Articles of interest from the week of August 8, 2022

Consumers Pay the Price as Data Breach Costs Reach All-Time High

Last week IBM Security released the annual Cost of a Data Breach Report, revealing costlier and higher-impact data breaches than ever before, with the global average cost of a data breach reaching an all-time high of $4.35 million for studied organizations. With breach costs increasing nearly 13% over the last two years of the report, the findings suggest these incidents may also be contributing to rising costs of goods and services. In fact, 60% of studied organizations raised their product or service prices due to the breach, when the cost of goods is already soaring worldwide amid inflation and supply chain issues. (IBM Newsroom)

New Gmail Attack Bypasses Passwords and 2FA To Read All Email

Among the best practice items for Gmail security protection, strengthening your login credentials and enabling two-step verification are high on the list, as I mentioned in an article over the weekend. But what if I were to tell you that security researchers have now uncovered evidence of one likely state-sponsored attack group that has found a way to bypass even these protections? (Forbes)

Over a Dozen Android Apps on Google Play Store Caught Dropping Banking Malware

A malicious campaign leveraged seemingly innocuous Android dropper apps on the Google Play Store to compromise users' devices with banking malware. (The Hacker News)

Who Needs Macros? | Threat Actors Pivot to Abusing Explorer and Other LOLBins via Windows Shortcuts

This article discusses Windows shortcuts (LNK files) as a medium to deploy malware and/or establish persistence. In the initial stages of an attack, threat actors are gravitating more towards the use of malicious shortcuts that deploy malware by executing code in the context of so-called living-off-the-land binaries (LOLbins) – legitimate executables that are readily available on Windows systems, such as powershell.exe or mshta.exe – to bypass detection. Threat actors conveniently build malicious LNK files with Windows system capabilities or tools specifically designed for that purpose, and then distribute the files to victims, usually through phishing emails. (SentinelLabs)

CISA Warns of Atlassian Confluence Hard-Coded Credential Bug Exploited in Attacks

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added the recently disclosed Atlassian security flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-26138, concerns the use of hard-coded credentials when the Questions For Confluence app is enabled in Confluence Server and Data Center instances. (The Hacker News)