Thursday, December 29, 2022

'Weather Whiplash' Is the New Normal. What It's Like Living Through It - CNET

First came the fires this year, then the floods.

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Latest Tech News

Many Citrix ADC and Gateway servers remain vulnerable to high-severity flaws that were reportedly patched by the company weeks ago, experts have claimed.

In early November 2022, Citrix uncovered and patched an “Unauthorized access to Gateway user capabilities” flaw, since tracked as CVE-2022-27510. Affecting both products, it allows an attacker to gain authorized access to target endpoints, take over the devices remotely, and bypass the device’s brute force login protection.

Roughly a month later, in mid-December, the company fixed an “Unauthenticated remote arbitrary code execution” flaw, since tracked as CVE-2022-27518. This one allows threat actors to execute malicious code on the target endpoint, remotely.

NSA warning

Both have a 9.8/10 severity score, and at least one of them was abused in the wild as a zero-day, researchers from NCC Group’s Fox IT team claim.

In fact, the US National Security Agency (NSA) warned in early December, that a hacking collective backed by the Chinese state was exploiting the latter vulnerability as a zero-day security flaw. 

Back then, in an official blog post, chief security and trust officer at Citrix Peter Lefkowitz claimed that “limited exploits of this vulnerability have been reported,” but did not elaborate on the number of attacks or the industries involved.

Sometimes referred to as Manganese,  this group of threat actors has apparently explicitly targeted networks running these Citrix applications to break through organizational security without first having to steal credentials via social engineering and phishing attacks. 

The researchers have also said that while the majority of endpoints had been patched since the release of the fixes, there are “thousands” of vulnerable servers out there. As of November 11 2022, at least 28,000 Citrix servers were found to have been at risk.

“We hope this blog creates extra awareness for these two Citrix CVEs and that our research on version identification contributes to future studies,” the researchers concluded.

Via: BleepingComputer



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Wednesday, December 28, 2022

4 Prime Membership Perks That Make Your Amazon Echo More Useful in 2023 - CNET

Here are all the perks you get when you have an Amazon Echo and Prime membership.

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Why 2022 Was Taylor Swift's Most Epically Creative Year Yet - CNET

Commentary: The star has truly entered her Renaissance woman of the arts era.

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Heating an Older Home Is Expensive. Here's How to Slash Your Bill - CNET

We've got some easy tips to help you keep your older or period property warmer this winter.

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You May Be Owed Money From a False Advertising Settlement if You Use Wesson Oil - CNET

A federal judge gave preliminary approval in November to a $3 million payout to consumers who purchased Wesson Oil.

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LG to Unveil New, Flat Smartphone Camera Module at CES - CNET

The new camera includes a telephoto lens with up to 9x zoom and takes the "bump" out of smartphone cameras.

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Latest Tech News

A new malware variant has been detected that is capable of listening to a users’ calls, recognizing a callers’ gender and identity, and even recognizing, to some degree, what’s being said. 

Fortunately, the good news is that the malware is part of a research experiment done by white hats and poses no risk to smartphone users (at the time).

Researchers from five universities in the United States - Texas A&M University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Temple University, University of Dayton, and Rutgers University - teamed up and built EarSpy. 

Abusing the hardware

EarSpy is a side-channel attack that abuses the fact that smartphone speakers, motion sensors, and gyroscopes, had gotten better over the years.

The malware tries to read the data captured by motion sensors, as the endpoint’s ear speakers reverberate during a conversation. In earlier years, this wasn’t a viable attack vector as the speakers and sensors weren’t that powerful. 

To prove their point, the researchers used two smartphones - one from 2016, and one from 2019. The difference in the amount of data gathered was quite obvious.

To test if the data could be used to identify the caller’s gender and recognize the speech, the researchers used a OnePlus 7T device, and a OnePlus 9 device.

Caller gender identification on the former was between 77.7% and 98.7%, while the caller’s identification between 63.0% and 91.2%. Speech recognition danced between 51.8% and 56.4%.

“As there are ten different classes here, the accuracy still exhibits five times greater accuracy than a random guess, which implies that vibration due to the ear speaker induced a reasonable amount of distinguishable impact on accelerometer data,” the researchers explained in the whitepaper.

The researchers were also able to guess the caller’s gender quite well on the OnePlus 9 smartphone (88.7% on average), but identification fell to an average of 73.6%. Speech recognition fell between 33.3% and 41.6%.

Via: BleepingComputer



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Tuesday, December 27, 2022

The First COLA Increase Comes to SSI Beneficiaries This Week - CNET

Next year's cost-of-living adjustment arrives at the end of December for Supplemental Security Income recipients.

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You Need to Stop Mounting Your TV Over the Fireplace - CNET

Chestnuts should roast over open fires. Your TV? Not so much.

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You Need to Stop Reheating Christmas Leftovers in the Microwave - CNET

Reheat your leftovers without succumbing to soggy pizza or overly dry holiday roast. There are better ways to heat up your food without using the microwave.

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10 Best Winter Skin Care Products - CNET

Protect and ease your dry and itchy skin this winter season.

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Latest Tech News

Cybersquatting, a method of tricking victims into visiting malicious websites, has reached record highs in 2022, new reports have claimed.

Data from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) analyzed by Atlas VPN found 5,616 cybersquatting disputes filed with the organization this year, representing almost a 10% increase compared to 2021.

Cybersquatting is a method in which crooks try to leverage typos (or recklessness) to have people visit their malicious websites. There are various formats of cybersquatting, including typosquatting, combosquatting, and others. 

Typosquatting variants

Typosquatting, arguably the most popular among the methods, has threat actors registering domain names seemingly identical to the ones belonging to legitimate businesses. So, for example, Amazon might be Anazon, Amazom, while Netflix could be NetfIix (there is a capital i instead of the letter L). 

Combosquatting is also a popular technique and revolves around combining the domain name with an extra word such as “payment”, “support”, or similar. So, for example, Amazon might be amazon-support.com, while Netflix could be netflix-payment.com. 

With cybersquatting, threat actors are banking on two things: either people will mistype the address on their own, or the crooks share the link via email, or social channels, and hope no one notices the typo or the obvious fake domain name. The malicious websites are designed to look identical to their legitimate counterparts, and are built to steal identity and login data. 

The number of cybersquatting complaints has been steadily rising over the years, Atlas VPN further claims. Compared to the year 2000, there’s been an increase of 202% in cybersquatting disputes. The total number of complaints has exceeded 61,000, in that time period. 

One of the bigger, and more recent campaigns, included an unknown threat actor that set up more than 200 malicious domains and impersonated more than two dozen global brands to distribute all kinds of malware for both Android and Windows operating systems. Some of the brands impersonated in the attack included PayPal, SnapChat, TikTok, and others.



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Monday, December 26, 2022

5 Google Home Settings You Should Change Right After Unboxing - CNET

These cool Google Home features can make your gift even better, if you enable them.

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Natural Home Remedies to Ease Your Insomnia That Actually Work - CNET

Counting sheep not helping you fall asleep? These seven natural remedies may do the trick.

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Netflix Has Stopped Allowing Streaming From Phone to TV: How to Watch Now

On most TVs, you'll now need to use the official Netflix app to watch the streaming service. from CNET https://ift.tt/RxqeX8T