Security

Microsoft made Secure Boot a requirement for Windows 11, and has been pushing to use the technology to secure against BIOS rootkits for years. Now, researchers have found that Secure Boot has been compromised on more than 200 device models from Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and more. Ars Technica reports that an important cryptographic key was published on GitHub in 2022, by “someone working for multiple US-based device manufacturers.”

“However, we understand our work is not yet complete, and we remain committed to restoring every impacted system.,” CEO George Kurtz continued in his post on LinkedIn.

Yesterday, CrowdStrike released a detailed report on the software update that crashed 8.5 million Windows machines, along with some of the changes it plans to avoid similar issues in the future.

As reported by TechCrunch and in some social media posts, even if it seems a little light for a global outage affecting millions of systems (and codes that in some cases, didn’t work). In a statement sent to The Verge, spokesperson Kevin Benacci said:

CrowdStrike did not send gift cards to customers or clients. We did send these to our teammates and partners who have been helping customers through this situation. Uber flagged it as fraud because of high usage rates.

That’s according to an update made last night to CrowdStrike’s statement on yesterday’s global outage,

Similar to the above-referenced query, a Dashboard is now available that displays Impacted channels and CIDs and Impacted Sensors. Depending on your subscriptions, it’s available in the Console menu at either:

• Next-GEN SIEM > Dashboard or;

• Investigate > Dashboards

• Named as: hosts_possibly_impacted_by_windows_crashes

In a tweet and blog post, George Kurtz says:

As this incident is resolved, you have my commitment to provide full transparency on how this occurred and the steps we’re taking to prevent anything like this from happening again.

We are working on a technical update and root cause analysis that we will share with everyone as well.

Other updates from CrowdStrike about Friday’s global IT misadventure warn about threat actors impersonating it in phishing attempts and other attacks or advise automated methods (PDF) to track down systems that have been affected.

Hospital systems from New York to Massachusetts to Pennsylvania impacted by the CrowdStrike outage say they’re canceling appointments and shifting to pen and paper. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in NYC had said it would “pause the start of any procedure that requires anesthesia,” according to NBC News, though it’s site now says most of its systems are back online.

A bad time to get hit with the Blue Screen of Death is probably when you’re preparing for a practice session ahead of the Hungarian GP, especially when the problem has been caused by a team sponsor. But the Mercedes F1 team’s trackside engineering director, Andrew Shovlin, told reporters they were back up after updating affected PCs.

The impact in FP1 was minimal, if not nil. So, it created a bit of work, but we’re back where we need to be now.

This timelapse of Delta, American Airlines, and United air traffic says it all.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz apologized to customers on the Today show and said that the company “knows what the issue is” that caused the global IT outage early Friday morning.

Thousands of flights have been grounded so far in the massive outage. Some businesses are trying to reboot and bring their systems back themselves.

According to a new Bloomberg report, the FBI’s initial attempts to break into the phone belonging to Thomas Matthew Crooks were unsuccessful.

But that changed once Cellebrite provided the agency with an unreleased, still-in-development update to its software. From there, it took just 40 minutes to access Crooks’ phone, which is described as “a newer Samsung model.”

The new Proton Scribe writing tool runs locally on the device and is available to all privacy conscious Proton Mail business customers as an add-on:

Proton Scribe helps users improve their productivity by composing emails based on a prompt, redrafting to better convey a message, and proofreading content. No user data or information is used to train Proton Scribe, and no data is shared with third parties.

Proton says it’s rolling out to web and desktop apps.

The Russian cybersecurity company confirmed the move in a statement to Zero Day, saying business opportunities in the US “are no longer viable” and that it’s laying off less than 50 workers.

Last month, the US government announced a ban on Kaspersky’s antivirus software over concerns about national security.

A group that has previously claimed responsibility for breaching NATO, as well as satellite systems used by Halliburton and Shell, tells CyberScoop they’ve released 2GB of data from the conservative think tank behind “Project 2025” policy proposals for a second Trump administration.

The data includes the “full names, email addresses, passwords, and usernames” of people associating with Heritage, vio said, including users with U.S. government email addresses. “This itself can have an impact to heritage’s (sic) reputation,” they added, “and it’ll especially push away users in positions of power.” 

With Number Lock, you can’t transfer your phone number to a new phone or port your number over to another carrier, Google says.

If you have Google Fi, it’s probably worth setting this up — SIM swapping attacks can be pretty bad!

Ticketmaster does some pretty wild (and user-hostile) stuff in the name of stopping scalpers and bots from getting all the good tickets. And the scalpers and bots seem to always have another move. Case in point: those rotating barcodes on your ticket.

If you’ve bought a ticket, this token can be extracted from within the Ticketmaster app (or, in some cases, from Ticketmaster’s desktop website), exported to a third-party platform, and tickets can then be generated on that third-party platform.

Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative is set to impact Chinese employees in September, with the software giant reportedly set to cut off Android devices from accessing its corporate network. Bloomberg News reports that the move is due to Android devices in China lacking Google’s Play store to distribute Authenticator and identity apps for Microsoft employees. Microsoft is ramping up its internal security efforts after a series of high-profile attacks in recent years.