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Google Cloud has addressed a medium-severity security flaw in its platform that could be abused by an attacker who already has access to a Kubernetes cluster to escalate their privileges. "An attacker who has compromised the  Fluent Bit  logging container could combine that access with high privileges required by  Anthos Service Mesh  (on clusters that have enabled it) to escalate privileges in the cluster," the company  said  as part of an advisory released on December 14, 2023. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, which discovered and reported the shortcoming, said adversaries could weaponize it to carry out "data theft, deploy malicious pods, and disrupt the cluster's operations." There is no evidence that the issue has been exploited in the wild. It has been addressed in the following versions of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Anthos Service Mesh (ASM) - 1.25.16-gke.1020000 1.26.10-gke.1235000 1.27.7-gke.1293000 1.28.4-gke.1083000 1.17.8-asm.8 ...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered what they say is malicious cyber activity orchestrated by two prominent Chinese nation-state hacking groups targeting 24 Cambodian government organizations. "This activity is believed to be part of a long-term espionage campaign," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers  said  in a report last week. "The observed activity aligns with geopolitical goals of the Chinese government as it seeks to leverage their strong relations with Cambodia to project their power and expand their naval operations in the region." Targeted organizations span defense, election oversight, human rights, national treasury and finance, commerce, politics, natural resources, and telecommunications sectors. The assessment stems from the persistent nature of inbound network connections originating from these entities to a China-linked adversarial infrastructure that masquerades as cloud backup and storage services over a "period of several month...

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...

An unnamed Southeast Asian government has been targeted by multiple China-nexus threat actors as part of espionage campaigns targeting the region over extended periods of time. "While this activity occurred around the same time and in some instances even simultaneously on the same victims' machines, each cluster is characterized by distinct tools, modus operandi, and infrastructure," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers Lior Rochberger, Tom Fakterman, and Robert Falcone  said  in an exhaustive three-part report. The attacks, which targeted different governmental entities such as critical infrastructure, public healthcare institutions, public financial administrators and ministries, have been attributed with moderate confidence to three disparate clusters tracked as  Stately Taurus  (aka Mustang Panda),  Alloy Taurus  (aka Granite Typhoon), and  Gelsemium . Mustang Panda Uses TONESHELL Variant and ShadowPad "The attackers conducted a cyberespiona...

The threat actors linked to the malware loader known as IcedID have made updates to the BackConnect (BC) module that's used for post-compromise activity on hacked systems, new findings from Team Cymru reveal. IcedID, also called BokBot , is a strain of malware similar to  Emotet  and  QakBot  that started off as a banking trojan in 2017, before switching to the role of an initial access facilitator for other payloads. Recent versions of the malware have been  observed  removing functionality related to online banking fraud to prioritize ransomware delivery. The BackConnect (BC) module,  first documented  by Netresec in October 2022, relies on a proprietary command-and-control (C2) protocol to exchange commands between a server and the infected host. The protocol, which comes with a VNC component for remote access, has also been identified in other malware such as the now-discontinued  BazarLoader  and QakBot. In December 2022, Team ...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new cloud targeting, peer-to-peer (P2P) worm called  P2PInfect  that targets vulnerable Redis instances for follow-on exploitation. "P2PInfect exploits Redis servers running on both Linux and Windows Operating Systems making it more scalable and potent than other worms," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers William Gamazo and Nathaniel Quist  said . "This worm is also written in Rust, a highly scalable and cloud-friendly programming language." It's estimated that as many as 934 unique Redis systems may be vulnerable to the threat. The first known instance of P2PInfect was detected on July 11, 2023. A notable characteristic of the worm is its ability to infects vulnerable Redis instances by exploiting a critical Lua sandbox escape vulnerability,  CVE-2022-0543  (CVSS score: 10.0), which has been previously exploited to deliver multiple  malware families  such as  Muhstik ,  Redigo , and  H...

A threat actor known as  Muddled Libra  is targeting the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry with persistent attacks that leverage advanced social engineering ploys to gain initial access. "The attack style defining Muddled Libra appeared on the cybersecurity radar in late 2022 with the release of the 0ktapus phishing kit, which offered a prebuilt hosting framework and bundled templates," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42  said  in a technical report. Libra is the constellation-themed  designation  given by the cybersecurity company for cybercrime groups. The "muddled" moniker for the threat actor stems from the prevailing ambiguity with regards to the use of the 0ktapus framework. 0ktapus , also known as Scatter Swine, refers to an intrusion set that first came to light in August 2022 in connection with smishing attacks against over 100 organizations, including Twilio and Cloudflare. Then in late 2022, CrowdStrike  detailed  a string of cy...

Governmental entities in the Middle East and Africa have been at the receiving end of sustained cyber-espionage attacks that leverage never-before-seen and rare credential theft and Exchange email exfiltration techniques. "The main goal of the attacks was to obtain highly confidential and sensitive information, specifically related to politicians, military activities, and ministries of foreign affairs," Lior Rochberger, senior threat researcher at Palo Alto Networks,  said  in a technical deep dive published last week. The company's Cortex Threat Research team is  tracking  the activity under the temporary name  CL-STA-0043  (where CL stands for cluster and STA stands for state-backed motivation), describing it as a "true advanced persistent threat." The infection chain is triggered by the exploitation of vulnerable on-premises Internet Information Services ( IIS ) and Microsoft Exchange servers to infiltrate target networks. Palo Alto Networks said i...

The Chinese nation-state group dubbed  Alloy Taurus  is using a Linux variant of a backdoor called PingPull as well as a new undocumented tool codenamed Sword2033. That's according to findings from Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, which  discovered  recent malicious cyber activity carried out by the group targeting South Africa and Nepal. Alloy Taurus is the constellation-themed moniker assigned to a threat actor that's known for its attacks targeting telecom companies since at least 2012. It's also tracked by Microsoft as Granite Typhoon (previously Gallium). Last month, the adversary was attributed to a campaign called  Tainted Love  targeting telecommunication providers in the Middle East as part of a broader operation referred to as Soft Cell. Recent cyber espionage attacks mounted by Alloy Taurus have also broadened their victimology footprint to include financial institutions and government entities. PingPull,  first documented  by Unit 42...

Researchers are warning about a spike in exploitation attempts weaponizing a now-patched critical remote code execution flaw in Realtek Jungle SDK since the start of August 2022. According to Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, the ongoing campaign is said to have recorded 134 million exploit attempts as of December 2022, with 97% of the attacks occurring in the past four months. Close to 50% of the attacks originated from the U.S. (48.3%), followed by Vietnam (17.8%), Russia (14.6%), The Netherlands (7.4%), France (6.4%), Germany (2.3%0, and Luxembourg (1.6%). What's more, 95% of the attacks leveraging the security shortcoming that emanated from Russia singled out organizations in Australia. "Many of the attacks we observed tried to deliver malware to infect vulnerable IoT devices," Unit 42 researchers  said  in a report, adding "threat groups are using this vulnerability to carry out large-scale attacks on smart devices around the world." The vulnerability in q...

The threat actor known as  BackdoorDiplomacy  has been linked to a new wave of attacks targeting Iranian government entities between July and late December 2022. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, which is tracking the activity under its  constellation-themed  moniker  Playful Taurus , said it observed the government domains attempting to connect to malware infrastructure previously identified as associated with the adversary. Also known by the names APT15, KeChang, NICKEL, and Vixen Panda, the Chinese APT group has a history of cyber espionage campaigns aimed at government and diplomatic entities across North America, South America, Africa, and the Middle East at least since 2010. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET, in June 2021,  unpacked  the intrusions mounted by the hacking crew against diplomatic entities and telecommunication companies in Africa and the Middle East using a custom implant known as Turian. Then in December 2021, Microsoft  announc...

A South Africa-based threat actor known as Automated Libra has been observed employing CAPTCHA bypass techniques to create GitHub accounts in a programmatic fashion as part of a freejacking campaign dubbed PURPLEURCHIN. The group "primarily targets cloud platforms offering limited-time trials of cloud resources in order to perform their crypto mining operations," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers William Gamazo and Nathaniel Quist  said . PURPLEURCHIN first came to light in October 2022 when Sysdig  disclosed  that the adversary created as many as 30 GitHub accounts, 2,000 Heroku accounts, and 900 Buddy accounts to scale its operation. Now according to Unit 42, the cloud threat actor group created three to five GitHub accounts every minute at the height of its activity in November 2022, totally setting up over 130,000 bogus accounts across Heroku, Togglebox, and GitHub. More than 22,000 GitHub accounts are estimated to have been created between September and No...

The Russia-linked Gamaredon group attempted to unsuccessfully break into a large petroleum refining company within a NATO member state earlier this year amid the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. The attack, which took place on August 30, 2022, is just one of multiple intrusions orchestrated by the advanced persistent threat (APT) that's attributed to Russia's Federal Security Service ( FSB ). Gamaredon , also known by the monikers Actinium, Armageddon, Iron Tilden, Primitive Bear, Shuckworm, Trident Ursa, and Winterflounder, has a history of primarily going after Ukrainian entities and, to a lesser extent, NATO allies to harvest sensitive data. "As the conflict has continued on the ground and in cyberspace, Trident Ursa has been operating as a dedicated access creator and intelligence gatherer," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Trident Ursa remains one of the most pervasive, intrusive, continuously active and focused AP...

A new attack method can be used to circumvent web application firewalls (WAFs) of various vendors and infiltrate systems, potentially enabling attackers to gain access to sensitive business and customer information. Web application firewalls are a  key line of defense  to help filter, monitor, and block HTTP(S) traffic to and from a web application, and safeguard against attacks such as cross-site forgery, cross-site-scripting (XSS), file inclusion, and SQL injection (SQLi). The generic bypass "involves appending  JSON syntax  to SQL injection payloads that a WAF is unable to parse," Claroty researcher Noam Moshe  said . "Most WAFs will easily detect SQLi attacks, but prepending JSON to SQL syntax left the WAF blind to these attacks." The industrial and IoT cybersecurity company said its technique successfully worked against WAFs from vendors like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudflare, F5, Imperva, and Palo Alto Networks, all of whom have since released upd...

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 has detailed the inner workings of a malware called  OriginLogger , which has been touted as a successor to the widely used information stealer and remote access trojan (RAT) known as  Agent Tesla . A .NET based keylogger and remote access, Agent Tesla has had a long-standing presence in the threat landscape, allowing malicious actors to gain remote access to targeted systems and beacon sensitive information to an actor-controlled domain. Known to be used in the wild since 2014, it's advertised for sale on dark web forums and is generally distributed through malicious spam emails as an attachment. In February 2021, cybersecurity firm Sophos  disclosed two new variants  of the commodity malware (version 2 and 3) that featured capabilities to steal credentials from web browsers, email apps, and VPN clients, as well as use Telegram API for command-and-control. Now according to Unit 42 researcher Jeff White, what has been tagged as Agent ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday  added  a security flaw impacting Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS to its  Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog , based on evidence of active exploitation. The high-severity vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2022-0028  (CVSS score: 8.6), is a URL filtering policy misconfiguration that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to carry out reflected and amplified TCP denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. "If exploited, this issue would not impact the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of our products," Palo Alto Networks said in an alert. "However, the resulting denial-of-service (DoS) attack may help obfuscate the identity of the attacker and implicate the firewall as the source of the attack. The weakness impacts the following product versions and has been addressed as part of updates released this month - PAN-OS 10.2 (version < 10.2.2-h2) PAN-OS 10.1 (version < 10.1.6-h...

The Russian state-sponsored hacking collective known as APT29 has been attributed to a new phishing campaign that takes advantage of legitimate cloud services like Google Drive and Dropbox to deliver malicious payloads on compromised systems. "These campaigns are believed to have targeted several Western diplomatic missions between May and June 2022," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42  said  in a Tuesday report. "The lures included in these campaigns suggest targeting of a foreign embassy in Portugal as well as a foreign embassy in Brazil." APT29, also tracked under the monikers Cozy Bear, Cloaked Ursa, or The Dukes, has been characterized as an organized cyberespionage group working to collect intelligence that aligns with Russia's strategic objectives. Some aspects of the advanced persistent threat's activities, including the infamous  SolarWinds supply chain attack  of 2020, are separately tracked by Microsoft under the name Nobelium, with Mandiant calling i...

VoIP phones using Digium's software have been targeted to drop a web shell on their servers as part of an attack campaign designed to exfiltrate data by downloading and executing additional payloads. "The malware installs multilayer obfuscated PHP backdoors to the web server's file system, downloads new payloads for execution, and schedules recurring tasks to re-infect the host system," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42  said  in a Friday report. The unusual activity is said to have commenced in mid-December 2021 and targets Asterisk, a widely used software implementation of a private branch exchange (PBX) that runs on the open-source Elastix Unified Communications Server. Unit 42 said the intrusions share similarities with the  INJ3CTOR3 campaign  that Israeli cybersecurity firm Check Point disclosed in November 2020, alluding to the possibility that they could be a "resurgence" of the previous attacks. Coinciding with the sudden surge is the public disclos...