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Threat actors are targeting the education, government and business services sectors with a remote access trojan called  NetSupport RAT . "The delivery mechanisms for the NetSupport RAT encompass fraudulent updates, drive-by downloads, utilization of malware loaders (such as  GHOSTPULSE ), and various forms of phishing campaigns," VMware Carbon Black researchers said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The cybersecurity firm said it detected no less than 15 new infections related to NetSupport RAT in the last few weeks.  While NetSupport Manager started off as a  legitimate remote administration tool  for technical assistance and support, malicious actors have misappropriated the tool to their own advantage, using it as a beachhead for subsequent attacks. NetSupport RAT is typically downloaded onto a victim's computer via deceptive websites and fake browser updates. In August 2022, Sucuri  detailed  a campaign in which compromised WordPress sites were being us

Bitcoin wallets created between 2011 and 2015 are susceptible to a new kind of exploit called  Randstorm  that makes it possible to recover passwords and gain unauthorized access to a multitude of wallets spanning several blockchain platforms. "Randstorm() is a term we coined to describe a collection of bugs, design decisions, and API changes that, when brought in contact with each other, combine to dramatically reduce the quality of random numbers produced by web browsers of a certain era (2011-2015)," Unciphered  disclosed  in a report published last week. It's estimated that approximately 1.4 million bitcoins are parked in wallets that were generated with potentially weak cryptographic keys. Customers can check whether their wallets are vulnerable at www.keybleed[.]com. The cryptocurrency recovery company said it re-discovered the problem in January 2022 while it was  working for an unnamed customer  who had been locked out of its Blockchain.com wallet. The issue

Ambitious Employees Tout New AI Tools, Ignore Serious SaaS Security Risks Like the  SaaS shadow IT  of the past, AI is placing CISOs and cybersecurity teams in a tough but familiar spot.  Employees are covertly using AI  with little regard for established IT and cybersecurity review procedures. Considering  ChatGPT's meteoric rise to 100 million users within 60 days of launch , especially with little sales and marketing fanfare, employee-driven demand for AI tools will only escalate.  As new studies show  some workers boost productivity by 40% using generative AI , the pressure for CISOs and their teams to fast-track AI adoption — and turn a blind eye to unsanctioned AI tool usage — is intensifying.  But succumbing to these pressures can introduce serious SaaS data leakage and breach risks, particularly as employees flock to AI tools developed by small businesses, solopreneurs, and indie developers. AI Security Guide Download AppOmni's CISO Guide to AI Security - Part 1 AI evoke

A new set of 48 malicious npm packages have been discovered in the npm repository with capabilities to deploy a reverse shell on compromised systems. "These packages, deceptively named to appear legitimate, contained obfuscated JavaScript designed to initiate a reverse shell on package install," software supply chain security firm Phylum  said . All the counterfeit packages have been published by an npm user named  hktalent  ( GitHub ,  X ). As of writing, 39 of the packages uploaded by the author are still available for download. The attack chain is triggered post the installation of the package via an install hook in the package.json that calls a JavaScript code to establish a  reverse shell  to rsh.51pwn[.]com. "In this particular case, the attacker published dozens of benign-sounding packages with several layers of obfuscation and deceptive tactics in an attempt to ultimately deploy a reverse shell on any machine that simply installs one of these packages,"

Nearly three dozen counterfeit packages have been discovered in the npm package repository that are designed to exfiltrate sensitive data from developer systems, according to findings from Fortinet FortiGuard Labs. One set of packages – named @expue/webpack, @expue/core, @expue/vue3-renderer, @fixedwidthtable/fixedwidthtable, and @virtualsearchtable/virtualsearchtable – harbored an obfuscated JavaScript file that's capable of gathering valuable secrets. This includes Kubernetes configurations, SSH keys, and system metadata such as username, IP address, and hostname. The cybersecurity firm said it also discovered another collection of four modules, i.e., binarium-crm, career-service-client-0.1.6, hh-dep-monitoring, and orbitplate, which results in the unauthorized extraction of source code and configuration files. "The targeted files and directories may contain highly valuable intellectual property and sensitive information, such as various application and service credent

The npm registry for the Node.js JavaScript runtime environment is susceptible to what's called a  manifest confusion  attack that could potentially allow threat actors to conceal malware in project dependencies or perform arbitrary script execution during installation. "A npm package's manifest is published independently from its tarball," Darcy Clarke, a former GitHub and npm engineering manager,  said  in a technical write-up published last week. "Manifests are never fully validated against the tarball's contents." "The ecosystem has broadly assumed the contents of the manifest and tarball are consistent," Clarke added. The problem, at its core, stems from the fact that the manifest and package metadata are decoupled and that they are never cross-referenced against one another, thereby leading to unexpected behavior and misuse when there is a mismatch. As a result, a threat actor could exploit this loophole to publish a module with a ma

A new strain of JavaScript dropper has been observed delivering next-stage payloads like Bumblebee and IcedID. Cybersecurity firm Deep Instinct is tracking the malware as  PindOS , which contains the name in its " User-Agent " string. Both  Bumblebee  and IcedID serve as loaders, acting as a vector for other malware on compromised hosts, including ransomware. A recent report from Proofpoint  highlighted  IcedID's abandoning of banking fraud features to solely focus on malware delivery. Bumblebee , notably, is a replacement for another loader called  BazarLoader , which has been attributed to the now-defunct TrickBot and Conti groups. A report from Secureworks in April 2022  found  evidence of collaboration between several actors in the Russian cybercrime ecosystem, including that of  Conti ,  Emotet , and IcedID. Deep Instinct's source code analysis of PindOS shows that it contains comments in Russian, raising the possibility of a continued partnership between

A security vulnerability has been disclosed in the popular WordPress plugin  Essential Addons for Elementor  that could be potentially exploited to achieve elevated privileges on affected sites. The issue, tracked as CVE-2023-32243, has been addressed by the plugin maintainers in version 5.7.2 that was shipped on May 11, 2023. Essential Addons for Elementor has over one million active installations. "This plugin suffers from an unauthenticated privilege escalation vulnerability and allows any unauthenticated user to escalate their privilege to that of any user on the WordPress site," Patchstack researcher Rafie Muhammad  said . Successful exploitation of the flaw could permit a threat actor to reset the password of any arbitrary user as long as the malicious party is aware of their username. The shortcoming is believed to have existed since version 5.4.0. This can have serious ramifications as the flaw could be weaponized to reset the password associated with an administ

Third-party apps such as Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, HotJar, and JQuery have become critical tools for businesses to optimize their website performance and services for a global audience. However, as their importance has grown, so has the threat of cyber incidents involving unmanaged third-party apps and open-source tools. Online businesses increasingly struggle to maintain complete visibility and control over the ever-changing third-party threat landscape, with sophisticated threats like evasive skimmers, Magecart attacks, and unlawful tracking practices potentially causing severe damage. This article explores the challenges of protecting modern websites from third-party scripts and the security risks associated with a lack of visibility over these scripts. Invisible to Standard Security Controls  Third-party scripts are often invisible to standard security controls like Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) because they are loaded from external sources that are not under the control

A fresh round of patches has been made available for the vm2 JavaScript library to address two critical flaws that could be exploited to break out of sandbox protections and achieve code execution. Both the flaws –  CVE-2023-29199  and  CVE-2023-30547  – are rated 9.8 out of 10 on the CVSS scoring system and have been addressed in versions 3.9.16 and 3.9.17, respectively. Successful  exploitation  of the  bugs , which allow an attacker to raise an unsanitized host exception, could be weaponized to escape the sandbox and run arbitrary code in the host context. "A threat actor can bypass the sandbox protections to gain remote code execution rights on the host running the sandbox," the maintainers of the vm2 library said in an alert. Credited with discovering and reporting the vulnerabilities is security researcher  SeungHyun Lee , who has also  released   proof-of-concept  (PoC) exploits for the two issues in question. The disclosure comes a little over a week after vm2

A pair of severe security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in the Jenkins open source automation server that could lead to code execution on targeted systems. The flaws, tracked as  CVE-2023-27898  and  CVE-2023-27905 , impact the Jenkins server and Update Center, and have been collectively christened  CorePlague  by cloud security firm Aqua. All versions of Jenkins versions prior to 2.319.2 are vulnerable and exploitable. "Exploiting these vulnerabilities could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code on the victim's Jenkins server, potentially leading to a complete compromise of the Jenkins server," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The shortcomings are the result of how Jenkins processes plugins available from the  Update Center , thereby potentially enabling a threat actor to upload a plugin with a malicious payload and trigger a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack. "Once the victim opens the ' Available Plug

A new attack campaign has been targeting the gaming and gambling sectors since at least September 2022, just as the ICE London 2023 gaming industry trade fair event is scheduled to kick off next week. Israeli cybersecurity company Security Joes is tracking the activity cluster under the name  Ice Breaker , stating the intrusions employ clever social engineering tactics to deploy a JavaScript backdoor. The attack sequence proceeds as follows: The threat actor poses as a customer while initiating a conversation with a support agent of a gaming company under the pretext of having account registration issues. The adversary then urges the individual on the other end to open a screenshot image hosted on Dropbox. Security Joes said that the threat actor is "well-aware of the fact that the customer service is human-operated." Clicking the purported screenshot link sent in the chat leads to the retrieval of an LNK payload or, alternatively, a VBScript file as a backup option,

A recent wave of Gootkit malware loader attacks has targeted the Australian healthcare sector by leveraging legitimate tools like VLC Media Player. Gootkit , also called Gootloader, is  known  to  employ  search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning tactics (aka spamdexing) for initial access. It typically works by compromising and abusing legitimate infrastructure and seeding those sites with common keywords. Like other malware of its kind, Gootkit is capable of stealing data from the browser, performing adversary-in-the-browser (AitB) attacks, keylogging, taking screenshots, and other malicious actions. Trend Micro's  new findings  reveal that the keywords "hospital," "health," "medical," and "enterprise agreement" have been paired with various city names in Australia, marking the malware's expansion beyond accounting and law firms. The starting point of the cyber assault is to direct users searching for the same keywords to an infe

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed two security flaws in the JavaScript-based blogging platform known as  Ghost , one of which could be abused to elevate privileges via specially crafted HTTP requests. Ghost is an open source blogging platform that's used in more than 52,600 live websites, most of them located in the U.S., the U.K., German, China, France, Canada, and India. Tracked as CVE-2022-41654 (CVSS score: 9.6), the authentication bypass vulnerability allows unprivileged users (i.e., members) to make unauthorized modifications to newsletter settings. Cisco Talos, which  discovered  the shortcoming, said it could enable a member to change the system-wide default newsletter that all users are subscribed to by default. Even worse, the ability of a site administrator to inject JavaScript into the newsletter by default could be exploited to trigger the creation of arbitrary administrator accounts when attempting to edit the newsletter. "This gives unprivileged us

A critical security vulnerability has been disclosed in the Quarkus Java framework that could be potentially exploited to achieve remote code execution on affected systems. Tracked as  CVE-2022-4116  (CVSS score: 9.8), the shortcoming could be trivially abused by a malicious actor without any privileges. "The vulnerability is found in the Dev UI Config Editor, which is vulnerable to drive-by localhost attacks that could lead to remote-code execution (RCE)," Contrast Security researcher Joseph Beeton, who reported the bug,  said  in a write-up. Quarkus, developed by Red Hat, is an  open source project  that's used for creating Java applications in  containerized  and serverless environments. It's worth pointing out that the  issue  only impacts developers who are running Quarkus and are tricked into visiting a specially crafted website, which is embedded with malicious JavaScript code designed to install or execute arbitrary payloads. This could take the form o

Spotify's Backstage has been discovered as vulnerable to a severe security flaw that could be exploited to gain remote code execution by leveraging a recently disclosed bug in a third-party module. The vulnerability (CVSS score: 9.8), at its core, takes advantage of a critical sandbox escape in vm2, a popular JavaScript sandbox library ( CVE-2022-36067  aka Sandbreak), that came to light last month. "An unauthenticated threat actor can execute arbitrary system commands on a Backstage application by exploiting a vm2 sandbox escape in the Scaffolder core plugin," application security firm Oxeye said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Backstage  is an open source  developer portal  from Spotify that allows users to create, manage, and explore software components from a unified " front door ." It's used by  many companies  like Netflix, DoorDash, Roku, and Expedia, among others. According to Oxeye, the flaw is rooted in a tool called  software templ

A now-patched security flaw in the vm2 JavaScript sandbox module could be abused by a remote adversary to break out of security barriers and perform arbitrary operations on the underlying machine. "A threat actor can bypass the sandbox protections to gain remote code execution rights on the host running the sandbox," GitHub  said  in an advisory published on September 28, 2022. The issue, tracked as CVE-2022-36067 and codenamed Sandbreak, carries a maximum severity rating of 10 on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system. It has been addressed in  version 3.9.11  released on August 28, 2022. vm2 is a  popular Node library  that's used to run untrusted code with allowlisted built-in modules. It's also one of the most widely downloaded software, accounting for nearly 3.5 million downloads per week. The  shortcoming  is rooted in the error mechanism in Node.js to escape the sandbox, according to application security firm Oxeye, which  discovered the flaw . This mean

A threat actor likely with associations to China has been attributed to a new supply chain attack that involves the use of a trojanized installer for the Comm100 Live Chat application to distribute a JavaScript backdoor. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said the attack made use of a signed Comm100 desktop agent app for Windows that was downloadable from the company's website. The scale of the attack is currently unknown, but the trojanized file is said to have been identified at organizations in the industrial, healthcare, technology, manufacturing, insurance, and telecom sectors in North America and Europe. Comm100 is a Canadian provider of live audio/video chat and customer engagement software for enterprises. It  claims  to have more than 15,000 customers across 51 countries. "The installer was signed on September 26, 2022 at 14:54:00 UTC using a valid Comm100 Network Corporation certificate," the company  noted , adding it remained available until September 29. E

WordPress sites are being hacked to display fraudulent Cloudflare DDoS protection pages that lead to the delivery of malware such as NetSupport RAT and Raccoon Stealer. "A recent surge in JavaScript injections targeting WordPress sites has resulted in fake DDoS prevent prompts which lead victims to download remote access trojan malware," Sucuri's Ben Martin  said  in a write-up published last week. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection pages are essential browser verification checks designed to deter bot-driven unwanted and malicious traffic from eating up bandwidth and taking down websites. The new attack vector involves hijacking WordPress sites to display fake DDoS protection pop-ups that, when clicked, ultimately lead to the download of a malicious ISO file ("security_install.iso") to the victim's systems. This is achieved by injecting three lines of code into a JavaScript file ("jquery.min.js"), or alternatively into the active

Two client-side risks dominate the problems with data loss and data exfiltration: improperly placed trackers on websites and web applications and malicious client-side code pulled from third-party repositories like NPM.  Client-side security researchers are finding that improperly placed trackers, while not intentionally malicious, are a growing problem and have clear and significant privacy implications when it comes to both compliance/regulatory concerns, like HIPAA or PCI DSS 4.0. To highlight the risks with misplaced trackers, a  recent study  by The Markup (a non-profit news organization) examined Newsweek's top 100 hospitals in America. They found a Facebook tracker on one-third of the hospital websites which sent Facebook highly personal healthcare data whenever the user clicked the "schedule appointment" button. The data was not necessarily anonymized, because the data was connected to an IP address, and both the IP address and the appointment information get delivered to Fac