endpoint security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Palo Alto Networks has released software patches to address several security flaws in its Expedition migration tool, including a high-severity bug that an authenticated attacker could exploit to access sensitive data. "Multiple vulnerabilities in the Palo Alto Networks Expedition migration tool enable an attacker to read Expedition database contents and arbitrary files, as well as create and delete arbitrary files on the Expedition system," the company said in an advisory. "These files include information such as usernames, cleartext passwords, device configurations, and device API keys for firewalls running PAN-OS software." Expedition, a free tool offered by Palo Alto Networks to facilitate migration from other firewall vendors to its own platform, reached end-of-life (EoL) as of December 31, 2024. The list of flaws is as follows - CVE-2025-0103 (CVSS score: 7.8) - An SQL injection vulnerability that enables an authenticated attacker to reveal Expedition...

It's time once again to pay our respects to the once-famous cybersecurity solutions whose usefulness died in the past year. The cybercriminal world collectively mourns the loss of these solutions and the easy access they provide to victim organizations. These solutions, though celebrated in their prime, succumbed to the twin forces of time and advancing threats. Much like a tribute to celebrities lost in the past year, this article will look back at a few of cybersecurity's brightest stars that went dark in the past year.  1. Legacy Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Cause of Death: Compromised by sophisticated phishing, man-in-the-middle (MitM), SIM-swapping, and MFA prompt bombing attacks. The superstar of access security for more than twenty years, legacy MFA solutions enjoyed broad adoption followed by almost-universal responsibility for cybersecurity failures leading to successful ransomware attacks. These outdated solutions relied heavily on SMS or email-based codes o...

It's time once again to pay our respects to the once-famous cybersecurity solutions whose usefulness died in the past year. The cybercriminal world collectively mourns the loss of these solutions and the easy access they provide to victim organizations. These solutions, though celebrated in their prime, succumbed to the twin forces of time and advancing threats. Much like a tribute to celebrities lost in the past year, this article will look back at a few of cybersecurity's brightest stars that went dark in the past year.  1. Legacy Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Cause of Death: Compromised by sophisticated phishing, man-in-the-middle (MitM), SIM-swapping, and MFA prompt bombing attacks. The superstar of access security for more than twenty years, legacy MFA solutions enjoyed broad adoption followed by almost-universal responsibility for cybersecurity failures leading to successful ransomware attacks. These outdated solutions relied heavily on SMS or email-based codes o...

Fortinet has issued an advisory for a now-patched critical security flaw impacting Wireless LAN Manager (FortiWLM) that could lead to disclosure of sensitive information. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-34990, carries a CVSS score of 9.6 out of a maximum of 10.0. It was originally fixed by Fortinet back on August 18, 2023, but without a CVE designation. The list of supported FortiOS versions was updated in early September. "A relative path traversal [CWE-23] in FortiWLM may allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to read sensitive files," the company said in an alert released Wednesday. However, according to a description of the security flaw in the NIST's National Vulnerability Database (NVD), the path traversal vulnerability could also be exploited by an attacker to "execute unauthorized code or commands via specially crafted web requests." The flaw impacts the following versions of the product - FortiWLM versions 8.6.0 through 8.6.5 (Fixed i...

Run by the team at orchestration, AI, and automation platform Tines, the Tines library contains pre-built workflows shared by real security practitioners from across the community, all of which are free to import and deploy via the Community Edition of the platform.  Their bi-annual "You Did What with Tines?!" competition highlights some of the most interesting workflows submitted by their users, many of which demonstrate practical applications of large language models (LLMs) to address complex challenges in security operations. One recent winner is a workflow designed to automate CrowdStrike RFM reporting. Developed by Tom Power, a security analyst at The University of British Columbia, it uses orchestration, AI and automation to reduce the time spent on manual reporting. Here, we'll share an overview of the workflow, plus a step-by-step guide for getting it up and running. The problem - time-consuming reporting The workflow's builder, Tom Power, explains, "The CrowdStrike ...

A newly devised technique leverages a Windows accessibility framework called UI Automation (UIA) to perform a wide range of malicious activities without tipping off endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions. "To exploit this technique, a user must be convinced to run a program that uses UI Automation," Akamai security researcher Tomer Peled said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This can lead to stealthy command execution, which can harvest sensitive data, redirect browsers to phishing websites, and more." Even worse, local attackers could take advantage of this security blindspot to execute commands and read/write messages from/to messaging applications like Slack and WhatsApp. On top of that, it could also be potentially weaponized to manipulate UI elements over a network. First available in Windows XP as part of the Microsoft .NET Framework, UI Automation is designed to provide programmatic access to various user interface (UI) elements and h...

Regain control of SaaS sprawl with Day One discovery of all SaaS and GenAI accounts along with workflows to help you mitigate security risks, curb rogue app usage, and manage SaaS spend. In today's highly distributed workplace, every employee has the ability to act as their own CIO, adopting new cloud and SaaS technologies whenever and wherever they need. While this has been a critical boon to productivity and innovation in the digital enterprise, it has upended traditional approaches to IT security and governance. Nudge Security is the world's first and only solution to bring together all facets of SaaS management in one solution: Discovery : Gain visibility into your full SaaS footprint including GenAI apps, free tools, duplicate tenants, unapproved apps, and more, all on Day One. Security: Secure new accounts as they are created, uncover and revoke risky OAuth grants, and continuously harden your SaaS security posture. Spend Management: Discover up to 2 years of historical...

Microsoft has announced a new Windows Resiliency Initiative as a way to improve security and reliability, as well as ensure that system integrity is not compromised. The idea, the tech giant said, is to avoid incidents like that of CrowdStrike's earlier this July, enable more apps and users to be run without admin privileges, add controls surrounding the use of unsafe apps and drivers, and offer options to encrypt personal data. One of the most important features is Quick Machine Recovery that's expected to be available to the Windows Insider Program community in early 2025. "This feature will enable IT administrators to execute targeted fixes from Windows Update on PCs, even when machines are unable to boot, without needing physical access to the PC," David Weston, vice president of enterprise and OS security at Microsoft, said . "This remote recovery will unblock your employees from broad issues much faster than what has been possible in the past." ...

Apple has released security updates for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, visionOS, and its Safari web browser to address two zero-day flaws that have come under active exploitation in the wild. The flaws are listed below - CVE-2024-44308 (CVSS score: 8.8)  - A vulnerability in JavaScriptCore that could lead to arbitrary code execution when processing malicious web content CVE-2024-44309 (CVSS score: 6.1)  - A cookie management vulnerability in WebKit that could lead to a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack when processing malicious web content The iPhone maker said it addressed CVE-2024-44308 and CVE-2024-44309 with improved checks and improved state management, respectively.  Not much is known about the exact nature of the exploitation, but Apple has acknowledged that the pair of vulnerabilities "may have been actively exploited on Intel-based Mac systems." Clément Lecigne and Benoît Sevens of Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) have been credited with discovering and report...

Threat actors are attempting to abuse the open-source EDRSilencer tool as part of efforts to tamper endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions and hide malicious activity. Trend Micro said it detected "threat actors attempting to integrate EDRSilencer in their attacks, repurposing it as a means of evading detection." EDRSilencer , inspired by the NightHawk FireBlock tool from MDSec, is designed to block outbound traffic of running EDR processes using the Windows Filtering Platform ( WFP ). It supports terminating various processes related to EDR products from Microsoft, Elastic, Trellix, Qualys, SentinelOne, Cybereason, Broadcom Carbon Black, Tanium, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Cisco, ESET, HarfangLab, and Trend Micro. By incorporating such legitimate red teaming tools into their arsenal, the goal is to render EDR software ineffective and make it a lot more challenging to identify and remove malware. "The WFP is a powerful framework built into Windows for ...

A suspected nation-state adversary has been observed weaponizing three security flaws in Ivanti Cloud Service Appliance (CSA) a zero-day to perform a series of malicious actions. That's according to findings from Fortinet FortiGuard Labs, which said the vulnerabilities were abused to gain unauthenticated access to the CSA, enumerate users configured in the appliance, and attempt to access the credentials of those users. "The advanced adversaries were observed exploiting and chaining zero-day vulnerabilities to establish beachhead access in the victim's network," security researchers Faisal Abdul Malik Qureshi, John Simmons, Jared Betts, Luca Pugliese, Trent Healy, Ken Evans, and Robert Reyes said . The flaws in question are listed below - CVE-2024-8190 (CVSS score: 7.2) - A command injection flaw in the resource /gsb/DateTimeTab.php CVE-2024-8963 (CVSS score: 9.4) - A path traversal vulnerability on the resource /client/index.php CVE-2024-9380 (CVSS score:...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added a security flaw impacting Ivanti Endpoint Manager (EPM) that the company patched in May to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-29824 , carries a CVSS score of 9.6 out of a maximum of 10.0, indicating critical severity. "An unspecified SQL Injection vulnerability in Core server of Ivanti EPM 2022 SU5 and prior allows an unauthenticated attacker within the same network to execute arbitrary code," the software service provider said in an advisory released on May 21, 2024. Horizon3.ai, which released a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for the flaw in June, said the issue is rooted in a function called RecordGoodApp() within a DLL named PatchBiz.dll. Specifically, it concerns how the function handles an SQL query statement, thereby allowing an attacker to gain remote code execution via xp_cmdshe...

It's the age of identity security. The explosion of driven ransomware attacks has made CISOs and security teams realize that identity protection lags 20 years behind their endpoints and networks. This realization is mainly due to the transformation of lateral movement from fine art, found in APT and top cybercrime groups only, to a commodity skill used in almost every ransomware attack. The lateral movement uses compromised credentials for malicious access – a critical blind spot that existing XDR, network, and SIEM solutions fail to block.  Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) has emerged in the last couple of years to close this gap. This article breaks down the top five ITDR capabilities and provides the key questions to ask your ITDR vendor. Only a definitive 'YES' to these questions can ensure that the solution you evaluate can indeed deliver its identity security promise.  Coverage For All Users, Resources, and Access Methods  Why is it important? Par...

The sophisticated malware known as ViperSoftX has been observed being distributed as eBooks over torrents. "A notable aspect of the current variant of ViperSoftX is that it uses the Common Language Runtime ( CLR ) to dynamically load and run PowerShell commands, thereby creating a PowerShell environment within AutoIt for operations," Trellix security researchers Mathanraj Thangaraju and Sijo Jacob said . "By utilizing CLR, ViperSoftX can seamlessly integrate PowerShell functionality, allowing it to execute malicious functions while evading detection mechanisms that might otherwise flag standalone PowerShell activity." Initially detected by Fortinet in 2020, ViperSoftX is known for its ability to exfiltrate sensitive information from compromised Windows hosts. Over the years, the malware has become a relevant example of threat actors continuously innovating their tactics in an attempt to stay stealthy and circumvent defenses. This is exemplified by the increas...