AWS | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

As many as 196 hosts have been infected as part of an aggressive cloud campaign mounted by the TeamTNT group called  Silentbob . "The botnet run by TeamTNT has set its sights on Docker and Kubernetes environments, Redis servers, Postgres databases, Hadoop clusters, Tomcat and Nginx servers, Weave Scope, SSH, and Jupyter applications," Aqua security researchers Ofek Itach and Assaf Morag  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The focus this time seems to be more on infecting systems and testing the botnet, rather than deploying cryptominers for profit." The development arrives a week after the cloud security company  detailed  an intrusion set linked to the TeamTNT group that targets exposed JupyterLab and Docker APIs to deploy the Tsunami malware and hijack system resources to run a cryptocurrency miner. The latest findings suggest a broader campaign and the use of a larger attack infrastructure than previously thought, including various shell script

Cloud environments continue to be at the receiving end of an ongoing advanced attack campaign dubbed SCARLETEEL, with the threat actors now setting their sights on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Fargate. "Cloud environments are still their primary target, but the tools and techniques used have adapted to bypass new security measures, along with a more resilient and stealthy command and control architecture," Sysdig security researcher Alessandro Brucato said in a new report shared with The Hacker News. SCARLETEEL was  first exposed  by the cybersecurity company in February 2023, detailing a sophisticated attack chain that culminated in the theft of proprietary data from AWS infrastructure and the deployment of cryptocurrency miners to profit off the compromised systems' resources illegally. A follow-up analysis by Cado Security  uncovered  potential links to a prolific cryptojacking group known as  TeamTNT , although Sysdig told The Hacker News that it "could be some

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

A financially motivated threat actor of Indonesian origin has been observed leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances to carry out illicit crypto mining operations. Cloud security company's Permiso P0 Labs, which first detected the group in November 2021, has assigned it the moniker  GUI-vil  (pronounced Goo-ee-vil). "The group displays a preference for Graphical User Interface (GUI) tools, specifically S3 Browser (version 9.5.5) for their initial operations," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Upon gaining AWS Console access, they conduct their operations directly through the web browser." Attack chains mounted by GUI-vil entail obtaining initial access by weaponizing AWS keys in publicly exposed source code repositories on GitHub or scanning for GitLab instances that are vulnerable to remote code execution flaws (e.g.,  CVE-2021-22205 ). A successful ingress is followed by privilege escalation and

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has resolved a cross-tenant vulnerability in its platform that could be weaponized by an attacker to gain unauthorized access to resources. The issue relates to a  confused deputy problem , a type of privilege escalation where a program that doesn't have permission to perform an action can coerce a more-privileged entity to perform the action. The shortcoming was reported by Datadog to AWS on September 1, 2022, following which a patch was shipped on September 6. "This attack abuses the AppSync service to assume [identity and access management]  roles  in other AWS accounts, which allows an attacker to pivot into a victim organization and access resources in those accounts," Datadog researcher Nick Frichette  said  in a report published last week. In a coordinated disclosure, Amazon  said  that no customers were affected by the vulnerability and that no customer action is required. It described it as a "case-sensitivity parsing issue w

An unpatched security issue in the Travis CI API has left tens of thousands of developers' user tokens exposed to potential attacks, effectively allowing threat actors to breach cloud infrastructures, make unauthorized code changes, and initiate supply chain attacks. "More than 770 million logs of free tier users are available, from which you can easily extract tokens, secrets, and other credentials associated with popular cloud service providers such as GitHub, AWS, and Docker Hub," researchers from cloud security firm Aqua  said  in a Monday report. Travis CI is a  continuous integration  service used to build and test software projects hosted on cloud repository platforms such as GitHub and Bitbucket. The issue, previously reported in 2015 and  2019 , is rooted in the fact that the  API  permits access to historical logs in cleartext format, enabling a malicious party to even "fetch the logs that were previously unavailable via the API." The logs go all

Unsurprisingly, here at  Rewind , we've got a lot of data to protect (over 2 petabytes worth). One of the databases we use is called Elasticsearch (ES or Opensearch, as it is currently known in AWS). To put it simply, ES is a document database that facilitates lightning-fast search results. Speed is essential when customers are looking for a particular file or item that they need to restore using  Rewind . Every second of downtime counts, so our search results need to be fast, accurate, and reliable. Another consideration was disaster  recovery . As part of our  System and Organization Controls Level 2 (SOC2)  certification process, we needed to ensure we had a working disaster recovery plan to restore service in the unlikely event that the entire AWS region was down. "An entire AWS region?? That will never happen!" (Except for  when it did )  Anything is possible, things go wrong, and in order to meet our SOC2 requirements we needed to have a working solution. Specif

Threat actors are actively incorporating public cloud services from Amazon and Microsoft into their malicious campaigns to deliver commodity remote access trojans (RATs) such as  Nanocore ,  Netwire , and  AsyncRAT  to siphon sensitive information from compromised systems. The spear-phishing attacks, which commenced in October 2021, have primarily targeted entities located in the U.S., Canada, Italy, and Singapore, researchers from Cisco Talos said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Using existing legitimate infrastructure to facilitate intrusions is increasingly becoming part of an attacker's playbook as it obviates the need to host their own servers, not to mention be used as a cloaking mechanism to evade detection by security solutions. In recent months, collaboration and communication tools like  Discord, Slack, and Telegram  have found a place in many an infection chain to  commandeer and exfiltrate data  from the victim machines. Viewed in that light, the abuse of