cybersecurity | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Not all heroes wear capes. Cybersecurity professionals are digital warriors who use their knowledge and skill to battle malicious hackers.  Sounds like an exciting career, right?  If the comic-book comparisons aren't working for you, perhaps some figures will. According to ZipRecruiter, the average salary of a cybersecurity professional is just over $100,000 a year. The Complete 2021 CyberSecurity Super Bundle  can help you get started in this niche, with 24 courses working towards top certification exams.  If you went and bought these courses separately, you would pay a total of $7,080.  To bring the price down, The Hacker News has teamed up with iCollege to offer  all the training for just $69.99 . That is 99% off the full value! You don't need a college education to get a job in cybersecurity, but you do need to pass some exams.  This bundle gives you full prep for important tests, including CISSP, and CompTIA Security+, PenTest+, CySA+, and CASP+. Picking up these certifica

A new ransomware family that emerged last month comes with its own bag of tricks to bypass ransomware protection by leveraging a novel technique called "intermittent encryption." Called  LockFile , the operators of the ransomware have been found exploiting recently disclosed flaws such as  ProxyShell  and  PetitPotam  to compromise Windows servers and deploy file-encrypting malware that scrambles only every alternate 16 bytes of a file, thereby giving it the ability to evade ransomware defences. "Partial encryption is generally used by ransomware operators to speed up the encryption process and we've seen it implemented by BlackMatter, DarkSide and LockBit 2.0 ransomware," Mark Loman, Sophos director of engineering, said in a statement. "What sets LockFile apart is that, unlike the others, it doesn't encrypt the first few blocks. Instead, LockFile encrypts every other 16 bytes of a document." "This means that a file such as a text documen

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

Google and Microsoft said they are pledging to invest a total of $30 billion in cybersecurity advancements over the next five years, as the U.S. government  partners  with private sector companies to address threats facing the country in the wake of a string of sophisticated malicious cyber activity targeting critical infrastructure, laying bare the risks to data, organizations, and governments worldwide. The White House cybersecurity meeting, which brought together executives from the education, energy, finance, insurance, and tech sectors, included companies like ADP, Amazon, Apple, Bank of America, Code.org, Girls Who Code, Google, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, and Vantage Group, among others. To that end, the U.S. government on Wednesday announced a collaboration between the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and industry partners to develop a new framework to improve the security and integrity of the technology supply chain, alongside plans to expand the 

Today I discuss an attack vector conducive to cross-organizational spread, in-home local propagation. Though often overlooked, this vector is especially relevant today, as many corporate employees remain working from home. In this post, I contrast in-home local propagation with traditional vectors through which a threat (ransomware in particular) spreads throughout an organization. I discuss the reasons this type of spread is problematic for employees and corporations alike. Finally, I offer simple solutions to mitigate the risk of such tactics.  Why Should IT and Security Stakeholders Care? Today's long cycle attacks are often reconnoitering the victim environment for weeks, if not months. In this time, the attacker gains a tremendous amount of knowledge about systems in the victim's footprint. This additional loiter time in the victim's environment, coupled with ad-hoc maintained work-from-home environments, presents both an  ingress avenue  for attacks into their net

Forget watercooler conspiracies or boardroom battles. There's a new war in the office. As companies nudge their staff to return to communal workspaces, many workers don't actually want to – more than 50 percent of employees would rather quit, according to  research by EY .  While HR teams worry over the hearts and minds of staff, IT security professionals have a different battle plan to draft – how to make the new normal of the hybrid workplace secure. The Trade-off Between Usability and Security A company's biggest vulnerability continues to be its people. In a hybrid workplace, a Zero Trust strategy means ever-tightening security.  The MFA a company chooses  affects the difficulty of logging into email, dashboards, workflow tools, client documentation, and so on. Or, conversely, how porous access security is.  Now imagine this scenario. An employee opens a company portal, confirms a prompt on a company app on her phone, and that's it. She has been authenticated s

I'm sure you would agree that, in today's digital world, the majority of applications we work on require some type of credentials – to connect to a database with a username/password, to access computer programs via authorized tokens, or API keys to invoke services for authentication. Credentials, or sometimes just referred to as 'Secrets,' are pieces of user or system-level confidential information that ought to be carefully protected and accessible to legitimate users only. We all know how important it is to keep these assets secure to prevent account misuse and breaches.  A reality check: How often do you make proactive efforts to protect these assets? Rarely, I'd say.  Among the worst mistakes a developer can make when it comes to application security is to accidentally commit confidential information publicly on the Internet. Surprisingly, secrets and credentials are accidentally leaked more often than you might expect, and there are intelligent tools that s

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed five previously unreported security vulnerabilities affecting B. Braun's Infusomat Space Large Volume Pump and SpaceStation that could be abused by malicious parties to tamper with medication doses without any prior authentication. McAfee, which discovered and reported the flaws to the German medical and pharmaceutical device company on January 11, 2021,  said  the "modification could appear as a device malfunction and be noticed only after a substantial amount of drug has been dispensed to a patient, since the infusion pump displays exactly what was prescribed, all while dispensing potentially lethal doses of medication." The issues have been addressed by B. Braun in SpaceCom L82 or later, Battery Pack SP with WiFi:L82 or later, and DataModule compactplus version A12 or later. Infusion pumps are medical devices used to deliver intravenous fluids, such as nutrients and medications, into a patient's body in controlled amoun

One of the great resources available to businesses today is the large ecosystem of value-added services and solutions. Especially in technology solutions, there is no end to the services of which organizations can avail themselves. In addition, if a business needs a particular solution or service they don't handle in-house, there is most likely a third-party vendor that can take care of that for them. It is highly beneficial for businesses today to access these large pools of third-party resources. However, there can be security challenges for companies using third-party vendors and their services despite the benefits. Let's look at navigating vendor risk management as IT professionals and see how businesses can accomplish this in a highly complex cybersecurity world. How can third-party vendors introduce cybersecurity risks? As mentioned, third-party vendors can be highly beneficial to organizations doing business today. They allow companies to avoid building out technolo

ShinyHunters, a notorious cybercriminal underground group that's been on a data breach spree since last year, has been observed searching companies' GitHub repository source code for vulnerabilities that can be abused to stage larger scale attacks, an analysis of the hackers' modus operandi has revealed. "Primarily operating on Raid Forums, the collective's moniker and motivation can partly be derived from their avatar on social media and other forums: a shiny Umbreon Pokémon," Intel 471 researchers said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "As Pokémon players hunt and collect "shiny" characters in the game, ShinyHunters collects and resells user data." The revelation comes as the  average cost of a data breach  rose from $3.86 million to $4.24 million, making it the highest average cost in 17 years, with compromised credentials responsible for 20% of the breaches reported by over 500 organizations. Since rising to prominence in A

If you're reading this post, there is a pretty good chance you're interested in hacking. Ever thought about turning it into a career? The cybersecurity industry is booming right now, and ethical hacking is one of the most lucrative and challenging niches. It's open to anyone with the right skills. Featuring 18 courses from top-rated instructors,  The All-In-One 2021 Super-Sized Ethical Hacking Bundle  helps you acquire those skills.  If you went on a shopping spree, these courses would normally set you back $3,284 in total.  However, The Hacker News has teamed up with several education partners to offer  the full bundle for just $42.99 . That means you're paying less than $3 per course! Ethical hacking is all about finding the weaknesses in systems before they can be exploited by malicious hackers. Many people who work in this field earn six figures, and top experts often work for themselves. There are two things you need for building a career in ethical hacking: practical know

A critical vulnerability has been disclosed in hardware random number generators used in billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices whereby it fails to properly generate random numbers, thus undermining their security and putting them at risk of attacks. "It turns out that these 'randomly' chosen numbers aren't always as random as you'd like when it comes to IoT devices," Bishop Fox researchers Dan Petro and Allan Cecil  said  in an analysis published last week. "In fact, in many cases, devices are choosing encryption keys of 0 or worse. This can lead to a catastrophic collapse of security for any upstream use." Random number generation ( RNG ) is a  crucial process  that undergirds several cryptographic applications, including key generation, nonces, and salting. On traditional operating systems, it's derived from a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator (CSPRNG) that uses entropy obtained from a high-quality seed source.

Among the problems stemming from our systemic failure with cybersecurity, which ranges from decades-old software-development practices to Chinese and Russian cyber-attacks, one problem gets far less attention than it should—the insider threat. But the reality is that most organizations should be at least as worried about user management as they are about Bond villain-type hackers launching compromises from abroad. Most organizations have deployed single sign-on and modern identity-management solutions. These generally allow easy on-boarding, user management, and off-boarding. However, on mobile devices, these solutions have been less effective. Examples include mobile applications such as WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, or even SMS-which are common in the workforce. All of these tools allow for low-friction, agile communication in an increasingly mobile business environment. Today, many of these tools offer end-to-end encryption (e2ee), which is a boon when viewed through the lens of

Pulse Secure has shipped a fix for a critical post-authentication remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in its Connect Secure virtual private network (VPN) appliances to address an incomplete patch for an actively exploited flaw it previously resolved in October 2020. "The Pulse Connect Secure appliance suffers from an uncontrolled archive extraction vulnerability which allows an attacker to overwrite arbitrary files, resulting in Remote Code Execution as root," NCC Group's Richard Warren  disclosed  on Friday. "This vulnerability is a bypass of the patch for  CVE-2020-8260 ." "An attacker with such access will be able to circumvent any restrictions enforced via the web application, as well as remount the filesystem, allowing them to create a persistent backdoor, extract and decrypt credentials, compromise VPN clients, or pivot into the internal network," Warren added. The disclosure comes days after Ivanti, the company behind Pulse Secure,  p

Apple on Thursday said it's introducing new child safety features in iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS as part of its efforts to limit the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) in the U.S. To that effect, the iPhone maker said it intends to begin client-side scanning of images shared via every Apple device for known child abuse content as they are being uploaded into iCloud Photos, in addition to leveraging on-device machine learning to vet all iMessage images sent or received by minor accounts (aged under 13) to warn parents of sexually explicit photos shared over the messaging platform. Furthermore, Apple also plans to update Siri and Search to stage an intervention when users try to perform searches for CSAM-related topics, alerting that the "interest in this topic is harmful and problematic." "Messages uses on-device machine learning to analyze image attachments and determine if a photo is sexually explicit," Apple  noted . "The feature is desi

Amazon earlier this April addressed a critical vulnerability in its Kindle e-book reader platform that could have been potentially exploited to take full control over a user's device, resulting in the theft of sensitive information by just deploying a malicious e-book. "By sending Kindle users a single malicious e-book, a threat actor could have stolen any information stored on the device, from Amazon account credentials to billing information," Yaniv Balmas, head of cyber research at Check Point, said in an emailed statement. "The security vulnerabilities allow an attacker to target a very specific audience." In other words, if a threat actor wanted to single out a specific group of people or demographic, it's possible for the adversary to choose a popular e-book in a language or dialect that's widely spoken among the group to tailor and orchestrate a highly targeted cyber attack. Upon responsibly disclosing the issue to Amazon in February 2021, t

Koo, India's homegrown Twitter clone, recently patched a serious security vulnerability that could have been exploited to execute arbitrary JavaScript code against hundreds of thousands of its users, spreading the attack across the platform. The vulnerability involves a  stored cross-site scripting flaw  (also known as persistent XSS) in Koo's web application that allows malicious scripts to be embedded directly into the affected web application. To carry out the attack, all a malicious actor had to do was log into the service via the web application and post an XSS-encoded payload to its timeline, which automatically gets executed on behalf of all users who saw the post. The issue was discovered by security researcher  Rahul Kankrale  in July, following which a fix was rolled out by Koo on July 3. Using cross-site scripting, an attacker can perform actions on behalf of users with the same privileges as the user and steal web browser's secrets, such as authentication