SolarWinds | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

In yet another sign that the Russian hackers who breached SolarWinds network monitoring software to compromise a slew of entities never really went away, Microsoft said the threat actor behind the malicious cyber activities used password spraying and brute-force attacks in an attempt to guess passwords and gain access to its customer accounts. "This recent activity was mostly unsuccessful, and the majority of targets were not successfully compromised – we are aware of three compromised entities to date," the tech giant's Threat Intelligence Center  said  Friday. "All customers that were compromised or targeted are being contacted through our nation-state notification process." The development was first  reported  by news service Reuters. The names of the victims were not revealed. The latest wave in a series of intrusions is said to have primarily targeted IT companies, followed by government agencies, non-governmental organizations, think tanks, and financ

Days after  Microsoft ,  Secureworks , and  Volexity  shed light on a new spear-phishing activity unleashed by the Russian hackers who breached SolarWinds IT management software, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) Tuesday said it intervened to take control of two command-and-control (C2) and malware distribution domains used in the campaign. The court-authorized domain seizure took place on May 28, the DoJ said, adding the action was aimed at disrupting the threat actors' follow-on exploitation of victims as well as block their ability to compromise new systems. The department, however, cautioned that the adversary might have deployed additional backdoor accesses in the interim period between when the initial compromises occurred, and the seizures took place last week. "[The] action is a continued demonstration of the Department's commitment to proactively disrupt hacking activity prior to the conclusion of a criminal investigation,"  said  Assistant Attorney Ge

For years, securing a company's systems was synonymous with securing its "perimeter." There was what was safe "inside" and the unsafe outside world. We built sturdy firewalls and deployed sophisticated detection systems, confident that keeping the barbarians outside the walls kept our data and systems safe. The problem is that we no longer operate within the confines of physical on-prem installations and controlled networks. Data and applications now reside in distributed cloud environments and data centers, accessed by users and devices connecting from anywhere on the planet. The walls have crumbled, and the perimeter has dissolved, opening the door to a new battlefield: identity . Identity is at the center of what the industry has praised as the new gold standard of enterprise security: "zero trust." In this paradigm, explicit trust becomes mandatory for any interactions between systems, and no implicit trust shall subsist. Every access request, regardless of its origin,

Microsoft on Thursday disclosed that the threat actor behind the  SolarWinds supply chain hack  returned to the threat landscape to target government agencies, think tanks, consultants, and non-governmental organizations located across 24 countries, including the U.S. Some of the entities that were singled out include the U.S. Atlantic Council, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Ukrainian Anti-Corruption Action Center (ANTAC), the EU DisinfoLab, and the Government of Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs. "This wave of attacks targeted approximately 3,000 email accounts at more than 150 different organizations," Tom Burt, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President for Customer Security and Trust,  said . "At least a quarter of the targeted organizations were involved in international development, humanitarian, and human rights work." Microsoft attributed the ongoing intrusions to the Russian threat actor it tracks as Nobeliu

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has disclosed details of a new advanced persistent threat (APT) that's leveraging the Supernova backdoor to compromise SolarWinds Orion installations after gaining access to the network through a connection to a Pulse Secure VPN device. "The threat actor connected to the entity's network via a Pulse Secure virtual private network (VPN) appliance, moved laterally to its SolarWinds Orion server, installed malware referred to by security researchers as SUPERNOVA (a .NET web shell), and collected credentials," the agency  said  on Thursday. CISA said it identified the threat actor during an incident response engagement at an unnamed organization and found that the attacker had access to the enterprise's network for nearly a year through the use of the VPN credentials between March 2020 and February 2021. Interestingly, the adversary is said to have used valid accounts that had multi-factor authent

The sprawling  SolarWinds cyberattack  which came to light last December was known for its sophistication in the breadth of tactics used to infiltrate and persist in the target infrastructure, so much so that Microsoft went on to call the threat actor behind the campaign "skillful and methodic operators who follow operations security (OpSec) best practices to minimize traces, stay under the radar, and avoid detection." As further proof of this, new research published today shows that the threat actor carefully planned each stage of the operation to "avoid creating the type of patterns that make tracking them simple," thus deliberately making forensic analysis difficult. By analyzing telemetry data associated with previously published indicators of compromise, RiskIQ said it identified an additional set of 18 servers with high confidence that likely communicated with the targeted, secondary Cobalt Strike payloads delivered via the TEARDROP and RAINDROP malware, r

The U.S. and U.K. on Thursday formally attributed the supply chain attack of IT infrastructure management company SolarWinds with "high confidence" to government operatives working for Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). "Russia's pattern of malign behaviour around the world – whether in cyberspace, in election interference or in the aggressive operations of their intelligence services – demonstrates that Russia remains the most acute threat to the U.K.'s national and collective security," the U.K. government  said  in a statement. To that effect, the U.S. Department of the Treasury has imposed sweeping sanctions against Russia for "undermining the conduct of free and fair elections and democratic institutions" in the U.S. and for its role in facilitating the sprawling SolarWinds hack, while also barring six technology companies in the country that provide support to the cyber program run by Russian Intelligence Services. The com

The SolarWinds attack , which succeeded by utilizing the sunburst malware , shocked the cyber-security industry. This attack achieved persistence and was able to evade internal systems long enough to gain access to the source code of the victim. Because of the far-reaching SolarWinds deployments, the perpetrators were also able to infiltrate many other organizations, looking for intellectual property and other assets. Among the co-victims: US government, government contractors, Information Technology companies, and NGOs. An incredible amount of sensitive data was stolen from several customers after a trojanized version of SolarWinds' application was installed on their internal structures. Looking at the technical capabilities of the malware, as you will see, this particular attack was quite impressive. A particular file, named  SolarWinds.Orion.Core.BusinessLayer.dll  is a SolarWinds digitally signed component of the Orion software framework. The threat actors installed a back

IT infrastructure management provider SolarWinds on Thursday released a new update to its Orion networking monitoring tool with fixes for four security vulnerabilities, counting two weaknesses that could be exploited by an authenticated attacker to achieve remote code execution (RCE). Chief among them is a JSON deserialization flaw that allows an authenticated user to execute arbitrary code via the  test alert actions  feature available in the Orion Web Console, which lets users simulate network events (e.g., an unresponsive server) that can be configured to trigger an alert during setup. It has been rated critical in severity. A second issue concerns a high-risk vulnerability that could be leveraged by an adversary to achieve RCE in the Orion Job Scheduler. "In order to exploit this, an attacker first needs to know the credentials of an unprivileged local account on the Orion Server," SolarWinds  said  in its release notes. The advisory is light on technical specifics,

Email security firm Mimecast on Tuesday revealed that the state-sponsored SolarWinds hackers who broke into its internal network also downloaded source code out of a limited number of repositories. "The threat actor did access a subset of email addresses and other contact information and hashed and salted credentials," the company  said  in a write-up detailing its investigation, adding the adversary "accessed and downloaded a limited number of our source code repositories, as the threat actor is reported to have done with other victims of the SolarWinds Orion supply chain attack." But Mimecast said the source code downloaded by the attackers was incomplete and would be insufficient to build and run any aspect of the Mimecast service and that it did not find signs of any tampering made by the threat actor to the build process associated with the executables that are distributed to its customers.  On January 12, Mimecast  disclosed  that "a sophisticated th

The SolarWinds Sunburst attack has been in the headlines since it was first discovered in December 2020.  As the so-called layers of the onion are peeled back, additional information regarding how the vulnerability was exploited, who was behind the attack, who is to blame for the attack, and the long-term ramifications of this type of supply chain vulnerabilities continue to be actively discussed.  Cybersecurity company Cynet is taking a needed step back to provide a full picture of the SolarWinds attack from start to finish in an upcoming webinar, " Lessons Learned from the SolarWinds SUNBURST Attack ." Information regarding many aspects of the attack has been coming out in pieces, but we haven't yet seen this type of comprehensive overview of the technical steps behind the full attack, as well as clear recommendations for protecting against similar future attacks. And this is precisely what's needed so security professionals can gain insights on the attack tact

FireEye and Microsoft on Thursday said they discovered three more malware strains in connection with the SolarWinds supply-chain attack, including a "sophisticated second-stage backdoor," as the investigation into the  sprawling espionage campaign  continues to yield fresh clues about the threat actor's tactics and techniques.  Dubbed GoldMax (aka SUNSHUTTLE), GoldFinder, and Sibot, the new set of malware adds to a growing list of malicious tools such as  Sunspot ,  Sunburst  (or Solorigate),  Teardrop , and  Raindrop  that were stealthily delivered to enterprise networks by  alleged Russian operatives . "These tools are new pieces of malware that are unique to this actor," Microsoft  said . "They are tailor-made for specific networks and are assessed to be introduced after the actor has gained access through compromised credentials or the SolarWinds binary and after moving laterally with Teardrop and other hands-on-keyboard actions." Microsoft al

As cybersecurity researchers continue to piece together the sprawling  SolarWinds supply chain attack , top executives of the Texas-based software services firm blamed an intern for a critical password lapse that went unnoticed for several years.  The said password " solarwinds123 " was originally believed to have been publicly accessible via a GitHub repository since June 17, 2018, before the misconfiguration was addressed on November 22, 2019. But in a  hearing  before the House Committees on Oversight and Reform and Homeland Security on SolarWinds on Friday, CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna testified that the password had been in use as early as 2017. While a preliminary investigation into the attack revealed that the operators behind the espionage campaign managed to compromise the software build and code signing infrastructure of SolarWinds Orion platform as early as October 2019 to deliver the Sunburst backdoor, Crowdstrike's incident response efforts pointed to a  revi

It's no secret that sysadmins have plenty on their plates. Managing, troubleshooting, and updating software or hardware is a tedious task. Additionally, admins must grapple with complex webs of permissions and security. This can quickly become overwhelming without the right tools. If you're a sysadmin seeking to simplify your workflows, you're in luck. We've gathered some excellent software picks to help tackle different duties more efficiently.  Thankfully, these free tools are also respectful of tight budgets—without sacrificing core functionality. Best for Permissions Management: SolarWinds Permissions Analyzer for Active Directory Whether you are part of an organization with many members or numerous resources, keeping track of permissions can be challenging. Changes in responsibilities, titles, or even employment statuses can influence one's access to proprietary data. Each user has unique privileges. We not only need to visualize these but manage them on