Yesterday we reported that the source code stealing group, Lapsus$, claimed they have breached and stollen source code from Microsoft. They made the announcement on their Telegram account by posting a screenshot of the projects they claimed to have access to. Now, as with other leaks, they have dropped a compressed file (7zip) via Torrent which appears to contain around 37GB of source code.

Elden Ring, from developer FromSoftware seems to have a flaw that is allowing an interesting attack for PC players. The flaw allows invaders, malicious players that enter another player’s world to cause a game crash, this crash leads the player into an endless death loop once the player can get back online.

The Lapsus$ group has been in the news recently for theft of source code form some high-profile targets. These targets have included companies like NVIDIA, Samsung, Vodafone, and Ubisoft. The NVIDIA event was noteworthy as it included a claim that NVIDIA hacked the attackers back in order to encrypt the data that have been taken out of their environment.

Phishing, regular and spear, is a very common method of compromising accounts and gaining access to a network. In many incidents, the initial compromise can be traced back to a compromised account via some sort of phishing message. This happens despite the many hours and dollars spent towards educating users about the dangers of trusting messages sent to them.

Recently a SolarWinds Web Help Desk client reported an attempted attack on their externally facing Web Help Desk instance. The attack was caught by their EDR system which was able to block the attempt. However, the reported attack, after a review, has caused concern with SolarWinds who is now advising their customers to remove public access to avoid possible compromise.

Yesterday we reported that insider builds of Microsoft’s Windows 11 were displaying ads for other Microsoft services inside File Explorer. Like most people, we felt this was not a good thing and the news went around the internet at a pace typical of things that are bad. In response to this Microsoft release a statement saying, “This was an experimental banner that was not intended to be published externally and was turned off,” Basically the marketing equivalent of a 5-year-old saying they got the cookie for you.

Ukrainian Security Officials are warning of an active phishing campaign. The campaign involves emails that impersonate government agencies and include links to what appear to be critical security updates. The payload of the campaign delivers Cobalt Strike and a few other things to complete the set and compromise the computer.

Microsoft, famous for bad marketing moves, is looking to make another one. In this case the mistake has not hit the general public but is in a preview build of Windows 11. The mistake is shoveling ads to people for other Microsoft products as part of the Windows File Explorer. To say that this move caused some concern with testers is a bit of an understatement. Some even called it “one of the worst places to show ads”

PatchStack has pushed out a report that shows that a shocking 30% of vulnerabilities in WordPress sites are left unpatched. This is not to say that people are not patching (they are not), but the report illustrates that vendors for plugins are not properly updating their own tools and software to address security issues. WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems available and has a very broad ecosystem of plug-ins, themes, and other bolt-on components to make it even more flexible and usable.

Emotet, (not to be confused with Imhotep the ancient Egyptian Polymath) was originally identified in 2014 and quickly became one of the top threats of the decade. After an early start as a banking trojan, the group amassed a huge number of bots that it was able to leverage to execute attacks on targets. This bot infrastructure was then sold as a service to other groups as part of a malware-as-a-Service model. The prevalence and reach of Emotet was enough that in early 2021 the global law enforcement and cyber security community targeted Emotet’s infrastructure and people that had been identified as part of the group. It was a significant hit to the organization.