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Three high-impact security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in APC Smart-UPS devices that could be abused by remote adversaries as a physical weapon to access and control them in an unauthorized manner. Collectively dubbed TLStorm, the flaws “allow for complete remote takeover of Smart-UPS devices and the ability to carry out extreme cyber-physical attacks,” Ben Seri

The unfortunate truth is that while companies are investing more in cyber defenses and taking cybersecurity more seriously than ever, successful breaches and ransomware attacks are on the rise. While a successful breach is not inevitable, it is becoming more likely despite best efforts to prevent it from happening. Just as it wasn’t raining when

APT41, the state-sponsored threat actor affiliated with China, breached at least six U.S. state government networks between May 2021 and February 2022 by retooling its attack vectors to take advantage of vulnerable internet-facing web applications. The exploited vulnerabilities included “a zero-day vulnerability in the USAHERDS application (CVE-2021-44207) as well as the now infamous zero-day in

Researchers have disclosed three security vulnerabilities affecting Pascom Cloud Phone System (CPS) that could be combined to achieve a full pre-authenticated remote code execution of affected systems. Kerbit security researcher Daniel Eshetu said the shortcomings, when chained together, can lead to “an unauthenticated attacker gaining root on these devices.” Pascom Cloud Phone System is an

Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday update for the month of March has been made officially available with 71 fixes spanning across its software products such as Windows, Office, Exchange, and Defender, among others. Of the total 71 patches, three are rated Critical and 68 are rated Important in severity. While none of the vulnerabilities are listed as

Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday disclosed 16 new high-severity vulnerabilities in various implementations of Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) firmware impacting multiple HP enterprise devices. The shortcomings, which have CVSS scores ranging from 7.5 to 8.8, have been uncovered in HP’s UEFI firmware. The variety of devices affected includes HP’s laptops, desktops, point-of-sale (PoS) systems, and

Yaroslav Vasinskyi, a Ukrainian national, linked to the Russia-based REvil ransomware group has been extradited to the U.S. to face charges for his role in carrying out the file-encrypting malware attacks against several companies, including Kaseya last July. The 22-year-old had been previously arrested in Poland in October 2021, prompting the U.S. Justice Department (DoJ)

Details have emerged about a new cyber espionage campaign directed against the aerospace and telecommunications industries, primarily in the Middle East, with the goal of stealing sensitive information about critical assets, organizations’ infrastructure, and technology while remaining in the dark and successfully evading security solutions. Boston-based cybersecurity company Cybereason dubbed the attacks “Operation Ghostshell,” pointing

A newly discovered data exfiltration mechanism employs Ethernet cables as a “transmitting antenna” to stealthily siphon highly-sensitive data from air-gapped systems, according to the latest research. “It’s interesting that the wires that came to protect the air-gap become the vulnerability of the air gap in this attack,” Dr. Mordechai Guri, the head of R&D in

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed an unpatched flaw in Apple Pay that attackers could abuse to make an unauthorized Visa payment with a locked iPhone by taking advantage of the Express Travel mode set up in the device’s wallet. “An attacker only needs a stolen, powered on iPhone. The transactions could also be relayed from an

A formerly unknown Chinese-speaking threat actor has been linked to a long-standing evasive operation aimed at South East Asian targets as far back as July 2020 to deploy a kernel-mode rootkit on compromised Windows systems. Attacks mounted by the hacking group, dubbed GhostEmperor by Kaspersky, are also said to have used a “sophisticated multi-stage malware

In yet another indicator of how hacking groups are quick to capitalize on world events and improvise their attack campaigns for maximum impact, threat actors have been discovered impersonating Amnesty International to distribute malware that purports to be security software designed to safeguard against NSO Group’s Pegasus surveillanceware. “Adversaries have set up a phony website

Google on Thursday pushed urgent security fixes for its Chrome browser, including a pair of new security weaknesses that the company said are being exploited in the wild, making them the fourth and fifth actively zero-days plugged this month alone. The issues, designated as CVE-2021-37975 and CVE-2021-37976, are part of a total of four patches,

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed an unpatched security vulnerability in the protocol used by Microsoft Azure Active Directory that potential adversaries could abuse to stage undetected brute-force attacks. “This flaw allows threat actors to perform single-factor brute-force attacks against Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) without generating sign-in events in the targeted organization’s tenant,” researchers from Secureworks

Professional developers want to embrace DevSecOps and write secure code, but their organizations need to support this seachange if they want that effort to grow. The cyber threat landscape is becoming more complex by the day. Attackers are constantly scanning networks for vulnerable applications, programs, cloud instances, and the latest flavor of the month is

The IDC cloud security survey 2021 states that as many as 98% of companies were victims of a cloud data breach within the past 18 months. Fostered by the pandemic, small and large organizations from all over the world are migrating their data and infrastructure into a public cloud, while often underestimating novel and cloud-specific

Cybersecurity researchers on Wednesday disclosed a previously undocumented backdoor likely designed and developed by the Nobelium advanced persistent threat (APT) behind last year’s SolarWinds supply chain attack, joining the threat actor’s ever-expanding arsenal of hacking tools. Moscow-headquartered firm Kaspersky codenamed the malware “Tomiris,” calling out its similarities to another second-stage malware used during the campaign,

Russian authorities on Wednesday arrested and detained Ilya Sachkov, the founder of cybersecurity firm Group-IB, for two months in Moscow on charges of state treason following a search of its office on September 28. The Russian company, which is headquartered in Singapore, confirmed the development but noted the “reason for the search was not yet

Facebook on Wednesday announced it’s open-sourcing Mariana Trench, an Android-focused static analysis platform the company uses to detect and prevent security and privacy bugs in applications created for the mobile operating system at scale. “[Mariana Trench] is designed to be able to scan large mobile codebases and flag potential issues on pull requests before they

New details have been revealed about a recently remediated critical vulnerability in Netgear smart switches that could be leveraged by an attacker to potentially execute malicious code and take control of vulnerable devices. The flaw — dubbed “Seventh Inferno” (CVSS score: 9.8) — is part of a trio of security weaknesses, called Demon’s Cries (CVSS

A targeted phishing campaign aimed at the aviation industry for two years may be spearheaded by a threat actor operating out of Nigeria, highlighting how attackers can carry out small-scale cyber offensives for extended periods of time while staying under the radar. Cisco Talos dubbed the malware attacks “Operation Layover,” building on previous research from

A number of malicious samples have been created for the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with the goal of compromising Windows machines, highlighting a sneaky method that allows the operators to stay under the radar and thwart detection by popular anti-malware engines. The “distinct tradecraft” marks the first instance where a threat actor has been

Continuous integration vendor Travis CI has patched a serious security flaw that exposed API keys, access tokens, and credentials, potentially putting organizations that use public source code repositories at risk of further attacks. The issue — tracked as CVE-2021-41077 — concerns unauthorized access and plunder of secret environment data associated with a public open-source project

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Tuesday disclosed it fined three intelligence community and military personnel $1.68 million in penalties for their role as cyber-mercenaries working on behalf of a U.A.E.-based cybersecurity company. The trio in question — Marc Baier, 49, Ryan Adams, 34, and Daniel Gericke, 40 — are accused of “knowingly and

Users searching for TeamViewer remote desktop software on search engines like Google are being redirected to malicious links that drop ZLoader malware onto their systems while simultaneously embracing a stealthier infection chain that allows it to linger on infected devices and evade detection by security solutions. “The malware is downloaded from a Google advertisement published

Researchers on Monday took the wraps off a newly discovered Linux and Windows re-implementation of Cobalt Strike Beacon that’s actively set its sights on government, telecommunications, information technology, and financial institutions in the wild. The as-yet undetected version of the penetration testing tool — codenamed “Vermilion Strike” — marks one of the rare Linux ports,

WhatsApp on Friday announced it will roll out support for end-to-end encrypted chat backups on the cloud for Android and iOS users, paving the way for storing information such as chat messages and photos in Apple iCloud or Google Drive in a cryptographically secure manner. The feature, which will go live to all of its

Russian internet giant Yandex has been the target of a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack by a new botnet called Mēris. The botnet is believed to have pummeled the company’s web infrastructure with millions of HTTP requests, before hitting a peak of 21.8 million requests per second (RPS), dwarfing a recent botnet-powered attack that came

The Linux community was caught unprepared when, in December 2020, as part of a change in the way Red Hat supports and develops CentOS, Red Hat suddenly announced that it’s cutting the official CentOS 8 support window from ten years – to just two, with support ending Dec 31, 2021. It created a peculiar situation

The operators behind the REvil ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) staged a surprise return after a two-month hiatus following the widely publicized attack on technology services provider Kaseya on July 4. Two of the dark web portals, including the gang’s Happy Blog data leak site and its payment/negotiation site, have resurfaced online, with the most recent victim added