News

Apr 26, 2023Ravie LakshmananLinux / Cyber Threat The Chinese nation-state group dubbed Alloy Taurus is using a Linux variant of a backdoor called PingPull as well as a new undocumented tool codenamed Sword2033. That’s according to findings from Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, which discovered recent malicious cyber activity carried out by the group targeting

Apr 25, 2023Ravie LakshmananNetwork Security / DDoS Details have emerged about a high-severity security vulnerability impacting Service Location Protocol (SLP) that could be weaponized to launch volumetric denial-of-service attacks against targets. “Attackers exploiting this vulnerability could leverage vulnerable instances to launch massive Denial-of-Service (DoS) amplification attacks with a factor as high as 2200 times, potentially

Apr 24, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyber Espionage The Russian-speaking threat actor behind a backdoor known as Tomiris is primarily focused on gathering intelligence in Central Asia, fresh findings from Kaspersky reveal. “Tomiris’s endgame consistently appears to be the regular theft of internal documents,” security researchers Pierre Delcher and Ivan Kwiatkowski said in an analysis published today. “The

Apr 22, 2023Ravie LakshmananPatch Management / Vulnerability The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added three security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The three vulnerabilities are as follows – CVE-2023-28432 (CVSS score – 7.5) – MinIO Information Disclosure Vulnerability CVE-2023-27350 (CVSS score –

Apr 22, 2023Ravie LakshmananSupply Chain / Cyber Threat Lazarus, the prolific North Korean hacking group behind the cascading supply chain attack targeting 3CX, also breached two critical infrastructure organizations in the power and energy sector and two other businesses involved in financial trading using the trojanized X_TRADER application. The new findings, which come courtesy of

Apr 21, 2023Ravie LakshmananKubernetes / Cryptocurrency A large-scale attack campaign discovered in the wild has been exploiting Kubernetes (K8s) Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to create backdoors and run cryptocurrency miners. “The attackers also deployed DaemonSets to take over and hijack resources of the K8s clusters they attack,” cloud security firm Aqua said in a report

Apr 20, 2023Ravie LakshmananCloud Security / Vulnerability A chain of two critical flaws has been disclosed in Alibaba Cloud’s ApsaraDB RDS for PostgreSQL and AnalyticDB for PostgreSQL that could be exploited to breach tenant isolation protections and access sensitive data belonging to other customers. “The vulnerabilities potentially allowed unauthorized access to Alibaba Cloud customers’ PostgreSQL

Apr 19, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyber War / Cyber Attack Elite hackers associated with Russia’s military intelligence service have been linked to large-volume phishing campaigns aimed at hundreds of users in Ukraine to extract intelligence and influence public discourse related to the war. Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG), which is monitoring the activities of the actor under

Apr 18, 2023Ravie LakshmananThreat Intelligence / Cyber Risk Cybersecurity researchers have detailed the inner workings of a highly evasive loader named “in2al5d p3in4er” (read: invalid printer) that’s used to deliver the Aurora information stealer malware. “The in2al5d p3in4er loader is compiled with Embarcadero RAD Studio and targets endpoint workstations using advanced anti-VM (virtual machine) technique,”

Apr 17, 2023Ravie LakshmananSurveillance / Privacy Israeli spyware vendor QuaDream is allegedly shutting down its operations in the coming days, less than a week after its hacking toolset was exposed by Citizen Lab and Microsoft. The development was reported by the Israeli business newspaper Calcalist, citing unnamed sources, adding the company “hasn’t been fully active

Apr 14, 2023Ravie LakshmananData Breach / Cyber Security Open source media player software provider Kodi has confirmed a data breach after threat actors stole the company’s MyBB forum database containing user data and private messages. What’s more, the unknown threat actors attempted to sell the data dump comprising 400,635 Kodi users on the now-defunct BreachForums

Apr 15, 2023Ravie LakshmananZero-Day / Browser Security Google on Friday released out-of-band updates to resolve an actively exploited zero-day flaw in its Chrome web browser, making it the first such bug to be addressed since the start of the year. Tracked as CVE-2023-2033, the high-severity vulnerability has been described as a type confusion issue in

Apr 14, 2023Ravie LakshmananUnited States The Russia-linked APT29 (aka Cozy Bear) threat actor has been attributed to an ongoing cyber espionage campaign targeting foreign ministries and diplomatic entities located in NATO member states, the European Union, and Africa. According to Poland’s Military Counterintelligence Service and the CERT Polska team, the observed activity shares tactical overlaps

Apr 13, 2023Ravie LakshmananVulnerability Management Google on Thursday outlined a set of initiatives aimed at improving the vulnerability management ecosystem and establishing greater transparency measures around exploitation. “While the notoriety of zero-day vulnerabilities typically makes headlines, risks remain even after they’re known and fixed, which is the real story,” the company said in an announcement.

Threat actors using hacking tools from an Israeli surveillanceware vendor named QuaDream targeted at least five members of civil society in North America, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. According to findings from a group of researchers from the Citizen Lab, the spyware campaign was directed against journalists, political opposition figures, and

Apr 11, 2023Ravie LakshmananCloud Security / Data Security A “by-design flaw” uncovered in Microsoft Azure could be exploited by attackers to gain access to storage accounts, move laterally in the environment, and even execute remote code. “It is possible to abuse and leverage Microsoft Storage Accounts by manipulating Azure Functions to steal access-tokens of higher

Apr 10, 2023Ravie LakshmananHacking Tool / Cyber Threat An Estonian national has been charged in the U.S. for purchasing U.S.-made electronics on behalf of the Russian government and military. The 45-year-old individual, Andrey Shevlyakov, was arrested on March 28, 2023, in Tallinn. He has been indicted with 18 counts of conspiracy and other charges. If

Apr 08, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyber War / Cyber Threat The Iranian nation-state group known as MuddyWater has been observed carrying out destructive attacks on hybrid environments under the guise of a ransomware operation. That’s according to new findings from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team, which discovered the threat actor targeting both on-premises and cloud infrastructures in

Apr 08, 2023Ravie LakshmananMalware / Cyber Attack Taiwanese PC company MSI (short for Micro-Star International) officially confirmed it was the victim of a cyber attack on its systems. The company said it “promptly” initiated incident response and recovery measures after detecting “network anomalies.” It also said it alerted law enforcement agencies of the matter. That

Apr 07, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyber Threat / Online Security In yet another sign that Telegram is increasingly becoming a thriving hub for cybercrime, researchers have found that threat actors are using the messaging platform to peddle phishing kits and help set up phishing campaigns. “To promote their ‘goods,’ phishers create Telegram channels through which they educate

Critical infrastructure attacks are a preferred target for cyber criminals. Here’s why and what’s being done to protect them. What is Critical Infrastructure and Why is It Attacked? Critical infrastructure is the physical and digital assets, systems and networks that are vital to national security, the economy, public health, or safety. It can be government-

Apr 05, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyber Threat / Malware Portuguese users are being targeted by a new malware codenamed CryptoClippy that’s capable of stealing cryptocurrency as part of a malvertising campaign. The activity leverages SEO poisoning techniques to entice users searching for “WhatsApp web” to rogue domains hosting the malware, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said in

Clouded vision CTI systems are confronted with some major issues ranging from the size of the collection networks to their diversity, which ultimately influence the degree of confidence they can put on their signals. Are they fresh enough and sufficiently reliable to avoid any false positives or any poisoning? Do I risk acting on outdated

Apr 03, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyber Attack / Data Security Data storage devices maker Western Digital on Monday disclosed a “network security incident” that involved unauthorized access to its systems. The breach is said to have occurred on March 26, 2023, enabling an unnamed third party to gain access to a “number of the company’s systems.” Following

Apr 01, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyber Attack / Vulnerability Critical security flaws in Cacti, Realtek, and IBM Aspera Faspex are being exploited by various threat actors in hacks targeting unpatched systems. This entails the abuse of CVE-2022-46169 (CVSS score: 9.8) and CVE-2021-35394 (CVSS score: 9.8) to deliver MooBot and ShellBot (aka PerlBot), Fortinet FortiGuard Labs said in

Apr 01, 2023Ravie LakshmananAzure / Active Directory Microsoft has patched a misconfiguration issue impacting the Azure Active Directory (AAD) identity and access management service that exposed several “high-impact” applications to unauthorized access. “One of these apps is a content management system (CMS) that powers Bing.com and allowed us to not only modify search results, but

Mar 31, 2023Ravie LakshmananCyber Espionage / APT The advanced persistent threat (APT) actor known as Winter Vivern is now targeting officials in Europe and the U.S. as part of an ongoing cyber espionage campaign. “TA473 since at least February 2023 has continuously leveraged an unpatched Zimbra vulnerability in publicly facing webmail portals that allows them

Mar 30, 2023Ravie LakshmananCloud Security / Vulnerability Details have emerged about a now-patched vulnerability in Azure Service Fabric Explorer (SFX) that could lead to unauthenticated remote code execution. Tracked as CVE-2023-23383 (CVSS score: 8.2), the issue has been dubbed “Super FabriXss” by Orca Security, a nod to the FabriXss flaw (CVE-2022-35829, CVSS score: 6.2) that

Mar 29, 2023Ravie LakshmananZero-Day / Mobile Security A number of zero-day vulnerabilities that were addressed last year were exploited by commercial spyware vendors to target Android and iOS devices, Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has revealed. The two distinct campaigns were both limited and highly targeted, taking advantage of the patch gap between the release

Mar 28, 2023Ravie LakshmananArtificial Intelligence / Cyber Threat Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled Security Copilot in preview, marking its continued push to embed AI-oriented features in an attempt to offer “end-to-end defense at machine speed and scale.” Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 generative AI and its own security-specific model, it’s billed as a security analysis tool that