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There are many different types of accounts in a typical Active Directory environment. These include user accounts, computer accounts, and a particular type of account called a  service account .  A service account is a special type of account that serves a specific purpose for services, and ultimately, applications in the environment. These special-purpose Active Directory accounts are also the subject of cybersecurity risks in the environment. What is a service account? What special privileges does it have on local systems? What cybersecurity risks can relate to service accounts used in the environment? How can IT admins find weak or non-expiring passwords used in Active Directory for service accounts? What is a Windows service? As mentioned at the outset, specific Active Directory accounts serve different purposes in Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS). You can assign Active Directory accounts as service accounts, a special-purpose account that most organizations create and

As managed security service providers, you're always on the lookout for new platforms. One that can generate further business, enables you to scale easily without investing in more human resources and provides that value immediately. In the meanwhile, your clients are constantly demanding more security for a lesser cost. Cynet recently published an 8-min video detailing their platform, the Cynet 360 Autonomous XDR Platform. In their video, Cynet specifically focuses on managed service partners, showing the security and business benefits that the platform provides. The video shows the "partner view" of the system and demonstrates how the platform is used to manage multiple clients. Learn more about the Cynet 360 platform for Managed Service Providers  here . Cynet 360 natively combines several security components to reduce your operational costs. First, an XDR - Extended Detection and Response, which is a consolidated pre-integrated platform of multiple security sol

Over the past two years, a shocking  51% of organizations surveyed in a leading industry report have been compromised by a cyberattack.  Yes, over half.  And this, in a world where enterprises deploy  an average of 53 different security solutions  to safeguard their digital domain.  Alarming? Absolutely. A recent survey of CISOs and CIOs, commissioned by Pentera and conducted by Global Surveyz Research, offers a quantifiable glimpse into this evolving battlefield, revealing a stark contrast between the growing risks and the tightening budget constraints under which cybersecurity professionals operate. With this report, Pentera has once again taken a magnifying glass to the state of pentesting to release its annual report about today's pentesting practices. Engaging with 450 security executives from North America, LATAM, APAC, and EMEA—all in VP or C-level positions at organizations with over 1,000 employees—the report paints a current picture of modern security validation prac

Cybersecurity researchers on Monday disclosed details of a now-patched flaw in the Telegram messaging app that could have exposed users' secret messages, photos, and videos to remote malicious actors. The issues were discovered by Italy-based Shielder in iOS, Android, and macOS versions of the app. Following responsible disclosure, Telegram addressed them in a series of patches on September 30 and October 2, 2020. The flaws stemmed from the way secret chat functionality operates and in the app's handling of  animated stickers , thus allowing attackers to send malformed stickers to unsuspecting users and gain access to messages, photos, and videos that were exchanged with their Telegram contacts through both classic and secret chats. One caveat of note is that exploiting the flaws in the wild may not have been trivial, as it requires chaining the aforementioned weaknesses to at least one additional vulnerability in order to get around security defenses in modern devices to

Russian Dutch-domiciled search engine, ride-hailing and  email service provider Yandex on Friday disclosed a data breach that compromised 4,887 email accounts of its users. The company blamed the incident on an unnamed employee who had been providing unauthorized access to the users' mailboxes for personal gain. "The employee was one of three system administrators with the necessary access rights to provide technical support for the service," Yandex said in a statement. The company said the security breach was identified during a routine audit of its systems by its security team. It also said there was no evidence that user payment details were compromised during the incident and that it had notified affected mailbox owners to change their passwords. It's not immediately clear when the breach occurred or when the employee began offering unauthorized access to third-parties. "A thorough internal investigation of the incident is under way, and Yandex will be

Two new Android surveillanceware families have been found to target military, nuclear, and election entities in Pakistan and Kashmir as part of a pro-India, state-sponsored hacking campaign. Dubbed Hornbill and Sunbird, the malware impersonates legitimate or seemingly innocuous services to cover its tracks, only to stealthily collect SMS, encrypted messaging app content, and geolocation, among other types of sensitive information. The findings published by Lookout is the result of an analysis of 18GB of exfiltrated data that was publicly exposed from at least six insecurely configured command-and-control (C2) servers located in India. "Some notable targets included an individual who applied for a position at the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, individuals with numerous contacts in the Pakistan Air Force (PAF), as well as officers responsible for electoral rolls (Booth Level Officers) located in the Pulwama district of Kashmir," the researchers  said  in a Wednesday ana

In the era of hacking and malicious actors, a company's cloud security posture is a concern that preoccupies most, if not all, organizations. Yet even more than that, it is the SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) that is critical to today's company security. Recently Malwarebytes released a statement on how they were targeted by Nation-State Actors implicated in SolarWinds breach. Their investigation suggested abuse of privileged access to Microsoft Office 365 and Azure environments. Often left unsecured, it's SaaS setting errors like misconfigurations, inadequate legacy protocols, insufficient identity checks, credential access, and key management that leave companies open to account hijacking, insider threats, and other types of leaks or breaches in the organization.  Gartner has defined  the SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) category in 2020's Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Security as solutions that continuously assess the security risk and manage SaaS a

Ten people belonging to a criminal network have been arrested in connection with a series of SIM-swapping attacks that resulted in the theft of more than $100 million by hijacking the mobile phone accounts of high-profile individuals in the U.S. The Europol-coordinated  year-long investigation  was jointly conducted by law enforcement authorities from the U.K., U.S., Belgium, Malta, and Canada. "The attacks orchestrated by this criminal gang targeted thousands of victims throughout 2020, including famous internet influencers, sport stars, musicians and their families," Europol  said  in a statement. "The criminals are believed to have stolen from them over $100 million in cryptocurrencies after illegally gaining access to their phones." The eight suspects, aged 18 to 26, are said to be part of a larger ring, two members of which were nabbed previously in Malta and Belgium. The latest arrests were made in England and Scotland. The sweep comes almost a year afte

Law enforcement officials in Ukraine, in coordination with authorities from the U.S. and Australia, last week shut down one of the world's largest phishing services that were used to attack financial institutions in 11 countries, causing tens of millions of dollars in losses. The Ukrainian attorney general's office  said  it worked with the National Police and its Main Investigation Department to identify a 39-year-old man from the Ternopil region who developed a phishing package and a special administrative panel for the service, which were then aimed at several banks located in Australia, Spain, the U.S., Italy, Chile, the Netherlands, Mexico, France, Switzerland, Germany, and the U.K. Computer equipment, mobile phones, and hard drives were seized as part of five authorized searches conducted during the course of the operation. Security researcher Brian Krebs  noted  the raids were in connection with  U-Admin , a phishing framework that makes use of fake web pages to pil

Google on Thursday removed The Great Suspender , a popular Chrome extension used by millions of users, from its Chrome Web Store for containing malware. It also took the unusual step of deactivating it from users' computers. "This extension contains malware,"  read  a terse notification from Google, but it has since emerged that the add-on stealthily added features that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code from a remote server, including tracking users online and committing advertising fraud. "The old maintainer appears to have sold the extension to parties unknown, who have malicious intent to exploit the users of this extension in advertising fraud, tracking, and more," Calum McConnell  said  in a GitHub post. The extension, which had more than two million installs before it was disabled, would suspend tabs that aren't in use, replacing them with a blank gray screen until they were reloaded upon returning to the tabs in question. Signs of the

A nascent malware campaign has been spotted co-opting Android devices into a botnet with the primary purpose of carrying out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Called " Matryosh " by Qihoo 360's Netlab researchers, the latest threat has been found reusing the Mirai botnet framework and propagates through exposed Android Debug Bridge (ADB) interfaces to infect Android devices and ensnare them into its network. ADB is a  command-line tool  part of the Android SDK that handles communications and allows developers to install and debug apps on Android devices. While this option is turned off by default on most Android smartphones and tablets, some vendors ship with this feature enabled, thus allowing unauthenticated attackers to connect remotely via the 5555 TCP port and open the devices directly to exploitation. This is not the first time a botnet has taken advantage of ADB to infect vulnerable devices. In July 2018, open ADB ports were used to spread multip

New details have emerged about a vast network of rogue extensions for Chrome and Edge browsers that were found to hijack clicks to links in search results pages to arbitrary URLs, including phishing sites and ads. Collectively called " CacheFlow " by Avast, the 28 extensions in question — including Video Downloader for Facebook, Vimeo Video Downloader, Instagram Story Downloader, VK Unblock — made use of a sneaky trick to mask its true purpose: Leverage  Cache-Control  HTTP header as a covert channel to retrieve commands from an attacker-controlled server. All the  backdoored browser add-ons  have been taken down by Google and Microsoft as of December 18, 2020, to prevent more users from downloading them from the official stores. According to telemetry data gathered by the firm, the top three infected countries were Brazil, Ukraine, and France, followed by Argentina, Spain, Russia, and the U.S. The CacheFlow sequence began when unsuspecting users downloaded one of the

The dynamic nature of cybersecurity, the changes in the threat landscape, and the expansion of the attack surface lead organizations to add more security solutions—from different vendors—creating a layered security infrastructure that introduces new challenges to any team, with a much more significant impact on small ones. And yet, sophisticated attacks continue to bypass these advanced security layers while FOMO (fear of missing out) compels security teams to evaluate every new solution that comes out. A new guide, "How Security Consolidation Helps Small Security Teams" ( download here ), reviews the challenges of a layered, multi-vendor security approach for protecting your internal environment and reveals why the concept of consolidation of security solutions is becoming the go-to security approach of many CISOs with small teams. Having a single consolidated solution for protecting your internal environment can free up much of your small team's time and reduce your

High-performance computing clusters belonging to university networks as well as servers associated with government agencies, endpoint security vendors, and internet service providers have been targeted by a newly discovered backdoor that gives attackers the ability to execute arbitrary commands on the systems remotely. Cybersecurity firm ESET named the malware " Kobalos " — a nod to a " mischievous creature " of the same name from Greek mythology — for its "tiny code size and many tricks." "Kobalos is a generic backdoor in the sense that it contains broad commands that don't reveal the intent of the attackers," researchers Marc-Etienne M. Léveillé and Ignacio Sanmillan  said  in a Tuesday analysis. "In short, Kobalos grants remote access to the file system, provides the ability to spawn terminal sessions, and allows proxying connections to other Kobalos-infected servers." Besides tracing the malware back to attacks against a nu

Security researchers on Tuesday uncovered new delivery and evasion techniques adopted by Agent Tesla remote access trojan (RAT) to get around defense barriers and monitor its victims. Typically spread through social engineering lures, the Windows spyware not only now targets Microsoft's Antimalware Scan Interface ( AMSI ) in an attempt to defeat endpoint protection software, it also employs a multi-stage installation process and makes use of Tor and Telegram messaging API to communicate with a command-and-control (C2) server. Cybersecurity firm Sophos , which observed two versions of Agent Tesla — version 2 and version 3 — currently in the wild, said the changes are yet another sign of Agent Tesla's constant evolution designed to make a sandbox and static analysis more difficult. "The differences we see between v2 and v3 of Agent Tesla appear to be focused on improving the success rate of the malware against sandbox defenses and malware scanners, and on providing more

Security Operations is a 24 x 7 job. It does not stop for weekends or holidays or even that much-needed coffee break after the first hour of the shift is complete. We all know this. Every SOC engineer is hoping for some rest at some point. One of my favorite jokes when talking about Security Operations is "3 SOC engineers walked into a bar…" That the joke. No SOC engineers have time to do that. They get it. They laugh. So why is this all true? Let us explore that a little bit. Demand for experienced SOC engineers far surpasses the available talent. Event volume levels boggle the imagination compared to even just a few years ago. Utilization of tools to their utmost capability has often not been a priority.  In the Security Operations space, we have been using SIEM's for many years with varying degrees of deployments, customization, and effectiveness. For the most part, they have been a helpful tool for Security Operations. But they can be better. Like any tool, t

The pressure on small to medium-sized enterprises to protect their organizations against cyberthreats is astronomical. These businesses face the same threats as the largest enterprises, experience the same (relative) damages and consequences when breaches occur as the largest enterprises but are forced to protect their organizations with a fraction of the resources as the largest enterprises.  Cybersecurity company Cynet just released findings from a survey of 200 CISOs in charge of small security teams ( Download here ) to shine "a spotlight into the challenges of small security teams everywhere." In addition to better understanding the challenges these CISOs face, the 2021 Survey of CISOs with Small Security Teams delves into the strategies CISOs will employ to ensure their organizations are protected from the ongoing onslaught of cyber threats - all while saddled with limited budgets and headcount. The survey findings will also be presented in a live webinar,  register

A newly devised variant of the  NAT Slipstreaming attack  can be leveraged to compromise and expose any device in an internal network, according to the latest research. Detailed by enterprise IoT security firm Armis, the  new attack  (CVE-2020-16043 and CVE-2021-23961) builds on the previously disclosed technique to bypass routers and firewalls and reach any unmanaged device within the internal network from the Internet. First  disclosed  by security researcher Samy Kamkar in late October 2020, the JavaScript-based attack relied on luring a user into visiting a malicious website to circumvent browser-based port restrictions and allow the attacker to remotely access TCP/UDP services on the victim's device, even those that were protected by a firewall or NAT. Although partial mitigations were released on November 11 to thwart the attack in  Chrome 87 ,  Firefox 84 , and  Safari  by preventing connections on port 5060 or 5061, Armis researchers Ben Seri and Gregory Vishnipolsky r

Creating workflows around verifying password resets can be challenging for organizations, especially since many have shifted work due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. With the numbers of cyberattacks against businesses exploding and compromised credentials often being the culprit, companies have to bolster security around resetting passwords on user accounts. How can organizations bolster the security of password resets for remote workers? One security workflow might involve having manager approval before IT helpdesk technicians can change a remote worker's password. In this way, the user's manager is involved in the process. Additionally, some organizations might opt to allow managers themselves the ability to change end-user passwords. How can this be configured in Active Directory? Also, is there a more seamless solution for requiring manager approval for password resets? Why password reset security is critical This past year has undoubtedly created many IT helpdesk st