now-fixed, weak permissions in Proofpoint's email protection service to dispatch millions of spoofed emails impersonating big entities like Disney, Nike, IBM, and Coca-Cola, to target Fortune 100 companies. The campaign started in January 2024, disseminating an average of 3 million spoofed emails daily and reaching a peak of 14 million emails in early June. The phishing emails were designed to steal sensitive personal information and incur unauthorized charges. They also included properly configured Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) signatures, making them appear authentic to the recipients. Guardio Labs helped discover the phishing campaign and security gap in Proofpoint's email relay servers. In May 2024, they notified the firm and helped them fix it.

When a ransomware attacker isn’t up to snuff, the damage might be limited. By Tim Culpan,  Bloomberg For more than two decades, ransomware attacks have been the bane of corporate IT managers and their CEOs, and a source of much research for cybersecurity professionals. An underground market for hacking and encryption tools has helped such incursions proliferate, but thankfully a recent case shows what we can learn when attackers don’t know what they’re doing.  Unlike other cyber nuisances, such as viruses, which replicate and cause mayhem, or denial of service attacks, which bring networks to a grinding halt, ransomware is almost impossible to unwind once it’s been deployed successfully. That’s because they use encryption to lock up the files, with a secret decryption key being the only route out.  Rather than try to undo this encryption, most victims just write off the files and restore their systems using backups. This can take days or weeks, assuming the target ha...