A new botnet discovered, low MFA adoption and a Struts bug finally patched.
Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Friday April 15th, 2022. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com. Thanks for taking the time to tune in if this is a holiday Friday for you.
 
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A new denial of service botnet has been discovered by security researchers in China. Called Fodcha, it’s adding 100 new infected devices to the estimated 62,000 enslaved devices already on the network. Most are in China. Devices are being compromised by Fodcha malware either through known vulnerabilities or weak passwords on Android servers, GitLab accounts and certain brands of routers. Some are made by Totolink. Last week I reported that another botnet was also compromised of certain unpatched models of Totolink routers.
I regularly quote cybersecurity experts saying implementing multifactor authentication is one of the best things IT leaders can do to lower the risk of a successful cyberattack through compromised passwords. So, here are some disturbing numbers from a report released this week by Trellix: Less than half of U.S. government agency respondents to a survey said their organization has fully developed MFA. At least that’s better than the critical infrastructure sector — which includes banks, transportation companies and utilities. Only 37 per cent of American firms in that sector had implemented MFA. Guest commentator Terry Cutler and I will talk about MFA and other identity management technologies in the Week in Review podcast later today.
Apache has admitted a fix for the Struts Java web application development platform issued two years ago didn’t do the job. It has now put out what it says is a patch that solves the problem. It’s serious enough that the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is urging users to upgrade to version 2.5.30.
Attention hospital IT administrators: If your facility uses the Aethon TUG wireless smart robot cart for delivering medicine or maintenance supplies, the Homebase server needs to be patched. Researchers at Cynerio have discovered five vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to take remote control of the carts. That could disrupt the delivery of medication to patients or lab samples to be analyzed. It could also allow the video camera on the carts to take photos of patients. And it could allow the attacker to inject malware that could infect the entire hospital IT system.
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Remember later today the Week in Review edition will be available. Terry Cutler of Cyology Labs and I will talk about identity management, the hack of a U.S. government agency and using the courts to help stop a botnet.
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