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A Chinese hacking group has been found leveraging a new exploit chain in iOS devices to install a spyware implant targeting the Uyghur Muslim minority in China's autonomous region of Xinjiang. The findings, published by digital forensics firm Volexity , reveal that the exploit — named "Insomnia" — works against iOS versions 12.3, 12.3.1, and 12.3.2 using a flaw in WebKit that was patched by Apple with the release of iOS 12.4 in July 2019. Volexity said the attacks were carried out by a state-sponsored hacking group it calls Evil Eye , the same threat actor that it said was behind a series of attacks against the Uyghurs last September following a bombshell disclosure by Google's Project Zero team . China has long considered Xinjiang a breeding ground for " separatists, terrorists and religious extremists ," with the residents of the region — ethnically Turkic Muslims — thrown into concentration camps , and subjected to persecution and high-tech surv

Cybersecurity firm Cynet today announced the launch of a first of its kind challenge to enable Incident Response professionals to test their skills with 25 forensic challenges that were built by top researchers and analysts. The challenge is available on https://incident-response-challenge.com/ and is open to anyone willing to test his or her investigation skills, between April 21st and May 15th. What's more interesting is that there's a USD 5000 prize for the first-place winner of the challenge. Forensic investigation is at the core of any IR processes and provides the critical path from the initial stage of suspicion or limited attack view to the concrete and actionable knowledge on the attack's root cause and the impact that is essential for recovery and restore operations. The challenge of the incident responder is to identify and collect the scattered traces the attackers have left them and connect the dots to understand the how, what, and where of the atta

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

A cybersecurity researcher today publicly disclosed technical details and PoC for 4 unpatched zero-day vulnerabilities affecting an enterprise security software offered by IBM after the company refused to acknowledge the responsibly submitted disclosure. The affected premium product in question is IBM Data Risk Manager (IDRM) that has been designed to analyze sensitive business information assets of an organization and determine associated risks. According to Pedro Ribeiro from Agile Information Security firm, IBM Data Risk Manager contains three critical severity vulnerabilities and a high impact bug, all listed below, which can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker reachable over the network, and when chained together could also lead to remote code execution as root. Authentication Bypass Command Injection Insecure Default Password Arbitrary File Download Ribeiro successfully tested the flaws against IBM Data Risk Manager version 2.0.1 to 2.0.3, which is not the la

A newly discovered unpatchable hardware vulnerability in Xilinx programmable logic products could allow an attacker to break bitstream encryption, and clone intellectual property, change the functionality, and even implant hardware Trojans. The details of the attacks against Xilinx 7-Series and Virtex-6 Field Programmable Gate Arrays ( FPGAs ) have been covered in a paper titled " The Unpatchable Silicon: A Full Break of the Bitstream Encryption of Xilinx 7-Series FPGAs " by a group of academics from the Horst Goertz Institute for IT Security and Max Planck Institute for Cyber Security and Privacy. "We exploit a design flaw which piecewise leaks the decrypted bitstream," the researchers said. "In the attack, the FPGA is used as a decryption oracle, while only access to a configuration interface is needed. The attack does not require any sophisticated tools and, depending on the target system, can potentially be launched remotely." The findings wil

A new malware campaign has been found using coronavirus-themed lures to strike government and energy sectors in Azerbaijan with remote access trojans (RAT) capable of exfiltrating sensitive documents, keystrokes, passwords, and even images from the webcam. The targeted attacks employ Microsoft Word documents as droppers to deploy a previously unknown Python-based RAT dubbed "PoetRAT" due to various references to sonnets by English playwright William Shakespeare. "The RAT has all the standard features of this kind of malware, providing full control of the compromised system to the operation," said Cisco Talos in an analysis published last week. According to the researchers, the malware specifically targets supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems in the energy industry, such as wind turbine systems, whose identities are currently not known. The development is the latest in a surge in cyberattacks exploiting the ongoing coronavirus pandemi

The United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) yesterday issued a fresh advisory alerting organizations to change all their Active Directory credentials as a defense against cyberattacks trying to leverage a known remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Pulse Secure VPN servers—even if they have already patched it. The warning comes three months after another CISA alert urging users and administrators to patch Pulse Secure VPN environments to thwart attacks exploiting the vulnerability. "Threat actors who successfully exploited CVE-2019-11510 and stole a victim organization's credentials will still be able to access — and move laterally through — that organization's network after the organization has patched this vulnerability if the organization did not change those stolen credentials," CISA said. CISA has also released a tool to help network administrators look for any indicators of compromise associated with the flaw.

Cloud services have become increasingly important to many companies' daily operations, and the rapid adoption of web apps has allowed businesses to continue operating with limited productivity hiccups, even as global coronavirus restrictions have forced much of the world to work from home. But at the same time, even major corporations have fallen prey to hackers. How can you maintain the integrity of your IT resources and data while still taking advantage of the benefits of software as a service (SaaS)? While cybersecurity is a broad and complicated topic, let's consider a hypothetical SaaS scenario and examine some of the risks. Imagine that one of your employees is writing a sensitive report. It could have financial or medical data in it. It could have information on a revolutionary new design. Whatever it is, the report needs to be kept confidential. What would happen if your employee writes the report in Google Docs? Let's assume that this decision wasn&

Coronavirus crisis introduces a heavy burden on the CISOs with the collective impact of a mass transition to working remotely coupled with a surge of cyberattacks that strive to monetize the general chaos. Security vendors, unintendedly, contribute to this burden by a relentless generation of noise in the form of attack reports, best practices, tips, and threat landscape analysis. Here we have a new " CISO Checklist for Secure Remote Working " ( download here ) that has been built to assist CISOs in navigating through this noise, providing them with a concise and high-level list of the absolute essentials needed to ensure their organization is well protected in these challenging times. The Coronavirus quarantine forces us to face a new reality. It is critical to acknowledge this new reality in order to understand how to successfully confront these changes. Make no mistake – these changed apply to any organization, regardless of its former security posture. For exa

International hotel chain Marriott today disclosed a data breach impacting nearly 5.2 million hotel guests, making it the second security incident to hit the company in recent years. "At the end of February 2020, we identified that an unexpected amount of guest information may have been accessed using the login credentials of two employees at a franchise property," Marriott said in a statement . "We believe this activity started in mid-January 2020. Upon discovery, we confirmed that the login credentials were disabled, immediately began an investigation, implemented heightened monitoring, and arranged resources to inform and assist guests." The incident exposed guests' personal information such as contact details (name, mailing address, email address, and phone number), loyalty account information (account number and points balance), and additional information such as company, gender, dates of births, room preferences, and language preferences. The ho

Cybersecurity researchers with Qihoo 360's NetLab today unveiled details of two recently spotted zero-day cyberattack campaigns in the wild targeting enterprise-grade networking devices manufactured by Taiwan-based DrayTek. According to the report , at least two separate groups of hackers exploited two critical remote command injection vulnerabilities ( CVE-2020-8515 ) affecting DrayTek Vigor enterprise switches, load-balancers, routers and VPN gateway devices to eavesdrop on network traffic and install backdoors. The zero-day attacks started somewhere at the end of last November or at the beginning of December and are potentially still ongoing against thousands of publicly exposed DrayTek switche s, Vigor 2960, 3900, 300B devices that haven't yet been patched with the latest firmware updates released last month. The zero-day vulnerabilities in question can be exploited by any unauthorized remote attackers to inject and execute arbitrary commands on the system, as als

A newly discovered watering-hole campaign is targeting Apple iPhone users in Hong Kong by using malicious website links as a lure to install spyware on the devices. According to research published by Trend Micro and Kaspersky , the " Operation Poisoned News " attack leverages a remote iOS exploit chain to deploy a feature-rich implant called 'LightSpy' through links to local news websites, which when clicked, executes the malware payload and allows an interloper to exfiltrate sensitive data from the affected device and even take full control. Watering-hole attacks typically let a bad actor compromise a specific group of end-users by infecting websites that they are known to visit, with an intention to gain access to the victim's device and load it with malware. The APT group, dubbed "TwoSail Junk" by Kaspersky, is said to be leveraging vulnerabilities present in iOS 12.1 and 12.2 spanning all models from iPhone 6 to the iPhone X, with the attac

Preying on public fears, the ongoing coronavirus outbreak is proving to be a goldmine of opportunity for attackers to stage a variety of malware attacks, phishing campaigns, and create scam sites and malicious tracker apps. Now in a fresh twist, third-party Android app developers too have begun to take advantage of the situation to use coronavirus-related keywords in their app names, descriptions, or in the package names so as to drop malware, perpetrate financial theft and rank higher in Google Play Store searches related to the topic. "Most malicious apps found are bundle threats that range from ransomware to SMS-sending malware, and even spyware designed to clean out the contents of victims' devices for personal or financial data," Bitdefender researchers said in a telemetry analysis report shared with The Hacker News. The find by Bitdefender is the latest in an avalanche of digital threats piggybacking on the coronavirus pandemic. Using Coronavirus-Relat

The Coronavirus is hitting hard on the world's economy, creating a high volume of uncertainty within organizations. Cybersecurity firm Cynet today revealed new data, showing that the Coronavirus now has a significant impact on information security and that the crisis is actively exploited by threat actors. In light of these insights, Cynet has also shared a few ways to best prepare for the Coronavirus derived threat landscape and provides a solution ( learn more here ) to protect employees that are working from home with their personal computers because of the Coronavirus. The researchers identify two main trends – attacks that aim to steal remote user credentials and weaponized email attacks: Remote User Credential Theft The direct impact of the Coronavirus is a comprehensive quarantine policy that compels multiple organizations to allow their workforce to work from home to maintain business continuity. This inevitably entails shifting a significant portion of the wor

Online guitar tutoring website TrueFire has apparently suffered a 'Magecart' style data breach incident that may have potentially led to the exposure of its customers' personal information and payment card information. TrueFire is one of the popular guitar tutoring websites with over 1 million users, where wanna-be-guitarists pay online to access a massive library of over 900 courses and 40,000 video lessons. Though TrueFire hasn't yet publicly disclosed or acknowledged the breach, The Hacker News learned about the incident after a few affected customers posted online  details of a notification they received from the company last week. The Hacker News also found a copy of the same ' Notice Of Data Breach ' uploaded recently to the website of Montana Department of Justice , specifically on a section where the government shares information on data breaches that also affect Montana residents. Confirming the breach, the notification reveals that an attack