Security experts warn companies need to brace for new harder-to-detect and more determined variants of the Locky ransomware spotted recently in the wild. The news comes just as reported Locky ransomware attacks have waned in recent weeks. Locky is now trying to evade detection by changing the way the ransomware communicates from an infected computer...

Routers manufactured by Quanta are riddled with critical vulnerabilities–backdoors, a hardcoded SSH key, and remote code execution flaws, to name a few–that won’t be patched because the company considers the product end of life. Researcher Pierre Kim found the flaws and reasons that the flaws are due to incompetence, or at worst, calls them “a deliberate act...

Researchers warn hundreds of popular Firefox browser extensions are vulnerable to attack that could give hackers control of Mac OS X and Windows computers. Researchers from Northeastern University say the flaw is tied to Firefox’s support for an older browser extension platform and the Mozilla Foundation’s plug-in vetting process for its Firefox browser. Researchers presented...

Researchers have identified a vulnerability in an Android API used by messaging apps such as Skype and perhaps more concerning, privacy-centric apps such as Signal, and Telegram, that could lead to privilege escalation and data loss including private keys. Dominik Schürmann and Lars Wolf, researchers at the Braunschweig University of Technology in Germany, discovered the vulnerability, which they’ve dubbed...

Google has patched a vulnerability being exploited in the wild to root Nexus 5 Android devices. The public exploit—a rooting application—was privately disclosed to Google on March 15 by Zimperium researchers, and a less than a month after CORE Team researchers reported that CVE-2015-1805, which was patched in 2014 in the Linux kernel, also affects...

Technology vendor Cisco is pushing out security updates to customers to address a critical vulnerability found in its recently introduced line of FirePower firewall products. The vulnerability, according to Cisco, allows attackers to slip malware onto critical systems without detection. The flaw is also impacts  Snort, an open source network-based intrusion detection system also owned by Cisco....

Ransomware clearly has people on many fronts worried, so much so that the United States and Canada took an unprecedented step last week to issue a joint advisory on the threat posed by crypto-ransomware. The U.S. Cyber Emergency Response Team together with the Canadian Cyber Incident Response Centre penned a comprehensive warning on the heels...

Researchers found a vulnerability in the classic compression standard Lhasa, once a mainstay for game developers in the mid-’90s and still in use today. Researchers at Cisco’s security research arm, Cisco Talos, identified the vulnerability calling it as a classic heap-spray exploit. In a report disclosing the vulnerability, Talos reports a rigged LHA and LZH...

Reddit’s latest transparency report is missing a nugget of information that was present in a previous report. Last year’s report included a warrant canary which stated that as of Jan. 29, 2015, Reddit had never received a National Security Letter, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order or classified order for user data. “If we ever received...

Mike Mimoso and Chris Brook recap the week in news, including how the FBI cracked that iPhone, the barrage of ransomware hitting hospitals, and the Hack the Pentagon bug bounty trial program announcement. Download: Threatpost_News_Wrap_-_April_1_2016.mp3 Music by Chris Gonsalves