Xpertfeed

  Most vulnerable are wage-earners working for rideshare companies or manufacturing plants who have no safety net. With COVID-19 cutting a devastating swath throughout the world, what everyone wants to know about India is how bad the situation really is. In a country with a large but mostly poor population of 1.3 billion and a per capita of around just $2,000, a virus such as this can spread like wildfire and cause devastation of no one has expected.  So far, India has seen  612 cases  and twelve deaths, but this is easily a questionable number considering the lack of testing kits, testers, and the country's massive population. China shut Wuhan down almost instantly and still suffered. India, like China, could also be deeply affected, especially if it has under-reported its figures. Realising this, the Indian government has done the smart thing by implementing a 21-day lockdown -- or de-facto "house arrest" -- along with an international and domestic flight...

  Microsoft's COVID-19 tracker is located at bing.com/covid. The Microsoft Bing team launched today a web portal for tracking coronavirus (COVID-19) infections across the globe. "Lots of Bing folks worked (from home) this past week to create a mapping and authoritative news resource for COVID19 info," said Michael Schechter, General Manager for Bing Growth and Distribution at Microsoft. The website, accessible at  bing.com/covid , is a basic tracker. It shows up-to-date infection statistics for each country around the globe and all the US states. Data is aggregated from authoritative sources like the World Health Organization (WHO), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). Users can click countries or US states on the map and see the latest infection stats, along with the latest COVID-19 news coverage for that specific country or state. Microsoft announced the website tonight, two days afte...

  SMB vulnerability is currently not patched, but now everyone knows it's there. Details about a new "wormable" vulnerability in the Microsoft Server Message Block ( SMB ) protocol have accidentally leaked online today during the preamble to Microsoft's regular Patch Tuesday update cycle. No technical details have been published, but short summaries describing the bug have been posted on the websites of two cyber-security firms, Cisco Talos and Fortinet. The security flaw, tracked as  CVE-2020-0796 , is not included with this month's March 2020 Patch Tuesday updates, and it's unclear when it will be patched. BUFFER OVERFLOW IN SMBV3 According to Fortinet , the bug was described as "a Buffer Overflow Vulnerability in Microsoft SMB Servers" and received a maximum severity rating. "The vulnerability is due to an error when the vulnerable software handles a maliciously crafted compressed data packet," Fortinet said. "A remote, unauthentica...

  Security researchers say that a bug in one of Intel’s CPU technologies that was patched last year is actually much worse than previously thought.”Most Intel chipsets released in the last five years contain the vulnerability in question,” said Positive Technologies in a report published today.Attacks are impossible to detect, and a firmware patch only partially… The actual vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2019-0090, and it impacts the Intel Converged Security and Management Engine (CSME), formerly called the Intel Management Engine BIOS Extension (Intel MEBx). The CSME is a security feature that’s included with all recent Intel CPUs. It is considered a “cryptographic basis” for all other Intel technologies and firmware running on Intel-based platforms. According to Mark Ermolov, Lead Specialist of OS and Hardware Security at Positive Technologies, the CSME is one of the first systems that start running and is responsible for cryptographically verifying and authenticating all firmwa...

  The new offerings are aimed at helping service providers get the most out of their 5G infrastructure investments. Cisco on Tuesday announced a  series of new software and hardware products  aimed at helping service providers get the most out of their 5G infrastructure investments. The new offerings include new Cloud Services stacks for mobility, residential and content delivery. The introduction of 5G services puts pressure on service providers to prepare for significant increases in mobile traffic, Cisco noted. According to the Cisco Annual Internet Report, there will be nearly 30 billion connected devices by 2023, and nearly half of those will be mobile.  First, Cisco is introducing the Cisco Cloud Services Stack for Mobility, a cloud-based mobile packet core solution. Cisco claims it should speed up the implementation of 4G and 5G mobility services while reducing overall network complexity. It offers a carrier-grade NFVI (Network Functions Virtualization Infrast...

  WordPress site owners who use commercial themes provided by ThemeGrill are advised to update one of the plugins that come installed with these themes in order to patch a critical bug that can let attackers wipe their sites. The vulnerability resides in ThemeGrill Demo Importer, a plugin that ships with themes sold by ThemeGrill, a web development company that sells commercial WordPress themes. The plugin, which is installed on more than 200,000 sites, allows site owners to import demo content inside their ThemeGrill themes so they'll have examples and a starting point on which they can build their own sites. However, in a report published yesterday, WordPress security firm WebARX says that older versions of the ThemeGrill Demo Importer are vulnerable to remote attacks from unauthenticated attackers. Remote hackers can send a specially crafted payload to vulnerable sites and trigger a function inside the plugin.

  Exclusive: FBI alerts US private sectors about attacks aimed at their supply chain software providers. The FBI has sent a security alert to the US private sector about an ongoing hacking campaign that's targeting supply chain software providers has learned. The FBI says hackers are attempting to infect companies with the Kwampirs malware, a remote access trojan (RAT). "Software supply chain companies are believed to be targeted in order to gain access to the victim's strategic partners and/or customers, including entities supporting Industrial Control Systems (ICS) for global energy generation, transmission, and distribution," the FBI said in a private industry notification sent out last week. Besides attacks against supply chain software providers, the FBI said the same malware was also deployed in attacks against companies in the healthcare, energy, and financial sectors. The alert did not identify the targeted software providers, nor any other victims. Instead, t...

  Shortly after Microsoft ended support for Windows 7 some users have started facing a bug that prevents their systems from shutting down. Microsoft Windows 7 has a bug which is preventing users from shutting down their PCs. Multiple Windows 7 users have reported this issue which can only be fixed with some tiresome workarounds. There's also no update on how the bug came up. Windows 7  systems affected by this bug are unable to shut down or reboot their PCs. Whenever users try to turn off their PC a message is flashed saying, "You don't have permission to shut down this computer." According to a report,  Windows 7 users  have been facing this issue for two days now. Some users on  Reddit  have shared workarounds on turning off PCs. One way is to create another admin account, log into that account and log back into the default admin account. Users should be able to shut down or reboot their systems after this. There's another workaround which is supposed to ...

  Newsrooms, political campaigns, and PR agencies panic as they lose access to one of their crucial media monitoring tools. A ransomware infection has brought down  TVEyes , a company that manages a popular platform for monitoring TV and radio news broadcasts, broadly used by newsrooms and PR agencies across the globe. TVEyes CEO David Ives told the ransomware attack took place after midnight on Thursday, January 30. The ransomware hit core server & engineering workstations inside TVEyes' network, primarily in the US, but also some systems located abroad. Ives told they have not yet identified the ransomware strain that infected the company's network, but they have already began recovery efforts. The TVEyes CEO says they don't intend to pay the ransom demand and are currently restoring from backups and rebuilding impacted infrastructure. In the meantime, the company's main product, the TVEyes Media Monitoring Suite (MMS), has been down for the past two days, sources...

  Hackers exploited a Trend Micro OfficeScan zero-day to plant malicious files on Mitsubishi Electric servers. Chinese hackers have used a zero-day in the  Trend Micro OfficeScan antivirus  during their attacks on Mitsubishi Electric, Tech News has learned from sources close to the investigation. Trend Micro has now patched the vulnerability, but the company did not comment if the zero-day was used in other attacks beyond Mitsubishi Electric. MITSUBISHI ELECTRIC HACK News of the Mitsubishi Electric hack became public on Monday, this week.  In a press release  published on its website, the Japanese electronics vendor and defense contractor said it was hacked last year. The company said it detected an intrusion on its network on June 28, 2019. Following a months-long investigation, Mitsubishi said it discovered that hackers gained access to its internal network from where they stole roughly 200 MB of files. While initially the company didn't reveal the content of ...