The Register - Anti-Virus

Big Red agrees not to capture personal details after two-year class action

Oracle has agreed to cough up $115 million to settle a two-year class action lawsuit that alleged misuse of user data.…

Was a 2009 agreement on interoperability to blame?

Did the EU force Microsoft to let third parties like CrowdStrike run riot in the Windows kernel as a result of a 2009 undertaking? This is the implication being peddled by the Redmond-based cloud and software titan.…

Supposed hacktivist efforts previously linked to the Kremlin's GRU

Flying under the radar on Clownstrike day last week, two members of the Cyber Army of Russia Reborn (CARR) hacktivist crew are the latest additions to the US sanctions list.…

Also: Second-string Russian hackers sanctioned; Senators demand answers from Snowflake, and more

Infosec in brief  Unable to access the Samsung smartphone of the deceased Trump shooter for clues, the FBI turned to a familiar – if controversial – source to achieve its goal: digital forensics tools vendor Cellebrite.…

Rapid restore tool being tested as Microsoft estimates 8.5M machines went down

Updated  CrowdStrike's now-infamous Falcon Sensor software, which last week led to widespread outages of Windows-powered computers, has also been linked to crashes of Linux machines.…

17-year-old cuffed as FBI says it will 'relentlessly pursue' miscreants around the globe

Cops in the UK have arrested a suspected member of the notorious Scattered Spider crime gang, which is accused of crippling MGM Resorts in Las Vegas with ransomware last summer.…

Our vultures gather to review this very freaky Friday

Kettle  If you're an IT administrator with Windows boxes on your network, Friday can't have been a lot of fun. What's likely millions of systems were or still are stuck in blue-screen boot loop hell, mostly requiring manual intervention to fix.…

Falcon Sensor putting hosts into deathloop - but there's a workaround

Updated  An update to a product from infosec vendor CrowdStrike is bricking computers running Windows globally.…

Firm halts trades after seeing $230 million disappear

Indian crypto exchange WazirX has revealed it lost virtual assets valued at over $230 million after a cyber attack that has since been linked to North Korea.…

Run by the NSA, the FBI, and Five Eyes nations, who fooled infosec researchers, apparently

China has wildly claimed the Volt Typhoon gang, which Five Eyes nations accuse of being a Beijing-backed attacker that targets critical infrastructure, was in fact made up by the US intelligence community.…

Russia-invaded software biz 'grateful for the support we have received'

A judge has mostly thrown out a lawsuit brought by America's financial watchdog that accused SolarWinds and its chief infosec officer of misleading investors about its computer security practices and the backdooring of its Orion product.…

Stick an independent probe in our software, you won't find any Putin.DLL backdoor

Kaspersky has hit back after the US government banned its products – by proposing an independent verification that its software is above board and not backdoored by the Kremlin.…

Major vendors' products scuppered by novel techniques

Prolific Russian cybercrime syndicate FIN7 is using various pseudonyms to sell its custom security solution-disabling malware to different ransomware gangs.…

You’re going to want to patch this one

Cisco just dropped a patch for a maximum-severity vulnerability that allows attackers to change the password of any user, including admins.…

Complicated, costly, time-consuming – pick three

Updated  Cybersecurity workers review major updates to software applications only 54 percent of the time, according to a poll of tech managers.…

Nothing else can detect attackers with implants designed to foil physical security

Sniffer dogs may soon become a useful means of improving physical security in datacenters, as increasing numbers of people are adopting implants like NFC chips that have the potential to enable novel attacks on access control tools.…

Unconfirmed reports suggest 30 percent reduction in headcount

Exabeam and LogRhythm – a pair of cyber security firms – finalized their merger on Wednesday, an occasion The Register understands was marked by swift job cuts and shareholder action to investigate the transaction.…

So long, farewell, do svidaniya, goodbye

Updated  Embattled Russian infosec shop Kaspersky is giving US customers six months of security updates for free as a parting gift as Uncle Sam kicks the antivirus maker out of the American market.…

Millions more spent without any improvement in recovery times

Costs associated with ransomware attacks on critical national infrastructure (CNI) organizations skyrocketed in the past year.…