Tag Archives: Biz & IT

The most severe Linux threat to surface in years catches the world flat-footed

Publicly released exploit code for an effectively unpatched vulnerability that gives root access to virtually all releases of Linux is setting off alarm bells as defenders scramble to ward off severe compromises inside data centers and on personal devices. The vulnerability and exploit code that exploits it were released Wednesday evening by researchers from security… Read More »

Why a recent supply-chain attack singled out security firms Checkmarx and Bitwarden

“Current evidence indicates that this data originated from Checkmarx’s GitHub repositories, and that access to those repositories was facilitated through the initial supply chain attack of March 23, 2023,” Checkmarx said Monday. The company didn’t say what kinds of data were leaked. Checkmarx isn’t the only security company to suffer the aftereffects of the Trivy… Read More »

Open source package with 1 million monthly downloads stole user credentials

The developers are urging all developers who installed version 0.23.3 to take the following steps immediately: 1. Check your installed version: pip show elementary-data | grep Version 2. If the version is 0.23.3, uninstall it and replace it with the safe version: pip uninstall elementary-data pip install elementary-data==0.23.4 In your requirements and lockfiles, pin explicitly… Read More »

Why are top university websites serving porn? It comes down to shoddy housekeeping.

Websites for some of the world’s most prestigious universities are serving explicit porn and malicious content after scammers exploited the shoddy record-keeping of the site administrators, a researcher found recently. The sites included berkeley.edu, columbia.edu, and washu.edu, the official domains for the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, and Washington University in St. Louis. Subdomains… Read More »

In a first, a ransomware family is confirmed to be quantum-safe

There is no practical benefit for Kyber developers to have chosen a PQC key-exchange algorithm. The Kyber ransom note gives victims one week to respond. Quantum computers capable of running Shor’s algorithm—the series of mathematical equations that allow the breakage of RSA and ECC (elliptic curve cryptography)—are, at a minimum, three years away and likely… Read More »

Microsoft issues emergency update for macOS and Linux ASP.NET threat

Microsoft released an emergency patch for its ASP.NET Core to fix a high-severity vulnerability that allows unauthenticated attackers to gain SYSTEM privileges on devices that use the Web development framework to run Linux or macOS apps. The software maker said Tuesday evening that the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-40372, affects versions 10.0.0 through 10.0.6 of the… Read More »

Contrary to popular superstition, AES 128 is just fine in a post-quantum world

On Monday, Valsorda finally channeled years’ worth of frustration, fueled by the widely held misunderstanding, into a blog post titled “Quantum Computers Are Not a Threat to 128-bit Symmetric Keys.” “There’s a common misconception that quantum computers will ‘halve’ the security of symmetric keys, requiring 256-bit keys for 128 bits of security,” he wrote. “That… Read More »

US-sanctioned currency exchange says $15 million heist done by “unfriendly states”

Grinex, a US-sanctioned cryptocurrency exchange registered in Kyrgyzstan, said it’s halting operations after experiencing a $13 million heist carried out by “western special services” hackers. Researchers from TRM, which has confirmed the theft, put the value of stolen assets at $15 million after discovering roughly 70 drained addresses, about 16 more than Grinex reported. Neither… Read More »

Recent advances push Big Tech closer to the Q-Day danger zone

Interestingly, Amazon is using SigV4, an impromptu algorithm it developed in-house to make authentication quantum-safe. “AWS limits the transmission of these secrets to the moment of generation,” Campagna wrote. “Once initially distributed, it is never re-sent to the customer. While we made this decision to operate at the massive scale of AWS, we avoided the… Read More »

“Negative” views of Broadcom driving thousands of VMware migrations, rival says

Amid customer dissatisfaction around Broadcom’s VMware takeover, rivals have been trying to lure customers from the leading virtualization firm. One of VMware’s biggest competitors, Nutanix, claims to have swiped tens of thousands of VMware customers. Speaking at a press briefing at Nutanix’s .NEXT conference in Chicago this week, Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said that “about… Read More »