QEMU | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Threat actors have been observed leveraging the  QEMU  open-source hardware emulator as tunneling software during a cyber attack targeting an unnamed "large company" to connect to their infrastructure. While a number of legitimate tunneling tools like Chisel, FRP, ligolo, ngrok, and Plink have been used by adversaries to their advantage, the development marks the first QEMU that has been used for this purpose. "We found that QEMU supported connections between virtual machines: the -netdev option creates network devices (backend) that can then connect to the virtual machines," Kaspersky researchers Grigory Sablin, Alexander Rodchenko, and Kirill Magaskin  said . "Each of the numerous network devices is defined by its type and supports extra options." In other words, the idea is to create a virtual network interface and a socket-type network interface, thereby allowing the virtual machine to communicate with any remote server. The Russian cybersecurit...

Sysadmins know what the risks are of running unpatched services. Given the choice, and unlimited resources, most hardworking administrators will ensure that all systems and services are patched consistently. But things are rarely that simple. Technical resources are limited, and patching can often be more complicated than it appears at first glance. Worse, some services are so hidden in the background, that they just don't make it onto the list of things to be patched. QEMU is one of those services that tend to create difficulties with patching. It works away in the background and is easy to take for granted. Plus, patching QEMU involves significant technical and practical challenges – while requiring enormous resources. In this article, we'll address some of the difficulties around patching QEMU, and point to a solution that takes the toughest bits out of QEMU patching. Ignoring QEMU patching is a big risk You'll probably know about it if you're using QEMU – shor...

The latest Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 Cloud Threat Report found that sensitive data is found in 66% of cloud storage buckets. This data is vulnerable to ransomware attacks. The SANS Institute recently reported that these attacks can be performed by abusing the cloud provider's storage security controls and default settings. "In just the past few months, I have witnessed two different methods for executing a ransomware attack using nothing but legitimate cloud security features," warns Brandon Evans, security consultant and SANS Certified Instructor. Halcyon disclosed an attack campaign that leveraged one of Amazon S3's native encryption mechanisms, SSE-C, to encrypt each of the target buckets. A few months prior, security consultant Chris Farris demonstrated how attackers could perform a similar attack using a different AWS security feature, KMS keys with external key material, using simple scripts generated by ChatGPT. "Clearly, this topic is top-of-mind for both threat actors and ...