Kornerstone Technology Blog

Just a few months after finding themselves in a firmware fiasco, Intel is making news for all the wrong reasons. This issue had the potential to affect the CPU of a device, causing a severe dip in the performance of the device.

Thanks to one of Google’s researchers with the Zero Day Project, it has been discovered that LastPass has a major vulnerability as a result of a major architectural problem. This news comes on the heels of many other flaws the same researcher discovered within LastPass. However, based on what the researcher claims, these vulnerabilities were much less serious than his latest discovery.

In recent news, millions of records containing personal information were made available to the public in a sizable data leak, providing potential scammers with plenty of information to utilize in their schemes. These records were all part of a 53 GB database that was available for purchase from Dun & Bradstreet, a business service firm.

In 2014, Facebook launched Safety Check, a helpful tool allowing users to “check in” that they’re okay during a crisis event, like a natural disaster, mass shooting, etc. Recently, Facebook made a major change to Safety Check by allowing users affected by the crisis to activate the feature. This is yet another example of how social media is changing the way people find out about major events and react to them.

Ransomware is a particularly nasty strain of malware that continues to pop up in unexpected forms. In the case of a new variant of called Cerber, it targets users of Microsoft Outlook using a zero-day vulnerability via phishing messages. To make matters worse, Cerber can also utilize DDoS attacks, which is a major cause for concern.

Microsoft recently issued security patches to fix 27 vulnerabilities, many of which are critical in nature. The vulnerabilities are significant and popular titles are affected like Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, and the new Edge browser. Microsoft users that ignore these security patches are putting their system at unnecessary risk.

You don’t often hear about mobile operating systems being vulnerable to security threats (desktop vulnerabilities usually hog the spotlight), but when you do, they’re usually major problems that you need to be aware of. One such threat is called “Hummer,” a trojan that has installed unwanted apps and malware to more than a million phones all over the world.

Software vulnerabilities can cause major issues for individuals and businesses. Cisco’s Talos Security Intelligence and Research Group, which is designed as an organization to “protect consumers from known and emerging threats,” has found such a vulnerability with 7zip.