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Cybersecurity researchers have reported an increase in  TrueBot  infections, primarily targeting Mexico, Brazil, Pakistan, and the U.S. Cisco Talos said the attackers behind the operation have moved from using malicious emails to alternative delivery methods such as the exploitation of a now-patched remote code execution (RCE) flaw in Netwrix auditor as well as the Raspberry Robin worm. "Post-compromise activity included data theft and the execution of Clop ransomware," security researcher Tiago Pereira  said  in a Thursday report. TrueBot is a Windows malware downloader that's attributed to a threat actor tracked by Group-IB as  Silence , a Russian-speaking crew believed to  share associations  with Evil Corp (aka DEV-0243) and  TA505 . The first-stage module functions as an entry point for subsequent post-exploitation activities, including information theft using a hitherto unknown custom data exfiltration utility dubbed Teleport, the cybersecurity firm said. The

An Internet Explorer zero-day vulnerability was actively exploited by a North Korean threat actor to target South Korean users by capitalizing on the recent  Itaewon Halloween crowd crush  to trick users into downloading malware. The discovery, reported by Google Threat Analysis Group researchers Benoît Sevens and Clément Lecigne, is the latest set of attacks perpetrated by  ScarCruft , which is also called APT37, InkySquid, Reaper, and Ricochet Chollima. "The group has historically focused their targeting on South Korean users, North Korean defectors, policy makers, journalists, and human rights activists," TAG  said  in a Thursday analysis. The new findings illustrate the threat actor's continued abuse of Internet Explorer flaws such as CVE-2020-1380 and CVE-2021-26411 to drop backdoors like  BLUELIGHT and Dolphin , the latter of which was disclosed by Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET late last month. Another key tool in its arsenal is  RokRat , a Windows-based remo

Imagine a world where the software that powers your favorite apps, secures your online transactions, and keeps your digital life could be outsmarted and taken over by a cleverly disguised piece of code. This isn't a plot from the latest cyber-thriller; it's actually been a reality for years now. How this will change – in a positive or negative direction – as artificial intelligence (AI) takes on a larger role in software development is one of the big uncertainties related to this brave new world. In an era where AI promises to revolutionize how we live and work, the conversation about its security implications cannot be sidelined. As we increasingly rely on AI for tasks ranging from mundane to mission-critical, the question is no longer just, "Can AI  boost cybersecurity ?" (sure!), but also "Can AI  be hacked? " (yes!), "Can one use AI  to hack? " (of course!), and "Will AI  produce secure software ?" (well…). This thought leadership article is about the latter. Cydrill  (a

The maintainers of the FreeBSD operating system have released updates to remediate a security vulnerability impacting the ping module that could be potentially exploited to crash the program or trigger remote code execution. The issue, assigned the identifier  CVE-2022-23093 , impacts all supported versions of FreeBSD and concerns a  stack-based buffer overflow  vulnerability in the  ping service . "ping reads raw IP packets from the network to process responses in the pr_pack() function," according to an  advisory  published last week. "The pr_pack() copies received IP and  ICMP  headers into stack buffers for further processing. In so doing, it fails to take into account the possible presence of IP option headers following the IP header in either the response or the quoted packet." As a consequence, the destination buffer could be overflowed by up to 40 bytes when the IP option headers are present. The FreeBSD Project noted that the ping process runs in a 

Search giant Google on Friday released an out-of-band security update to fix a new actively exploited zero-day flaw in its Chrome web browser. The high-severity flaw, tracked as  CVE-2022-4262 , concerns a type confusion bug in the V8 JavaScript engine. Clement Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has been credited with reporting the issue on November 29, 2022. Type confusion vulnerabilities could be weaponized by threat actors to perform out-of-bounds memory access, or lead to a crash and arbitrary code execution. According to the NIST's National Vulnerability Database, the flaw  permits  a "remote attacker to potentially exploit heap corruption via a crafted HTML page." Google acknowledged active exploitation of the vulnerability but stopped short of sharing additional specifics to prevent further abuse. CVE-2022-4262 is the fourth actively exploited type confusion flaw in Chrome that Google has addressed since the start of the year. It's also

IBM has fixed a high-severity security vulnerability affecting its Cloud Databases (ICD) for PostgreSQL product that could be potentially exploited to tamper with internal repositories and run unauthorized code. The privilege escalation flaw (CVSS score: 8.8), dubbed " Hell's Keychain " by cloud security firm Wiz, has been described as a "first-of-its-kind supply-chain attack vector impacting a cloud provider's infrastructure." Successful exploitation of the bug could enable a malicious actor to remotely execute code in customers' environments and even read or modify data stored in the PostgreSQL database. "The vulnerability consists of a chain of three exposed secrets (Kubernetes service account token, private container registry password, CI/CD server credentials) coupled with overly permissive network access to internal build servers," Wiz researchers Ronen Shustin and Shir Tamari  said . Hell's Keychain commences with an SQL inject

A previously undocumented Go-based malware is targeting Redis servers with the goal of taking control of the infected systems and likely building a botnet network. The attacks involve taking advantage of a critical security vulnerability in the open source, in-memory, key-value store that was disclosed earlier this year to deploy  Redigo , according to cloud security firm  Aqua . Tracked as CVE-2022-0543 (CVSS score: 10.0), the weakness pertains to a case of sandbox escape in the Lua scripting engine that could be leveraged to attain remote code execution. This is not the first time the flaw has come under active exploitation, what with Juniper Threat Labs uncovering attacks perpetrated by the  Muhstik botnet  in March 2022 to execute arbitrary commands. The Redigo infection chain is similar in that the adversaries scan for exposed Redis servers on port 6379 to establish initial access, following it up by downloading a shared library "exp_lin.so" from a remote server.

A critical security vulnerability has been disclosed in the Quarkus Java framework that could be potentially exploited to achieve remote code execution on affected systems. Tracked as  CVE-2022-4116  (CVSS score: 9.8), the shortcoming could be trivially abused by a malicious actor without any privileges. "The vulnerability is found in the Dev UI Config Editor, which is vulnerable to drive-by localhost attacks that could lead to remote-code execution (RCE)," Contrast Security researcher Joseph Beeton, who reported the bug,  said  in a write-up. Quarkus, developed by Red Hat, is an  open source project  that's used for creating Java applications in  containerized  and serverless environments. It's worth pointing out that the  issue  only impacts developers who are running Quarkus and are tricked into visiting a specially crafted website, which is embedded with malicious JavaScript code designed to install or execute arbitrary payloads. This could take the form o

Acer has released a firmware update to address a security vulnerability that could be potentially weaponized to turn off UEFI Secure Boot on affected machines. Tracked as  CVE-2022-4020 , the high-severity vulnerability affects five different models that consist of Aspire A315-22, A115-21, and A315-22G, and Extensa EX215-21 and EX215-21G. The PC maker described the vulnerability as an issue that "may allow changes to Secure Boot settings by creating NVRAM variables." Credited with  discovering  the flaw is ESET researcher Martin Smolár, who previously disclosed  similar bugs  in Lenovo computers. Disabling Secure Boot, an integrity mechanism that guarantees that only trusted software is loaded during system startup, enables a malicious actor to tamper with  boot loaders , leading to severe consequences. This includes  granting  the attacker complete control over the operating system loading process as well as "disable or bypass protections to silently deploy their

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has resolved a cross-tenant vulnerability in its platform that could be weaponized by an attacker to gain unauthorized access to resources. The issue relates to a  confused deputy problem , a type of privilege escalation where a program that doesn't have permission to perform an action can coerce a more-privileged entity to perform the action. The shortcoming was reported by Datadog to AWS on September 1, 2022, following which a patch was shipped on September 6. "This attack abuses the AppSync service to assume [identity and access management]  roles  in other AWS accounts, which allows an attacker to pivot into a victim organization and access resources in those accounts," Datadog researcher Nick Frichette  said  in a report published last week. In a coordinated disclosure, Amazon  said  that no customers were affected by the vulnerability and that no customer action is required. It described it as a "case-sensitivity parsing issue w

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

Spotify's Backstage has been discovered as vulnerable to a severe security flaw that could be exploited to gain remote code execution by leveraging a recently disclosed bug in a third-party module. The vulnerability (CVSS score: 9.8), at its core, takes advantage of a critical sandbox escape in vm2, a popular JavaScript sandbox library ( CVE-2022-36067  aka Sandbreak), that came to light last month. "An unauthenticated threat actor can execute arbitrary system commands on a Backstage application by exploiting a vm2 sandbox escape in the Scaffolder core plugin," application security firm Oxeye said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Backstage  is an open source  developer portal  from Spotify that allows users to create, manage, and explore software components from a unified " front door ." It's used by  many companies  like Netflix, DoorDash, Roku, and Expedia, among others. According to Oxeye, the flaw is rooted in a tool called  software templ

Credit: Marina Minkin A novel attack method has been disclosed against a crucial piece of technology called time-triggered ethernet ( TTE ) that's used in safety-critical infrastructure, potentially causing the failure of systems powering spacecraft and aircraft. Dubbed  PCspooF  by a group of academics and researchers from the University of Michigan , the University of Pennsylvania, and the NASA Johnson Space Center, the  technique  is designed to break TTE's security guarantees and induce TTE devices to lose synchronization for up to a second, a behavior that can even lead to uncontrolled maneuvers in spaceflight missions and threaten crew safety. TTE is one among the networking technologies that's part of what's called a mixed-criticality network wherein traffic with different timing and faults tolerance requirements coexist in the same physical network. This means that both critical devices, which, say, enable vehicle control, and non-critical devices, which are

Citrix has released  security updates  to address a critical authentication bypass flaw in the application delivery controller (ADC) and Gateway products that could be exploited to take control of affected systems. Successful exploitation of the issues could enable an adversary to gain authorized access, perform remote desktop takeover, and even circumvent defenses against login brute-force attempts under specific configurations. CVE-2022-27510  - Unauthorized access to Gateway user capabilities CVE-2022-27513  - Remote desktop takeover via phishing CVE-2022-27516  - User login brute-force protection functionality bypass The following supported versions of Citrix ADC and Citrix Gateway are affected by the flaws - Citrix ADC and Citrix Gateway 13.1 before 13.1-33.47  Citrix ADC and Citrix Gateway 13.0 before 13.0-88.12  Citrix ADC and Citrix Gateway 12.1 before 12.1.65.21 Citrix ADC 12.1-FIPS before 12.1-55.289 Citrix ADC 12.1-NDcPP before 12.1-55.289 Exploitation, howe

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new vulnerability in a system used across oil and gas organizations that could be exploited by an attacker to inject and execute arbitrary code. The high-severity issue, tracked as  CVE-2022-0902  (CVSS score: 8.1), is a path-traversal vulnerability in ABB Totalflow  flow computers and remote controllers . "Attackers can exploit this flaw to gain root access on an ABB flow computer, read and write files, and remotely execute code," industrial security company Claroty  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. ABB, a Swedish-Swiss industrial automation firm, has since released  firmware updates  as of July 14, 2022, following responsible disclosure. Flow computers are special-purpose electronic instruments used by petrochemical manufacturers to interpret data from flow meters and calculate and record the volume of substances such as natural gas, crude oils, and other hydrocarbon fluids at a specific point in time

PC maker Lenovo has addressed yet another set of three shortcomings in the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) firmware affecting several Yoga, IdeaPad, and ThinkBook devices. "The vulnerabilities allow disabling UEFI Secure Boot or restoring factory default Secure Boot databases (incl. dbx): all simply from an OS," Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET  explained  in a series of tweets. UEFI refers to software that acts as an interface between the operating system and the firmware embedded in the device's hardware. Because UEFI is  responsible  for launching the operating system when a device is powered on, it has made the technology an attractive option for threat actors looking to  drop malware  that's difficult to detect and remove. Viewed in that light, the flaws, tracked as CVE-2022-3430, CVE-2022-3431, and CVE-2022-3432, could be abused by an adversary to turn off Secure Boot, a security mechanism that's designed to prevent malicious programs from lo

VMware has patched five security flaws affecting its  Workspace ONE Assist  solution, some of which could be exploited to bypass authentication and obtain elevated permissions. Topping the list are three critical vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2022-31685, CVE-2022-31686, and CVE-2022-31687. All the shortcomings are rated 9.8 on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system. CVE-2022-31685 is an authentication bypass flaw that could be abused by an attacker with network access to VMware Workspace ONE Assist to obtain administrative access without the need to authenticate to the application. CVE-2022-31686 has been described by the virtualization services provider as a "broken authentication method" vulnerability, and CVE-2022-31687 as a "Broken Access Control" flaw. "A malicious actor with network access may be able to obtain administrative access without the need to authenticate to the application," VMware  said  in an advisory for CVE-2022-31686 and CVE-202

Microsoft is warning of an uptick among nation-state and criminal actors increasingly leveraging publicly-disclosed zero-day vulnerabilities for breaching target environments. The tech giant, in its 114-page  Digital Defense Report , said it has "observed a reduction in the time between the announcement of a vulnerability and the commoditization of that vulnerability," making it imperative that organizations patch such exploits in a timely manner. This also corroborates with an April 2022 advisory from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which  found  that bad actors are "aggressively" targeting newly disclosed software bugs against broad targets globally. Microsoft noted that it only takes 14 days on average for an exploit to be available in the wild after public disclosure of a flaw, stating that while zero-day attacks are initially limited in scope, they tend to be swiftly adopted by other threat actors, leading to indiscriminat

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has  published  three Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories about multiple vulnerabilities in software from ETIC Telecom, Nokia, and Delta Industrial Automation. Prominent among them is a set of three flaws affecting ETIC Telecom's Remote Access Server (RAS), which "could allow an attacker to obtain sensitive information and compromise the vulnerable device and other connected machines," CISA said. This includes CVE-2022-3703 (CVSS score: 9.0), a critical flaw that stems from the RAS web portal's inability to verify the authenticity of firmware, thereby making it possible to slip in a rogue package that grants backdoor access to the adversary. Two other flaws relate to a directory traversal bug in the RAS API (CVE-2022-41607, CVSS score: 8.6) and a file upload issue (CVE-2022-40981, CVSS score: 8.3) that can be exploited to read arbitrary files and upload malicious files that can compromise th

Multiple vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Checkmk IT Infrastructure monitoring software that could be chained together by an unauthenticated, remote attacker to fully take over affected servers.  "These vulnerabilities can be chained together by an unauthenticated, remote attacker to gain code execution on the server running Checkmk version 2.1.0p10 and lower," SonarSource researcher Stefan Schiller  said  in a technical analysis. Checkmk's open source edition of the monitoring tool is based on  Nagios Core  and offers integrations with  NagVis  for the visualization and generation of topological maps of infrastructures, servers, ports, and processes. According to its Munich-based developer tribe29 GmbH, its Enterprise and Raw editions are used by  over 2,000 customers , including Airbus, Adobe, NASA, Siemens, Vodafone, and others. The four vulnerabilities, which consist of two Critical and two Medium severity bugs, are as follows - A  code injection flaw  

The OpenSSL project has rolled out fixes to contain two high-severity flaws in its widely used cryptography library that could result in a denial-of-service (DoS) and remote code execution. The issues, tracked as  CVE-2022-3602 and CVE-2022-3786 , have been described as buffer overrun vulnerabilities that can be triggered during X.509 certificate verification by supplying a specially-crafted email address. "In a TLS client, this can be triggered by connecting to a malicious server," OpenSSL said in an advisory for CVE-2022-3786. "In a TLS server, this can be triggered if the server requests client authentication and a malicious client connects." OpenSSL is an  open source implementation  of the SSL and TLS protocols used for secure communication and is baked into several operating systems and a wide range of software . Versions 3.0.0 through 3.0.6 of the library are affected by the new flaws, which has been remediated in version 3.0.7. It's worth noting tha