Patrick Domingues

A newly discovered malware infection targeting macOS devices. 
Malwarebytes security researchers say it has the ability of injecting ads into encrypted web traffic.

This malware is call OSX.SearchAwesome, the malware is delivered by a malicious installer that arrives as an app downloaded using a torrent file. The malware installer looks like a disk image file but doesn’t have the usual icon art that is used to make it look legitimate.

When the malware is launched, the image file installs the the payload silently and then it requests the user to authorize changes to the Certificate Trust Settings and to allow a component called spi to modify the network configuration. This will then allow the malware to inject itself to network traffic.

On Tuesday Microsoft notified users that digital certificates have been compromised for two apps which allowed someone to remotely spoof websites and content.  The issue was that the certificate and private key were the same for anyone who installed these two applications. Which allowed a hacker to decrypt the software’s private key which compromised the security of the windows computers. The certificate became susceptible to attacks like spoofing, phishing, or man-in-the-middle attacks.

November 23, following a vulnerability identified in Sennheiser HeadSetup and HeadSetup Pro, new versions have been made available.

Updating the software to its latest version will rid the software of vulnerable certificates. Additionally, the invalidation by Windows November 27th of the former certificates fully eliminate the possibility to exploit the certificates.

The latest software versions are as follows:

• HeadSetup Pro: v.2.6.8235
• HeadSetup: v.8.1.6114 (for PC) and v. 5.3.7011 (for Mac).

Mac users and Windows users, that

Crash Skype for Business by sending a large number of emojis 800+ kittens in one message and the client freezes the program for a few seconds. This can be exploited to perform Denial of Service attacks against Skype for Business users and compromises the availability of the program.

How would an attacker go about performing this attack? Well its quite simple, the attacker can continuously send many messages to the chat window and it will freeze the program for all participants in the meeting room and prevent them from using the chat or seeing the video.

 Are you affected?

You could send yourself a few hundred emojis and see if your client freezes but we wouldn’t recommend it. Plus, there is an easier way. Just check if your client is one of these:

• Skype for Business 2016 MSO (16.0.93).64-Bit or before
• Lync 2013 (15.0) 64-Bit part of Microsoft Office Professional

New reports on not just ransomware but all malware saw massive growth year after year. From SonicWall the cyber-security company detected 45 percent growth of malware infections towards desktops. SoncWall spotted 300,000 new attack variants so far this year. SonicWall’s recently announced Capture Cloud Platform is designed to counter these rising threats.

SonicWall Capture Threat Network, which includes more than 1 million sensors across the world, recorded the following 2018 year-to-date attack data through September 2018:

• 8.5 billion malware attacks (54 percent increase from 2017)
• 2.9 trillion intrusion attempts (49 percent increase)
• 262.4 million ransomware attacks (108 percent increase)
• 1.9 million encrypted threats (56 percent increase)

In September 2018 alone, the average SonicWall customer faced:

• 1,662 malware attacks (24 percent decrease from July 2017)
• 791,015 intrusion attempts (19 percent increase)
• 56 ransomware attacks (99 percent increase)
• 70.9 encrypted threats (61 percent decrease)
• 10 phishing attacks each day (92 percent decrease)