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SonicWall on Monday warned of active exploitation attempts against a zero-day vulnerability in its Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 100 series devices. The flaw, which affects both physical and virtual SMA 100 10.x devices (SMA 200, SMA 210, SMA 400, SMA 410, SMA 500v), came to light after the NCC Group on Sunday  alerted  it had detected "indiscriminate use of an exploit in the wild." Details of the exploit have not been disclosed to prevent the zero-day from being misused further, but a patch is expected to be available by the end of day on February 2, 2021. "A few thousand devices are impacted," SonicWall  said  in a statement, adding, "SMA 100 firmware prior to 10.x is unaffected by this zero-day vulnerability." On January 22, The Hacker News exclusively  revealed  that SonicWall had been breached as a consequence of a coordinated attack on its internal systems by exploiting "probable zero-day vulnerabilities" in its SMA 100 series remote acc

We likely all agree that 2020 was a year we won't soon forget - for many reasons. One area particularly impacted last year was (and continues to be) cybersecurity.  While Internet access allowed many businesses to continue functioning during the COVID-19 stay at home requirements, the unprecedented number of people accessing company assets remotely introduced many new challenges for cybersecurity professionals. With a history of leveraging societal maladies to their advantage, cyber criminals leverage the confusion and unpreparedness created by the global pandemic in their cyber attacks.  In just the last two months of 2020, several high-profile organizations and government entities were successfully attacked using clever approaches that were overlooked by cybersecurity experts. Making sense of how attacks have changed and what new defensive strategies should be taken is no easy task. Cybersecurity company Cynet will help by reviewing the 2020 high profile attacks in depth and

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 "persistent attacker group" with alleged ties to Hezbollah has retooled its malware arsenal with a new version of a remote access Trojan (RAT) to break into companies worldwide and extract valuable information. In a  new report  published by the ClearSky research team on Thursday, the Israeli cybersecurity firm said it identified at least 250 public-facing web servers since early 2020 that have been hacked by the threat actor to gather intelligence and steal the company's databases. The orchestrated intrusions hit a slew of companies located in the U.S., the U.K., Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority, with a majority of the victims representing telecom operators (Etisalat, Mobily, Vodafone Egypt), internet service providers (SaudiNet, TE Data), and hosting and infrastructure service providers (Secured Servers LLC, iomart). First documented in 2015,  Volatile Cedar  (or Lebanese Cedar) has been known to penetrate a large number

Researchers have disclosed a new family of Android malware that abuses accessibility services in the device to hijack user credentials and record audio and video. Dubbed " Oscorp " by Italy's CERT-AGID and spotted by  AddressIntel , the malware "induce(s) the user to install an accessibility service with which [the attackers] can read what is present and what is typed on the screen." So named because of the title of the login page of its command-and-control (C2) server, the malicious APK (called "Assistenzaclienti.apk" or "Customer Protection") is  distributed  via a domain named "supportoapp[.]com," which upon installation, requests intrusive permissions to enable the accessibility service and establishes communications with a C2 server to retrieve additional commands. Furthermore, the malware repeatedly reopens the Settings screen every eight seconds until the user turns on permissions for accessibility and device usage stati

U.S. and Bulgarian authorities this week took control of the dark web site used by the NetWalker ransomware cybercrime group to publish data stolen from its victims. "We are striking back against the growing threat of ransomware by not only bringing criminal charges against the responsible actors, but also disrupting criminal online infrastructure and, wherever possible, recovering ransom payments extorted from victims,"  said  Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicholas L. McQuaid of the Justice Department's Criminal Division. "Ransomware victims should know that coming forward to law enforcement as soon as possible after an attack can lead to significant results like those achieved in today's multi-faceted operation." In connection with the takedown, a Canadian national named Sebastien Vachon-Desjardins from the city of Gatineau was charged in the U.S. state of Florida for extorting $27.6 million in cryptocurrency from ransom payments. Separately, the

Law enforcement agencies from as many as eight countries dismantled the infrastructure of Emotet , a notorious email-based Windows malware behind several botnet-driven spam campaigns and ransomware attacks over the past decade. The coordinated takedown of the botnet on Tuesday — dubbed " Operation Ladybird " — is the result of a joint effort between authorities in the Netherlands, Germany, the U.S., the U.K., France, Lithuania, Canada, and Ukraine to take control of servers used to run and maintain the malware network. "The Emotet infrastructure essentially acted as a primary door opener for computer systems on a global scale," Europol  said . "What made Emotet so dangerous is that the malware was offered for hire to other cybercriminals to install other types of malware, such as banking Trojans or ransomware, onto a victim's computer." More Than a Malware  Since its first identification in 2014,  Emotet  has evolved from its initial roots as a cr

With so much of the world transitioning to working, shopping, studying, and streaming online during the coronavirus pandemic, cybercriminals now have access to a larger base of potential victims than ever before. "Zoombomb"  became the new photobomb—hackers would gain access to a private meeting or online class hosted on Zoom and shout  profanities and racial slurs  or flash  pornographic images . Nation-state hacker groups mounted attacks against organizations involved in the coronavirus pandemic response, including the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some in an attempt to politicize the pandemic. Even garden-variety cyber attacks like email phishing, social engineering, and refund theft took on a darker flavor in response to the widespread economic precarity brought on by the pandemic.  "Hackers were mostly trying to take advantage of people's fear by offering medical equipment like thermometers and masks for cheap, low

Throughout 2020, businesses, in general, have had their hands full with IT challenges. They had to rush to accommodate a sudden shift to remote work. Then they had to navigate a rapid adoption of automation technologies. And as the year came to a close, more businesses began trying to assemble the safety infrastructure required to return to some semblance of normal in 2021. But at the end of the year,  news of a massive breach  of IT monitoring software vendor SolarWinds introduced a new complication – the possibility of a wave of secondary data breaches and cyber-attacks. And because SolarWinds' products have a presence in so many business networks, the size of the threat is massive. So far, though, most of the attention is getting paid to large enterprises like Microsoft and Cisco (and the US Government), who were the primary target of the SolarWinds breach. What nobody's talking about is the rest of the 18,000 or so SolarWinds clients who may have been affected. For them

An evolving phishing campaign observed at least since May 2020 has been found to target high-ranking company executives across manufacturing, real estate, finance, government, and technological sectors with the goal of obtaining sensitive information. The campaign hinges on a social engineering trick that involves sending emails to potential victims containing fake Office 365 password expiration notifications as lures. The messages also include an embedded link to retain the same password that, when clicked, redirects users to a phishing page for credential harvesting. "The attackers target high profile employees who may not be as technically or cybersecurity savvy, and may be more likely to be deceived into clicking on malicious links," Trend Micro researchers  said  in a Monday analysis. "By selectively targeting C-level employees, the attacker significantly increases the value of obtained credentials as they could lead to further access to sensitive personal and

Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday disclosed a now-patched security flaw in TikTok that could have potentially enabled an attacker to build a database of the app's users and their associated phone numbers for future malicious activity. Although this flaw only impacts those users who have linked a phone number with their account or logged in with a phone number, a successful exploitation of the vulnerability could have resulted in data leakage and privacy violation, Check Point Research said in an analysis shared with The Hacker News. TikTok has deployed a fix to address the shortcoming following responsible disclosure from Check Point researchers. The newly discovered bug resides in TikTok's " Find friends " feature that allows users to sync their contacts with the service to identify potential people to follow. The contacts are uploaded to TikTok via an HTTP request in the form of a list that consists of hashed contact names and the corresponding phone numbe

Google on Monday disclosed details about an ongoing campaign carried out by a government-backed threat actor from North Korea that has targeted security researchers working on vulnerability research and development. The internet giant's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) said the adversary created a research blog and multiple profiles on various social media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, Discord, and Keybase in a bid to communicate with the researchers and build trust. The goal, it appears, is to steal exploits developed by the researchers for possibly undisclosed vulnerabilities, thereby allowing them to stage further attacks on vulnerable targets of their choice. "Their blog contains write-ups and analysis of vulnerabilities that have been publicly disclosed, including 'guest' posts from unwitting legitimate security researchers, likely in an attempt to build additional credibility with other security researchers,"  said  TAG researcher Adam Weide

SonicWall, a popular internet security provider of firewall and VPN products, on late Friday disclosed that it fell victim to a coordinated attack on its internal systems. The San Jose-based company said the attacks leveraged zero-day vulnerabilities in SonicWall secure remote access products such as NetExtender VPN client version 10.x and Secure Mobile Access ( SMA ) that are used to provide users with remote access to internal resources. "Recently, SonicWall identified a coordinated attack on its internal systems by highly sophisticated threat actors exploiting probable zero-day vulnerabilities on certain SonicWall secure remote access products," the company exclusively told The Hacker News. The development comes after The Hacker News received reports that SonicWall's internal systems went down earlier this week on Tuesday and that the source code hosted on the company's GitLab repository was accessed by the attackers. SonicWall wouldn't confirm the re

A relatively new crypto-mining malware that surfaced last year and infected thousands of Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) databases has now been linked to a small software development company based in Iran. The attribution was made possible due to an operational security oversight, said researchers from cybersecurity firm Sophos, that led to the company's name inadvertently making its way into the cryptominer code. First documented by Chinese tech giant Tencent last September,  MrbMiner  was found to target internet-facing MSSQL servers with the goal of installing a cryptominer, which hijacks the processing power of the systems to mine Monero and funnel them into accounts controlled by the attackers. The name "MrbMiner" comes after one of the domains used by the group to host their malicious mining software. "In many ways, MrbMiner's operations appear typical of most cryptominer attacks we've seen targeting internet-facing servers,"  said  Gabor Szappa

Microsoft on Wednesday shared more specifics about the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) adopted by the attackers behind the SolarWinds hack to stay under the radar and avoid detection, as cybersecurity companies work towards getting a "clearer picture" of one of the most sophisticated attacks in recent history. Calling the threat actor "skillful and methodic operators who follow operations security (OpSec) best practices," the company said the attackers went out of their way to ensure that the initial backdoor ( Sunburst  aka Solorigate) and the post-compromise implants ( Teardrop  and  Raindrop ) are separated as much as possible so as to hinder efforts to spot their malicious activity. "The attackers behind Solorigate are skilled campaign operators who carefully planned and executed the attack, remaining elusive while maintaining persistence," researchers from Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team, Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC)

A new large-scale phishing campaign targeting global organizations has been found to bypass Microsoft Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) and steal credentials belonging to over a thousand corporate employees. The cyber offensive is said to have originated in August last year, with the attacks aimed specifically at energy and construction companies, said researchers from Check Point Research today in a joint analysis in partnership with industrial cybersecurity firm Otorio. Although phishing campaigns engineered for credential theft are among the most prevalent reasons for data breaches, what makes this operation stand out is an operational security failure that led to the attackers unintentionally exposing the credentials they had stolen to the public Internet. "With a simple Google search, anyone could have found the password to one of the compromised, stolen email addresses: a gift to every opportunistic attacker," the researchers said . The attack chain comm

Cybersecurity researchers have unearthed a fourth new malware strain—designed to spread the malware onto other computers in victims' networks—which was deployed as part of the  SolarWinds supply chain attack  disclosed late last year. Dubbed "Raindrop" by Broadcom-owned Symantec, the malware joins the likes of other malicious implants such as  Sunspot , Sunburst (or Solorigate), and Teardrop that were stealthily delivered to enterprise networks. The latest finding comes amid a continued probe into the breach, suspected to be of  Russian origin , that has claimed a number of U.S. government agencies and private sector companies. "The discovery of Raindrop is a significant step in our investigation of the SolarWinds attacks as it provides further insights into post-compromise activity at organizations of interest to the attackers," Symantec researchers  said . The cybersecurity firm said it discovered only four samples of Raindrop to date that were used to d