Enlarge / Complex space systems like the International Space Station could be vulnerable to hackers. (credit: NASA )

If space systems such as GPS were hacked and knocked offline , much of the world would instantly be returned to the communications and navigation technologies of the 1950s. Yet space cybersecurity is largely invisible to the public at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions.

Cyberattacks on satellites have occurred since the 1980s , but the global wake-up alarm went off only a couple of years ago. An hour before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, its government operatives hacked Viasat’s satellite-Internet services to cut off communications and create confusion in Ukraine.

I study ethics and emerging technologies and serve as an adviser to the US National Space Council. My colleagues and I at California Polytechnic State University’s Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group released a US National Science Foundation-funded report on June 17, 2024, to explain the problem of cyberattacks in space and help anticipate novel and surprising scenarios .

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Ransomware criminals have quickly weaponized an easy-to-exploit vulnerability in the PHP programming language that executes malicious code on web servers, security researchers said.

As of Thursday, Internet scans performed by security firm Censys had detected 1,000 servers infected by a ransomware strain known as TellYouThePass, down from 1,800 detected on Monday. The servers, primarily located in China, no longer display their usual content; instead, many list the site’s file directory, which shows all files have been given a .locked extension, indicating they have been encrypted. An accompanying ransom note demands roughly $6,500 in exchange for the decryption key.

The output of PHP servers infected by TellYouThePass ransomware. (credit: Censys)

The accompanying ransom note. (credit: Censys)

When opportunity knocks

The vulnerability , tracked as CVE-2024-4577 and carrying a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10, stems from errors in the way PHP converts Unicode characters into ASCII. A feature built into Windows known as Best Fit allows attackers to use a technique known as argument injection to convert user-supplied input into characters that pass malicious commands to the main PHP application. Exploits allow attackers to bypass CVE-2012-1823, a critical code execution vulnerability patched in PHP in 2012.

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Hackers working for the Chinese government gained access to more than 20,000 VPN appliances sold by Fortinet using a critical vulnerability that the company failed to disclose for two weeks after fixing it, Netherlands government officials said.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-42475, is a heap-based buffer overflow that allows hackers to remotely execute malicious code. It carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10. A maker of network security software, Fortinet silently fixed the vulnerability on November 28, 2022, but failed to mention the threat until December 12 of that year, when the company said it became aware of an “instance where this vulnerability was exploited in the wild.” On January 11, 2023—more than six weeks after the vulnerability was fixed—Fortinet warned a threat actor was exploiting it to infect government and government-related organizations with advanced custom-made malware.

Enter CoatHanger

The Netherlands officials first reported in February that Chinese state hackers had exploited CVE-2022-42475 to install an advanced and stealthy backdoor tracked as CoatHanger on Fortigate appliances inside the Dutch Ministry of Defence. Once installed, the never-before-seen malware, specifically designed for the underlying FortiOS operating system, was able to permanently reside on devices even when rebooted or receiving a firmware update. CoatHanger could also escape traditional detection measures, the officials warned. The damage resulting from the breach was limited, however, because infections were contained inside a segment reserved for non-classified uses.

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AT&T reset passcodes for millions of customers after acknowledging a massive leak involving the data of 73 million current and former subscribers.

"Based on our preliminary analysis, the data set appears to be from 2019 or earlier, impacting approximately 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and approximately 65.4 million former account holders," AT&T said in an update posted to its website on Saturday.

An AT&T support article said the carrier is "reaching out to all 7.6 million impacted customers and have reset their passcodes. In addition, we will be communicating with current and former account holders with compromised sensitive personal information." AT&T said the leaked information varied by customer but included full names, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, AT&T account numbers, and passcodes.

Enlarge / Malware Detected Warning Screen with abstract binary code 3d digital concept (credit: Getty Images)

On Friday, researchers revealed the discovery of a backdoor that was intentionally planted in xz Utils, an open-source data compression utility available on almost all installations of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. The person or people behind this project likely spent years on it. They were likely very close to seeing the backdoor update merged into Debian and Red Hat, the two biggest distributions of Linux when an eagle-eyed software developer spotted something fishy.

"This might be the best executed supply chain attack we've seen described in the open, and it's a nightmare scenario: malicious, competent, authorized upstream in a widely used library," software and cryptography engineer Filippo Valsorda said of the effort, which came frightfully close to succeeding.

Researchers have spent the weekend gathering clues. Here's what we know so far.

Enlarge / Supply-chain attacks, like the latest PyPI discovery, insert malicious code into seemingly functional software packages used by developers. They're becoming increasingly common. (credit: Getty Images)

PyPI, a vital repository for open source developers, temporarily halted new project creation and new user registration following an onslaught of package uploads that executed malicious code on any device that installed them. Ten hours later, it lifted the suspension.

Short for the Python Package Index, PyPI is the go-to source for apps and code libraries written in the Python programming language. Fortune 500 corporations and independent developers alike rely on the repository to obtain the latest versions of code needed to make their projects run. At a little after 7 pm PT on Wednesday, the site started displaying a banner message informing visitors that the site was temporarily suspending new project creation and new user registration. The message didn’t explain why or provide an estimate of when the suspension would be lifted.

Screenshot showing temporary suspension notification. (credit: Checkmarx)

About 10 hours later, PyPI restored new project creation and new user registration. Once again, the site provided no reason for the 10-hour halt.

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Thousands of servers storing AI workloads and network credentials have been hacked in an ongoing attack campaign targeting a reported vulnerability in Ray, a computing framework used by OpenAI, Uber, and Amazon.

The attacks, which have been active for at least seven months, have led to the tampering of AI models. They have also resulted in the compromise of network credentials, allowing access to internal networks and databases and tokens for accessing accounts on platforms including OpenAI, Hugging Face, Stripe, and Azure. Besides corrupting models and stealing credentials, attackers behind the campaign have installed cryptocurrency miners on compromised infrastructure, which typically provides massive amounts of computing power. Attackers have also installed reverse shells, which are text-based interfaces for remotely controlling servers.

Hitting the jackpot

“When attackers get their hands on a Ray production cluster, it is a jackpot,” researchers from Oligo, the security firm that spotted the attacks, wrote in a post . “Valuable company data plus remote code execution makes it easy to monetize attacks—all while remaining in the shadows, totally undetected (and, with static security tools, undetectable).”

Enlarge / They look like normal notifications, but opening an iPhone with one or more of these stacked up, you won't be able to do much of anything until you tap "Allow" or "Don't Allow." And they're right next to each other. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

Human weaknesses are a rich target for phishing attacks. Making humans click "Don't Allow" over and over again in a phone prompt that can't be skipped is an angle some iCloud attackers are taking—and likely having some success.

Brian Krebs' at Krebs on Security detailed the attacks in a recent post , noting that "MFA Fatigue Attacks" are a known attack strategy . By repeatedly hitting a potential victim's device with multifactor authentication requests, the attack fills a device's screen with prompts that typically have yes/no options, often very close together. Apple's devices are just the latest rich target for this technique.

Both the Kremlin-backed Fancy Bear advanced persistent threat group and a rag-tag bunch of teenagers known as Lapsus$ have been known to use the technique, also known as MFA prompt bombing , successfully.

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Crooks are working overtime to anonymize their illicit online activities using thousands of devices of unsuspecting users, as evidenced by two unrelated reports published Tuesday.

The first, from security firm Lumen Labs, reports that roughly 40,000 home and office routers have been drafted into a criminal enterprise that anonymizes illicit Internet activities, with another 1,000 new devices being added each day. The malware responsible is a variant of TheMoon , a malicious code family dating back to at least 2014. In its earliest days, TheMoon almost exclusively infected Linksys E1000 series routers. Over the years it branched out to targeting the Asus WRTs, Vivotek Network Cameras, and multiple D-Link models.

In the years following its debut, TheMoon’s self-propagating behavior and growing ability to compromise a broad base of architectures enabled a growth curve that captured attention in security circles. More recently, the visibility of the Internet of Things botnet trailed off, leading many to assume it was inert. To the surprise of researchers in Lumen’s Black Lotus Lab, during a single 72-hour stretch earlier this month, TheMoon added 6,000 ASUS routers to its ranks, an indication that the botnet is as strong as it’s ever been.