The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: cybersecurity

Over the last several years, there have been numerous high-profile security breaches. These breaches have underscored the fact that traditional cyber defenses have become woefully inadequate and that stronger defenses are needed. As such, many organizations have transitioned toward a zero trust security model. A zero trust security model is based on the idea that no IT resource should be trusted implicitly. Prior to the introduction of zero trust security, a user who authenticated into a network was trustworthy for the duration of their session, as was the user's device. In a zero trust model, a user is no longer considered to be trustworthy just because they entered a password at the beginning of their session. Instead, the user's identity is verified through multi-factor authentication, and the user may be prompted to re-authenticate if they attempt to access resources that are particularly sensitive or if the user attempts to do something out of the ordinary. How Complic

2020 was a year of relentless disruptions. The protective layer of secured enterprise networks and controlled IT environments of the physical premises did not exist. Over the past year,  CISOs (Chief Information Security Officers)  have had to grapple with the challenges of bolstering the security posture, minimizing risks, and ensuring business continuity in the new normal. The rise in volumes and sophistication of cyberattacks in the rather borderless IT situation only compounded the challenges. All this has necessitated a shift in cybersecurity priorities in 2021. In this article, we have put together the top cybersecurity priorities for 2021 and beyond that will enable businesses to be fully equipped for future disruptions, without compromising on security. Cybersecurity Priorities for 2021 Strengthen the Cybersecurity Fundamentals CISOs must focus on security fundamentals, including asset management, password management, cyber hygiene, configuration,  vulnerability management

A spam campaign delivering spear-phishing emails aimed at South American organizations has retooled its techniques to include a wide range of commodity remote access trojans (RATs) and geolocation filtering to avoid detection, according to new research. Cybersecurity firm Trend Micro attributed the attacks to an advanced persistent threat (APT) tracked as  APT-C-36  (aka Blind Eagle), a suspected South America espionage group that has been active since at least 2018 and  previously known  for setting its sights on Colombian government institutions and corporations spanning financial, petroleum, and manufacturing sectors. Primarily spread via fraudulent emails by masquerading as Colombian government agencies, such as the National Directorate of Taxes and Customs (DIAN), the infection chain commences when the message recipients open a decoy PDF or Word document that claims to be a seizure order tied to their bank accounts and click on a link that's been generated from a URL short

A targeted phishing campaign aimed at the aviation industry for two years may be spearheaded by a threat actor operating out of Nigeria, highlighting how attackers can carry out small-scale cyber offensives for extended periods of time while staying under the radar. Cisco Talos dubbed the malware attacks "Operation Layover," building on  previous research  from the Microsoft Security Intelligence team in May 2021 that delved into a "dynamic campaign targeting the aerospace and travel sectors with spear-phishing emails that distribute an actively developed loader, which then delivers RevengeRAT or AsyncRAT." "The actor […] doesn't seem to be technically sophisticated, using off-the-shelf malware since the beginning of its activities without developing its own malware," researchers Tiago Pereira and Vitor Ventura  said . "The actor also buys the crypters that allow the usage of such malware without being detected, throughout the years it has use

Continuous integration vendor Travis CI has patched a serious security flaw that exposed API keys, access tokens, and credentials, potentially putting organizations that use public source code repositories at risk of further attacks. The issue — tracked as  CVE-2021-41077  — concerns unauthorized access and plunder of secret environment data associated with a public open-source project during the software build process. The problem is said to have lasted during an eight-day window between September 3 and September 10. Felix Lange of Ethereum has been credited with discovering the leakage on September 7, with the company's Péter Szilágyi  pointing out  that "anyone could exfiltrate these and gain lateral movement into 1000s of [organizations]." Travis CI is a hosted CI/CD (short for continuous integration and continuous deployment) solution used to build and test software projects hosted on source code repository systems like GitHub and Bitbucket. "The desired b

Microsoft on Tuesday addressed a quartet of security flaws as part of its  Patch Tuesday updates  that could be abused by adversaries to target Azure cloud customers and elevate privileges as well as allow for remote takeover of vulnerable systems. The list of flaws, collectively called OMIGOD by researchers from Wiz, affect a little-known software agent called Open Management Infrastructure that's automatically deployed in many Azure services - CVE-2021-38647  (CVSS score: 9.8) - Open Management Infrastructure Remote Code Execution Vulnerability CVE-2021-38648  (CVSS score: 7.8) - Open Management Infrastructure Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2021-38645  (CVSS score: 7.8) - Open Management Infrastructure Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2021-38649  (CVSS score: 7.0) - Open Management Infrastructure Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability Open Management Infrastructure ( OMI ) is an open-source  analogous equivalent  of Windows Management Infrastructure (WMI

In the classic children's movie 'The Princess Bride,' one of the characters utters the phrase, " You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means ." It's freely used as a response to someone's misuse or misunderstanding of a word or phrase. "Response Automation" is another one of those phrases that have different meanings to different people. It's bantered around by the security vendor community so much that its precise meaning, when used, is unclear. Many vendors throw the term out without explaining exactly what they mean by the phrase. One vendor's response automation might, and often do, perform very differently from another vendor's response automation capabilities. But, hey, they have "response automation!" A recently published guide is meant to make sense of Response Automation ( Download here ). It discusses the evolution of response automation and distinguishes five increasingly capabl

Google on Monday released security updates for Chrome web browser to address a total of 11 security issues, two of which it says are actively exploited zero-days in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2021-30632  and  CVE-2021-30633 , the  vulnerabilities  concern an out of bounds write in V8 JavaScript engine and a use after free flaw in Indexed DB API respectively, with the internet giant crediting anonymous researchers for reporting the bugs on September 8. As is typically the case, the company said it's "aware that exploits for CVE-2021-30632 and CVE-2021-30633 exist in the wild" without sharing additional specifics about how, when, and where the vulnerabilities were exploited, or the threat actors that may be abusing them. With these two security shortcomings, Google has addressed a total of 11 zero-day vulnerabilities in Chrome since the start of the year — CVE-2021-21148  - Heap buffer overflow in V8 CVE-2021-21166  - Object recycle issue in audio CVE-2021-21193  -

A newly discovered side-channel attack demonstrated on modern processors can be weaponized to successfully overcome  Site Isolation protections  weaved into Google Chrome and Chromium browsers and leak sensitive data in a  Spectre-style   speculative execution  attack. Dubbed " Spook.js " by academics from the University of Michigan, University of Adelaide, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Tel Aviv University, the technique is a  JavaScript-based line of attack  that specifically aims to get around barriers Google put in place to potentially prevent leakage by ensuring that content from different domains is not shared in the same address space after Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities came to light in January 2018. "An attacker-controlled webpage can know which other pages from the same websites a user is currently browsing, retrieve sensitive information from these pages, and even recover login credentials (e.g., username and password) when they are autofilled,

There are plenty of pop culture references to rogue AI and robots, and appliances turning on their human masters. It is the stuff of science fiction, fun, and fantasy, but with IoT and connected devices becoming more prevalent in our homes, we need more discussion around cybersecurity and safety. Software is all around us, and it's very easy to forget just how much we're relying on lines of code to do all those clever things that provide us so much innovation and convenience. Much like web-based software, APIs, and mobile devices, vulnerable code in embedded systems can be exploited if it is uncovered by an attacker.  While it's unlikely that an army of toasters is coming to enslave the human race (although, the  Tesla bot  is a bit concerning) as the result of a cyberattack, malicious cyber events are still possible. Some of our cars, planes, and medical devices also rely on intricate embedded systems code to perform key tasks, and the prospect of these objects being compromised i

Network security solutions provider Fortinet confirmed that a malicious actor had unauthorizedly disclosed VPN login names and passwords associated with 87,000 FortiGate SSL-VPN devices. "These credentials were obtained from systems that remained unpatched against  CVE-2018-13379  at the time of the actor's scan. While they may have since been patched, if the passwords were not reset, they remain vulnerable," the company  said  in a statement on Wednesday. The disclosure comes after the threat actor leaked a list of Fortinet credentials for free on a new Russian-speaking forum called  RAMP  that launched in July 2021 as well as on Groove ransomware's data leak site, with Advanced Intel  noting  that the "breach list contains raw access to the top companies" spanning across 74 countries, including India, Taiwan, Italy, France, and Israel. "2,959 out of 22,500 victims are U.S. entities," the researchers said. CVE-2018-13379  relates to a path t

The work-from-anywhere economy has opened up the possibility for your human resources team to source the best talent from anywhere. To scale their operations, organizations are leveraging the cloud to accelerate essential HR functions such as recruiting, onboarding, evaluating, and more. SAP is leading this HR transformation with its human capital management (HCM) solution, SAP SuccessFactors. Delivering HR solutions from the cloud enables employees and administrators to not only automate typical tasks, such as providing a report on employee attrition, but also allows them to complete these tasks from anywhere and on any device. SuccessFactors makes it easy for employees to access what they need. But the wide range of sensitive employee data within SuccessFactors creates additional security and compliance challenges. Whether it's personal and financial information used for payroll or health information for benefits, you need the right cybersecurity to ensure that sensitive data,

Most cyber security today involves much more planning, and much less reacting than in the past. Security teams spend most of their time preparing their organizations' defenses and doing operational work. Even so, teams often must quickly spring into action to respond to an attack. Security teams with copious resources can quickly shift between these two modes. They have enough resources to allocate to respond properly. Lean IT security teams, however, are more hard-pressed to react effectively. A new guide by XDR provider Cynet ( download here ), however, argues that lean teams can still respond effectively. It just takes some work.  For teams that are resource-constrained, success starts with having a clear plan and putting the tools and infrastructure in place for the organization to follow properly. The guide breaks down the tools, factors, and knowledge that go into optimizing an organization's time to respond.  Building a successful incident response plan Today's

The U.S. Cyber Command on Friday warned of ongoing mass exploitation attempts in the wild targeting a now-patched critical security vulnerability affecting Atlassian Confluence deployments that could be abused by unauthenticated attackers to take control of a vulnerable system. "Mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluence  CVE-2021-26084  is ongoing and expected to accelerate," the Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF)  said  in a tweet. The warning was also echoed by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency ( CISA ) and  Atlassian itself  in a series of independent advisories. Bad Packets  noted  on Twitter it "detected mass scanning and exploit activity from hosts in Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Nepal, Romania, Russia and the U.S. targeting Atlassian Confluence servers vulnerable to remote code execution." Atlassian Confluence is a widely popular web-based documentation service that allows teams to create, collaborate, and organize on different proj

Network Detection & Response (NDR) is an emerging technology developed to close the blind security spots left by conventional security solutions, which hackers exploited to gain a foothold in target networks. Nowadays, enterprises are using a plethora of security solutions to protect their network from cyber threats. The most prominent ones are Firewalls, IPS/IDS, SIEM, EDR, and XDR (which combines the functionality of EDR and SIEM). However, all these solutions suffer from security gaps that prevent them from stopping advanced cyber-attacks efficiently.  NDR was developed based on Intrusion Detection System (IDS). An IDS solution is installed on the network perimeter and monitors the network traffic for suspicious activities. IDS systems suffer from many downsides that make them inefficient in stopping modern cyber-attacks: IDS use signature-based detection techniques to discover abnormal activities, making them unable to spot unknown attacks. In addition, IDS systems trigger

Cybersecurity could be described as a marathon for security teams that spend most of their time building sustained defenses that prevent threats day after day. However, they must be ready to hit a sprint whenever an attack succeeds since attack duration, and the resulting damages are directly correlated.  Reacting to a successful attack is a major challenge for lean security teams today since speed tends to be a result of size. Large teams with abundant resources can respond to incidents much faster as they can expend those resources freely. Lean security teams face the same costs and resource needs but with a much smaller pool to call from. A new live webinar by XDR provider Cynet shows why that doesn't have to be the case ( register here ).  The webinar breaks down how even large enterprises struggle with time to response. Look at any of the major breaches of the past years and you'll find large security teams that overlooked red flags or mishandled their incident response. It's n

New vulnerabilities have been discovered in Fortress S03 Wi-Fi Home Security System that could be potentially abused by a malicious party to gain unauthorized access with an aim to alter system behavior, including disarming the devices without the victim's knowledge. The two unpatched issues, tracked under the identifiers CVE-2021-39276 (CVSS score: 5.3) and CVE-2021-39277 (CVSS score: 5.7), were discovered and reported by cybersecurity firm Rapid7 in May 2021 with a 60-day deadline to fix the weaknesses. The Fortress S03 Wi-Fi Home Security System is a do-it-yourself (DIY) alarm system that enables users to secure their homes and small businesses from burglars, fires, gas leaks, and water leaks by leveraging Wi-Fi and RFID technology for keyless entry. The company's security and surveillance systems are used by "thousands of clients and continued customers,"  according  to its website. Calling the vulnerabilities "trivially easy to exploit," Rapid7 re

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday  added  single-factor authentication to the short list of "exceptionally risky" cybersecurity practices that could expose critical infrastructure as well as government and the private sector entities to devastating cyberattacks. Single-factor authentication is a  method  of signing in users to websites and remote systems by using only one way of verifying their identity, typically a combination of username and password. It's considered to be of low-security, since it heavily relies on "matching one factor — such as a password — to a username to gain access to a system." But with weak, reused, and common passwords posing a grave threat and emerging a lucrative attack vector, the use of single-factor authentication can lead to unnecessary risk of compromise and increase the possibility of account takeover by cybercriminals. With the latest development, the  list of bad practices  now e