OAuth | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Multiple suspected Russia-linked threat actors are "aggressively" targeting individuals and organizations with ties to Ukraine and human rights with an aim to gain unauthorized access to Microsoft 365 accounts since early March 2025. The highly targeted social engineering operations, per Volexity, are a shift from previously documented attacks that leveraged a technique known as device code phishing to achieve the same goals, indicating that indicating that the Russian adversaries behind these campaigns are actively refining their tradecraft to fly under the radar. "These recently observed attacks rely heavily on one-on-one interaction with a target, as the threat actor must both convince them to click a link and send back a Microsoft-generated code," security researchers Charlie Gardner, Josh Duke, Matthew Meltzer, Sean Koessel, Steven Adair, and Tom Lancaster said in an exhaustive analysis. At least two different threat clusters tracked as UTA0352 and UTA03...

In what has been described as an "extremely sophisticated phishing attack," threat actors have leveraged an uncommon approach that allowed bogus emails to be sent via Google's infrastructure and redirect message recipients to fraudulent sites that harvest their credentials. "The first thing to note is that this is a valid, signed email – it really was sent from no-reply@google.com," Nick Johnson, the lead developer of the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), said in a series of posts on X. "It passes the DKIM signature check, and Gmail displays it without any warnings – it even puts it in the same conversation as other, legitimate security alerts." The email message informs prospective targets of a subpoena from a law enforcement authority asking for unspecified content present in their Google Account and urges them to click on a sites.google[.]com URL in order to "examine the case materials or take measures to submit a protest." The Google Si...

The problem is simple: all breaches start with initial access, and initial access comes down to two primary attack vectors – credentials and devices. This is not news; every report you can find on the threat landscape depicts the same picture.  The solution is more complex. For this article, we'll focus on the device threat vector. The risk they pose is significant, which is why device management tools like Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) are essential components of an organization's security infrastructure. However, relying solely on these tools to manage device risk actually creates a false sense of security. Instead of the blunt tools of device management, organizations are looking for solutions that deliver device trust . Device trust provides a comprehensive, risk-based approach to device security enforcement, closing the large gaps left behind by traditional device management solutions. Here are 5 of those limitations and how to ov...

New research has pulled back the curtain on a "deficiency" in Google's "Sign in with Google" authentication flow that exploits a quirk in domain ownership to gain access to sensitive data. "Google's OAuth login doesn't protect against someone purchasing a failed startup's domain and using it to re-create email accounts for former employees," Truffle Security co-founder and CEO Dylan Ayrey said in a Monday report.  "And while you can't access old email data, you can use those accounts to log into all the different SaaS products that the organization used." The San Francisco-based company said the issue has the potential to put millions of American users' data at risk simply by purchasing a defunct domain associated with a failed startup and gaining unauthorized access to old employee accounts related to various applications like OpenAI ChatGPT, Slack, Notion, Zoom, and even HR systems. "The most sensitive accou...

Information stealing malware are actively taking advantage of an undocumented Google OAuth endpoint named MultiLogin to hijack user sessions and allow continuous access to Google services even after a password reset. According to CloudSEK, the  critical exploit  facilitates session persistence and cookie generation, enabling threat actors to maintain access to a valid session in an unauthorized manner. The technique was first revealed by a threat actor named PRISMA on October 20, 2023, on their Telegram channel. It has since been  incorporated  into  various malware-as-a-service (MaaS) stealer families , such as Lumma, Rhadamanthys, Stealc, Meduza, RisePro, and WhiteSnake. The MultiLogin authentication endpoint is primarily designed for synchronizing Google accounts across services when users sign in to their accounts in the Chrome web browser (i.e.,  profiles ).  A reverse engineering of the Lumma Stealer code has revealed that the technique tar...

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed a "severe design flaw" in Google Workspace's domain-wide delegation ( DWD ) feature that could be exploited by threat actors to facilitate privilege escalation and obtain unauthorized access to Workspace APIs without super admin privileges. "Such exploitation could result in theft of emails from Gmail, data exfiltration from Google Drive, or other unauthorized actions within Google Workspace APIs on all of the identities in the target domain," cybersecurity firm Hunters  said  in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. The design weakness – which remains active to this date – has been codenamed  DeleFriend  for its ability to manipulate existing delegations in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google Workspace without possessing super admin privileges. When reached for comment, Google disputed the characterization of the issue as a design flaw. "This report does not identify an underlying security issue in o...

Critical security flaws have been disclosed in the Open Authorization (OAuth) implementation of popular online services such as Grammarly, Vidio, and Bukalapak, building upon previous shortcomings uncovered in  Booking[.]com and Expo . The weaknesses, now addressed by the respective companies following responsible disclosure between February and April 2023, could have allowed malicious actors to obtain access tokens and potentially hijack user accounts. OAuth is a  standard  that's commonly used as a mechanism for cross-application access, granting websites or applications access to their information on other websites, such as Facebook, but without giving them the passwords. "When OAuth is used to provide service authentication, any security breach in it can lead to identity theft, financial fraud, and access to various personal information including credit card numbers, private messages, health records, and more, depending on the specific service being attacked," Sa...

From a user's perspective, OAuth works like magic. In just a few keystrokes, you can whisk through the account creation process and gain immediate access to whatever new app or integration you're seeking. Unfortunately, few users understand the implications of the permissions they allow when they create a new OAuth grant, making it easy for malicious actors to manipulate employees into giving away unintended access to corporate environments. In one of the  highest-profile examples , Pawn Storm's attacks against the Democratic National Convention and others leveraged OAuth to target victims through social engineering.  Security and IT teams would be wise to establish a practice of reviewing new and existing OAuth grants programmatically to catch risky activity or overly-permissive scopes. And, there are new solutions for  SaaS security  cropping up that can make this process easier. Let's take a look at some best practices for prioritizing and investigating your or...

A security shortcoming in Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) Open Authorization ( OAuth ) process could have been exploited to achieve full account takeover, researchers said. California-based identity and access management service Descope, which discovered and reported the issue in April 2023, dubbed it  nOAuth . "nOAuth is an authentication implementation flaw that can affect Microsoft Azure AD multi-tenant OAuth applications," Omer Cohen, chief security officer at Descope,  said . The misconfiguration has to do with how a malicious actor can modify email attributes under "Contact Information" in the Azure AD account and exploit the "Log in with Microsoft" feature to hijack a victim account. To pull off the attack, all an adversary has to do is to create and access an Azure AD admin account and modify their email address to that of a victim and take advantage of the single sign-on scheme on a vulnerable app or website. "If the app merges u...

A critical security vulnerability has been disclosed in the Open Authorization (OAuth) implementation of the application development framework Expo.io. The shortcoming, assigned the CVE identifier  CVE-2023-28131 , has a severity rating of 9.6 on the CVSS scoring system. API security firm Salt Labs  said  the issue rendered services using the framework susceptible to credential leakage, which could then be used to hijack accounts and siphon sensitive data. Under certain circumstances, a threat actor could have taken advantage of the flaw to perform arbitrary actions on behalf of a compromised user on various platforms such as Facebook, Google, or Twitter. Expo, similar to Electron, is an open source platform for developing universal native apps that run on Android, iOS, and the web. It's worth noting that for the attack to be successful, sites and applications using Expo should have configured the AuthSession Proxy setting for single sign-on (SSO) using a third-party...

Recent data breaches across CircleCI, LastPass, and Okta underscore a common theme: The enterprise SaaS stacks connected to these industry-leading apps can be at serious risk for compromise. CircleCI, for example, plays an integral, SaaS-to-SaaS role for SaaS app development. Similarly, tens of thousands of organizations rely on Okta and LastPass security roles for SaaS identity and access management. Enterprise and niche SaaS apps alike have effectively introduced multitudes of unmonitored endpoints into organizations of all sizes.  While  spending for SaaS security  is trending up, it lags behind categories such as cloud infrastructure protection and network security. According to Statista, the average organization employs 100+ SaaS apps, many of which are unsanctioned by IT, creating a glaring gap in SaaS security.  Why Users Flock to SaaS Apps — And Often Bypass IT in the Process As productivity tools for tasks such as marketing automation, document signatur...

Microsoft on Tuesday said it took steps to disable fake Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) accounts that were used for creating malicious  OAuth  applications as part of a phishing campaign designed to breach organizations' cloud environments and steal email. "The applications created by these fraudulent actors were then used in a consent phishing campaign, which tricked users into granting permissions to the fraudulent apps," the tech giant  said . "This phishing campaign targeted a subset of customers primarily based in the U.K. and Ireland." Consent phishing is a  social engineering attack  wherein users are tricked into granting permissions to malicious cloud applications, which can then be weaponized to gain access to legitimate cloud services and sensitive user data. The Windows maker said it became aware of the campaign on December 15, 2022. It has since alerted affected customers via email, with the company noting that the threat actors abused the conse...

It's no secret that 3rd party apps can boost productivity, enable remote and hybrid work and are overall, essential in building and scaling a company's work processes.  An innocuous process much like clicking on an attachment was in the earlier days of email, people don't think twice when connecting an app they need with their Google workspace or M365 environment, etc. Simple actions that users take, from creating an email to updating a contact in the CRM, can result in several other automatic actions and notifications in the connected platforms.  As seen in the image below, the OAuth mechanism makes it incredibly easy to interconnect apps and many don't consider what the possible ramifications could be. When these apps and other add-ons for SaaS platforms ask for permissions' access, they are usually granted without a second thought, presenting more opportunities for bad actors to gain access to a company's data. This puts companies at risk for supply chain ...

Cloud-based repository hosting service GitHub on Friday shared additional details into the theft of its integration OAuth tokens last month, noting that the attacker was able to access internal NPM data and its customer information. "Using stolen OAuth user tokens originating from two third-party integrators, Heroku and Travis CI, the attacker was able to escalate access to NPM infrastructure," Greg Ose said , adding the attacker then managed to obtain a number of files - A database backup of skimdb.npmjs.com consisting of data as of April 7, 2021, including an archive of user information from 2015 and all private NPM package manifests and package metadata. The archive contained NPM usernames, password hashes, and email addresses for roughly 100,000 users. A set of CSV files encompassing an archive of all names and version numbers of published versions of all NPM private packages as of April 10, 2022, and  A "small subset" of private packages from two organiz...

Salesforce-owned subsidiary Heroku on Thursday acknowledged that the theft of GitHub integration OAuth tokens further involved unauthorized access to an internal customer database. The company, in an  updated notification , revealed that a compromised token was abused to breach the database and "exfiltrate the hashed and salted passwords for customers' user accounts." As a consequence, Salesforce said it's resetting all Heroku user passwords and ensuring that potentially affected credentials are refreshed. It also emphasized that internal Heroku credentials were rotated and extra detections have been put in place. The attack campaign, which GitHub  discovered  on April 12, related to an unidentified actor leveraging stolen OAuth user tokens issued to two third-party OAuth integrators, Heroku and Travis-CI, to download data from dozens of organizations, including NPM. The timeline of events as shared by the cloud platform is as follows - April 7, 2022  - Threa...

Cloud-based code hosting platform GitHub described the recent  attack campaign  involving the abuse of OAuth access tokens issued to Heroku and Travis CI as "highly targeted" in nature. "This pattern of behavior suggests the attacker was only listing organizations in order to identify accounts to selectively target for listing and downloading private repositories," GitHub's Mike Hanley  said  in an updated post. The  security incident , which it discovered on April 12, related to an unidentified attacker leveraging stolen OAuth user tokens issued to two third-party OAuth integrators, Heroku and Travis CI, to download data from dozens of organizations, including NPM. The Microsoft-owned company said last week that it's in the process of sending a final set of notifications to GitHub customers who had either the Heroku or Travis CI OAuth app integrations authorized in their accounts. According to a detailed step-by-step analysis carried out by GitHub, th...