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Attackers Can Weaponize Firewalls and Middleboxes for Amplified DDoS Attacks

Attackers Can Weaponize Firewalls and Middleboxes for Amplified DDoS Attacks

Aug 16, 2021
Weaknesses in the implementation of TCP protocol in  middleboxes  and censorship infrastructure could be weaponized as a vector to stage reflected denial of service (DoS) amplification attacks against any target, surpassing many of the existing UDP-based amplification factors to date. Detailed by a group of academics from the University of Maryland and the University of Colorado Boulder at the USENIX Security Symposium, the volumetric attacks take advantage of TCP-non-compliance in-network middleboxes — such as firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, and deep packet inspection (DPI) boxes — to amplify network traffic, with hundreds of thousands of IP addresses offering  amplification factors  exceeding those from DNS, NTP, and Memcached. The research, which received a Distinguished Paper Award at the conference, is the first of its kind to describe a technique to carry out DDoS reflected amplification attacks over the TCP protocol by abusing middlebox misconfigurations in the wild
Hackers Spotted Using Morse Code in Phishing Attacks to Evade Detection

Hackers Spotted Using Morse Code in Phishing Attacks to Evade Detection

Aug 13, 2021
Microsoft has disclosed details of an evasive year-long social engineering campaign wherein the operators kept changing their obfuscation and encryption mechanisms every 37 days on average, including relying on Morse code, in an attempt to cover their tracks and surreptitiously harvest user credentials. The phishing attacks take the form of invoice-themed lures mimicking financial-related business transactions, with the emails containing an HTML file ("XLS.HTML"). The ultimate objective is to harvest usernames and passwords, which are subsequently used as an initial entry point for later infiltration attempts. Microsoft likened the attachment to a "jigsaw puzzle," noting that individual parts of the HTML file are designed to appear innocuous and slip past endpoint security software, only to reveal its true colors when these segments are decoded and assembled together. The company did not identify the hackers behind the operation. "This phishing campaign ex
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, 2024SaaS 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
IT Giant Accenture Hit by LockBit Ransomware; Hackers Threaten to Leak Data

IT Giant Accenture Hit by LockBit Ransomware; Hackers Threaten to Leak Data

Aug 12, 2021
Global IT consultancy giant Accenture has become the latest company to be hit by the LockBit ransomware gang, according to a post made by the operators on their dark web portal, likely filling a void left in the wake of DarkSide and REvil shutdown. "These people are beyond privacy and security. I really hope that their services are better than what I saw as an insider," read a message posted on the data leak website. Accenture  said  it has since restored the affected systems from backups. LockBit, like its now-defunct DarkSide and REvil counterparts, operates using a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) model, roping in other cybercriminals (aka affiliates) to carry out the intrusion using its platform, with the payments often divided between the criminal entity directing the attack and the core developers of the malware. The ransomware group emerged on the threat landscape in September 2019, and in June 2021 launched LockBit 2.0 along with an advertising campaign to recruit
cyber security

Automated remediation solutions are crucial for 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.
Hackers Steal Over $600 Million Worth of Cryptocurrencies from Poly Network

Hackers Steal Over $600 Million Worth of Cryptocurrencies from Poly Network

Aug 11, 2021
Hackers have siphoned $611 million worth of cryptocurrencies from a blockchain-based financial network in what's believed to be one of the largest heists targeting the digital asset industry, putting it ahead of breaches targeting exchanges Coincheck and Mt. Gox in recent years. Poly Network, a China-based cross-chain decentralized finance (DeFi) platform for swapping tokens across multiple blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, on Tuesday  disclosed  unidentified actors had exploited a vulnerability in its system to plunder thousands of digital tokens such as Ether. "The hacker exploited a vulnerability between contract calls," Poly Network said.  The stolen Binance Chain, Ethereum, and Polygon assets are said to have been transferred to three different wallets, with the company urging miners of affected blockchain and centralized crypto exchanges to blocklist tokens coming from the addresses. The three wallet addresses are as follows -  Ethereum: 0xC8a65Fadf
Experts Believe Chinese Hackers Are Behind Several Attacks Targeting Israel

Experts Believe Chinese Hackers Are Behind Several Attacks Targeting Israel

Aug 10, 2021
A Chinese cyber espionage group has been linked to a string of intrusion activities targeting Israeli government institutions, IT providers, and telecommunications companies at least since 2019, with the hackers masquerading themselves as Iranian actors to mislead forensic analysis. FireEye's Mandiant threat intelligence arm attributed the campaign to an operator it tracks as "UNC215", a Chinese espionage operation that's believed to have singled out organizations around the world dating back as far as 2014, linking the group with "low confidence" to an advanced persistent threat (APT) widely known as  APT27 , Emissary Panda, or Iron Tiger. "UNC215 has compromised organizations in the government, technology, telecommunications, defense, finance, entertainment, and health care sectors," FireEye's Israel and U.S. threat intel teams  said  in a report published today. "The group targets data and organizations which are of great interest
A New Wiper Malware Was Behind Recent Cyberattack On Iranian Train System

A New Wiper Malware Was Behind Recent Cyberattack On Iranian Train System

Jul 30, 2021
A cyber attack that derailed websites of Iran's transport ministry and its national railway system earlier this month, causing widespread disruptions in train services, was the result of a never-before-seen reusable wiper malware called "Meteor." The campaign — dubbed " MeteorExpress " — has not been linked to any previously identified threat group or to additional attacks, making it the first incident involving the deployment of this malware, according to researchers from Iranian antivirus firm  Amn Pardaz  and SentinelOne. Meteor is believed to have been in the works over the past three years. "Despite a lack of specific indicators of compromise, we were able to recover most of the attack components," SentinelOne's Principal Threat Researcher, Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, noted. "Behind this outlandish tale of stopped trains and glib trolls, we found the fingerprints of an unfamiliar attacker," adding the offensive is "designed t
Top 30 Critical Security Vulnerabilities Most Exploited by Hackers

Top 30 Critical Security Vulnerabilities Most Exploited by Hackers

Jul 29, 2021
Intelligence agencies in Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. issued a joint advisory on Wednesday detailing the most exploited vulnerabilities in 2020 and 2021, once again demonstrating how threat actors are able to swiftly weaponize publicly disclosed flaws to their advantage. "Cyber actors continue to exploit publicly known—and often dated—software vulnerabilities against broad target sets, including public and private sector organizations worldwide," the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), the United Kingdom's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)  noted . "However, entities worldwide can mitigate the vulnerabilities listed in this report by applying the available patches to their systems and implementing a centralized patch management system." The top 30 vulnerabilities span a wide range of software, including remote work, virtual pri
Chinese Hackers Implant PlugX Variant on Compromised MS Exchange Servers

Chinese Hackers Implant PlugX Variant on Compromised MS Exchange Servers

Jul 28, 2021
A Chinese cyberespionage group known for targeting Southeast Asia leveraged flaws in the Microsoft Exchange Server that came to light earlier this March to deploy a previously undocumented variant of a remote access trojan (RAT) on compromised systems. Attributing the intrusions to a threat actor named  PKPLUG  (aka  Mustang Panda  and HoneyMyte), Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 threat intelligence team said it identified a new version of the modular PlugX malware, called THOR, that was delivered as a post-exploitation tool to one of the breached servers. Dating back to as early as 2008,  PlugX  is a fully-featured second-stage implant with capabilities such as file upload, download, and modification, keystroke logging, webcam control, and access to a remote command shell. "The variant observed [...] is unique in that it contains a change to its core source code: the replacement of its trademark word 'PLUG' to 'THOR,'" Unit 42 researchers Mike Harbison an
Hackers Posed as Aerobics Instructors for Years to Target Aerospace Employees

Hackers Posed as Aerobics Instructors for Years to Target Aerospace Employees

Jul 28, 2021
An Iranian cyberespionage group masqueraded as an aerobics instructor on Facebook in an attempt to infect the machine of an employee of an aerospace defense contractor with malware as part of a years-long social engineering and targeted malware campaign. Enterprise security firm Proofpoint attributed the covert operation to a state-aligned threat actor it tracks as TA456, and by the wider cybersecurity community under the monikers Tortoiseshell and Imperial Kitten. "Using the social media persona 'Marcella Flores,' TA456 built a relationship across corporate and personal communication platforms with an employee of a small subsidiary of an aerospace defense contractor," Proofpoint  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "In early June 2021, the threat actor attempted to capitalize on this relationship by sending the target malware via an ongoing email communication chain." Earlier this month, Facebook  revealed  it took steps to dismantle a &quo
APT Hackers Distributed Android Trojan via Syrian e-Government Portal

APT Hackers Distributed Android Trojan via Syrian e-Government Portal

Jul 22, 2021
An advanced persistent threat (APT) actor has been tracked in a new campaign deploying Android malware via the Syrian e-Government Web Portal, indicating an upgraded arsenal designed to compromise victims. "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the group has been publicly observed using malicious Android applications as part of its attacks," Trend Micro researchers Zhengyu Dong, Fyodor Yarochkin, and Steven Du  said  in a technical write-up published Wednesday. StrongPity , also codenamed  Promethium  by Microsoft, is believed to have been active since 2012 and has typically focused on targets across Turkey and Syria. In June 2020, the espionage threat actor was  connected  to a wave of activities that banked on watering hole attacks and tampered installers, which abuse the popularity of legitimate applications, to infect targets with malware. "Promethium has been resilient over the years," Cisco Talos  disclosed  last year. "Its campai
US and Global Allies Accuse China of Massive Microsoft Exchange Attack

US and Global Allies Accuse China of Massive Microsoft Exchange Attack

Jul 20, 2021
The U.S. government and its key allies, including the European Union, the U.K., and NATO, formally attributed the massive cyberattack against Microsoft Exchange email servers to state-sponsored hacking crews working affiliated with the People's Republic of China's Ministry of State Security (MSS). In a  statement  issued by the White House on Monday, the administration said, "with a high degree of confidence that malicious cyber actors affiliated with PRC's MSS conducted cyber-espionage operations utilizing the zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server disclosed in early March 2021. The U.K. government  accused  Beijing of a "pervasive pattern of hacking" and "systemic cyber sabotage." The  sweeping espionage campaign  exploited four previously undiscovered vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange software and is believed to have hit at least 30,000 organizations in the U.S. and hundreds of thousands more worldwide. Microsoft identified
China's Cyberspies Targeting Southeast Asian Government Entities

China's Cyberspies Targeting Southeast Asian Government Entities

Jul 15, 2021
A sweeping and "highly active campaign" that originally set its sights on Myanmar has broadened its focus to strike a number of targets located in the Philippines, according to new research. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, which first spotted the infections in October 2020, attributed them to a threat actor it tracks as " LuminousMoth ," which it connected with medium to high confidence to a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group called HoneyMyte or  Mustang Panda , given its observed victimology, tactics, and procedures. About 100 affected victims have been identified in Myanmar, while the number of victims jumped to nearly 1,400 in the Philippines, although the researchers noted that the actual targets were only a fraction of the initial numbers, including government entities located both within the two countries and abroad. The goal of the attacks is to affect a wide perimeter of targets with the aim of hitting a select few that are of strategic interes
Google Details iOS, Chrome, IE Zero-Day Flaws Exploited Recently in the Wild

Google Details iOS, Chrome, IE Zero-Day Flaws Exploited Recently in the Wild

Jul 15, 2021
Threat intelligence researchers from Google on Wednesday  shed more light  on four in-the-wild zero-days in Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer browsers that were exploited by malicious actors in different campaigns since the start of the year. What's more, three of the four zero-days were engineered by commercial providers and sold to and used by government-backed actors, contributing to an uptick in real-world attacks. The list of now-patched vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2021-1879 : Use-After-Free in QuickTimePluginReplacement (Apple WebKit) CVE-2021-21166 : Chrome Object Lifecycle Issue in Audio CVE-2021-30551 : Chrome Type Confusion in V8 CVE-2021-33742 : Internet Explorer out-of-bounds write in MSHTML Both Chrome zero-days — CVE-2021-21166 and CVE-2021-30551 — are believed to have been used by the same actor, and were delivered as one-time links sent via email to targets located in Armenia, with the links redirecting unsuspecting users to attacker-controlled
REvil Ransomware Gang Mysteriously Disappears After High-Profile Attacks

REvil Ransomware Gang Mysteriously Disappears After High-Profile Attacks

Jul 14, 2021
REvil, the infamous ransomware cartel behind some of the biggest cyberattacks targeting JBS and Kaseya, has mysteriously disappeared from the dark web, leading to speculations that the criminal enterprise may have been taken down. Multiple darknet and clearnet sites maintained by the Russia-linked cybercrime syndicate, including the data leak, extortion, and payment portals, remained inaccessible, displaying an error message "Onionsite not found."  The group's  Tor network infrastructure  on the dark web consists of one data leak blog site and 22 data hosting sites. It's not immediately clear what prompted the infrastructure to be knocked offline. REvil is one of the most prolific ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) groups that first appeared on the threat landscape in April 2019. It's an evolution of the  GandCrab  ransomware, which hit the underground markets in early 2018. "If REvil has been permanently disrupted, it'll mark the end of a group which ha
Chinese Hackers Exploited Latest SolarWinds 0-Day in Targeted Attacks

Chinese Hackers Exploited Latest SolarWinds 0-Day in Targeted Attacks

Jul 14, 2021
Microsoft on Tuesday disclosed that the latest string of attacks targeting SolarWinds Serv-U managed file transfer service with a now-patched remote code execution (RCE) exploit is the handiwork of a Chinese threat actor dubbed "DEV-0322." The revelation comes days after the Texas-based IT monitoring software maker issued fixes for the flaw that could enable adversaries to remotely run arbitrary code with privileges, allowing them to perform actions like install and run malicious payloads or view and alter sensitive data. Tracked as  CVE-2021-35211 , the RCE flaw resides in Serv-U's implementation of the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol. While it was previously revealed that the attacks were limited in scope, SolarWinds said it's "unaware of the identity of the potentially affected customers." Attributing the intrusions with high confidence to DEV-0322 (short for "Development Group 0322") based on observed victimology, tactics, and procedures, Micr
A New Critical SolarWinds Zero-Day Vulnerability Under Active Attack

A New Critical SolarWinds Zero-Day Vulnerability Under Active Attack

Jul 13, 2021
SolarWinds, the Texas-based company that became the epicenter of a  massive supply chain attack  late last year, has issued patches to contain a remote code execution flaw in its Serv-U managed file transfer service. The fixes, which target Serv-U Managed File Transfer and Serv-U Secure FTP products, arrive after Microsoft notified the IT management and remote monitoring software maker that the flaw was being exploited in the wild. The threat actor behind the exploitation remains unknown as yet, and it isn't clear exactly how the attack was carried out. "Microsoft has provided evidence of limited, targeted customer impact, though SolarWinds does not currently have an estimate of how many customers may be directly affected by the vulnerability," SolarWinds  said  in an advisory published Friday, adding it's "unaware of the identity of the potentially affected customers." Impacting Serv-U versions 15.2.3 HF1 and before, a successful exploitation of the sh
Kaseya Releases Patches for Flaws Exploited in Widespread Ransomware Attack

Kaseya Releases Patches for Flaws Exploited in Widespread Ransomware Attack

Jul 12, 2021
Florida-based software vendor Kaseya on Sunday rolled out urgent updates to address critical security vulnerabilities in its Virtual System Administrator (VSA) solution that was used as a jumping off point to target as many as 1,500 businesses across the globe as part of a widespread supply-chain ransomware attack . Following the incident, the company had urged on-premises VSA customers to shut down their servers until a patch was available. Now, almost 10 days later the firm has shipped VSA version 9.5.7a (9.5.7.2994) with fixes for three new security flaws —  CVE-2021-30116 - Credentials leak and business logic flaw CVE-2021-30119 - Cross-site scripting vulnerability CVE-2021-30120 - Two-factor authentication bypass The security issues are part of a total of seven vulnerabilities that were discovered and reported to Kaseya by the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure ( DIVD ) earlier in April, of which four other weaknesses were remediated in previous releases —
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