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A coalition of dozens of countries, including France, the U.K., and the U.S., along with tech companies such as Google, MDSec, Meta, and Microsoft, have signed a joint agreement to curb the abuse of commercial spyware to commit human rights abuses. The initiative, dubbed the  Pall Mall Process , aims to tackle the proliferation and irresponsible use of commercial cyber intrusion tools by establishing guiding principles and policy options for States, industry, and civil society in relation to the development, facilitation, purchase, and use of such tools. The declaration stated that "uncontrolled dissemination" of spyware offerings contributes to "unintentional escalation in cyberspace," noting it poses risks to cyber stability, human rights, national security, and digital security. "Where these tools are used maliciously, attacks can access victims' devices, listen to calls, obtain photos and remotely operate a camera and microphone via 'zero-click&

Three new security vulnerabilities have been discovered in Azure HDInsight's Apache  Hadoop ,  Kafka , and  Spark  services that could be exploited to achieve privilege escalation and a regular expression denial-of-service ( ReDoS ) condition. "The new vulnerabilities affect any authenticated user of Azure HDInsight services such as Apache Ambari and Apache Oozie," Orca security researcher Lidor Ben Shitrit  said  in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. The list of flaws is as follows - CVE-2023-36419  (CVSS score: 8.8) - Azure HDInsight Apache Oozie Workflow Scheduler XML External Entity (XXE) Injection Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2023-38156  (CVSS score: 7.2) - Azure HDInsight Apache Ambari Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) Injection Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability Azure HDInsight Apache Oozie Regular Expression Denial-of-Service (ReDoS) Vulnerability (no CVE) The two privilege escalation flaws could be exploited by an authenticate

How's your vulnerability management program doing? Is it effective? A success? Let's be honest, without the right metrics or analytics, how can you tell how well you're doing, progressing, or if you're getting ROI? If you're not measuring, how do you know it's working? And even if you are measuring, faulty reporting or focusing on the wrong metrics can create blind spots and make it harder to communicate any risks to the rest of the business. So how do you know what to focus on? Cyber hygiene, scan coverage, average time to fix, vulnerability severity, remediation rates, vulnerability exposure… the list is endless. Every tool on the market offers different metrics, so it can be hard to know what is important. This article will help you identify and define the key metrics that you need to track the state of your vulnerability management program, the progress you've made, so you can create audit-ready reports that: Prove your security posture Meet vulnerability remediation SLAs an

A recently disclosed server-side request forgery ( SSRF ) vulnerability impacting Ivanti Connect Secure and Policy Secure products has come under mass exploitation. The Shadowserver Foundation  said  it observed exploitation attempts originating from more than 170 unique IP addresses that aim to establish a reverse shell, among others. The attacks exploit  CVE-2024-21893  (CVSS score: 8.2), an SSRF flaw in the SAML component of Ivanti Connect Secure, Policy Secure, and Neurons for ZTA that allows an attacker to access otherwise restricted resources without authentication. Ivanti had previously divulged that the vulnerability had been exploited in targeted attacks aimed at a "limited number of customers," but cautioned the status quo could change post public disclosure. That's exactly what appears to have happened, especially following the  release  of a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit by cybersecurity firm Rapid7 last week. The PoC involves fashioning an exploit cha

The decentralized social network Mastodon has disclosed a critical security flaw that enables malicious actors to impersonate and take over any account. "Due to insufficient origin validation in all Mastodon, attackers can impersonate and take over any remote account," the maintainers said in a terse advisory. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2024-23832 , has a severity rating of 9.4 out of a maximum of 10. Security researcher  arcanicanis  has been credited with discovering and reporting it. It has been described as an "origin validation error" ( CWE-346 ), which can typically allow an attacker to "access any functionality that is inadvertently accessible to the source." Every Mastodon version prior to 3.5.17 is vulnerable, as are 4.0.x versions before 4.0.13, 4.1.x versions before 4.1.13, and 4.2.x versions before 4.2.5. Mastodon said it's withholding additional technical specifics about the flaw until February 15, 2024, to give  admins  ampl

Remote desktop software maker AnyDesk disclosed on Friday that it suffered a cyber attack that led to a compromise of its production systems. The German company said the incident, which it discovered following a security audit, is not a ransomware attack and that it has notified relevant authorities. "We have revoked all security-related certificates and systems have been remediated or replaced where necessary," the company  said  in a statement. "We will be revoking the previous code signing certificate for our binaries shortly and have already started replacing it with a new one." Out of an abundance of caution, AnyDesk has also revoked all passwords to its web portal, my.anydesk[.]com, and it's urging users to change their passwords if the same passwords have been reused on other online services. It's also recommending that users download the latest version of the software, which comes with a new  code signing certificate . AnyDesk did not disclose

The threat actor behind a peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet known as  FritzFrog  has made a return with a new variant that leverages the  Log4Shell vulnerability  to propagate internally within an already compromised network. "The vulnerability is exploited in a brute-force manner that attempts to target as many vulnerable Java applications as possible," web infrastructure and security company Akamai said in a report shared with The Hacker News. FritzFrog,  first documented  by Guardicore (now part of Akamai) in August 2020, is a Golang-based malware that primarily targets internet-facing servers with weak SSH credentials. It's known to be active since January 2020. It has  since evolved  to strike healthcare, education, and government sectors as well as improved its capabilities to ultimately deploy cryptocurrency miners on infected hosts, claiming more than 1,500 victims over the years. What's novel about the latest version is the use of the Log4Shell vulnerability a

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday  added  a high-severity flaw impacting iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2022-48618  (CVSS score: 7.8), concerns a bug in the kernel component. "An attacker with arbitrary read and write capability may be able to bypass  Pointer Authentication ," Apple said in an advisory, adding the issue "may have been exploited against versions of iOS released before iOS 15.7.1." The iPhone maker said the problem was addressed with improved checks. It's currently not known how the vulnerability is being weaponized in real-world attacks. Interestingly, patches for the flaw were released on December 13, 2022, with the release of  iOS 16.2, iPadOS 16.2 ,  macOS Ventura 13.1 ,  tvOS 16.2 , and  watchOS 9.2 , although it was only publicly disclosed more than a yea

Ivanti is alerting of two new high-severity flaws in its Connect Secure and Policy Secure products, one of which is said to have come under targeted exploitation in the wild. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2024-21888  (CVSS score: 8.8) - A privilege escalation vulnerability in the web component of Ivanti Connect Secure (9.x, 22.x) and Ivanti Policy Secure (9.x, 22.x) allows a user to elevate privileges to that of an administrator CVE-2024-21893  (CVSS score: 8.2) - A server-side request forgery vulnerability in the SAML component of Ivanti Connect Secure (9.x, 22.x), Ivanti Policy Secure (9.x, 22.x) and Ivanti Neurons for ZTA allows an attacker to access certain restricted resources without authentication The Utah-based software company  said  it found no evidence of customers being impacted by CVE-2024-21888 so far, but acknowledged "the exploitation of CVE-2024-21893 appears to be targeted" and that it's "aware of a limited number of cust

A pair of recently disclosed zero-day flaws in Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) virtual private network (VPN) devices have been exploited to deliver a Rust-based payload called  KrustyLoader  that's used to drop the open-source Sliver adversary simulation tool. The  security vulnerabilities , tracked as CVE-2023-46805 (CVSS score: 8.2) and CVE-2024-21887 (CVSS score: 9.1), could be abused in tandem to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution on susceptible appliances. As of January 26,  patches for the two flaws  have been delayed, although the software company has released a temporary mitigation through an XML file. Volexity, which first shed light on the shortcomings, said they have been weaponized as zero-days since December 3, 2023, by a Chinese nation-state threat actor it tracks under the name UTA0178. Google-owned Mandiant has assigned the moniker UNC5221 to the group. Following public disclosure earlier this month, the vulnerabilities have  come under broad exploitati

Malicious local attackers can obtain full root access on Linux machines by taking advantage of a newly disclosed security flaw in the GNU C library (aka glibc). Tracked as CVE-2023-6246 (CVSS score: 7.8), the heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability is rooted in glibc's __vsyslog_internal() function, which is used by  syslog() and vsyslog()  for system logging purposes. It's said to have been accidentally introduced in August 2022 with the release of glibc 2.37. "This flaw allows local privilege escalation, enabling an unprivileged user to gain full root access," Saeed Abbasi, product manager of the Threat Research Unit at Qualys,  said , adding it impacts major Linux distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora. A threat actor could exploit the flaw to obtain elevated permissions via specially crafted inputs to applications that employ these logging functions. "Although the  vulnerability  requires specific conditions to be exploited (such as an unusuall

GitLab once again released fixes to address a critical security flaw in its Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) that could be exploited to write arbitrary files while creating a  workspace . Tracked as  CVE-2024-0402 , the vulnerability has a CVSS score of 9.9 out of a maximum of 10. "An issue has been discovered in GitLab CE/EE affecting all versions from 16.0 prior to 16.5.8, 16.6 prior to 16.6.6, 16.7 prior to 16.7.4, and 16.8 prior to 16.8.1 which allows an authenticated user to write files to arbitrary locations on the GitLab server while creating a workspace," GitLab  said  in an advisory released on January 25, 2024. The company also noted patches for the bug have been backported to 16.5.8, 16.6.6, 16.7.4, and 16.8.1. Also resolved by GitLab are four medium-severity flaws that could lead to a regular expression denial-of-service (ReDoS), HTML injection, and the disclosure of a user's public email address via the tags RSS feed. The latest updat

Juniper Networks has released out-of-band updates to  address high-severity flaws  in SRX Series and EX Series that could be exploited by a threat actor to take control of susceptible systems. The vulnerabilities, tracked as  CVE-2024-21619 and CVE-2024-21620 , are rooted in the J-Web component and impact all versions of Junos OS. Two other shortcomings, CVE-2023-36846 and CVE-2023-36851, were  previously disclosed  by the company in August 2023. CVE-2024-21619  (CVSS score: 5.3) - A missing authentication vulnerability that could lead to exposure of sensitive configuration information CVE-2024-21620  (CVSS score: 8.8) - A cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that could lead to the execution of arbitrary commands with the target's permissions by means of a specially crafted request Cybersecurity firm watchTowr Labs has been  credited  with discovering and reporting the issues. The two vulnerabilities have been addressed in the following versions - CVE-2024-21619  - 20.

A now-patched security flaw in Microsoft Outlook could be exploited by threat actors to access NT LAN Manager (NTLM) v2 hashed passwords when opening a specially crafted file. The issue, tracked as CVE-2023-35636 (CVSS score: 6.5), was addressed by the tech giant as part of its  Patch Tuesday updates  for December 2023. "In an email attack scenario, an attacker could exploit the vulnerability by sending the specially crafted file to the user and convincing the user to open the file," Microsoft  said  in an advisory released last month. "In a web-based attack scenario, an attacker could host a website (or leverage a compromised website that accepts or hosts user-provided content) containing a specially crafted file designed to exploit the vulnerability." Put differently, the adversary would have to convince users to click a link, either embedded in a phishing email or sent via an instant message, and then deceive them into opening the file in question. CVE-202

Cybersecurity researchers have detected in the wild yet another variant of the Phobos ransomware family known as  Faust . Fortinet FortiGuard Labs, which detailed the latest iteration of the ransomware, said it's being propagated by means of an infection that delivers a Microsoft Excel document (.XLAM) containing a VBA script. "The attackers utilized the Gitea service to store several files encoded in Base64, each carrying a malicious binary," security researcher Cara Lin  said  in a technical report published last week. "When these files are injected into a system's memory, they initiate a file encryption attack." Faust is the latest addition to several ransomware variants from the Phobos family, including Eking, Eight, Elbie, Devos, and 8Base. It's worth noting that Faust was  previously documented  by Cisco Talos in November 2023. The cybersecurity firm described the variant as active since 2022 and "does not target specific industries or re

Mexican financial institutions are under the radar of a new spear-phishing campaign that delivers a modified version of an open-source remote access trojan called  AllaKore RAT . The BlackBerry Research and Intelligence Team attributed the activity to an unknown Latin America-based financially motivated threat actor. The campaign has been active since at least 2021. "Lures use Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) naming schemas and links to legitimate, benign documents during the installation process," the Canadian company  said  in an analysis published earlier this week. "The AllaKore RAT payload is heavily modified to allow the threat actors to send stolen banking credentials and unique authentication information back to a command-and-control (C2) server for the purposes of financial fraud." The attacks appear to be designed to particularly single out large companies with gross revenues over $100 million. Targeted entities span retail, agriculture, publ

Cisco has released patches to address a critical security flaw impacting Unified Communications and Contact Center Solutions products that could permit an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on an affected device. Tracked as  CVE-2024-20253  (CVSS score: 9.9), the issue stems from improper processing of user-provided data that a threat actor could abuse to send a specially crafted message to a listening port of a susceptible appliance. "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system with the privileges of the web services user," Cisco  said  in an advisory. "With access to the underlying operating system, the attacker could also establish root access on the affected device." Synacktiv security researcher Julien Egloff has been credited with discovering and reporting CVE-2024-20253. The following products are impacted by the flaw - Unified Communications Manager (versions 11

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on the command-and-control (C2) server workings of a known malware family called  SystemBC . "SystemBC can be purchased on underground marketplaces and is supplied in an archive containing the implant, a command-and-control (C2) server, and a web administration portal written in PHP," Kroll  said  in an analysis published last week. The risk and financial advisory solutions provider said it has witnessed an increase in the use of malware throughout Q2 and Q3 2023. SystemBC,  first observed  in the wild in 2018, allows threat actors to remote control a compromised host and deliver additional payloads, including trojans, Cobalt Strike, and ransomware. It also features support for launching ancillary modules on the fly to expand on its core functionality. A standout aspect of the malware revolves around its use of SOCKS5 proxies to mask network traffic to and from C2 infrastructure, acting as a persistent access mechanism for post-

The maintainers of the open-source continuous integration/continuous delivery and deployment (CI/CD) automation software Jenkins have resolved nine security flaws, including a critical bug that, if successfully exploited, could result in remote code execution (RCE). The issue, assigned the CVE identifier  CVE-2024-23897 , has been described as an arbitrary file read vulnerability through the built-in command line interface ( CLI ) "Jenkins uses the args4j library to parse command arguments and options on the Jenkins controller when processing CLI commands," the maintainers  said  in a Wednesday advisory. "This command parser has a feature that replaces an @ character followed by a file path in an argument with the file's contents (expandAtFiles). This feature is enabled by default and Jenkins 2.441 and earlier, LTS 2.426.2 and earlier does not disable it." A threat actor could exploit this quirk to read arbitrary files on the Jenkins controller file system

In a world where more & more organizations are adopting open-source components as foundational blocks in their application's infrastructure, it's difficult to consider traditional SCAs as complete protection mechanisms against open-source threats. Using open-source libraries saves tons of coding and debugging time, and by that - shortens the time to deliver our applications. But, as codebases become increasingly composed of open-source software, it's time to respect the entire attack surface - including attacks on the supply chain itself - when choosing an  SCA platform  to depend upon. The Impact of One Dependency When a company adds an open-source library, they are probably adding not just the library they intended to, but also many other libraries as well. This is due to the way open-source libraries are built: just like every other application on the planet, they aim for a speed of delivery and development and, as such, rely on code other people built - i.e., ot