The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: cybersecurity

In the world of professional IT, recruiters look for certificates as an important criterion for eligibility and assessing skills. Any IT professional with résumé that includes CompTIA certificates tends to rise up the pile. Of course, there are many different CompTIA exams you can choose from based on your interest and already chosen path. Our educational and industry partners have introduced " Complete 2020 CompTIA Certification Training Bundle ," aiming to help cybersecurity aspirants prepare for the big ones, with 14 courses covering A+, Security+, Network+, and more. The original fees for all these certification preparation courses are worth nearly $3,486 when subscribed directly through the instructor's platform. However, the great news is that The Hacker News has now partnered with these leading instructors to offer the same training bundle for only $89 to its readers with lifetime access. Special Offer — For a limited time, this bundle's one-time

In April 2020, Cynet launched the world's first Incident Response Challenge to test and reward the skills of Incident Response professionals. The Challenge consisted of 25 incidents, in increasing difficulty, all inspired by real-life scenarios that required participants to go beyond the textbook solution and think outside of the box. Over 2,500 IR professionals competed to be recognized as the top incident responders. Now that the competition is over (however, the challenge website is still open for anyone who wants to practice solving the challenges), Cynet makes the detailed solutions available as a free resource for knowledge and inspiration. Providing the thought process and detailed steps to solve each of the challenges will serve as a training aid and knowledge base for incident responders. The Fine Art of Forensic Investigation The core of any IR processes is the forensic investigation. It uncovers the critical path from the initial stage of suspicion or l

Microsoft has announced a new free-to-use initiative aimed at uncovering forensic evidence of sabotage on Linux systems, including rootkits and intrusive malware that may otherwise go undetected. The cloud offering, dubbed Project Freta , is a snapshot-based memory forensic mechanism that aims to provide automated full-system volatile memory inspection of virtual machine (VM) snapshots, with capabilities to spot malicious software, kernel rootkits , and other stealthy malware techniques such as process hiding . The project is named after Warsaw's Freta Street , the birthplace of Marie Curie, the famous French-Polish physicist who brought X-ray medical imaging to the battlefield during World War I. "Modern malware is complex, sophisticated, and designed with non-discoverability as a core tenet," said Mike Walker, Microsoft's senior director of New Security Ventures. "Project Freta intends to automate and democratize VM forensics to a point where every us

Lately, we can't help noticing an endless cycle where the more enterprises invest in threat prevention; the more hackers adapt and continue to penetrate enterprises. To make things worse, detecting these penetrations still takes too long with an average dwell time that exceeds 100 (!) days. To keep the enterprise protected, IT needs to figure out a way to break this endless cycle without purchasing complex security and data analysis tools and hiring the right (skilled and expensive) security professionals to operate them. Enter MDR An advanced security service, Managed Detection and Response (MDR), provides ongoing threat detection and response, leveraging AI and machine learning to investigate, alert, and contain threats. MDR is becoming popular and gaining traction. In fact, Gartner forecasts that by 2024, 25% of organizations will be using MDR services, up from less than 5% today. And by 2024, 40% of midsize enterprises will use MDR as their only managed security s

A new class of security tools is emerging that promises to significantly improve the effectiveness and efficiency of threat detection and response. Emerging Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions aim to aggregate and correlate telemetry from multiple detection controls and then synthesize response actions. XDR has been referred to as the next step in the evolution of Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions. In fact, Gartner named XDR as the first of their Top 9 Security and Risk Trend for 2020. Because XDR represents a new solution category, there is no single accepted definition of what capabilities and features should (and shouldn't) be included. Each provider approaches XDR with different strengths and perspectives on how what an XDR solution should include. Therefore, selecting an XDR provider is quite challenging as organizations must organize and prioritize a wide range of capabilities that can differ significantly between providers. Cynet is no

Cybersecurity researchers this week discovered a new type of ransomware targeting macOS users that spreads via pirated apps. According to several independent reports from K7 Lab malware researcher Dinesh Devadoss , Patrick Wardle , and Malwarebytes , the ransomware variant — dubbed " EvilQuest " — is packaged along with legitimate apps, which upon installation, disguises itself as Apple's CrashReporter or Google Software Update. Besides encrypting the victim's files, EvilQuest also comes with capabilities to ensure persistence, log keystrokes, create a reverse shell, and steal cryptocurrency wallet-related files. With this development, EvilQuest joins a handful of ransomware strains that have exclusively singled out macOS, including KeRanger and Patcher . The source of the malware appears to be trojanized versions of popular macOS software — such as Little Snitch, a DJ software called Mixed In Key 8, and Ableton Live — that are distributed on popular torre

GeoVision, a Taiwanese manufacturer of video surveillance systems and IP cameras, recently patched three of the four critical flaws impacting its card and fingerprint scanners that could've potentially allowed attackers to intercept network traffic and stage man-in-the-middle attacks. In a report shared exclusively with The Hacker News, enterprise security firm Acronis said it discovered the vulnerabilities last year following a routine security audit of a Singapore-based major retailer. "Malicious attackers can establish persistence on the network and spy on internal users, steal data — without ever getting detected," Acronis said. "They can reuse your fingerprint data to enter your home and/or personal devices, and photos can be easily reused by malicious actors to perpetrate identity theft based on biometric data." In all, the flaws affect at least 6 device families, with over 2,500 vulnerable devices discovered online across Brazil, US, Germany, Ta

Google recently removed 106 more extensions from its Chrome Web Store after they were found illegally collecting sensitive user data as part of a "massive global surveillance campaign" targeting oil and gas, finance, and healthcare sectors. Awake Security, which disclosed the findings late last week, said the malicious browser add-ons were tied back to a single internet domain registrar, GalComm. However, it's not immediately clear who is behind the spyware effort. "This campaign and the Chrome extensions involved performed operations such as taking screenshots of the victim device, loading malware, reading the clipboard, and actively harvesting tokens and user input," Awake Security said. The extensions in question posed as utilities offering capabilities to convert files from one format to the other, among other tools for secure browsing, while relying on thousands of fake reviews to trick unsuspecting users into installing them. Furthermore, the

High impact vulnerabilities in modern communication protocol used by mobile network operators (MNOs) can be exploited to intercept user data and carry out impersonation, fraud, and denial of service (DoS) attacks, cautions a newly published research. The findings are part of a new Vulnerabilities in LTE and 5G Networks 2020 report published by London-based cybersecurity firm Positive Technologies last week. "This paper encompasses the results of security assessments performed during the 2018–2019 timeframe on behalf of 28 telecom operators in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America." Called the GPRS Tunnelling Protocol ( GTP ), the affected Internet Protocol (IP)-based communications standard defines a set of rules governing data traffic over 2G, 3G, and 4G networks. It also forms the basis for GPRS core network and its successor Evolved Packet Core ( EPC ), thus making it possible for users to keep connected to the Internet while moving from one place to the ot

Last week, application security company ImmuniWeb released a new free tool  to monitor and measure an organization's exposure on the Dark Web. To improve the decision-making process for cybersecurity professionals, the free tool crawls Dark Web marketplaces, hacking forums, and Surface Web resources such as Pastebin or GitHub to provide you with a classified schema of your data being offered for sale or leaked. All you need to launch a Dark Web search is to enter your domain name. The volume of stolen credentials on the Dark Web is booming This week, over 26 million user records, including plaintext passwords, stolen from LiveJournal appeared on a Dark Web marketplace for as low as $35. The present week is likewise sadly marked with a compromise of 31 SQL databases (with 1.6 million rows of client data) from webshop owners. There were 7,098 breaches reported in 2019, exposing over 15.1 billion records, a new worst year on record according to Risk Based Security report

As cyberattacks continue to proliferate in volume and increase in sophistication, many organizations acknowledge that some part of their breach protection must be outsourced, introducing a million-dollar question of what type of service to choose form. Today, Cynet releases the Security Outsourcing Guide ( download here ), providing IT Security executives with clear and actionable guidance on the pros and cons of each outsourcing alternative. The reason for security outsourcing increasing momentum is that unlike traditional IT, cyber threats evolve at a much faster pace. While relatively not long ago, AV and firewall covered most of the standard organization's cybersecurity needs, today no security posture can be considered complete without a certain level of incident response capabilities, alert prioritization, root cause analysis and forensic investigation – and security professional that are sufficiently qualified in this domain both are hard to find as well as costly t

Israeli cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details about a new flaw impacting DNS protocol that can be exploited to launch amplified, large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to takedown targeted websites. Called NXNSAttack , the flaw hinges on the DNS delegation mechanism to force DNS resolvers to generate more DNS queries to authoritative servers of attacker's choice, potentially causing a botnet-scale disruption to online services. "We show that the number of DNS messages exchanged in a typical resolution process might be much higher in practice than what is expected in theory, mainly due to a proactive resolution of name-servers' IP addresses," the researchers said in the paper. "We show how this inefficiency becomes a bottleneck and might be used to mount a devastating attack against either or both, recursive resolvers and authoritative servers." Following responsible disclosure of NXNSAttack, several of the companies i

A new version of COMpfun remote access trojan (RAT) has been discovered in the wild that uses HTTP status codes to control compromised systems targeted in a recent campaign against diplomatic entities in Europe. The cyberespionage malware—traced to Turla APT with "medium-to-low level of confidence" based on the history of compromised victims—spread via an initial dropper that masks itself as a visa application, the Global Research and Analysis Team at Kaspersky discovered. The Turla APT , a Russian-based threat group, has a long history of carrying out espionage and watering hole attacks spanning various sectors, including governments, embassies, military, education, research, and pharmaceutical companies. First documented by G-Data in 2014, COMpfun received a significant upgrade last year (called "Reductor") after Kaspersky found that the malware was used to spy on a victim's browser activity by staging man-in-the-middle ( MitM ) attacks on encrypte

As more businesses leverage remote, mobile, and temporary workforces, the elements of business continuity planning are evolving and requiring that IT professionals look deep into the nuts and bolts of connectivity. CISOs and their team members are facing new challenges each and every day, many of which have been driven by digital transformation, as well as the adoption of other productivity-enhancing technologies. A case in point is the rapidly evolving need to support remote and mobile users as businesses change how they interact with staffers. For example, the recent COVID-19 crisis has forced the majority of businesses worldwide to support employees that work from home or other remote locations. Many businesses are encountering numerous problems with connection reliability, as well as the challenges presented by rapidly scaling connectivity to meet a growing number of remote workers. Add to that security and privacy issues, and it becomes evident that CISOs may very wel

More than 4,000 Android apps that use Google's cloud-hosted Firebase databases are 'unknowingly' leaking sensitive information on their users, including their email addresses, usernames, passwords, phone numbers, full names, chat messages and location data. The investigation, led by Bob Diachenko from Security Discovery in partnership with Comparitech, is the result of an analysis of 15,735 Android apps, which comprise about 18 percent of all apps on Google Play store. "4.8 percent of mobile apps using Google Firebase to store user data are not properly secured, allowing anyone to access databases containing users' personal information, access tokens, and other data without a password or any other authentication," Comparitech said. Acquired by Google in 2014, Firebase is a popular mobile application development platform that offers a variety of tools to help third-party app developers build apps, securely store app data and files, fix issues, and ev