cloud server | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The mass adoption of cloud infrastructure is fully justified by innumerable advantages. As a result, today, organizations' most sensitive business applications, workloads, and data are in the cloud. Hackers, good and bad, have noticed that trend and effectively evolved their attack techniques to match this new tantalizing target landscape. With threat actors' high reactivity and adaptability, it is recommended to assume that organizations are under attack and that some user accounts or applications might already have been compromised. Finding out exactly which assets are put at risk through compromised accounts or breached assets requires mapping potential attack paths across a comprehensive map of all the relationships between assets.  Today, mapping potential attack paths is performed with scanning tools such as AzureHound or AWSPX. Those are graph-based tools enabling the visualization of assets and resources relationships within the related cloud service provider. By r...

Threat actors are actively incorporating public cloud services from Amazon and Microsoft into their malicious campaigns to deliver commodity remote access trojans (RATs) such as  Nanocore ,  Netwire , and  AsyncRAT  to siphon sensitive information from compromised systems. The spear-phishing attacks, which commenced in October 2021, have primarily targeted entities located in the U.S., Canada, Italy, and Singapore, researchers from Cisco Talos said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Using existing legitimate infrastructure to facilitate intrusions is increasingly becoming part of an attacker's playbook as it obviates the need to host their own servers, not to mention be used as a cloaking mechanism to evade detection by security solutions. In recent months, collaboration and communication tools like  Discord, Slack, and Telegram  have found a place in many an infection chain to  commandeer and exfiltrate data  from the victim machines....

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed multiple vulnerabilities in a third-party driver software developed by Eltima that have been "unwittingly inherited" by cloud desktop solutions like Amazon Workspaces, Accops, and NoMachine and could provide attackers a path to perform an array of malicious activities. "These vulnerabilities allow attackers to escalate privileges enabling them to disable security products, overwrite system components, corrupt the operating system, or perform malicious operations unimpeded," SentinelOne Senior Security Researcher, Kasif Dekel, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The 27 flaws have since been addressed in Amazon Nimble Studio AMI, Amazon NICE DCV, Amazon WorkSpaces, Amazon AppStream, NoMachine, Accops HyWorks, Accops HyWorks DVM Tools, Eltima USB Network Gate, Amzetta zPortal Windows zClient, Amzetta zPortal DVM Tools, FlexiHub, and Donglify. At its core, the issues reside in a product developed by Eltima that of...

WhatsApp on Friday  announced  it will roll out support for end-to-end encrypted chat backups on the cloud for Android and iOS users, paving the way for storing information such as chat messages and photos in Apple iCloud or Google Drive in a cryptographically secure manner. The optional feature, which will go live to all of its two billion users in the coming weeks, is expected to only work on the primary devices tied to their accounts, and not companion devices such as desktops or laptops that simply mirror the content of WhatsApp on the phones. The development marks an escalation in the growing tussle over encryption technology and meeting law enforcement needs, wherein privacy-preserving technologies have created impenetrable barriers to comply with legal demands to access vast swathes of digital information stored on smartphones and the cloud — a phenomenon referred to as the "going dark" problem. While the Facebook-owned messaging platform flipped the switch on end-...

Security researchers have discovered the first known malware, dubbed " Siloscope ," targeting Windows Server containers to infect Kubernetes clusters in cloud environments. "Siloscape is heavily obfuscated malware targeting Kubernetes clusters through Windows containers,"  said  Unit 42 researcher Daniel Prizmant. "Its main purpose is to open a backdoor into poorly configured Kubernetes clusters in order to run malicious containers such as, but not limited to, cryptojackers." Siloscape, first detected in March 2021, is characterized by several techniques, including targeting common cloud applications such as web servers to gain an initial foothold via known vulnerabilities, following which it leverages Windows container escape techniques to break out of the confines of the container and gain remote code execution on the underlying node. A container is an  isolated, lightweight silo  for running an application on the host operating system. The malware...

Cybersecurity researcher Paul Litvak today disclosed an unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft Azure Functions that could be used by an attacker to escalate privileges and escape the Docker container used for hosting them. The findings come as part of Intezer Lab 's investigations into the Azure compute infrastructure. Following disclosure to Microsoft, the Windows maker is said to have "determined that the vulnerability has no security impact on Function users, since the host itself is still protected by another defense boundary against the elevated position we reached in the container host." Azure Functions , analogous to Amazon AWS Lambda, is a serverless solution that allows users to run event-triggered code without having to provision or manage infrastructure explicitly while simultaneously making it possible to scale and allocate compute and resources based on demand. By incorporating Docker into the mix, it makes it possible for developers to easily deploy and ...

Days after cybersecurity researchers sounded the alarm over two critical vulnerabilities in the SaltStack configuration framework , a hacking campaign has already begun exploiting the flaws to breach servers of LineageOS, Ghost, and DigiCert. Tracked as CVE-2020-11651 and CVE-2020-11652 , the disclosed flaws could allow an adversary to execute arbitrary code on remote servers deployed in data centers and cloud environments. The issues were fixed by SaltStack in a release published on April 29th. "We expect that any competent hacker will be able to create 100% reliable exploits for these issues in under 24 hours," F-Secure researchers had previously warned in an advisory last week. LineageOS, a maker of an open-source operating system based on Android, said it detected the intrusion on May 2nd at around 8 pm Pacific Time. "Around 8 pm PST on May 2nd, 2020, an attacker used a CVE in our SaltStack master to gain access to our infrastructure," the company n...

Two severe security flaws have been discovered in the open-source SaltStack Salt configuration framework that could allow an adversary to execute arbitrary code on remote servers deployed in data centers and cloud environments. The vulnerabilities were identified by F-Secure researchers earlier this March and disclosed on Thursday, a day after SaltStack released a patch (version 3000.2) addressing the issues , rated with CVSS score 10. "The vulnerabilities, allocated CVE IDs CVE-2020-11651 and CVE-2020-11652 , are of two different classes," the cybersecurity firm said . "One being authentication bypass where functionality was unintentionally exposed to unauthenticated network clients, the other being directory traversal where untrusted input (i.e., parameters in network requests) was not sanitized correctly allowing unconstrained access to the entire filesystem of the master server." The researchers warned that the flaws could be exploited in the wild imm...

Cybersecurity researchers at Check Point today disclosed details of two recently patched potentially dangerous vulnerabilities in Microsoft Azure services that, if exploited, could have allowed hackers to target several businesses that run their web and mobile apps on Azure. Azure App Service is a fully-managed integrated service that enables users to create web and mobile apps for any platform or device, and easily integrate them with SaaS solutions, on-premises apps to automate business processes. According to a report researchers shared with The Hacker News, the first security vulnerability ( CVE-2019-1234 ) is a request spoofing issue that affected Azure Stack, a hybrid cloud computing software solution by Microsoft. If exploited, the issue would have enabled a remote hacker to unauthorizedly access screenshots and sensitive information of any virtual machine running on Azure infrastructure—it doesn't matter if they're running on a shared, dedicated or isolated vir...

Skyrocketing data breaches bring incalculable losses to organizations and can cost cybersecurity executives their jobs. Here we examine the top five places in 2019 where cybercriminals are stealing corporate and government data without ever getting noticed and then learn how to avoid falling victim to unscrupulous attackers. 1. Misconfigured Cloud Storage 48% of all corporate data is stored in the cloud compared to 35% three years ago, according to a 2019 Global Cloud Security Study by cybersecurity company Thales that surveyed over 3,000 professionals across the globe. Contrastingly, only 32% of the organizations believe that protecting data in the cloud is their own responsibility, counting on cloud and IaaS providers to safeguard the data. Worse, 51% of the organizations do not use encryption or tokenization in the cloud. (ISC)² Cloud Security Report 2019 assets that 64% of cybersecurity professionals perceive data loss and leakage as the biggest risk associated with the...

The massive data breach at Capital One – America's seventh-largest bank, according to revenue – has challenged many common assumptions about cloud computing for the first time. Ironically, the incident, which exposed some 106 million Capital One customers' accounts , has only reinforced the belief that the cloud remains the safest way to store sensitive data. "You have to compare [the cloud] not against 'perfect' but against 'on-premises.'" Ed Amoroso, a former chief security officer at AT&T, told Fortune magazine this week. He wasn't the only voice defending cloud computing in the wake of a hack attack. In an article titled "Don't Doubt the Cloud," Fortune columnist Robert Hackett , wrote: "The cloud is undeniably convenient and, more importantly, better in terms of security than what the majority of companies can achieve alone." The problem, experts said, was not cloud computing but rather the tendency for...

German security researchers claim to have found a new practical attack against virtual machines (VMs) protected using AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology that could allow attackers to recover plaintext memory data from guest VMs. AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology, which comes with EPYC line of processors, is a hardware feature that encrypts the memory of each VM in a way that only the guest itself can access the data, protecting it from other VMs/containers and even from an untrusted hypervisor. Discovered by researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security in Munich, the page-fault side channel attack, dubbed SEVered, takes advantage of lack in the integrity protection of the page-wise encryption of the main memory, allowing a malicious hypervisor to extract the full content of the main memory in plaintext from SEV-encrypted VMs. Here's the outline of the SEVered attack, as briefed in the paper :...

How many more data dumps does this hacker have with him that has yet to be exposed? Well, no one knows the answer, but we were recently made aware of another data breach from Peace – the same Russian hacker who was behind the massive breaches in some of the most popular social media sites including LinkedIn , MySpace , Tumblr , and VK.com . The hacker under the nickname "Peace" (or Peace_of_mind) is now selling over 51 Million records obtained from iMesh – now defunct peer-to-peer file sharing service. The New York-based iMesh was one of the first and most popular file sharing services that allowed users to share multimedia files with their friends via the peer-to-peer (or P2P) protocol. Launched in the late 90s, iMesh became the third-largest service in the United States in 2009, but the service was unexpectedly closed down last month. LeakedSource, a search engine site that indexes leaked login credentials from data breaches, noted in a blog post that the comp...

This year, Microsoft impressed the world with 'Microsoft loves Linux' announcements, like developing a custom Linux-based OS for running Azure Cloud Switch, selecting Ubuntu as the operating system for its Cloud-based Big Data services and bringing the popular Bash shell to Windows 10 . Now, the next big news for open-source community: Microsoft has released its own custom distribution of FreeBSD 10.3 as a "ready-made" Virtual Machine image in order to make the operating system available directly from the Azure Marketplace. FreeBSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) is an open source Unix-like advanced computer operating system used to power modern servers, desktops as well as embedded systems. Until now, the only way for Azure customers to run FreeBSD was to make use of a custom image from outside of Azure (from the FreeBSD Foundation). However, the new release makes it easier for Azure users to launch FreeBSD directly from the Azure Marketplace and get...

Where tech companies like Facebook and Google prefer to move their data centers to colder countries to reduce their air conditioning bill, Microsoft has come up with an even better home for data centers while cutting high energy costs for cooling them: Under the Sea . Here's what Microsoft says: "50% of us live near the coast. Why doesn't our data?" Building massive data centers underwater might sound crazy, but it is exactly something Microsoft is testing with its first submarine data center, dubbed Leona Philpot . World's First Underwater Data Center The testing is part of Microsoft's plan dubbed Project Natick — an ongoing research project to build and run a data center that is submerged in the ocean, which the company believes, could make data centers faster, cost-effective, environmentally friendly and easier to set up. Leona Philpot (named after the Halo character from Microsoft's Xbox) was tested last August, when engineer...

Have you ever seen any mobile application working in the background silently even after you have uninstalled it completely? I have seen Google Photos app doing the same. Your Android smartphone continues to upload your phone photos to Google servers without your knowledge , even if you have already uninstalled the Google Photos app from your device. Nashville Business Journal editor David Arnott found that Google Photos app uploaded all his personal photographs from the device into the service even after uninstalling it. Arnott provided a video demonstration showing that after uninstalling the Google Photos app from his Samsung smartphone, the photograph he took off his coffee mug still wound up being synced into his account on the web. "Months ago, I downloaded the [Photos] app to play with it, but I did not like it and so un-installed the app after just a few days," Arnott tweeted Wednesday. "This evening, I went back to Google Photos on my l...

Security researchers have discovered a number of critical vulnerabilities in the Java environment of the Google App Engine (GAE) that enables attackers to bypass critical security sandbox defenses. Google App Engine is Google's PaaS (Platform as a Service) Cloud computing Platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. GAE offers to run custom-built programs using a wide variety of popular languages and frameworks, out of which many are built on the Java environment. The vulnerabilities was reported by Security Explorations, the same security research company that carried out multiple researches related to Java in past. The discovery was announced on the Full Disclosure security mailing list by Adam Gowdiak , founder and CEO of Security Explorations. According to the security firm, the flaws can be exploited by attackers to achieve a complete Java VM security sandbox escape, as well as to execute an arbitrary code. The researchers ...

The Pirate Bay is the world's largest torrent tracker site which handles requests from millions of users everyday and is in the top 100 most visited websites on the Internet. Generally, The Pirate Bay is famous for potentially hosting illegal contents on its website. Despite years of persecution, it continues to disobey copyright laws worldwide. Even both the founders of The Pirate Bay (TPB) file exchange service were arrested by the authorities and are in prison, but their notorious pirated content exchange continues to receive millions of unique visitors daily. That's really Strange!! But how?? Recently, The Pirate Bay team has revealed how cloud technology made its service's virtual servers truly secure to avoid police raids and detection. While it doesn't own any physical servers, The Pirate Bay is working on " virtual machines " through a few commercial cloud hosting services, even without knowing that whom they are dealing with. According to Torren...