Amazon S3 | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A threat actor known as Hazy Hawk has been observed hijacking abandoned cloud resources of high-profile organizations, including Amazon S3 buckets and Microsoft Azure endpoints, by leveraging misconfigurations in the Domain Name System (DNS) records. The hijacked domains are then used to host URLs that direct users to scams and malware via traffic distribution systems (TDSes), according to Infoblox. Some of the other resources usurped by the threat actor include those hosted on Akamai, Bunny CDN, Cloudflare CDN, GitHub, and Netlify. The DNS threat intelligence firm said it first discovered the threat actor after it gained control of several sub-domains associated with the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) in February 2025. It has since been determined that other government agencies across the globe, prominent universities, and international corporations such as Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Ernst & Young have been victimized by the same threat actor since at least ...

Cybersecurity researchers have exposed what they say is an "industrial-scale, global cryptocurrency phishing operation" engineered to steal digital assets from cryptocurrency wallets for several years. The campaign has been codenamed FreeDrain by threat intelligence firms SentinelOne and Validin . "FreeDrain uses SEO manipulation, free-tier web services (like gitbook.io, webflow.io, and github.io), and layered redirection techniques to target cryptocurrency wallets," security researchers Kenneth Kinion, Sreekar Madabushi, and Tom Hegel said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "Victims search for wallet-related queries, click on high-ranking malicious results, land on lure pages, and are redirected to phishing pages that steal their seed phrases." The scale of the campaign is reflected in the fact that over 38,000 distinct FreeDrain sub-domains hosting lure pages have been identified. These pages are hosted on cloud infrastructure lik...

Magecart strikes again! Cybersecurity researchers have identified yet another supply-chain attack carried out by payment card hackers against more than 17,000 web domains, which also include websites in the top 2,000 of Alexa rankings. Since Magecart is neither a single group nor a specific malware instead an umbrella term given to all those cyber criminal groups and individuals who inject digital card skimmers on compromised websites, it is not necessary for every one of them to use similar techniques with the same sophistication. A new report shared with The Hacker News prior to its release details a new supply-chain attack campaign wherein hackers are using shotgun approach instead of targeted attacks to infect a wide range of websites, preferring larger infection reach as possible over accuracy. Almost two months ago, security researchers from RiskIQ discovered supply-chain attacks involving credit card skimmers placed on several web-based suppliers, including AdMaxi...

Security operations centers (SOCs) are under pressure from both sides: threats are growing more complex and frequent, while security budgets are no longer keeping pace. Today's security leaders are expected to reduce risk and deliver results without relying on larger teams or increased spending. At the same time, SOC inefficiencies are draining resources. Studies show that up to half of all alerts are false positives, with some reports citing false positive rates as high as 99 percent . This means highly trained analysts spend a disproportionate amount of time chasing down harmless activity, wasting effort, increasing fatigue, and raising the chance of missing real threats. In this environment, the business imperative is clear: maximize the impact of every analyst and every dollar by making security operations faster, smarter, and more focused. Enter the Agentic AI SOC Analyst The agentic AI SOC Analyst is a force multiplier that enables organizations to do more with the team an...

Viacom—the popular entertainment and media company that owns Paramount Pictures, Comedy Central, MTV, and hundreds of other properties—has exposed the keys to its kingdom on an unsecured Amazon S3 server. A security researcher working for California-based cyber resiliency firm UpGuard has recently discovered a wide-open, public-facing misconfigured Amazon Web Server S3 cloud storage bucket containing roughly a gigabyte's worth of credentials and configuration files for the backend of dozens of Viacom properties. These exposed credentials discovered by UpGuard researcher Chris Vickery would have been enough for hackers to take down Viacom's internal IT infrastructure and internet presence, allowing them to access cloud servers belonging to MTV, Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon. Among the data exposed in the leak was Viacom's master key to its Amazon Web Services account, and the credentials required to build and maintain Viacom servers across its many subsidiarie...

Verizon, the major telecommunications provider, has suffered a data security breach with over 14 million US customers' personal details exposed on the Internet after NICE Systems , a third-party vendor, mistakenly left the sensitive users' details open on a server. Chris Vickery, researcher and director of cyber risk research at security firm UpGuard, discovered the exposed data on an unprotected Amazon S3 cloud server that was fully downloadable and configured to allow public access. The exposed data includes sensitive information of millions of customers, including their names, phone numbers, and account PINs (personal identification numbers), which is enough for anyone to access an individual's account, even if the account is protected by two-factor authentication . "The exposure of Verizon account PIN codes used to verify customers, listed alongside their associated phone numbers, is particularly concerning," explained UpGuard's Dan O'Sullivan in ...

The major internet outage across the United States earlier this week was not due to any virus or malware or state-sponsored cyber attack, rather it was the result of a simple TYPO. Amazon on Thursday admitted that an incorrectly typed command during a routine debugging of the company's billing system caused the 5-hour-long outage of some Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers on Tuesday. The issue caused tens of thousands of websites and services to become completely unavailable, while others show broken images and links, which left online users around the world confused. The sites and services affected by the disruption include Quora, Slack, Medium, Giphy, Trello, Splitwise, Soundcloud, and IFTTT, among a ton of others. Here's What Happened: On Tuesday morning, members of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) team were debugging the S3 cloud-storage billing system. As part of the process, the team needed to take a few billing servers offline, but unfortunately, it end...