VMware Horizon | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Iranian government-sponsored threat actors have been blamed for compromising a U.S. federal agency by taking advantage of the Log4Shell vulnerability in an unpatched VMware Horizon server. The details, which were shared by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), come in response to incident response efforts undertaken by the authority from mid-June through mid-July 2022. "Cyber threat actors exploited the Log4Shell vulnerability in an unpatched VMware Horizon server, installed XMRig crypto mining software, moved laterally to the domain controller (DC), compromised credentials, and then implanted Ngrok reverse proxies on several hosts to maintain persistence," CISA  noted . LogShell, aka  CVE-2021-44228 , is a critical remote code execution flaw in the widely-used Apache Log4j Java-based logging library. It was addressed by the open source project maintainers in December 2021. The latest development  marks  the  continued   abuse  of the Log4j v

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), along with the Coast Guard Cyber Command (CGCYBER), on Thursday released a joint advisory warning of continued attempts on the part of threat actors to exploit the Log4Shell flaw in VMware Horizon servers to breach target networks. "Since December 2021, multiple threat actor groups have exploited Log4Shell on unpatched, public-facing VMware Horizon and [Unified Access Gateway] servers," the agencies  said . "As part of this exploitation, suspected APT actors implanted loader malware on compromised systems with embedded executables enabling remote command-and-control (C2)." In one instance, the adversary is said to have been able to move laterally inside the victim network, obtain access to a disaster recovery network, and collect and exfiltrate sensitive law enforcement data. Log4Shell , tracked as  CVE-2021-44228  (CVSS score: 10.0), is a remote code execution vulnerability affecting the Apache

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

A Chinese advanced persistent threat tracked as Deep Panda has been observed exploiting the  Log4Shell vulnerability  in VMware Horizon servers to deploy a backdoor and a novel rootkit on infected machines with the goal of stealing sensitive data. "The nature of targeting was opportunistic insofar that multiple infections in several countries and various sectors occurred on the same dates,"  said  Rotem Sde-Or and Eliran Voronovitch, researchers with Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs, in a report released this week. "The victims belong to the financial, academic, cosmetics, and travel industries." Deep Panda , also known by the monikers Shell Crew, KungFu Kittens, and Bronze Firestone, is said to have been active since at least 2010, with recent attacks "targeting legal firms for data exfiltration and technology providers for command-and-control infrastructure building,"  according  to Secureworks. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which assigned the panda

A "potentially destructive actor" aligned with the government of Iran is actively exploiting the well-known  Log4j vulnerability  to infect unpatched VMware Horizon servers with ransomware. Cybersecurity firm SentinelOne dubbed the group " TunnelVision " owing to their heavy reliance on tunneling tools, with overlaps in tactics observed to that of a broader group tracked under the moniker  Phosphorus  as well as Charming Kitten and Nemesis Kitten. "TunnelVision activities are characterized by wide-exploitation of 1-day vulnerabilities in target regions," SentinelOne researchers Amitai Ben Shushan Ehrlich and Yair Rigevsky  said  in a report, with the intrusions detected in the Middle East and the U.S. Also observed alongside Log4Shell is the exploitation of Fortinet FortiOS path traversal flaw ( CVE-2018-13379 ) and the Microsoft Exchange  ProxyShell  vulnerability to gain initial access into the target networks for post-exploitation. "TunnelVis