Lateral Movement | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new malware called MDifyLoader that has been observed in conjunction with cyber attacks exploiting security flaws in Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) appliances. According to a report published by JPCERT/CC today, the threat actors behind the exploitation of CVE-2025-0282 and CVE-2025-22457 in intrusions observed between December 2024 and July 2025 have weaponized the vulnerabilities to drop MDifyLoader, which is then used to launch Cobalt Strike in memory. CVE-2025-0282 is a critical security flaw in ICS that could permit unauthenticated remote code execution. It was addressed by Ivanti in early January 2025. CVE-2025-22457, patched in February 2025, concerns a stack-based buffer overflow that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code. Previous findings from JPCERT/CC have revealed that CVE-2025-0282, which was weaponized in the wild as a zero-day beginning mid-December 2024, has been leveraged to deliver malware families like...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed what they say is a "critical design flaw" in delegated Managed Service Accounts (dMSAs) introduced in Windows Server 2025. "The flaw can result in high-impact attacks, enabling cross-domain lateral movement and persistent access to all managed service accounts and their resources across Active Directory indefinitely," Semperis said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Put differently, successful exploitation could allow adversaries to sidestep authentication guardrails and generate passwords for all Delegated Managed Service Accounts ( dMSAs ) and group Managed Service Accounts ( gMSAs ) and their associated service accounts. The persistence and privilege escalation method has been codenamed Golden dMSA , with the cybersecurity company deeming it as low complexity owing to the fact that the vulnerability simplifies brute-force password generation. However, in order for bad actors to exploit it, they must already be ...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered risky default identity and access management (IAM) roles impacting Amazon Web Services that could open the door for attackers to escalate privileges, manipulate other AWS services, and, in some cases, even fully compromise AWS accounts. "These roles, often created automatically or recommended during setup, grant overly broad permissions, such as full S3 access," Aqua researchers Yakir Kadkoda and Ofek Itach said in an analysis. "These default roles silently introduce attack paths that allow privilege escalation, cross-service access, and even potential account compromise." The cloud security firm said it identified security issues in default IAM roles created by AWS services like SageMaker, Glue, EMR, and Lightsail. A similar flaw has also been unearthed in a popular open-source framework called Ray, which automatically creates a default IAM role (ray-autoscaler-v1) with the AmazonS3FullAccess policy. What's concer...

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At least six organizations in South Korea have been targeted by the prolific North Korea-linked Lazarus Group as part of a campaign dubbed Operation SyncHole . The activity targeted South Korea's software, IT, financial, semiconductor manufacturing, and telecommunications industries, according to a report from Kaspersky published today. The earliest evidence of compromise was first detected in November 2024. The campaign involved a "sophisticated combination of a watering hole strategy and vulnerability exploitation within South Korean software," security researchers Sojun Ryu and Vasily Berdnikov said . "A one-day vulnerability in Innorix Agent was also used for lateral movement." The attacks have been observed paving the way for variants of known Lazarus tools such as ThreatNeedle , AGAMEMNON , wAgent , SIGNBT , and COPPERHEDGE . What makes these intrusions particularly effective is the likely exploitation of a security vulnerability in Cross EX, a legi...

A recently open-sourced network mapping tool called  SSH-Snake  has been repurposed by threat actors to conduct malicious activities. "SSH-Snake is a self-modifying worm that leverages SSH credentials discovered on a compromised system to start spreading itself throughout the network," Sysdig researcher Miguel Hernández  said . "The worm automatically searches through known credential locations and shell history files to determine its next move." SSH-Snake was first released on GitHub in early January 2024, and is described by its developer as a "powerful tool" to carry out  automatic network traversal  using SSH private keys discovered on systems. In doing so, it creates a comprehensive map of a network and its dependencies, helping determine the extent to which a network can be compromised using SSH and SSH private keys starting from a particular host. It also supports  resolution of domains  which have multiple IPv4 addresses. "It's comp...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a stealthy backdoor named  Effluence  that's deployed following the successful exploitation of a recently disclosed security flaw in Atlassian Confluence Data Center and Server. "The malware acts as a persistent backdoor and is not remediated by applying patches to Confluence," Aon's Stroz Friedberg Incident Response Services  said  in an analysis published earlier this week. "The backdoor provides capability for lateral movement to other network resources in addition to exfiltration of data from Confluence. Importantly, attackers can access the backdoor remotely without authenticating to Confluence." The attack chain documented by the cybersecurity entity entailed the exploitation of  CVE-2023-22515  (CVSS score: 10.0), a critical bug in Atlassian that could be abused to create unauthorized Confluence administrator accounts and access Confluence servers. Atlassian has since disclosed a second flaw known as...