Microsoft | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The Russian threat actor known as Star Blizzard has been linked to a new spear-phishing campaign that targets victims' WhatsApp accounts, signaling a departure from its longstanding tradecraft in a likely attempt to evade detection. "Star Blizzard's targets are most commonly related to government or diplomacy (both incumbent and former position holders), defense policy or international relations researchers whose work touches on Russia, and sources of assistance to Ukraine related to the war with Russia," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a report  shared with The Hacker News. Star Blizzard (formerly SEABORGIUM) is a Russia-linked threat activity cluster known for its credential harvesting campaigns. Active since at least 2012, it's also tracked under the monikers Blue Callisto, BlueCharlie (or TAG-53), Calisto (alternately spelled Callisto), COLDRIVER, Dancing Salome, Gossamer Bear, Iron Frontier, TA446, and UNC4057. Previously observed attack ...

Details have emerged about a now-patched security vulnerability that could allow a bypass of the Secure Boot mechanism in Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) systems. The vulnerability, assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2024-7344 (CVSS score: 6.7), resides in a UEFI application signed by Microsoft's "Microsoft Corporation UEFI CA 2011" third-party UEFI certificate, according to a new report from ESET shared with The Hacker News. Successful exploitation of the flaw can lead to the execution of untrusted code during system boot, thereby enabling attackers to deploy malicious UEFI bootkits on machines that have Secure Boot on, irrespective of the operating system installed. Secure Boot is a firmware security standard that prevents malware from loading when a computer starts up by ensuring that the device boots using only software that is trusted by the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). The feature leverages digital signatures to validate the authenticity,...

What do identity risks, data security risks and third-party risks all have in common? They are all made much worse by SaaS sprawl. Every new SaaS account adds a new identity to secure, a new place where sensitive data can end up, and a new source of third party risk. Learn how you can protect this sprawling attack surface in 2025. What do identity risks, data security risks and third-party risks all have in common? They are all made much worse by SaaS sprawl. Every new SaaS account adds a new identity to secure, a new place where sensitive data can end up, and a new source of third-party risk. And, this growing attack surface, much of which is unknown or unmanaged in most orgs, has become an attractive target for attackers. So, why should you prioritize securing your SaaS attack surface in 2025? Here are 4 reasons. ‍ 1. Modern work runs on SaaS. When's the last time you used something other than a cloud-based app to do your work? Can't remember? You're not alone.  Outside of ...

Cybersecurity researchers have found that the Microsoft Active Directory Group Policy that's designed to disable NT LAN Manager (NTLM) v1 can be trivially bypassed by a misconfiguration. "A simple misconfiguration in on-premise applications can override the Group Policy, effectively negating the Group Policy designed to stop NTLMv1 authentications," Silverfort researcher Dor Segal said in a report shared with The Hacker News. NTLM is a still widely used mechanism particularly in Windows environments to authenticate users across a network. The legacy protocol, while not removed due to backward compatibility requirements, has been deprecated as of mid 2024. Late last year, Microsoft officially removed NTLMv1 starting in Windows 11, version 24H2, and Windows Server 2025. While NTLMv2 introduces new mitigations to make it harder to perform relay attacks, the technology has been besieged by several security weaknesses that have been actively exploited by threat acto...

Microsoft kicked off 2025 with a new set of patches for a total of 161 security vulnerabilities across its software portfolio, including three zero-days that have been actively exploited in attacks. Of the 161 flaws, 11 are rated Critical and 149 are rated Important in severity. One other flaw, a non-Microsoft CVE related to a Windows Secure Boot bypass ( CVE-2024-7344 , CVSS score: 6.7), has not been assigned any severity. According to the Zero Day Initiative , the update marks the largest number of CVEs addressed in a single month since at least 2017. The fixes are in addition to seven vulnerabilities the Windows maker addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of December 2024 Patch Tuesday updates. Prominent among the patches released by Microsoft is a trio of flaws in Windows Hyper-V NT Kernel Integration VSP ( CVE-2025-21333 , CVE-2025-21334 , and CVE-2025-21335 , CVSS scores: 7.8) that the company said has come under active exploitation in the wild. ...

Microsoft has shed light on a now-patched security flaw impacting Apple macOS that, if successfully exploited, could have allowed an attacker running as "root" to bypass the operating system's System Integrity Protection ( SIP ) and install malicious kernel drivers by loading third-party kernel extensions. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2024-44243 (CVSS score: 5.5), a medium-severity bug that was addressed by Apple as part of macOS Sequoia 15.2 released last month. The iPhone maker described it as a "configuration issue" that could permit a malicious app to modify protected parts of the file system. "Bypassing SIP could lead to serious consequences, such as increasing the potential for attackers and malware authors to successfully install rootkits, create persistent malware, bypass Transparency, Consent and Control (TCC), and expand the attack surface for additional techniques and exploits," Jonathan Bar Or of the Microsoft Threat Intelligen...

Microsoft has revealed that it's pursuing legal action against a "foreign-based threat–actor group" for operating a hacking-as-a-service infrastructure to intentionally get around the safety controls of its generative artificial intelligence (AI) services and produce offensive and harmful content. The tech giant's Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) said it has observed the threat actors "develop sophisticated software that exploited exposed customer credentials scraped from public websites," and "sought to identify and unlawfully access accounts with certain generative AI services and purposely alter the capabilities of those services." The adversaries then used these services, such as Azure OpenAI Service, and monetized the access by selling them to other malicious actors, providing them with detailed instructions as to how to use these custom tools to generate harmful content. Microsoft said it discovered the activity in July 2024. The Windows maker...

A proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit has been released for a now-patched security flaw impacting Windows Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) that could trigger a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. The out-of-bounds reads vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2024-49113 (CVSS score: 7.5). It was addressed by Microsoft as part of Patch Tuesday updates for December 2024, alongside CVE-2024-49112 (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical integer overflow flaw in the same component that could result in remote code execution. Credited with discovering and reporting both vulnerabilities is independent security researcher Yuki Chen ( @guhe120 ). The CVE-2024-49113 PoC devised by SafeBreach Labs, codenamed LDAPNightmare , is designed to crash any unpatched Windows Server "with no pre-requisites except that the DNS server of the victim DC has Internet connectivity."  Specifically, it entails sending a DCE/RPC request to the victim server, ultimately causing the Local Security Authority Su...

Microsoft has announced that it's making an "unexpected change" to the way .NET installers and archives are distributed, requiring developers to update their production and DevOps infrastructure. "We expect that most users will not be directly affected, however, it is critical that you validate if you are affected and to watch for downtime or other kinds of breakage," Richard Lander, a program manager on the .NET team, said in a statement last week. The move is the result of the fact that some .NET binaries and installers are hosted on Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) domains that end in .azureedge[.]net -- dotnetcli.azureedge.net and dotnetbuilds.azureedge.net -- which are hosted on Edgio. Last month, web infrastructure and security company Akamai acquired select assets from Edgio following its bankruptcy. As part of this transition, the Edgio platform is scheduled to end service on January 15, 2025. Given that the .azureedge[.]net domains could ceas...

Details have emerged about three now-patched security vulnerabilities in Dynamics 365 and Power Apps Web API that could result in data exposure. The flaws, discovered by Melbourne-based cybersecurity company Stratus Security, have been addressed as of May 2024. Two of the three shortcomings reside in Power Platform's OData Web API Filter , while the third vulnerability is rooted in the FetchXML API . The root cause of the first vulnerability is the lack of access control on the OData Web API Filter, thereby allowing access to the contacts table that holds sensitive information such as full names, phone numbers, addresses, financial data, and password hashes. A threat actor could then weaponize the flaw to perform a boolean-based search to extract the complete hash by guessing each character of the hash sequentially until the correct value is identified. "For example, we start by sending startswith(adx_identity_passwordhash, 'a') then startswith( adx_identity_p...

A new phishing campaign has been observed employing tax-themed lures to deliver a stealthy backdoor payload as part of attacks targeting Pakistan. Cybersecurity company Securonix, which is tracking the activity under the name FLUX#CONSOLE , said it likely starts with a phishing email link or attachment, although it said it couldn't obtain the original email used to launch the attack. "One of the more notable aspects of the campaign is how the threat actors leverage MSC (Microsoft Common Console Document) files to deploy a dual-purpose loader and dropper to deliver further malicious payloads," security researchers Den Iuzvyk and Tim Peck said . It's worth noting that the abuse of specially crafted management saved console (MSC) files to execute malicious code has been codenamed GrimResource by Elastic Security Labs. The starting point is a file with double extensions (.pdf.msc) that masquerades as a PDF file (if the setting to display file extensions is disabled)...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a "critical" security vulnerability in Microsoft's multi-factor authentication (MFA) implementation that allows an attacker to trivially sidestep the protection and gain unauthorized access to a victim's account. "The bypass was simple: it took around an hour to execute, required no user interaction and did not generate any notification or provide the account holder with any indication of trouble," Oasis Security researchers Elad Luz and Tal Hason said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Following responsible disclosure, the issue – codenamed AuthQuake – was addressed by Microsoft in October 2024. While the Windows maker supports various ways to authenticate users via MFA, one method involves entering a six-digit code from an authenticator app after supplying the credentials. Up to 10 consequent failed attempts are permitted for a single session. The vulnerability identified by Oasis, at its core, concerns...

Microsoft closed out its Patch Tuesday updates for 2024 with fixes for a total of 72 security flaws spanning its software portfolio, including one that it said has been exploited in the wild. Of the 72 flaws, 17 are rated Critical, 54 are rated Important, and one is rated Moderate in severity. Thirty-one of the vulnerabilities are remote code execution flaws, and 27 of them allow for the elevation of privileges. This is in addition to 13 vulnerabilities the company has addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of last month's security update . In total, Microsoft has resolved as many as 1,088 vulnerabilities in 2024 alone, per Fortra. The vulnerability that Microsoft has acknowledged as having been actively exploited is CVE-2024-49138 (CVSS score: 7.8), a privilege escalation flaw in the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) Driver. "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges," the company said in an...

The Russia-linked advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as Turla has been linked to a previously undocumented campaign that involved infiltrating the command-and-control (C2) servers of a Pakistan-based hacking group named Storm-0156 to conduct its own operations since 2022. The activity, first observed in December 2022, is the latest instance of the nation-state adversary "embedding themselves" in another group's malicious operations to further their own objectives and cloud attribution efforts, Lumen Technologies Black Lotus Labs said. "In December 2022, Secret Blizzard initially gained access to a Storm-0156 C2 server and by mid-2023 had expanded their control to a number of C2s associated with the Storm-0156 actor," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. By leveraging their access to these servers, Turla has been found to take advantage of the intrusions already orchestrated by Storm-0156 to deploy custom malware families refe...