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AWS Patches Critical 'FlowFixation' Bug in Airflow Service to Prevent Session Hijacking

AWS Patches Critical 'FlowFixation' Bug in Airflow Service to Prevent Session Hijacking
Mar 22, 2024 Amazon Web Services / Vulnerability
Cybersecurity researchers have shared details of a now-patched security vulnerability in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow ( MWAA ) that could be potentially exploited by a malicious actor to hijack victims' sessions and achieve remote code execution on underlying instances. The vulnerability, now addressed by AWS, has been codenamed  FlowFixation  by Tenable. "Upon taking over the victim's account, the attacker could have performed tasks such as reading connection strings, adding configurations and triggering directed acyclic graphs (DAGS)," senior security researcher Liv Matan  said  in a technical analysis. "Under certain circumstances such actions can result in RCE on the instance that underlies the MWAA, and in lateral movement to other services." The root cause of the vulnerability, per the cybersecurity firm, is a combination of  session fixation  on the web management panel of AWS MWAA and an AWS domain misconfigura

How to Accelerate Vendor Risk Assessments in the Age of SaaS Sprawl

How to Accelerate Vendor Risk Assessments in the Age of SaaS Sprawl
Mar 21, 2024 SaaS Security / Endpoint Security
In today's digital-first business environment dominated by SaaS applications, organizations increasingly depend on third-party vendors for essential cloud services and software solutions. As more vendors and services are added to the mix, the complexity and potential vulnerabilities within the  SaaS supply chain  snowball quickly. That's why effective vendor risk management (VRM) is a critical strategy in identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks to protect organizational assets and data integrity. Meanwhile, common approaches to vendor risk assessments are too slow and static for the modern world of SaaS. Most organizations have simply adapted their legacy evaluation techniques for on-premise software to apply to SaaS providers. This not only creates massive bottlenecks, but also causes organizations to inadvertently accept far too much risk. To effectively adapt to the realities of modern work, two major aspects need to change: the timeline of initial assessment must shorte

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future
Mar 21, 2024Operational Technology / SCADA Security
When you read reports about cyber-attacks affecting operational technology (OT), it's easy to get caught up in the hype and assume every single one is sophisticated. But are OT environments all over the world really besieged by a constant barrage of complex cyber-attacks? Answering that would require breaking down the different types of OT cyber-attacks and then looking back on all the historical attacks to see how those types compare.  The Types of OT Cyber-Attacks Over the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the need for improved cybersecurity practices in IT's lesser-known counterpart, OT. In fact, the lines of what constitutes a cyber-attack on OT have never been well defined, and if anything, they have further blurred over time. Therefore, we'd like to begin this post with a discussion around the ways in which cyber-attacks can either target or just simply impact OT, and why it might be important for us to make the distinction going forward. Figure 1 The Pu

Researchers Detail Kubernetes Vulnerability That Enables Windows Node Takeover

Researchers Detail Kubernetes Vulnerability That Enables Windows Node Takeover
Mar 14, 2024 Container Security / Vulnerability
Details have been made public about a now-patched high-severity flaw in Kubernetes that could allow a malicious attacker to achieve remote code execution with elevated privileges under specific circumstances. "The vulnerability allows remote code execution with SYSTEM privileges on all Windows endpoints within a Kubernetes cluster," Akamai security researcher Tomer Peled  said . "To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker needs to apply malicious YAML files on the cluster." Tracked as CVE-2023-5528 (CVSS score: 7.2), the shortcoming impacts all versions of kubelet, including and after version 1.8.0. It was addressed as part of updates released on November 14, 2023, in the following versions - kubelet v1.28.4 kubelet v1.27.8 kubelet v1.26.11, and kubelet v1.25.16 "A security issue was discovered in Kubernetes where a user that can create pods and persistent volumes on Windows nodes may be able to escalate to admin privileges on those nodes," Kubernetes maintainers  said  in a

Automated remediation solutions are crucial for security

cyber security
websiteWing SecurityShadow IT / SaaS Security
Especially when it comes to securing employees' SaaS usage, don't settle for a longer to-do list. Auto-remediation is key to achieving SaaS security.

3 Things CISOs Achieve with Cato

3 Things CISOs Achieve with Cato
Mar 14, 2024 Data Protection / Cybersecurity
Being a CISO is a balancing act: ensuring organizations are secure without compromising users' productivity. This requires taking multiple elements into consideration, like cost, complexity, performance and user experience. CISOs around the globe use Cato SSE 360, as part of the  Cato SASE Cloud platform  to balance these factors without compromise. This article details how CISOs are leveraging Cato across different touchpoints of their  SASE  and SSE transition journey. It shows the top 3 achievements CISOs can accomplish: visibility, real-time threat prevention, and data sovereignty. Read and discover how it's done. Since Cato is easy to deploy, adopt and manage, you can soon benefit from these capabilities as well. To read a more in-depth explanation of these findings, click  here . Achievement #1: Comprehensive Visibility Sites can be quickly onboarded using Cato's zero-touch Socket edge SD-WAN devices or IPSEC tunnels. At the same time, remote users can easily download the Ca

What is Exposure Management and How Does it Differ from ASM?

What is Exposure Management and How Does it Differ from ASM?
Mar 05, 2024 Attack Surface / Exposure Management
Startups and scales-ups are often cloud-first organizations and rarely have sprawling legacy on-prem environments. Likewise, knowing the agility and flexibility that cloud environments provide, the mid-market is predominantly running in a hybrid state, partly in the cloud but with some on-prem assets. While there has been a bit of a backswing against the pricing and lock-in presented when using cloud infrastructure, cloud is still the preferred provider for the majority of SMBs. As a result, external attack surfaces are increasingly complex and distributed and, therefore, harder to monitor and secure. This expanded attack surface gives hackers plenty of blind spots and gaps to exploit. Security teams are on the back, reacting, often too slowly, to changes in their own attack surface as engineering teams continuously spin up and expose new systems, services, and data to the internet. This is compounded by the fact that the threat landscape is always changing. Thousands of new vulne

Wazuh in the Cloud Era: Navigating the Challenges of Cybersecurity

Wazuh in the Cloud Era: Navigating the Challenges of Cybersecurity
Feb 09, 2024 Cloud Security / Open Source XDR / SIEM
Cloud computing has innovated how organizations operate and manage IT operations, such as data storage, application deployment, networking, and overall resource management. The cloud offers scalability, adaptability, and accessibility, enabling businesses to achieve sustainable growth. However, adopting cloud technologies into your infrastructure presents various cybersecurity risks and challenges that demand diligent consideration. In this blog post, we will explore some challenges of cybersecurity in the cloud era. We will also delve into how Wazuh, a cybersecurity solution supporting cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Github, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), can help address these challenges effectively. The rise of cloud computing Cloud computing deploys services, including servers, storage, software, databases, networking, and intelligence over the Internet " the cloud " to offer flexible resources, faster innovation, and cost efficiencies. Cloud c

Hackers Could Exploit Google Workspace and Cloud Platform for Ransomware Attacks

Hackers Could Exploit Google Workspace and Cloud Platform for Ransomware Attacks
Nov 16, 2023 Cloud Security / Ransomware
A set of novel attack methods has been demonstrated against Google Workspace and the Google Cloud Platform that could be potentially leveraged by threat actors to conduct ransomware, data exfiltration, and password recovery attacks. "Starting from a single compromised machine, threat actors could progress in several ways: they could move to other cloned machines with  GCPW  installed, gain access to the cloud platform with custom permissions, or decrypt locally stored passwords to continue their attack beyond the Google ecosystem," Martin Zugec, technical solutions director at Bitdefender,  said  in a new report. A prerequisite for these attacks is that the bad actor has already gained access to a local machine through other means, prompting Google to mark the bug as  not eligible for fixing  "since it's outside of our threat model and the behavior is in line with Chrome's practices of storing local data." However, the Romanian cybersecurity firm has wa

Record-Breaking 100 Million RPS DDoS Attack Exploits HTTP/2 Rapid Reset Flaw

Record-Breaking 100 Million RPS DDoS Attack Exploits HTTP/2 Rapid Reset Flaw
Oct 26, 2023 Network Security / Cyber Attack
Cloudflare on Thursday said it mitigated thousands of hyper-volumetric HTTP distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that exploited a recently disclosed flaw called  HTTP/2 Rapid Reset , 89 of which exceeded 100 million requests per second (RPS). "The campaign contributed to an overall increase of 65% in HTTP DDoS attack traffic in Q3 compared to the previous quarter ," the web infrastructure and security company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Similarly,  L3/4 DDoS attacks  also increased by 14%." The total number of HTTP DDoS attack requests in the quarter surged to 8.9 trillion, up from 5.4 trillion in Q2 2023 and 4.7 trillion in Q1 2023. The number of attack requests in Q4 2022 stood at 6.5 trillion. HTTP/2 Rapid Reset (CVE-2023-44487) came to light earlier this month following an industry-wide coordinated disclosure that delved into DDoS attacks orchestrated by an unknown actor by leveraging the flaw to target various providers such as

Experts Reveal Google Cloud Platform's Blind Spot for Data Exfiltration Attacks

Experts Reveal Google Cloud Platform's Blind Spot for Data Exfiltration Attacks
Mar 06, 2023 Cloud Computing / Data Safety
Malicious actors can take advantage of "insufficient" forensic visibility into Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to exfiltrate sensitive data, a new research has found. "Unfortunately, GCP does not provide the level of visibility in its storage logs that is needed to allow any effective forensic investigation, making organizations blind to potential data exfiltration attacks," cloud incident response firm Mitiga  said  in a report. The attack banks on the prerequisite that the adversary is able to gain control of an identity and access management (IAM) entity in the targeted organization by methods like social engineering to access the GCP environment. The crux of the problem is that GCP's  storage access logs  do not provide adequate transparency with regards to potential file access and read events, instead grouping them all as a single "Object Get" activity. "The same event is used for a wide variety of types of access, including: Reading a fil

Critical VMware Cloud Director Bug Could Let Hackers Takeover Entire Cloud Infrastructure

Critical VMware Cloud Director Bug Could Let Hackers Takeover Entire Cloud Infrastructure
Apr 15, 2022
Cloud computing and virtualization technology firm VMWare on Thursday rolled out an update to resolve a critical security flaw in its Cloud Director product that could be weaponized to launch remote code execution attacks. The issue, assigned the identifier  CVE-2022-22966 , has a CVSS score of 9.1 out of a maximum of 10. VMware credited security researcher Jari Jääskelä with reporting the flaw. "An authenticated, high privileged malicious actor with network access to the VMware Cloud Director tenant or provider may be able to exploit a remote code execution vulnerability to gain access to the server," VMware  said  in an advisory. VMware Cloud Director, formerly known as vCloud Director, is used by many well-known cloud providers to operate and manage their cloud infrastructures and gain visibility into datacenters across sites and geographies. The vulnerability could, in other words, end up allowing attackers to gain access to sensitive data and take over private clou

Finding Attack Paths in Cloud Environments

Finding Attack Paths in Cloud Environments
Apr 12, 2022
The mass adoption of cloud infrastructure is fully justified by innumerable advantages. As a result, today, organizations' most sensitive business applications, workloads, and data are in the cloud. Hackers, good and bad, have noticed that trend and effectively evolved their attack techniques to match this new tantalizing target landscape. With threat actors' high reactivity and adaptability, it is recommended to assume that organizations are under attack and that some user accounts or applications might already have been compromised. Finding out exactly which assets are put at risk through compromised accounts or breached assets requires mapping potential attack paths across a comprehensive map of all the relationships between assets.  Today, mapping potential attack paths is performed with scanning tools such as AzureHound or AWSPX. Those are graph-based tools enabling the visualization of assets and resources relationships within the related cloud service provider. By r

Eltima SDK Contain Multiple Vulnerabilities Affecting Several Cloud Service Provides

Eltima SDK Contain Multiple Vulnerabilities Affecting Several Cloud Service Provides
Dec 07, 2021
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed multiple vulnerabilities in a third-party driver software developed by Eltima that have been "unwittingly inherited" by cloud desktop solutions like Amazon Workspaces, Accops, and NoMachine and could provide attackers a path to perform an array of malicious activities. "These vulnerabilities allow attackers to escalate privileges enabling them to disable security products, overwrite system components, corrupt the operating system, or perform malicious operations unimpeded," SentinelOne Senior Security Researcher, Kasif Dekel, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The 27 flaws have since been addressed in Amazon Nimble Studio AMI, Amazon NICE DCV, Amazon WorkSpaces, Amazon AppStream, NoMachine, Accops HyWorks, Accops HyWorks DVM Tools, Eltima USB Network Gate, Amzetta zPortal Windows zClient, Amzetta zPortal DVM Tools, FlexiHub, and Donglify. At its core, the issues reside in a product developed by Eltima that of

Researchers Discover First Known Malware Targeting Windows Containers

Researchers Discover First Known Malware Targeting Windows Containers
Jun 07, 2021
Security researchers have discovered the first known malware, dubbed " Siloscope ," targeting Windows Server containers to infect Kubernetes clusters in cloud environments. "Siloscape is heavily obfuscated malware targeting Kubernetes clusters through Windows containers,"  said  Unit 42 researcher Daniel Prizmant. "Its main purpose is to open a backdoor into poorly configured Kubernetes clusters in order to run malicious containers such as, but not limited to, cryptojackers." Siloscape, first detected in March 2021, is characterized by several techniques, including targeting common cloud applications such as web servers to gain an initial foothold via known vulnerabilities, following which it leverages Windows container escape techniques to break out of the confines of the container and gain remote code execution on the underlying node. A container is an  isolated, lightweight silo  for running an application on the host operating system. The malware&

NSA Warns Russian Hacker Exploiting VMware Bug to Breach Corporate Networks

NSA Warns Russian Hacker Exploiting VMware Bug to Breach Corporate Networks
Dec 08, 2020
The US National Security Agency (NSA) on Monday issued an  advisory  warning that Russian threat actors are leveraging recently disclosed VMware vulnerability to install malware on corporate systems and access protected data. Specifics regarding the identities of the threat actor exploiting the  VMware flaw  or when these attacks started were not disclosed. The development comes two weeks after the virtualization software company publicly disclosed the flaw—affecting VMware Workspace One Access, Access Connector, Identity Manager, and Identity Manager Connector products for Windows and Linux—without releasing a patch and three days after releasing a software update to fix it. In late November, VMware pushed  temporary workarounds  to address the issue, stating permanent patches for the flaw were "forthcoming." But it wasn't until December 3rd the escalation-of-privileges bug was entirely resolved. That same day, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agenc

Hackers Breach LineageOS, Ghost, DigiCert Servers Using SaltStack Vulnerability

Hackers Breach LineageOS, Ghost, DigiCert Servers Using SaltStack Vulnerability
May 04, 2020
Days after cybersecurity researchers sounded the alarm over two critical vulnerabilities in the SaltStack configuration framework , a hacking campaign has already begun exploiting the flaws to breach servers of LineageOS, Ghost, and DigiCert. Tracked as CVE-2020-11651 and CVE-2020-11652 , the disclosed flaws could allow an adversary to execute arbitrary code on remote servers deployed in data centers and cloud environments. The issues were fixed by SaltStack in a release published on April 29th. "We expect that any competent hacker will be able to create 100% reliable exploits for these issues in under 24 hours," F-Secure researchers had previously warned in an advisory last week. LineageOS, a maker of an open-source operating system based on Android, said it detected the intrusion on May 2nd at around 8 pm Pacific Time. "Around 8 pm PST on May 2nd, 2020, an attacker used a CVE in our SaltStack master to gain access to our infrastructure," the company n

Critical SaltStack RCE Bug (CVSS Score 10) Affects Thousands of Data Centers

Critical SaltStack RCE Bug (CVSS Score 10) Affects Thousands of Data Centers
May 01, 2020
Two severe security flaws have been discovered in the open-source SaltStack Salt configuration framework that could allow an adversary to execute arbitrary code on remote servers deployed in data centers and cloud environments. The vulnerabilities were identified by F-Secure researchers earlier this March and disclosed on Thursday, a day after SaltStack released a patch (version 3000.2) addressing the issues , rated with CVSS score 10. "The vulnerabilities, allocated CVE IDs CVE-2020-11651 and CVE-2020-11652 , are of two different classes," the cybersecurity firm said . "One being authentication bypass where functionality was unintentionally exposed to unauthenticated network clients, the other being directory traversal where untrusted input (i.e., parameters in network requests) was not sanitized correctly allowing unconstrained access to the entire filesystem of the master server." The researchers warned that the flaws could be exploited in the wild imm
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