Microosft | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Ransomware attacks are a major problem for organizations everywhere, and the severity of this problem continues to intensify. Recently, Microsoft's Incident Response team investigated the BlackByte 2.0 ransomware attacks and exposed these cyber strikes' terrifying velocity and damaging nature. The findings indicate that hackers can complete the entire attack process, from gaining initial access to causing significant damage, in just five days. They waste no time infiltrating systems, encrypting important data, and demanding a ransom to release it. This shortened timeline poses a significant challenge for organizations trying to protect themselves against these harmful operations. BlackByte ransomware is used in the final stage of the attack, using an 8-digit number key to encrypt the data. To carry out these attacks, hackers use a powerful combination of tools and techniques. The investigation revealed that they take advantage of unpatched Microsoft Exchange Servers—an

Authentication services provider Okta on Wednesday named Sitel as the third-party linked to a  security incident  experienced by the company in late January that allowed the LAPSUS$ extortion gang to remotely take over an internal account belonging to a customer support engineer. The company added that 366 corporate customers, or about 2.5% of its customer base, may have been impacted by the "highly constrained" compromise. "On January 20, 2022, the Okta Security team was alerted that a new factor was added to a Sitel customer support engineer' Okta account [from a new location]," Okta's Chief Security Officer, David Bradbury,  said  in a statement. "This factor was a password." The disclosure comes after LAPSUS$ posted screenshots of Okta's apps and systems earlier this week, about two months after the hackers gain access to the company's internal network over a five-day period between January 16 and 21, 2022 using remote desktop proto

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

A new large scale supply chain attack has been observed targeting Azure developers with no less than 218 malicious NPM packages with the goal of stealing personal identifiable information. "After manually inspecting some of these packages, it became apparent that this was a targeted attack against the entire  @azure NPM scope , by an attacker that employed an automatic script to create accounts and upload malicious packages that cover the entirety of that scope," JFrog researchers Andrey Polkovnychenko and Shachar Menashe  said  in a new report. The entire set of malicious packages was disclosed to the NPM maintainers roughly two days after they were published earlier this week, leading to their quick removal, but not before each of the packages were downloaded around 50 times on average. The attack refers to what's called typosquatting, which takes place when bad actors push rogue packages with names mimicking legitimate libraries to a public software registry such

Microsoft this week revealed that it had fended off a record number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks aimed at its customers in 2021, three of which surpassed 2.4 terabit per second (Tbps). One of the DDoS attacks took place in November, targeting an unnamed Azure customer in Asia and lasted a total of 15 minutes. It hit a peak throughput of 3.47 Tbps and a packet rate of 340 million packets per second (pps), making it the largest attack ever reported in history. "This was a distributed attack originating from approximately 10,000 sources and from multiple countries across the globe, including the United States, China, South Korea, Russia, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Iran, Indonesia, and Taiwan," Alethea Toh, product manager of Azure Networking,  said . DDoS attacks occur when several compromised devices are employed as a conduit to overwhelm a targeted server, service, or network with a flood of internet traffic with the goal of overloading the systems and d

Microsoft on Wednesday shared more specifics about the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) adopted by the attackers behind the SolarWinds hack to stay under the radar and avoid detection, as cybersecurity companies work towards getting a "clearer picture" of one of the most sophisticated attacks in recent history. Calling the threat actor "skillful and methodic operators who follow operations security (OpSec) best practices," the company said the attackers went out of their way to ensure that the initial backdoor ( Sunburst  aka Solorigate) and the post-compromise implants ( Teardrop  and  Raindrop ) are separated as much as possible so as to hinder efforts to spot their malicious activity. "The attackers behind Solorigate are skilled campaign operators who carefully planned and executed the attack, remaining elusive while maintaining persistence," researchers from Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team, Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC)