Relay attack | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Microsoft on Monday said it detected Kremlin-backed nation-state activity exploiting a now-patched critical security flaw in its Outlook email service to gain unauthorized access to victims' accounts within Exchange servers. The tech giant  attributed  the intrusions to a threat actor it called  Forest Blizzard  (formerly Strontium), which is also widely tracked under the monikers APT28, BlueDelta, Fancy Bear, FROZENLAKE, Iron Twilight, Sednit, Sofacy, and TA422. The security vulnerability in question is  CVE-2023-23397  (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical privilege escalation bug that could allow an adversary to access a user's Net-NTLMv2 hash that could then be used to conduct a relay attack against another service to authenticate as the user. It was patched by Microsoft in March 2023. The goal, according to the Polish Cyber Command (DKWOC), is to obtain unauthorized access to mailboxes belonging to public and private entities in the country. "In the next stage of malici

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a case of "forced authentication" that could be exploited to leak a Windows user's NT LAN Manager (NTLM) tokens by tricking a victim into opening a specially crafted Microsoft Access file. The attack takes advantage of a legitimate feature in the database management system solution that allows users to  link to external data sources , such as a remote SQL Server table. "This feature can be abused by attackers to automatically leak the Windows user's NTLM tokens to any attacker-controlled server, via any TCP port, such as port 80," Check Point security researcher Haifei Li  said . "The attack can be launched as long as the victim opens an .accdb or .mdb file. In fact, any more-common Office file type (such as a .rtf ) can work as well." NTLM, an authentication protocol introduced by Microsoft in 1993, is a challenge-response protocol that's used to authenticate users during sign-in. Over the years,