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The  ransomware industry surged in 2023  as it saw an alarming 55.5% increase in victims worldwide, reaching a staggering 5,070.  But 2024 is starting off showing a very different picture.  While the numbers skyrocketed in Q4 2023 with 1309 cases, in Q1 2024, the ransomware industry was down to 1,048 cases. This is a 22% decrease in ransomware attacks compared to Q4 2023. Figure 1: Victims per quarter There could be several reasons for this significant drop.  Reason 1: The Law Enforcement Intervention Firstly, law enforcement has upped the ante in 2024 with actions against both LockBit and ALPHV. The LockBit Arrests In February, an international operation named "Operation Cronos" culminated in the arrest of at least three associates of the infamous LockBit ransomware syndicate in Poland and Ukraine.  Law enforcement from multiple countries collaborated to take down LockBit's infrastructure. This included seizing their dark web domains and gaining access to their backend sys

Threat actors have been found exploiting a critical flaw in Magento to inject a persistent backdoor into e-commerce websites. The attack leverages  CVE-2024-20720  (CVSS score: 9.1), which has been described by Adobe as a case of "improper neutralization of special elements" that could pave the way for arbitrary code execution. It was  addressed  by the company as part of security updates released on February 13, 2024. Sansec said it discovered a "cleverly crafted layout template in the database" that's being used to automatically inject malicious code to execute arbitrary commands. "Attackers combine the Magento layout parser with the beberlei/assert package (installed by default) to execute system commands," the company  said . "Because the layout block is tied to the checkout cart, this command is executed whenever <store>/checkout/cart is requested." The command in question is  sed , which is used to insert a code execution

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,

Multiple China-nexus threat actors have been linked to the zero-day exploitation of three security flaws impacting Ivanti appliances (CVE-2023-46805, CVE-2024-21887, and CVE-2024-21893). The clusters are being tracked by Mandiant under the uncategorized monikers  UNC5221 , UNC5266, UNC5291,  UNC5325 , UNC5330, and UNC5337. Also previously linked to the exploitation spree is a Chinese hacking crew called UNC3886 , whose tradecraft is notable for weaponizing zero-day bugs in Fortinet and VMware to breach target networks. The Google Cloud subsidiary said it has also observed financially motivated actors exploiting CVE-2023-46805 and CVE-2024-21887, likely in an attempt to conduct cryptocurrency mining operations. "UNC5266 overlaps in part with UNC3569, a China-nexus espionage actor that has been observed exploiting vulnerabilities in Aspera Faspex, Microsoft Exchange, and Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator, among others, to gain initial access to target environments,"

Cloud solutions are more mainstream – and therefore more exposed – than ever before. In 2023 alone, a staggering 82% of data breaches were against public, private, or hybrid cloud environments. What's more, nearly 40% of breaches spanned multiple cloud environments. The average cost of a cloud breach was above the overall average, at $4.75 million. In a time where cloud has become the de facto standard – with 65% of IT decision-makers confirming that cloud-based services are their first choice when upgrading or purchasing new solutions – despite its overwhelming prominence, cloud security still faces multiple challenges.  Security Challenges in the Cloud  One major hurdle is the lack of visibility. Unlike physical servers you can see and touch, cloud resources are often spread across vast networks, making it difficult to monitor for suspicious activity and leaving vulnerabilities undetected. Another challenge is the inconsistency across cloud vendor permission management systems. D

A threat activity cluster tracked as  Earth Freybug  has been observed using a new malware called UNAPIMON to fly under the radar. "Earth Freybug is a cyberthreat group that has been active since at least 2012 that focuses on espionage and financially motivated activities," Trend Micro security researcher Christopher So  said  in a report published today. "It has been observed to target organizations from various sectors across different countries." The cybersecurity firm has described Earth Freybug as a subset within  APT41 , a China-linked cyber espionage group that's also tracked as Axiom, Brass Typhoon (formerly Barium), Bronze Atlas, HOODOO, Wicked Panda, and Winnti. The adversarial collective is known to rely on a combination of living-off-the-land binaries (LOLBins) and custom malware to realize its goals. Also adopted are techniques like dynamic-link library (DLL) hijacking and application programming interface (API) unhooking. Trend Micro said th

The threat actor known as  TA558  has been attributed to a new massive phishing campaign that targets a wide range of sectors in Latin America with the goal of deploying Venom RAT. The attacks primarily singled out hotel, travel, trading, financial, manufacturing, industrial, and government verticals in Spain, Mexico, the United States, Colombia, Portugal, Brazil, Dominican Republic, and Argentina. Active since at least 2018, TA558 has a  history  of  targeting entities  in the LATAM region to deliver a variety of malware such as Loda RAT, Vjw0rm, and Revenge RAT. The latest infection chain, according to Perception Point researcher  Idan Tarab , leverages phishing emails as an initial access vector to drop  Venom RAT , a fork of Quasar RAT that comes with  capabilities  to harvest sensitive data and commandeer systems remotely. The disclosure comes as threat actors have been increasingly observed using the  DarkGate  malware loader following the  law enforcement takedown of QakBo

The maintainers of the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository briefly suspended new user sign-ups following an influx of malicious projects uploaded as part of a typosquatting campaign. PyPI said "new project creation and new user registration" was temporarily halted to mitigate what it said was a "malware upload campaign." The incident was resolved 10 hours later, on March 28, 2024, at 12:56 p.m. UTC. Software supply chain security firm Checkmarx said the unidentified threat actors behind flooding the repository targeted developers with typosquatted versions of popular packages. "This is a multi-stage attack and the malicious payload aimed to steal crypto wallets, sensitive data from browsers (cookies, extensions data, etc.), and various credentials," researchers Yehuda Gelb, Jossef Harush Kadouri, and Tzachi Zornstain  said . "In addition, the malicious payload employed a persistence mechanism to survive reboots." The findings were also c

Considering the ever-changing state of cybersecurity, it's never too late to ask yourself, "am I doing what's necessary to keep my organization's web applications secure?" The continuous evolution of technology introduces new and increasingly sophisticated threats daily, posing challenges to organizations all over the world and across the broader spectrum of industries striving to maintain reliable defenses. 2024 promises to be no exception. Threat actors continue to adapt their tactics, techniques, and procedures to exploit vulnerabilities in innovative ways, injecting malicious content into files that bypass traditional antivirus solutions and advanced, AI and ML-powered solutions alike. Therefore, organizations must assess and continually reinforce their security measures. One critical aspect that organizations often grapple with is identifying and addressing security blind spots. These are areas within the infrastructure where vulnerabilities exist but may

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has  added  a security flaw impacting Microsoft Sharepoint Server to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog based on evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-24955 (CVSS score: 7.2), is a critical remote code execution flaw that allows an authenticated attacker with Site Owner privileges to execute arbitrary code. "In a network-based attack, an authenticated attacker as a Site Owner could execute code remotely on the SharePoint Server," Microsoft  said  in an advisory. The flaw was addressed by Microsoft as part of its  Patch Tuesday updates  for May 2023. The development comes more than two months after CISA  added  CVE-2023-29357, a privilege escalation flaw in SharePoint Server, to its KEV catalog. It's worth pointing out that an exploit chain combining CVE-2023-29357 and CVE-2023-24955 was demonstrated by StarLabs SG at the Pwn2Own Vancouver h

Threat hunters have identified a suspicious package in the  NuGet package manager  that's likely designed to target developers working with tools made by a Chinese firm that specializes in industrial- and digital equipment manufacturing. The package in question is  SqzrFramework480 , which ReversingLabs said was first published on January 24, 2024. It has been  downloaded  2,999 times as of writing. The software supply chain security firm said it did not find any other package that exhibited similar behavior. It, however, theorized the campaign could likely be used for orchestrating industrial espionage on systems equipped with cameras, machine vision, and robotic arms. The indication that SqzrFramework480 is seemingly tied to a Chinese firm named Bozhon Precision Industry Technology Co., Ltd. comes from the use of a version of the company's logo for the package's icon. It was uploaded by a Nuget user account called " zhaoyushun1999 ." Present within the l

Unidentified adversaries orchestrated a sophisticated attack campaign that has impacted several individual developers as well as the GitHub organization account associated with Top.gg, a Discord bot discovery site. "The threat actors used multiple TTPs in this attack, including account takeover via stolen browser cookies, contributing malicious code with verified commits, setting up a custom Python mirror, and publishing malicious packages to the PyPI registry," Checkmarx  said  in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. The software supply chain attack is said to have led to the theft of sensitive information, including passwords, credentials, and other valuable data. Some aspects of the campaign were  previously   disclosed  at the start of the month by an Egypt-based developer named Mohammed Dief. It chiefly entailed setting up a clever typosquat of the official PyPI domain known as "files. python hosted[.]org," giving it the name "files. pypi ho

German authorities have announced the takedown of an illicit underground marketplace called  Nemesis Market  that peddled narcotics, stolen data, and various cybercrime services. The Federal Criminal Police Office (aka Bundeskriminalamt or BKA) said it seized the digital infrastructure associated with the darknet service located in Germany and Lithuania and confiscated €94,000 ($102,107) in cryptocurrency assets. The operation, conducted in collaboration with law enforcement agencies from Germany, Lithuania, and the U.S., took place on March 20, 2024, following an extensive investigation that commenced in October 2022. Founded in 2021, Nemesis Market is estimated to have had more than 150,000 user accounts and 1,100 seller accounts from all over the world prior to its shutdown. Almost 20$ of the seller accounts were from Germany. "The range of goods available on the marketplace included narcotics, fraudulently obtained data and goods, as well as a selection of cybercrime serv

Cybersecurity researchers have detected a new wave of phishing attacks that aim to deliver an ever-evolving information stealer referred to as  StrelaStealer . The campaigns impact more than 100 organizations in the E.U. and the U.S., Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers said in a new report published today. "These campaigns come in the form of spam emails with attachments that eventually launch the StrelaStealer's DLL payload," researchers Benjamin Chang, Goutam Tripathy, Pranay Kumar Chhaparwal, Anmol Maurya, and Vishwa Thothathri said . "In an attempt to evade detection, attackers change the initial email attachment file format from one campaign to the next, to prevent detection from the previously generated signature or patterns." First disclosed in November 2022, StrelaStealer is  equipped  to siphon email login data from well-known email clients and exfiltrate them to an attacker-controlled server. Since then, two large-scale campaigns involving the ma

The data wiping malware called  AcidPour  may have been deployed in attacks targeting four telecom providers in Ukraine, new findings from SentinelOne show. The cybersecurity firm also confirmed connections between the malware and AcidRain, tying it to threat activity clusters associated with Russian military intelligence. "AcidPour's expanded capabilities would enable it to better disable embedded devices including networking, IoT, large storage (RAIDs), and possibly ICS devices running Linux x86 distributions," security researchers Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade and Tom Hegel  said . AcidPour is a variant of  AcidRain , a wiper that was used to render Viasat KA-SAT modems operable at the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian war in early 2022 and cripple Ukraine's military communications. It also builds upon the latter's features, while targeting Linux systems running on x86 architecture. AcidRain, on the other hand, is compiled for MIPS architecture. Where AcidRain w

The Russia-linked threat actor known as Turla infected several systems belonging to an unnamed European non-governmental organization (NGO) in order to deploy a backdoor called TinyTurla-NG (TTNG) . "The attackers compromised the first system, established persistence and added exclusions to antivirus products running on these endpoints as part of their preliminary post-compromise actions," Cisco Talos  said  in a new report published today. "Turla then opened additional channels of communication via Chisel for data exfiltration and to pivot to additional accessible systems in the network." There is evidence indicating that the infected systems were breached as early as October 2023, with Chisel deployed in December 2023 and data exfiltration taking place via the tool a month later, around January 12, 2024. TinyTurla-NG was  first documented  by the cybersecurity company last month after it was found to be used in connection with a cyber attack targeting a Poli

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a tool referred to as  AndroxGh0st  that's used to target Laravel applications and steal sensitive data. "It works by scanning and taking out important information from .env files, revealing login details linked to AWS and Twilio," Juniper Threat Labs researcher Kashinath T Pattan  said . "Classified as an SMTP cracker, it exploits SMTP using various strategies such as credential exploitation, web shell deployment, and vulnerability scanning." AndroxGh0st has been detected in the wild since at least 2022, with threat actors leveraging it to access Laravel environment files and steal credentials for various cloud-based applications like Amazon Web Services (AWS), SendGrid, and Twilio. Attack chains involving the Python malware are known to exploit known security flaws in Apache HTTP Server, Laravel Framework, and PHPUnit to gain initial access and for privilege escalation and persistence. Earlier this January, U