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In what's a case of setting a thief to catch a thief, the U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA) revealed that it has created a network of fake DDoS-for-hire websites to infiltrate the online criminal underground. "All of the NCA-run sites, which have so far been accessed by around several thousand people, have been created to look like they offer the tools and services that enable cyber criminals to execute these attacks," the law enforcement agency  said . "However, after users register, rather than being given access to cyber crime tools, their data is collated by investigators." The effort is part of an ongoing international joint effort called Operation PowerOFF in collaboration with authorities from the U.S., the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and Europol aimed at dismantling criminal DDoS-for-hire infrastructures worldwide. DDoS-for-hire (aka "Booter" or "Stresser") services rent out access to a network of infected devices to other crim

Microsoft on Friday shared guidance to help customers discover indicators of compromise (IoCs) associated with a recently patched Outlook vulnerability. Tracked as CVE-2023-23397 (CVSS score: 9.8), the  critical flaw  relates to a case of privilege escalation that could be exploited to steal NT Lan Manager (NTLM) hashes and stage a  relay attack  without requiring any user interaction. "External attackers could send specially crafted emails that will cause a connection from the victim to an untrusted location of attackers' control," the company  noted  in an advisory released this month. "This will leak the  Net-NTLMv2 hash  of the victim to the untrusted network which an attacker can then relay to another service and authenticate as the victim." The vulnerability was resolved by Microsoft as part of its  Patch Tuesday updates  for March 2023, but not before Russia-based threat actors weaponized the flaw in attacks targeting government, transportation, ene

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OpenAI on Friday disclosed that a bug in the Redis open source library was responsible for the exposure of other users' personal information and chat titles in the upstart's ChatGPT service earlier this week. The  glitch , which came to light on March 20, 2023, enabled certain users to view brief descriptions of other users' conversations from the chat history sidebar, prompting the company to temporarily shut down the chatbot. "It's also possible that the first message of a newly-created conversation was visible in someone else's chat history if both users were active around the same time," the company  said . The bug, it further added, originated in the  redis-py library , leading to a scenario where canceled requests could cause connections to be corrupted and return unexpected data from the database cache, in this case, information belonging to an unrelated user. To make matters worse, the San Francisco-based AI research company said it introduce

A malicious Python package on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository has been found to use Unicode as a trick to evade detection and deploy an info-stealing malware. The package in question, named  onyxproxy , was uploaded to PyPI on March 15, 2023, and comes with capabilities to harvest and exfiltrate credentials and other valuable data. It has since been taken down, but not before attracting a total of  183 downloads . According to software supply chain security firm Phylum, the package incorporates its malicious behavior in a setup script that's packed with thousands of seemingly legitimate code strings. These strings include a mix of bold and italic fonts and are still readable and can be parsed by the Python interpreter, only to activate the execution of the stealer malware upon installation of the package.  "An obvious and immediate benefit of this strange scheme is readability," the company  noted . "Moreover, these visible differences do not prevent

Any app that can improve business operations is quickly added to the SaaS stack. However, employees don't realize that this SaaS-to-SaaS connectivity, which typically takes place outside the view of the security team, significantly increases risk. Whether employees connect through Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Slack, Salesforce, or any other app, security teams have no way to quantify their exposure. These 'secondary' apps can be requesting an intrusive set of permissions or be malicious. Every click authorizing access may grant the right to edit or delete company files, send emails on behalf of the user, create new files, or otherwise handle data in a way that poses a profound threat to the organization's security. To handle the SaaS Security challenges, security teams need to address the entire SaaS ecosystem.  Today's SaaS security evolution has expanded SaaS security beyond simply preventing access. It extends far beyond securing the app. Today's orga

Cloud-based repository hosting service GitHub said it took the step of replacing its RSA SSH host key used to secure Git operations "out of an abundance of caution" after it was briefly exposed in a public repository. The activity, which was carried out at 05:00 UTC on March 24, 2023, is said to have been undertaken as a measure to prevent any bad actor from impersonating the service or eavesdropping on users' operations over SSH. "This key does not grant access to GitHub's infrastructure or customer data," Mike Hanley, chief security officer and SVP of engineering at GitHub,  said  in a post. "This change only impacts Git operations over SSH using RSA." The move does not impact Web traffic to GitHub.com and Git operations performed via HTTPS. No change is required for ECDSA or Ed25519 users. The Microsoft-owned company said there is no evidence that the exposed SSH private key was exploited by adversaries. It did not disclose how long the se

A recent campaign undertaken by  Earth Preta  indicates that nation-state groups aligned with China are getting increasingly proficient at bypassing security solutions. The  threat actor , active since at least 2012, is tracked by the broader cybersecurity community under Bronze President, HoneyMyte, Mustang Panda, RedDelta, and Red Lich. Attack chains mounted by the group commence with a spear-phishing email to deploy a wide range of tools for backdoor access, command-and-control (C2), and data exfiltration. These messages come bearing with malicious lure archives distributed via Dropbox or Google Drive links that employ DLL side-loading, LNK shortcut files, and fake file extensions as arrival vectors to obtain a foothold and drop backdoors like  TONEINS, TONESHELL, PUBLOAD , and  MQsTTang  (aka QMAGENT). Similar infection chains utilizing Google Drive links have been observed  delivering Cobalt Strike  as early as April 2021. "Earth Preta tends to hide malicious payloads

Patches have been released for a critical security flaw impacting the WooCommerce Payments plugin for WordPress, which is installed on over 500,000 websites. The flaw, if left unresolved, could enable a bad actor to gain unauthorized admin access to impacted stores, the company said in an advisory on March 23, 2023. It impacts versions 4.8.0 through 5.6.1. Put differently, the issue could permit an "unauthenticated attacker to impersonate an administrator and completely take over a website without any user interaction or social engineering required," WordPress security company Wordfence  said . The vulnerability appears to reside in a PHP file called "class-platform-checkout-session.php," Sucuri researcher Ben Martin  noted . Credited with discovering and reporting the vulnerability is Michael Mazzolini of Swiss penetration testing company GoldNetwork. WooCommerce also  said  it worked with WordPress to auto-update sites using affected versions of the softwar

Google has stepped in to remove a bogus Chrome browser extension from the official Web Store that masqueraded as OpenAI's ChatGPT service to harvest Facebook session cookies and hijack the accounts. The "ChatGPT For Google" extension, a trojanized version of a  legitimate open source browser add-on , attracted over 9,000 installations since March 14, 2023, prior to its removal. It was originally uploaded to the Chrome Web Store on February 14, 2023. According to  Guardio Labs  researcher Nati Tal, the extension was propagated through  malicious   sponsored Google search results  that were designed to redirect unsuspecting users searching for "Chat GPT-4" to fraudulent landing pages that point to the fake add-on. Installing the extension adds the promised functionality – i.e., enhancing search engines with ChatGPT – but it also stealthily activates the ability to capture Facebook-related cookies and exfiltrate it to a remote server in an encrypted manner. O