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Cybersecurity researchers said they discovered an accidentally leaked GitHub token that could have granted elevated access to the GitHub repositories of the Python language, Python Package Index (PyPI), and the Python Software Foundation (PSF). JFrog, which found the GitHub Personal Access Token, said the secret was leaked in a public Docker container hosted on Docker Hub. "This case was exceptional because it is difficult to overestimate the potential consequences if it had fallen into the wrong hands – one could supposedly inject malicious code into PyPI packages (imagine replacing all Python packages with malicious ones), and even to the Python language itself," the software supply chain security company said . An attacker could have hypothetically weaponized their admin access to orchestrate a large-scale supply chain attack by poisoning the source code associated with the core of the Python programming language, or the PyPI package manager. JFrog noted that the aut

Unknown threat actors have been found propagating trojanized versions of jQuery on npm, GitHub, and jsDelivr in what appears to be an instance of a "complex and persistent" supply chain attack. "This attack stands out due to the high variability across packages," Phylum said in an analysis published last week. "The attacker has cleverly hidden the malware in the seldom-used ' end ' function of jQuery, which is internally called by the more popular ' fadeTo ' function from its animation utilities." As many as 68 packages have been linked to the campaign. They were published to the npm registry starting from May 26 to June 23, 2024, using names such as cdnjquery, footersicons, jquertyi, jqueryxxx, logoo, and sytlesheets, among others.  There is evidence to suggest that each of the bogus packages were manually assembled and published due to the sheer number of packages published from various accounts, the differences in naming conventi

As a vCISO, you are responsible for your client's cybersecurity strategy and risk governance. This incorporates multiple disciplines, from research to execution to reporting. Recently, we published a comprehensive playbook for vCISOs, "Your First 100 Days as a vCISO – 5 Steps to Success" , which covers all the phases entailed in launching a successful vCISO engagement, along with recommended actions to take, and step-by-step examples.  Following the success of the playbook and the requests that have come in from the MSP/MSSP community, we decided to drill down into specific parts of vCISO reporting and provide more color and examples. In this article, we focus on how to create compelling narratives within a report, which has a significant impact on the overall MSP/MSSP value proposition.  This article brings the highlights of a recent guided workshop we held, covering what makes a successful report and how it can be used to enhance engagement with your cyber security clients.

A previously undocumented advanced persistent threat (APT) group dubbed CloudSorcerer has been observed targeting Russian government entities by leveraging cloud services for command-and-control (C2) and data exfiltration. Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, which discovered the activity in May 2024, said the tradecraft adopted by the threat actor bears similarities with that of CloudWizard , but pointed out the differences in the malware source code. The attacks wield an innovative data-gathering program and a slew of evasion tactics for covering its tracks. "It's a sophisticated cyber espionage tool used for stealth monitoring, data collection, and exfiltration via Microsoft Graph, Yandex Cloud, and Dropbox cloud infrastructure," the Russian security vendor said . "The malware leverages cloud resources as its command and control (C2) servers, accessing them through APIs using authentication tokens. Additionally, CloudSorcerer uses GitHub as its initial C2 server.&q

The Russian GRU-backed threat actor APT28 has been attributed as behind a series of campaigns targeting networks across Europe with the HeadLace malware and credential-harvesting web pages. APT28, also known by the names BlueDelta, Fancy Bear, Forest Blizzard, FROZENLAKE, Iron Twilight, ITG05, Pawn Storm, Sednit, Sofacy, and TA422, is an advanced persistent threat (APT) group affiliated with Russia's strategic military intelligence unit, the GRU. The hacking crew operates with a high level of stealth and sophistication, often demonstrating their adaptability through deep preparedness and custom tooling, and relying on legitimate internet services (LIS) and living off-the-land binaries (LOLBins) to conceal their operations within regular network traffic. "From April to December 2023, BlueDelta deployed Headlace malware in three distinct phases using geofencing techniques to target networks throughout Europe with a heavy focus on Ukraine," Recorded Future's Insikt

Cloudflare on Thursday said it took steps to disrupt a month-long phishing campaign orchestrated by a Russia-aligned threat actor called FlyingYeti targeting Ukraine. "The FlyingYeti campaign capitalized on anxiety over the potential loss of access to housing and utilities by enticing targets to open malicious files via debt-themed lures," Cloudflare's threat intelligence team Cloudforce One said in a new report published today. "If opened, the files would result in infection with the PowerShell malware known as COOKBOX, allowing FlyingYeti to support follow-on objectives, such as installation of additional payloads and control over the victim's system." FlyingYeti is the denomination used by the web infrastructure company to track an activity cluster that the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) is tracking under the moniker UAC-0149. Previous attacks disclosed by the cybersecurity agency have involved the use of malicious attachme

GitHub has rolled out fixes to address a maximum severity flaw in the GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) that could allow an attacker to bypass authentication protections. Tracked as  CVE-2024-4985  (CVSS score: 10.0), the issue could permit unauthorized access to an instance without requiring prior authentication. "On instances that use SAML single sign-on (SSO) authentication with the optional encrypted assertions feature, an attacker could forge a SAML response to provision and/or gain access to a user with administrator privileges," the company said in an advisory. GHES is a self-hosted platform for software development, allowing organizations to store and build software using Git version control as well as automate the deployment pipeline. The issue impacts all versions of GHES prior to 3.13.0 and has been  addressed  in versions 3.9.15, 3.10.12, 3.11.10 and 3.12.4. GitHub further noted that encrypted assertions are not enabled by default and that the flaw does not a

A "multi-faceted campaign" has been observed abusing legitimate services like GitHub and FileZilla to deliver an array of stealer malware and banking trojans such as Atomic (aka AMOS), Vidar, Lumma (aka LummaC2), and Octo by impersonating credible software like 1Password, Bartender 5, and Pixelmator Pro. "The presence of multiple malware variants suggests a broad cross-platform targeting strategy, while the overlapping C2 infrastructure points to a centralized command setup — possibly increasing the efficiency of the attacks," Recorded Future's Insikt Group  said  in a report. The cybersecurity firm, which is tracking the activity under the moniker GitCaught, said the campaign not only highlights the misuse of authentic internet services to orchestrate cyber attacks, but also the reliance on multiple malware variants targeting Android, macOS, and Windows to increase the success rate. Attack chains entail the use of fake profiles and repositories on GitHub,

An ongoing social engineering campaign is targeting software developers with bogus npm packages under the guise of a job interview to trick them into downloading a Python backdoor. Cybersecurity firm Securonix is tracking the activity under the name  DEV#POPPER , linking it to North Korean threat actors. "During these fraudulent interviews, the developers are often asked to perform tasks that involve downloading and running software from sources that appear legitimate, such as GitHub," security researchers Den Iuzvyk, Tim Peck, and Oleg Kolesnikov  said . "The software contained a malicious Node JS payload that, once executed, compromised the developer's system." Details of the campaign first emerged in late November 2023, when Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 detailed an activity cluster dubbed  Contagious Interview  in which the threat actors pose as employers to lure software developers into installing malware such as BeaverTail and InvisibleFerret through the

A new information stealer has been found leveraging Lua bytecode for added stealth and sophistication, findings from McAfee Labs reveal. The cybersecurity firm has assessed it to be a variant of a known malware called RedLine Stealer owing to the fact that the command-and-control (C2) server  IP address  has been previously identified as associated with the malware. RedLine Stealer,  first documented  in March 2020, is typically delivered via email and malvertising campaigns, either directly or via  exploit kits  and loader malware like  dotRunpeX  and  HijackLoader . The off-the-shelf malware is capable of harvesting information from cryptocurrency wallets, VPN software, and web browsers, such as saved credentials, autocomplete data, credit card information, and geolocations based on the victims' IP addresses. Over the years, RedLine Stealer has been co-opted by several threat actors into their attack chains, making it a prevalent strain spanning North America, South America,

Security researchers have uncovered a "credible" takeover attempt targeting the OpenJS Foundation in a manner that evokes similarities to the recently uncovered incident aimed at the open-source XZ Utils project. "The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping GitHub-associated emails," OpenJS Foundation and Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF)  said  in a joint alert. According to Robin Bender Ginn, executive director of OpenJS Foundation, and Omkhar Arasaratnam, general manager at OpenSSF, the email messages urged OpenJS to take action to update one of its popular JavaScript projects to remediate critical vulnerabilities without providing any specifics. The email author(s) also called on OpenJS to designate them as a new maintainer of the project despite having little prior involvement. Two other popular JavaScript projects not hosted by OpenJS are also sai

New cybersecurity research has found that command-line interface (CLI) tools from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud can expose sensitive credentials in build logs, posing significant risks to organizations. The vulnerability has been codenamed  LeakyCLI  by cloud security firm Orca. "Some commands on Azure CLI, AWS CLI, and Google Cloud CLI can expose sensitive information in the form of environment variables, which can be collected by adversaries when published by tools such as GitHub Actions," security researcher Roi Nisimi  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Microsoft has since  addressed  the issue as part of security updates released in November 2023, assigned it the CVE identifier CVE-2023-36052 (CVSS score: 8.6). The idea, in a nutshell, has to do with how the CLI commands such as could be used to show (pre-)defined environment variables and output to Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) logs. A list of such commands spann

"Test files" associated with the  XZ Utils backdoor  have made their way to a Rust crate known as  liblzma-sys , new  findings  from Phylum reveal. liblzma-sys, which has been downloaded over 21,000 times to date, provides Rust developers with bindings to the liblzma implementation, an underlying library that is part of the  XZ Utils  data compression software. The impacted version in question is 0.3.2. "The current distribution (v0.3.2) on Crates.io contains the test files for XZ that contain the backdoor," Phylum  noted  in a GitHub issue raised on April 9, 2024. "The test files themselves are not included in either the .tar.gz nor the .zip tags  here on GitHub  and are only present in liblzma-sys_0.3.2.crate that is installed from Crates.io." Following responsible disclosure, the files in question ("tests/files/bad-3-corrupt_lzma2.xz" and "tests/files/good-large_compressed.lzma") have since been removed from liblzma-sys version

GitGuardian is famous for its annual  State of Secrets Sprawl  report. In their 2023 report, they found over 10 million exposed passwords, API keys, and other credentials exposed in public GitHub commits. The takeaways in their 2024 report did not just highlight 12.8 million  new  exposed secrets in GitHub, but a number in the popular Python package repository  PyPI . PyPI, short for the Python Package Index, hosts over 20 terabytes of files that are freely available for use in Python projects. If you've ever typed pip install [name of package], it likely pulled that package from PyPI. A lot of people use it too. Whether it's GitHub, PyPI, or others, the report states, "open-source packages make up an estimated 90% of the code run in production today. "  It's easy to see why that is when these packages help developers avoid the reinvention of millions of wheels every day. In the 2024 report, GitGuardian reported finding over 11,000 exposed  unique  secrets, wit

Threat actors are now taking advantage of GitHub's search functionality to trick unsuspecting users looking for popular repositories into downloading spurious counterparts that serve malware. The latest assault on the open-source software supply chain involves concealing malicious code within Microsoft Visual Code project files that's designed to download next-stage payloads from a remote URL, Checkmarx  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Attackers create malicious repositories with popular names and topics, using techniques like automated updates and fake stars to boost search rankings and deceive users," security researcher Yehuda Gelb said. The idea is to manipulate the search rankings in GitHub and bring threat actor-controlled repositories to the top when users filter and sort their results based on the most recent updates by consistently committing small changes to a file named "log," and increase the popularity via bogus stars added v

Financial organizations in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are being targeted by a new version of an "evolving threat" called  JSOutProx . "JSOutProx is a sophisticated attack framework utilizing both JavaScript and .NET," Resecurity  said  in a technical report published this week. "It employs the .NET (de)serialization feature to interact with a core JavaScript module running on the victim's machine. Once executed, the malware enables the framework to load various plugins, which conduct additional malicious activities on the target." First  identified  in December 2019 by Yoroi, early attacks distributing JSOutProx have been attributed to a threat actor tracked as  Solar Spider . The cyber crime actors behind the malware have a track record of striking banks and other big companies in Asia and Europe. In late 2021, Quick Heal Security Labs  detailed  attacks leveraging the remote access trojan (RAT) to single out

The malicious code inserted into the open-source library XZ Utils, a widely used package present in major Linux distributions, is also capable of facilitating remote code execution, a new analysis has revealed. The audacious supply chain compromise, tracked as  CVE-2024-3094  (CVSS score: 10.0), came to light last week when Microsoft engineer and PostgreSQL developer Andres Freund alerted to the  presence  of a  backdoor  in the data compression utility that gives remote attackers a way to sidestep secure shell authentication and gain complete access to an affected system. "I was doing some micro-benchmarking at the time, needed to quiesce the system to reduce noise," Freund said in a post shared on Mastodon. "Saw sshd processes were using a surprising amount of CPU, despite immediately failing because of wrong usernames etc." "Profiled sshd, showing lots of cpu time in liblzma, with perf unable to attribute it to a symbol. Got suspicious. Recalled that I

Red Hat on Friday released an "urgent security alert" warning that two versions of a popular data compression library called  XZ Utils  (previously LZMA Utils) have been backdoored with malicious code designed to allow unauthorized remote access. The software supply chain compromise, tracked as  CVE-2024-3094 , has a CVSS score of 10.0, indicating maximum severity. It impacts XZ Utils versions 5.6.0 (released February 24) and 5.6.1 (released March 9). "Through a series of complex obfuscations, the liblzma build process extracts a prebuilt object file from a disguised test file existing in the source code, which is then used to modify specific functions in the liblzma code," the IBM subsidiary  said  in an advisory. "This results in a modified liblzma library that can be used by any software linked against this library, intercepting and modifying the data interaction with this library." Specifically, the nefarious code baked into the code is  designed