Incident response | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Unidentified adversaries orchestrated a sophisticated attack campaign that has impacted several individual developers as well as the GitHub organization account associated with Top.gg, a Discord bot discovery site. "The threat actors used multiple TTPs in this attack, including account takeover via stolen browser cookies, contributing malicious code with verified commits, setting up a custom Python mirror, and publishing malicious packages to the PyPI registry," Checkmarx  said  in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. The software supply chain attack is said to have led to the theft of sensitive information, including passwords, credentials, and other valuable data. Some aspects of the campaign were  previously   disclosed  at the start of the month by an Egypt-based developer named Mohammed Dief. It chiefly entailed setting up a clever typosquat of the official PyPI domain known as "files. python hosted[.]org," giving it the name "files. pypi ho

The Iran-affiliated threat actor tracked as  MuddyWater  (aka Mango Sandstorm or TA450) has been linked to a new phishing campaign in March 2024 that aims to deliver a legitimate Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) solution called Atera. The activity, which took place from March 7 through the week of March 11, targeted Israeli entities spanning global manufacturing, technology, and information security sectors, Proofpoint said. "TA450 sent emails with PDF attachments that contained malicious links," the enterprise security firm  said . "While this method is not foreign to TA450, the threat actor has more recently relied on including malicious links directly in email message bodies instead of adding in this extra step." MuddyWater has been attributed to attacks directed against Israeli organizations since late October 2023, with prior findings from Deep Instinct  uncovering  the threat actor's use of another remote administration tool from N-able. This i

Follow this real-life network attack simulation, covering 6 steps from Initial Access to Data Exfiltration. See how attackers remain undetected with the simplest tools and why you need multiple choke points in your defense strategy. Surprisingly, most network attacks are not exceptionally sophisticated, technologically advanced, or reliant on zero-day tools that exploit edge-case vulnerabilities. Instead, they often use commonly available tools and exploit multiple vulnerability points. By simulating a real-world network attack, security teams can test their detection systems, ensure they have multiple choke points in place, and demonstrate the value of networking security to leadership. In this article, we demonstrate a real-life attack that could easily occur in many systems. The attack simulation was developed based on the MITRE ATT&CK framework, Atomic Red Team,  Cato Networks ' experience in the field, and public threat intel. In the end, we explain why a holistic secur

The Russia-linked threat actor known as Turla infected several systems belonging to an unnamed European non-governmental organization (NGO) in order to deploy a backdoor called TinyTurla-NG (TTNG) . "The attackers compromised the first system, established persistence and added exclusions to antivirus products running on these endpoints as part of their preliminary post-compromise actions," Cisco Talos  said  in a new report published today. "Turla then opened additional channels of communication via Chisel for data exfiltration and to pivot to additional accessible systems in the network." There is evidence indicating that the infected systems were breached as early as October 2023, with Chisel deployed in December 2023 and data exfiltration taking place via the tool a month later, around January 12, 2024. TinyTurla-NG was  first documented  by the cybersecurity company last month after it was found to be used in connection with a cyber attack targeting a Poli

Large language models (LLMs) powering artificial intelligence (AI) tools today could be exploited to develop self-augmenting malware capable of bypassing YARA rules. "Generative AI can be used to evade string-based YARA rules by augmenting the source code of small malware variants, effectively lowering detection rates," Recorded Future  said  in a new report shared with The Hacker News. The findings are part of a red teaming exercise designed to uncover malicious use cases for AI technologies, which are  already being experimented  with by threat actors to create malware code snippets, generate phishing emails, and conduct reconnaissance on potential targets. The cybersecurity firm said it submitted to an LLM a known piece of malware called  STEELHOOK  that's associated with the APT28 hacking group, alongside its YARA rules, asking it to modify the source code to sidestep detection such that the original functionality remained intact and the generated source code wa

A 34-year-old Russian-Canadian national has been sentenced to nearly four years in jail in Canada for his participation in the LockBit global ransomware operation. Mikhail Vasiliev , an Ontario resident, was  originally arrested  in November 2022 and charged by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) with "conspiring with others to intentionally damage protected computers and to transmit ransom demands in connection with doing so." News of Vasiliev's jail term was  first reported  by CTV News.  The defendant, who had his home searched by Canadian law enforcement authorities in August and October 2022, is said to have kept a list of "prospective or historical" victims and screenshots of communications exchanged with "LockBitSupp" on the Tox messaging platform. The raid also uncovered a text file with instructions to deploy LockBit ransomware, the ransomware source code, and a control panel used by the e-crime group to deliver the file-locking malware.

More than a decade ago, the concept of the  'blameless'  postmortem changed how tech companies recognize failures at scale. John Allspaw, who coined the term during his tenure at Etsy, argued postmortems were all about controlling our natural reaction to an incident, which is to point fingers: "One option is to assume the single cause is incompetence and scream at engineers to make them 'pay attention!' or 'be more careful!' Another option is to take a hard look at how the accident actually happened, treat the engineers involved with respect, and learn from the event." What can we, in turn, learn from some of the most honest and blameless—and public—postmortems of the last few years? GitLab: 300GB of user data gone in seconds What happened : Back in 2017, GitLab experienced a painful 18-hour outage. That story, and GitLab's subsequent honesty and transparency, has significantly impacted how organizations handle data security today. The incident began when GitLab's secondary datab

As an IT leader, staying on top of the latest cybersecurity developments is essential to keeping your organization safe. But with threats coming from all around — and hackers dreaming up new exploits every day — how do you create proactive, agile cybersecurity strategies? And what cybersecurity approach gives you the most bang for your buck, mitigating your risks and maximizing the value of your cybersecurity investments? Let's take a closer look at the trends that are impacting organizations today, including the growing reach of data breaches and the increase in cybersecurity spending, and explore how you can get the most out of your cybersecurity resources, effectively securing your digital assets and maintaining your organization's integrity in the face of ever-evolving cyber threats. Successful data breaches In 2022, the number of people affected by data breaches increased significantly. According to the  Identity Theft Resource Center's 2022 Data Breach Report , more than 1,80

Created by John Tuckner and the team at workflow and automation platform  Tines , the  SOC Automation Capability Matrix (SOC ACM)  is a set of techniques designed to help security operations teams understand their automation capabilities and respond more effectively to incidents.  A customizable, vendor-agnostic tool featuring lists of automation opportunities, it's been shared and recommended by members of the security community since its launch in January 2023, notably by Airbnb engineer Allyn Stott in his BSides and Black Hat talk,  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Build a Modern Detection & Response Program .   The SOC ACM has been compared to the MITRE ATT&CK and RE&CT frameworks, with one user saying, "it could be a standard for classification of SOAR automations, a bit like the RE&CT framework, but with more automation focus." It's been used by organizations in Fintech, Cloud Security, and beyond, as a basis for assessing and optimizing their securi

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two malicious packages on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that were found leveraging a technique called  DLL side-loading  to circumvent detection by security software and run malicious code. The packages, named  NP6HelperHttptest  and  NP6HelperHttper , were each downloaded  537  and  166 times , respectively, before they were taken down. "The latest discovery is an example of DLL sideloading executed by an open-source package that suggests the scope of software supply chain threats is expanding," ReversingLabs researcher Petar Kirhmajer  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The name NP6 is notable as it refers to a legitimate marketing automation solution made by ChapsVision. In particular, the fake packages are typosquats of NP6HelperHttp and NP6HelperConfig, which are helper tools published by one of ChapsVision's employees to PyPI. In other words, the goal is to trick developers searching for NP6Hel

In the tumultuous landscape of cybersecurity, the year 2023 left an indelible mark with the brazen exploits of the Scattered Spider threat group. Their attacks targeted the nerve centers of major financial and insurance institutions, culminating in what stands as one of the most impactful ransomware assaults in recent memory.  When organizations have no response plan in place for such an attack, it can become overwhelming attempting to prioritize the next steps that will have a compounding impact on the threat actor's ability to retain access to and control over a compromised network. Silverfort's threat research team interacted closely with the identity threats used by Scattered Spider. and in fact, built a response playbook in real time to respond to an active Scattered Spider attack. This webinar will dissect the real-life scenario in which they were called upon to build and execute a response plan while attackers were moving inside an organization's hybrid environme

Threat actors are leveraging a recently disclosed security flaw impacting Ivanti Connect Secure, Policy Secure, and ZTA gateways to deploy a backdoor codenamed  DSLog  on susceptible devices. That's according to  findings  from Orange Cyberdefense, which said it observed the exploitation of CVE-2024-21893 within hours of the public release of the proof-the-concept (PoC) code. CVE-2024-21893, which was  disclosed  by Ivanti late last month alongside CVE-2024-21888, refers to a server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in the SAML module that, if successfully exploited, could permit access to otherwise restricted resources sans any authentication. The Utah-based company has since acknowledged that the flaw has limited targeted attacks, although the exact scale of the compromises is unclear. Then, last week, the Shadowserver Foundation  revealed  a surge in exploitation attempts targeting the vulnerability originating from over 170 unique IP addresses, shortly after both

Incident response (IR) is a race against time. You engage your internal or external team because there's enough evidence that something bad is happening, but you're still blind to the scope, the impact, and the root cause. The common set of IR tools and practices provides IR teams with the ability to discover malicious files and outbound network connections. However, the identity aspect - namely the pinpointing of compromised user accounts that were used to spread in your network - unfortunately remains unattended. This task proves to be the most time-consuming for IR teams and has become a challenging uphill battle that enables attackers to earn precious time in which they can still inflict damage.  In this article, we analyze the root cause of the identity of IR blind spots and provide sample IR scenarios in which it acts as an inhibitor to a rapid and efficient process. We then introduce Silverfort's Unified Identity Protection Platform and show how its real-time MFA and ident