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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

Google Cloud last week disclosed that it identified 34 different hacked release versions of the Cobalt Strike tool in the wild, the earliest of which  shipped  in November 2012. The versions, spanning 1.44 to 4.7, add up to a total of 275 unique JAR files, according to findings from the Google Cloud Threat Intelligence (GCTI) team. The  latest version  of Cobalt Strike is version 4.7.2. Cobalt Strike, developed by  Fortra  (née HelpSystems), is a popular adversarial framework used by red teams to simulate attack scenarios and test the resilience of their cyber defenses. It comprises a Team Server that acts as the command-and-control (C2) hub to remotely commandeer infected devices and a stager that's designed to deliver a next-stage payload called the Beacon, a fully-featured implant that reports back to the C2 server. Given its wide-ranging suite of features, unauthorized versions of the software have been  increasingly   weaponized  by  many  a  threat   actor  to  advance

When it comes to ensuring the security of your APIs, there are four critical capabilities.

Threat actors are exploiting improperly-secured Google Cloud Platform (GCP) instances to download cryptocurrency mining software to the compromised systems as well as abusing its infrastructure to install ransomware, stage phishing campaigns, and even generate traffic to YouTube videos for view count manipulation. "While cloud customers continue to face a variety of threats across applications and infrastructure, many successful attacks are due to poor hygiene and a lack of basic control implementation," Google's Cybersecurity Action Team (CAT)  outlined  as part of its recent Threat Horizons report published last week. Of the 50 recently compromised GCP instances, 86% of them were used to conduct cryptocurrency mining, in some cases within 22 seconds of successful breach, while 10% of the instances were exploited to perform scans of other publicly accessible hosts on the Internet to identify vulnerable systems, and 8% of the instances were used to strike other entiti

Google's one-year-old cybersecurity venture Chronicle today announced its first commercial product, called Backstory , a cloud-based enterprise-level threat analytics platform that has been designed to help companies quickly investigate incidents, pinpoint vulnerabilities and hunt for potential threats. Network infrastructures at most enterprises regularly generate enormous amounts of network data and logs on a daily basis that can be helpful to figure out exactly what happened when a security incident occurs. However, unfortunately, most companies either don't collect the right telemetry or even when they do, it's practically impossible for them to retain that telemetry for more than a week or two, making analysts blind if any security incident happens before that. Backstory solves this problem by allowing organizations to privately upload and store their petabytes of "internal security telemetry" on Google cloud platform and leverage machine learning and da

A serious security vulnerability has been discovered in the core runC container code that affects several open-source container management systems, potentially allowing attackers to escape Linux container and obtain unauthorized, root-level access to the host operating system. The vulnerability, identified as  CVE-2019-5736 , was discovered by open source security researchers Adam Iwaniuk and Borys Popławski and publicly disclosed by Aleksa Sarai, a senior software engineer and runC maintainer at SUSE Linux GmbH on Monday. The flaw resides in runC—a lightweight low-level command-line tool for spawning and running containers, an operating-system-level virtualization method for running multiple isolated systems on a host using a single kernel. Originally created by Docker, runC is the default container run-time for Docker, Kubernetes, ContainerD, CRI-O, and other container-dependent programs, and is widely being used by major cloud hosting and server providers. runC Containe

In an effort to secure users' data while maintaining privacy, Google has announced a new security measure for Android Backup Service that now encrypts all your backup data stored on its cloud servers in a way that even the company can't read it. Google allows Android users to automatically backup their essential app data and settings to their Google account, allowing them to simply restore it when required, instead of re-configuring all the apps after formatting or switching to a new phone. However, until now your backup data was not encrypted and visible to Google, and now the company is going to change its storage procedure. Starting with Android Pie, Google is going to encrypt your Android device backup data in the following way: Step 1: Your Android device will generate a random secret key (not known to Google), Step 2: The secret key will then get encrypted using your lockscreen PIN/pattern/passcode (not known to Google), Step 3: This passcode-protected

Have you ever seen any mobile application working in the background silently even after you have uninstalled it completely? I have seen Google Photos app doing the same. Your Android smartphone continues to upload your phone photos to Google servers without your knowledge , even if you have already uninstalled the Google Photos app from your device. Nashville Business Journal editor David Arnott found that Google Photos app uploaded all his personal photographs from the device into the service even after uninstalling it. Arnott provided a video demonstration showing that after uninstalling the Google Photos app from his Samsung smartphone, the photograph he took off his coffee mug still wound up being synced into his account on the web. "Months ago, I downloaded the [Photos] app to play with it, but I did not like it and so un-installed the app after just a few days," Arnott tweeted Wednesday. "This evening, I went back to Google Photos on my l

After the death of Google code this winter, Google is apparently back in the business through the launch of its private Git repository hosting service on Google Cloud Platform called Cloud Source Repositories . Not yet officially announced, but Google started providing free beta access to its new Cloud Source Repositories earlier this year, VentureBeat reported. Similar to the popular source code repository hosting service GitHub, Cloud Source Repositories provides developers with the ability to host and edit code on the ever-expanding Google Cloud Platform . Though it will not be easy to take hold of all GitHub's customers overnight, Google is taking a successive approach with its new service -- Cloud Source Repositories can serve as a 'remote' Git repositories for users sitting elsewhere on the Internet or locally. Moreover, it is also possible for users to connect a Cloud Source Repository to a hosted repository service like GitHub or Bitbucket that will automatical