Software | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The US National Security Agency (NSA) on Monday issued an  advisory  warning that Russian threat actors are leveraging recently disclosed VMware vulnerability to install malware on corporate systems and access protected data. Specifics regarding the identities of the threat actor exploiting the  VMware flaw  or when these attacks started were not disclosed. The development comes two weeks after the virtualization software company publicly disclosed the flaw—affecting VMware Workspace One Access, Access Connector, Identity Manager, and Identity Manager Connector products for Windows and Linux—without releasing a patch and three days after releasing a software update to fix it. In late November, VMware pushed  temporary workarounds  to address the issue, stating permanent patches for the flaw were "forthcoming." But it wasn't until December 3rd the escalation-of-privileges bug was entirely resolved. That same day, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agenc

There is no question that attackers are going after your sensitive account data. Passwords have long been a target of those looking to compromise your environment. Why would an attacker take the long, complicated way if they have the keys to the front door? No matter how extensive your security solutions are, protecting the various systems in your environment, your organization may likely be an easy target without proper password security. An especially vulnerable type of password is a  breached password , a.k.a "pwned" password. What is a breached password? How do you discover breached passwords in your environment? How can organizations effectively protect their end-users from using these types of passwords? The Danger of Compromised Accounts The  IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report  2020 noted compromised credentials as one of the primary contributors to malicious data breaches in the report's key findings. It noted: "Stolen or compromised credentials were the

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

Set of must-have online security tools that we believe may make a real difference to your cybersecurity program and improve your 2021 budget planning. In September, Gartner published a  list  of "Top 9 Security and Risk Trends for 2020" putting a bold emphasis on the growing complexity and size of the modern threat landscape. Incomplete visibility of external Attack surfaces led to the dramatic increase in disastrous breaches and data leaks during 2020, compromising PII and other sensitive data of millions of victims. These incidents stemmed from sophisticated intrusions by malicious nation-state actors and APT hacking groups, human error, and widespread misconfigurations exposing unprotected cloud storage or databases with confidential data to the Internet. Gartner's security analysts recommend automating laborious security tasks and processes, amid the ongoing shortage of cybersecurity skills, and promptly addressing emerging cloud and containers security risks.  G

A critical vulnerability uncovered in Real-Time Automation's (RTA) 499ES EtherNet/IP ( ENIP ) stack could open up the industrial control systems to remote attacks by adversaries. RTA's ENIP stack is one of the widely used industrial automation devices and is billed as the "standard for factory floor I/O applications in North America." "Successful exploitation of this vulnerability could cause a denial-of-service condition, and a buffer overflow may allow remote code execution," the US cybersecurity and infrastructure agency (CISA) said in an  advisory . As of yet, no known public exploits have been found to target this vulnerability. However, "according to public search engines for Internet-connected devices (e.g. shodan.io) there are more than 8,000 ENIP-compatible internet-facing devices." Tracked as CVE-2020-25159 , the flaw is rated 9.8 out of 10 in severity by the industry-standard Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) and impacts a

A team of five security researchers analyzed several Apple online services for three months and found as many as 55 vulnerabilities, 11 of which are critical in severity. The flaws — including 29 high severity, 13 medium severity, and 2 low severity vulnerabilities — could have allowed an attacker to "fully compromise both customer and employee applications, launch a worm capable of automatically taking over a victim's iCloud account, retrieve source code for internal Apple projects, fully compromise an industrial control warehouse software used by Apple, and take over the sessions of Apple employees with the capability of accessing management tools and sensitive resources." The flaws meant a bad actor could easily hijack a user's iCloud account and steal all the photos, calendar information, videos, and documents, in addition to forwarding the same exploit to all of their contacts. The findings were  reported by Sam Curry  along with Brett Buerhaus, Ben Sadeghipo

As security professionals who have spent more than a few years in the industry, we know a good challenge when we see one. SaaS and cloud-based technologies are growing rapidly, offering organizations convenience and constant feature refreshes without the need to install and deploy software on-premises. However, even when referred to as 'a game-changer,' many organizations are still highly concerned by security breaches. Today, organizations have anywhere from 35-to literally hundreds of SaaS applications running. Slack, Office 365, Zoom, Zendesk, Salesforce, Hubspot, etc. These applications are at the core of modern enterprises, to the point where running a business without them would be nearly impossible, with the cost and time-saving benefits they provide enabling growth while conserving resources. SaaS applications are easy to use, scalable, and now, they even come with an impressive array of native security controls to secure sensitive corporate data. How to make the

Cybersecurity researchers today disclosed details of security vulnerabilities found in popular antivirus solutions that could enable attackers to elevate their privileges, thereby helping malware sustain its foothold on the compromised systems. According to a report published by CyberArk researcher Eran Shimony today and shared with The Hacker News, the high privileges often associated with anti-malware products render them more vulnerable to exploitation via file manipulation attacks, resulting in a scenario where malware gains elevated permissions on the system. The bugs impact a wide range of antivirus solutions, including those from Kaspersky, McAfee, Symantec, Fortinet, Check Point, Trend Micro, Avira, and Microsoft Defender, each of which has been fixed by the respective vendor. Chief among the flaws is the ability to delete files from arbitrary locations, allowing the attacker to delete any file in the system, as well as a file corruption vulnerability that permits a bad ac