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The China-nexus cyber espionage actor linked to the zero-day exploitation of security flaws in Fortinet , Ivanti , and VMware devices has been observed utilizing multiple persistence mechanisms in order to maintain unfettered access to compromised environments. "Persistence mechanisms encompassed network devices, hypervisors, and virtual machines, ensuring alternative channels remain available even if the primary layer is detected and eliminated," Mandiant researchers said in a new report. The threat actor in question is UNC3886 , which the Google-owned threat intelligence company branded as "sophisticated, cautious, and evasive." Attacks orchestrated by the adversary have leveraged zero-day flaws such as CVE-2022-41328 (Fortinet FortiOS), CVE-2022-22948 (VMware vCenter), and CVE-2023-20867 (VMware Tools) to perform various malicious actions, ranging from deploying backdoors to obtaining credentials for deeper access. It has also been observed exploiting

The MITRE Corporation has revealed that the cyber attack targeting the not-for-profit company towards late December 2023 by exploiting zero-day flaws in Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) involved the threat actor creating rogue virtual machines (VMs) within its VMware environment. "The adversary created their own rogue VMs within the VMware environment, leveraging compromised vCenter Server access," MITRE researchers Lex Crumpton and Charles Clancy  said . "They wrote and deployed a JSP web shell (BEEFLUSH) under the vCenter Server's Tomcat server to execute a Python-based tunneling tool, facilitating SSH connections between adversary-created VMs and the ESXi hypervisor infrastructure." The motive behind such a move is to sidestep detection by obscuring their malicious activities from centralized management interfaces like vCenter and maintain persistent access while reducing the risk of being discovered. Details of the attack  emerged  last month when MITRE rev

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,

While cloud adoption has been top of mind for many IT professionals for nearly a decade, it's only in recent months, with industry changes and announcements from key players, that many recognize the time to make the move is now. It may feel like a daunting task, but tools exist to help you move your virtual machines (VMs) to a public cloud provider – like Microsoft Azure – with relative ease. Transitioning from VMware vSphere to Microsoft Azure requires careful planning and execution to ensure a smooth migration process. In this guide, we'll walk through the steps involved in moving your virtualized infrastructure to the cloud giant, Microsoft Azure. Whether you're migrating your entire data center or specific workloads, these steps will help you navigate the transition effectively. 1. Assess Your Environment: Before diving into the migration process, assess your current VMware vSphere environment thoroughly. Identify all virtual machines (VMs), dependencies, and resource

Super Low RPO with Continuous Data Protection: Dial Back to Just Seconds Before an Attack Zerto , a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, can help you detect and recover from ransomware in near real-time. This solution leverages continuous data protection (CDP) to ensure all workloads have the lowest recovery point objective (RPO) possible. The most valuable thing about CDP is that it does not use snapshots, agents, or any other periodic data protection methodology. Zerto has no impact on production workloads and can achieve RPOs in the region of 5-15 seconds across thousands of virtual machines simultaneously. For example, the environment in the image below has nearly 1,000 VMs being protected with an average RPO of just six seconds! Application-Centric Protection: Group Your VMs to Gain Application-Level Control   You can protect your VMs with the Zerto application-centric approach using Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs). This logical grouping of VMs ensures that your whole applica

Sandboxes are synonymous with dynamic malware analysis. They help to execute malicious files in a safe virtual environment and observe their behavior. However, they also offer plenty of value in terms of static analysis. See these five scenarios where a sandbox can prove to be a useful tool in your investigations. Detecting Threats in PDFs PDF files are frequently exploited by threat actors to deliver payloads. Static analysis in a sandbox makes it possible to expose any threat a malicious PDF contains by extracting its structure. The presence of JavaScript or Bash scripts can reveal a possible mechanism for downloading and executing malware.  Sandboxes like ANY.RUN also allows users to scrutinize URLs found in PDFs to identify suspicious domains, potential command and control (C2) servers, or other indicators of compromise. Example: Static analysis of a PDF file in ANY.RUN Interactivity allows our users to manipulate files within a VM as they wish, but static Discovery offers

Threat actors have been observed leveraging the  QEMU  open-source hardware emulator as tunneling software during a cyber attack targeting an unnamed "large company" to connect to their infrastructure. While a number of legitimate tunneling tools like Chisel, FRP, ligolo, ngrok, and Plink have been used by adversaries to their advantage, the development marks the first QEMU that has been used for this purpose. "We found that QEMU supported connections between virtual machines: the -netdev option creates network devices (backend) that can then connect to the virtual machines," Kaspersky researchers Grigory Sablin, Alexander Rodchenko, and Kirill Magaskin  said . "Each of the numerous network devices is defined by its type and supports extra options." In other words, the idea is to create a virtual network interface and a socket-type network interface, thereby allowing the virtual machine to communicate with any remote server. The Russian cybersecurit

A new Go-based information stealer malware called  JaskaGO  has emerged as the latest cross-platform threat to infiltrate both Windows and Apple macOS systems. AT&T Alien Labs, which made the discovery,  said  the malware is "equipped with an extensive array of commands from its command-and-control (C&C) server." Artifacts designed for macOS were first observed in July 2023, impersonating installers for legitimate software such as CapCut. Other variants of the malware have masqueraded as AnyConnect and security tools.  Upon installation, JaskaGO runs checks to determine if it is executing within a virtual machine (VM) environment, and if so, executes a harmless task like pinging Google or printing a random number in a likely effort to fly under the radar. In other scenarios, JaskaGO proceeds to harvest information from the victim system and establishes a connection to its C&C for receiving further instructions, including executing shell commands, enumerating

Microsoft has detailed a new campaign in which attackers unsuccessfully attempted to move laterally to a cloud environment through an SQL Server instance. "The attackers initially exploited a SQL injection vulnerability in an application within the target's environment," security researchers Sunders Bruskin, Hagai Ran Kestenberg, and Fady Nasereldeen  said  in a Tuesday report. "This allowed the attacker to gain access and elevated permissions on a Microsoft SQL Server instance deployed in Azure Virtual Machine (VM)." In the next stage, the threat actors leveraged the new permissions to attempt to move laterally to additional cloud resources by abusing the server's cloud identity, which may possess elevated permissions to likely carry out various malicious actions in the cloud that the identity has access to. Microsoft said it did not find any evidence to suggest that the attackers successfully moved laterally to the cloud resources using the technique

Researchers have disclosed details about a now-patched critical flaw in the Move virtual machine that powers the Aptos blockchain network. The vulnerability "can cause Aptos nodes to crash and cause denial of service," Singapore-based Numen Cyber Labs  said  in a technical write-up published earlier this month. Aptos is a  new entrant  to the blockchain space, which  launched  its  mainnet  on October 17, 2022. It has its roots in the Diem stablecoin payment system proposed by Meta (née Facebook), which also introduced a short-lived digital wallet called  Novi . The network is built using a platform-agnostic programming language known as  Move , a Rust-based system that's  designed  to implement and execute  smart contracts  in a secure  runtime environment , also known as the Move Virtual Machine (aka  MoveVM ). The  vulnerability  identified by Numen Cyber Labs is rooted in the Move language's verification module (" stack_usage_verifier.rs "), a com

GitHub Actions and Azure virtual machines (VMs) are being leveraged for cloud-based cryptocurrency mining, indicating sustained attempts on the part of malicious actors to target cloud resources for illicit purposes. "Attackers can abuse the  runners  or servers provided by GitHub to run an organization's pipelines and automation by maliciously downloading and installing their own cryptocurrency miners to gain profit easily," Trend Micro researcher Magno Logan  said  in a report last week. GitHub Actions ( GHAs ) is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that allows users to automate the software build, test, and deployment pipeline. Developers can leverage the feature to create workflows that build and test every pull request to a code repository, or deploy merged pull requests to production. Both Linux and Windows runners are hosted on  Standard_DS2_v2  virtual machines on Azure and come with two vCPUs and 7GB of memory. The Japanese com

Cisco Systems on Wednesday shipped security patches to contain three flaws impacting its Enterprise NFV Infrastructure Software ( NFVIS ) that could permit an attacker to fully compromise and take control over the hosts. Tracked as CVE-2022-20777, CVE-2022-20779, and CVE-2022-20780, the vulnerabilities "could allow an attacker to escape from the guest virtual machine (VM) to the host machine, inject commands that execute at the root level, or leak system data from the host to the VM," the company  said . Credited for discovering and reporting the issues are Cyrille Chatras, Pierre Denouel, and Loïc Restoux of Orange Group. Updates have been released in version 4.7.1. The networking equipment company said the flaws affect Cisco Enterprise NFVIS in the default configuration. Details of the three bugs are as follows - CVE-2022-20777  (CVSS score: 9.9) - An issue with insufficient guest restrictions that allows an authenticated, remote attacker to escape from the guest VM

Cybersecurity researchers have shed more light on a malicious loader that runs as a server and executes received modules in memory, laying bare the structure of an "advanced multi-layered virtual machine" used by the malware to fly under the radar. Wslink, as the malicious loader is called, was first  documented  by Slovak cybersecurity company ESET in October 2021, with very few telemetry hits detected in the past two years spanning Central Europe, North America, and the Middle East. Analysis of the malware samples have yielded little to no clues about the initial compromise vector used, and no code, functionality, or operational similarities have been uncovered to suggest that this is a tool from a previously identified threat actor. Packed with a file compression utility named NsPack, Wslink makes use of what's called a  process virtual machine  (VM), a mechanism to run an application in a platform-independent manner that abstracts the underlying hardware or opera

An unpatched security vulnerability affecting Google's Compute Engine platform could be abused by an attacker to take over virtual machines over the network. "This is done by impersonating the metadata server from the targeted virtual machine's point of view," security researcher Imre Rad said in an  analysis  published Friday. "By mounting this exploit, the attacker can grant access to themselves over SSH (public key authentication) so then they can login as the root user." Google Compute Engine ( GCE ) is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) component of Google Cloud Platform that enables users to create and launch virtual machines (VMs) on demand. GCE provides a method for storing and retrieving metadata in the form of the  metadata server , which offers a central point to set metadata in the form of key-value pairs that's then provided to virtual machines at runtime. According to the researcher, the issue is a consequence of weak pseudo-random

Remember the Reverse RDP Attack ? Earlier this year, researchers disclosed clipboard hijacking and path-traversal issues in Microsoft's Windows built-in RDP client that could allow a malicious RDP server to compromise a client computer, reversely. (You can find details and a video demonstration for this security vulnerability, along with dozens of critical flaws in other third-party RDP clients, in a previous article written by Swati Khandelwal for The Hacker News.) At the time when researchers responsibly reported this path-traversal issue to Microsoft, in October 2018, the company acknowledged the issue, also known as " Poisoned RDP vulnerability ," but decided not to address it. Now, it turns out that Microsoft silently patched this vulnerability  (CVE-2019-0887) just last month as part of its July Patch Tuesday updates after Eyal Itkin, security researcher at CheckPoint, found the same issue affecting Microsoft's Hyper-V technology as well. Microsoft