Domain Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

New research has pulled back the curtain on a "deficiency" in Google's "Sign in with Google" authentication flow that exploits a quirk in domain ownership to gain access to sensitive data. "Google's OAuth login doesn't protect against someone purchasing a failed startup's domain and using it to re-create email accounts for former employees," Truffle Security co-founder and CEO Dylan Ayrey said in a Monday report.  "And while you can't access old email data, you can use those accounts to log into all the different SaaS products that the organization used." The San Francisco-based company said the issue has the potential to put millions of American users' data at risk simply by purchasing a defunct domain associated with a failed startup and gaining unauthorized access to old employee accounts related to various applications like OpenAI ChatGPT, Slack, Notion, Zoom, and even HR systems. "The most sensitive accou...

No less than 4,000 unique web backdoors previously deployed by various threat actors have been hijacked by taking control of abandoned and expired infrastructure for as little as $20 per domain. Cybersecurity company watchTowr Labs said it pulled off the operation by registering over 40 domain names that the backdoors had been designed to use for command-and-control (C2). In partnership with the Shadowserver Foundation, the domains implicated in the research have been sinkholed. "We have been hijacking backdoors (that were reliant on now abandoned infrastructure and/or expired domains) that themselves existed inside backdoors, and have since been watching the results flood in," watchTowr Labs CEO Benjamin Harris and researcher Aliz Hammond said in a technical write-up last week. "This hijacking allowed us to track compromised hosts as they 'reported in,' and theoretically gave us the power to commandeer and control these compromised hosts." Among the ...

In cybersecurity, confidence is a double-edged sword. Organizations often operate under a false sense of security , believing that patched vulnerabilities, up-to-date tools, polished dashboards, and glowing risk scores guarantee safety. The reality is a bit of a different story. In the real world, checking the right boxes doesn't equal being secure. As Sun Tzu warned, "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." Two and a half millennia later, the concept still holds: your organization's cybersecurity defenses must be strategically validated under real-world conditions to ensure your business's very survival. Today, more than ever, you need Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) , the essential strategy that's still missing from most security frameworks. The Danger of False Confidence Conventional wisdom suggests that if you've patched known bugs, deployed a stack of well-regarded security tools, and passed the nec...

Over a million domains are susceptible to takeover by malicious actors by means of what has been called a Sitting Ducks attack. The powerful attack vector, which exploits weaknesses in the domain name system (DNS), is being exploited by over a dozen Russian-nexus cybercriminal actors to stealthily hijack domains, a joint analysis published by Infoblox and Eclypsium has revealed. "In a Sitting Ducks attack, the actor hijacks a currently registered domain at an authoritative DNS service or web hosting provider without accessing the true owner's account at either the DNS provider or registrar," the researchers said. "Sitting Ducks is easier to perform, more likely to succeed, and harder to detect than other well-publicized domain hijacking attack vectors, such as dangling CNAMEs ." Once a domain has been taken over by the threat actor, it could be used for all kinds of nefarious activities, including serving malware and conducting spams, while abusing the...

A new phishing technique called "file archiver in the browser" can be leveraged to "emulate" a file archiver software in a web browser when a victim visits a .ZIP domain. "With this phishing attack, you simulate a file archiver software (e.g., WinRAR) in the browser and use a .zip domain to make it appear more legitimate," security researcher mr.d0x  disclosed  last week. Threat actors, in a nutshell, could create a realistic-looking  phishing landing page  using HTML and CSS that mimics legitimate file archive software, and host it on a .zip domain, thus elevating  social engineering campaigns . In a potential attack scenario, a miscreant could resort to such trickery to redirect users to a credential harvesting page when a file "contained" within the fake ZIP archive is clicked. "Another interesting use case is listing a non-executable file and when the user clicks to initiate a download, it downloads an executable file," mr.d0x ...