News

Feb 03, 2023Ravie LakshmananCloud Security / Vulnerability Atlassian has released fixes to resolve a critical security flaw in Jira Service Management Server and Data Center that could be abused by an attacker to pass off as another user and gain unauthorized access to susceptible instances. The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2023-22501 (CVSS score: 9.4) and

Over the past few years, cybersecurity has become a major concern for businesses around the globe. With the total cost of cybercrime in 2023 forecasted to reach $8 Trillion – with a T, not a B – it’s no wonder that cybersecurity is top of mind for leaders across all industries and regions. However, despite

Feb 01, 2023Ravie LakshmananPayment Security / Risk The Brazilian threat actors behind an advanced and modular point-of-sale (PoS) malware known as Prilex have reared their head once again with new updates that allow it to block contactless payment transactions. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky said it detected three versions of Prilex (06.03.8080, 06.03.8072, and 06.03.8070) that

Jan 31, 2023Ravie LakshmananData Security / Vulnerability Taiwanese company QNAP has released updates to remediate a critical security flaw affecting its network-attached storage (NAS) devices that could lead to arbitrary code injection. Tracked as CVE-2022-27596, the vulnerability is rated 9.8 out of a maximum of 10 on the CVSS scoring scale. It affects QTS 5.0.1

Jan 30, 2023Ravie Lakshmanan Researchers are warning about a spike in exploitation attempts weaponizing a critical remote code execution flaw in Realtek Jungle SDK since the start of August 2022. According to Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, the ongoing campaign is said to have recorded 134 million exploit attempts as of December 2022, with 97%

Jan 29, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyber Threat / Malware The threat actors associated with the Gootkit malware have made “notable changes” to their toolset, adding new components and obfuscations to their infection chains. Google-owned Mandiant is monitoring the activity cluster under the moniker UNC2565, noting that the usage of the malware is “exclusive to this group.” Gootkit,

Jan 28, 2023Ravie LakshmananServer Security / DNS The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) has released patches to address multiple security vulnerabilities in the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) 9 Domain Name System (DNS) software suite that could lead to a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. “A remote attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to potentially cause denial-of-service conditions and

In what’s a case of hacking the hackers, the darknet infrastructure associated with the Hive ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation has been seized as part of a coordinated law enforcement effort involving 13 countries. “Law enforcement identified the decryption keys and shared them with many of the victims, helping them regain access to their data without paying

Jan 26, 2023Ravie LakshmananThreat Detection / Endpoint Security Cybersecurity researchers have unearthed a new Python-based attack campaign that leverages a Python-based remote access trojan (RAT) to gain control over compromised systems since at least August 2022. “This malware is unique in its utilization of WebSockets to avoid detection and for both command-and-control (C2) communication and

Jan 25, 2023Ravie LakshmananData Breach / Remote Work Tool LastPass-owner GoTo (formerly LogMeIn) on Tuesday disclosed that unidentified threat actors were able to steal encrypted backups of some customers’ data along with an encryption key for some of those backups in a November 2022 incident. The breach, which targeted a third-party cloud storage service, impacted

Jan 24, 2023Ravie LakshmananEncryption / Privacy Meta Platforms on Monday announced that it has started to expand global testing of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) in Messenger chats by default. “Over the next few months, more people will continue to see some of their chats gradually being upgraded with an extra layer of protection provided by end-to-end

Jan 23, 2023Ravie LakshmananMobile Security / Malvertising Researchers have shut down an “expansive” ad fraud scheme that spoofed more than 1,700 applications from 120 publishers and impacted roughly 11 million devices. “VASTFLUX was a malvertising attack that injected malicious JavaScript code into digital ad creatives, allowing the fraudsters to stack numerous invisible video ad players

Jan 20, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyber War / Cyber Attack The Russian state-sponsored cyber espionage group known as Gamaredon has continued its digital onslaught against Ukraine, with recent attacks leveraging the popular messaging app Telegram to strike military and law enforcement sectors in the country. “The Gamaredon group’s network infrastructure relies on multi-stage Telegram accounts for victim

Jan 20, 2023Ravie LakshmananNetwork Security / Mobile Hacking Threat actors associated with the Roaming Mantis attack campaign have been observed delivering an updated variant of their patent mobile malware known as Wroba to infiltrate Wi-Fi routers and undertake Domain Name System (DNS) hijacking. Kaspersky, which carried out an analysis of the malicious artifact, said the

Jan 20, 2023Ravie LakshmananFirewall / Network Security A suspected China-nexus threat actor exploited a recently patched vulnerability in Fortinet FortiOS SSL-VPN as a zero-day in attacks targeting a European government entity and a managed service provider (MSP) located in Africa. Telemetry evidence gathered by Google-owned Mandiant indicates that the exploitation occurred as early as October

Jan 19, 2023Ravie LakshmananEmail Security / Security Breach Popular email marketing and newsletter service Mailchimp has disclosed yet another security breach that enabled threat actors to access an internal support and account admin tool to obtain information about 133 customers. “The unauthorized actor conducted a social engineering attack on Mailchimp employees and contractors, and obtained

Jan 18, 2023Ravie LakshmananICS/SCADA Security The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has published four Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories, calling out several security flaws affecting products from Siemens, GE Digital, and Contec. The most critical of the issues have been identified in Siemens SINEC INS that could lead to remote code execution via

Jan 17, 2023Ravie LakshmananSoftware Security / Supply Chain A threat actor by the name Lolip0p has uploaded three rogue packages to the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that are designed to drop malware on compromised developer systems. The packages – named colorslib (versions 4.6.11 and 4.6.12), httpslib (versions 4.6.9 and 4.6.11), and libhttps (version 4.6.12)

Jan 14, 2023Ravie LakshmananServer Security / Patch Management A majority of internet-exposed Cacti servers have not been patched against a recently patched critical security vulnerability that has come under active exploitation in the wild. That’s according to attack surface management platform Censys, which found only 26 out of a total of 6,427 servers to be

Jan 14, 2023Ravie LakshmananDevOps / Data Security DevOps platform CircleCI on Friday disclosed that unidentified threat actors compromised an employee’s laptop and leveraged malware to steal their two-factor authentication-backed credentials to breach the company’s systems and data last month. The CI/CD service CircleCI said the “sophisticated attack” took place on December 16, 2022, and that

Jan 14, 2023Ravie LakshmananPrivacy / Online Safety Popular short-form video hosting service TikTok has been fined €5 million (about $5.4 million) by the French data protection watchdog for breaking cookie consent rules, making it the latest platform to face similar penalties after Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft since 2020. “Users of ‘tiktok[.]com’ could not refuse

Jan 12, 2023Ravie LakshmananActive Directory / Malware A recent IcedID malware attack enabled the threat actor to compromise the Active Directory domain of an unnamed target less than 24 hours after gaining initial access, while also borrowing techniques from other groups like Conti to meet its goals. “Throughout the attack, the attacker followed a routine

Jan 12, 2023Ravie LakshmananServer Security / Linux Malicious actors are actively attempting to exploit a recently patched critical vulnerability in Control Web Panel (CWP) that enables elevated privileges and unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) on susceptible servers. Tracked as CVE-2022-44877 (CVSS score: 9.8), the bug impacts all versions of the software before 0.9.8.1147 and was

The first Patch Tuesday fixes shipped by Microsoft for 2023 have addressed a total of 98 security flaws, including one bug that the company said is being actively exploited in the wild. 11 of the 98 issues are rated Critical and 87 are rated Important in severity, with one of the vulnerabilities also listed as

Jan 09, 2023Ravie LakshmananKubernetes / Cryptojacking The threat actors behind the Kinsing cryptojacking operation have been spotted exploiting misconfigured and exposed PostgreSQL servers to obtain initial access to Kubernetes environments. A second initial access vector technique entails the use of vulnerable images, Sunders Bruskin, security researcher at Microsoft Defender for Cloud, said in a report

Jan 09, 2023Ravie LakshmananSupply Chain / CodeSec A new attack vector targeting the Visual Studio Code extensions marketplace could be leveraged to upload rogue extensions masquerading as their legitimate counterparts with the goal of mounting supply chain attacks. The technique “could act as an entry point for an attack on many organizations,” Aqua security researcher

Jan 08, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyberespionage / Threat Analysis The Russian cyberespionage group known as Turla has been observed piggybacking on attack infrastructure used by a decade-old malware to deliver its own reconnaissance and backdoor tools to targets in Ukraine. Google-owned Mandiant, which is tracking the operation under the uncategorized cluster moniker UNC4210, said the hijacked servers

Jan 06, 2023Ravie LakshmananCryptocurrency / GitHub A South Africa-based threat actor known as Automated Libra has been observed employing CAPTCHA bypass techniques to create GitHub accounts in a programmatic fashion as part of a freejacking campaign dubbed PURPLEURCHIN. The group “primarily targets cloud platforms offering limited-time trials of cloud resources in order to perform their

Jan 05, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyber Attack / Malware A financially motivated threat actor tracked as Blind Eagle has resurfaced with a refined toolset and an elaborate infection chain as part of its attacks targeting organizations in Colombia and Ecuador. Check Point’s latest research offers new insights into the Spanish-speaking group’s tactics and techniques, including the use

Jan 05, 2023Ravie LakshmananPrivacy / Data Protection The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has fined Meta Platforms €390 million (roughly $414 million) over its handling of user data for serving personalized ads in what could be a major blow to its ad-fueled business model. To that end, the privacy regulator has ordered Meta Ireland to