Windows Powershell | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

It is no secret that cybercriminals are becoming dramatically more adept, innovative, and stealthy with each passing day. While new forms of cybercrime are on the rise, traditional activities seem to be shifting towards more clandestine techniques that involve the exploitation of standard system tools and protocols, which are not always monitored. The latest example of such attack is DNSMessenger – a new Remote Access Trojan (RAT) that uses DNS queries to conduct malicious PowerShell commands on compromised computers – a technique that makes the RAT difficult to detect onto targeted systems. The Trojan came to the attention of Cisco's Talos threat research group by a security researcher named Simpo, who highlighted a tweet that encoded text in a PowerShell script that said 'SourceFireSux.' SourceFire is one of Cisco's corporate security products. DNSMessenger Attack Is Completely Fileless Further analysis of the malware ultimately led Talos researchers to

'Microsoft loves Linux' and this has never been so true than now. Microsoft today made its PowerShell scripting language and command-line shell available to the open source developer community on GitHub under the permissive MIT license. The company has also launched alpha versions of PowerShell for Linux (specifically Red Hat, Ubuntu, and CentOS) and Mac OS X, in addition, of course, to Windows. Now, people can download binaries of the software, as well as access source code of the app from the new PowerShell GitHub page. "Users across Windows and Linux, current and new PowerShell users, even application developers can experience a rich interactive scripting language as well as a heterogeneous automation and configuration management that works well with your existing tools," Microsoft says in its blog post . "Your PowerShell skills are now even more marketable, and your Windows and Linux teams, who may have had to work separately, can now work toge

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

Until now Unix and Linux system administrators have to download a third-party SSH client software like Putty on their Windows machines to securely manage their machines and servers remotely through Secure Shell protocol or Shell Session (better known as SSH ). This might have always been an awkward feature of Windows platform, as it lacks both – a native SSH client software for connecting to Linux machines, and an SSH server to support inbound connections from Linux machines. But… Believe it or not: You don't need to deal with any third-party SSH client now, as Microsoft is working on supporting OpenSSH. Yes, Microsoft has finally decided to bring OpenSSH client and server to Windows. The PowerShell team at Microsoft has announced that the company is going to support and contribute to OpenSSH community in an effort to deliver better SSH support in the PowerShell and Windows SSH software solutions. So, the upcoming version of Windows PowerShell – the co

Ransomware is one of the most blatant and obvious money making schemes for cybercriminals and it was most likely to be known when last year Cryptolocker ransomware targeted millions of computers worldwide. Recently, security researchers at the Antivirus firm TrendLabs have unearthed another sophisticated variant of the ransomware malware which is employing  Windows PowerShell  in an effort to encrypt files on the victims' computer. The firm detected the variant as TROJ_POSHCODER.A . Windows PowerShell is a task automation and configuration management framework from Microsoft, consisting of a command-line shell and associated scripting language. It provides full access to COM and WMI, enabling administrators to perform administrative tasks on both local and remote Windows systems as well as WS-Management and CIM enabling management of remote Linux systems and network devices. It is believed that cybercriminals have used this feature of Windows just in order to make