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The operators behind the REvil ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS)  staged  a surprise return after a two-month hiatus following the widely publicized attack on technology services provider Kaseya on July 4. Two of the dark web portals, including the gang's Happy Blog data leak site and its payment/negotiation site, have resurfaced online, with the most recent victim added on July 8, five days before the sites  mysteriously went off the grid  on July 13. It's not immediately clear if REvil is back in the game or if they have launched new attacks. "Unfortunately, the Happy Blog is back online," Emsisoft threat researcher Brett Callow  tweeted  on Tuesday. The development comes a little over two months after a  wide-scale supply chain ransomware attack  aimed at Kaseya, which saw the Russia-based cybercrime gang encrypting approximately 60 managed service providers (MSPs) and over 1,500 downstream businesses using a zero-day vulnerability in the Kaseya VSA remote manage

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

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday issued a bulletin warning of a zero-day flaw affecting Zoho ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus deployments that is currently being actively exploited in the wild. The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2021-40539 , concerns a REST API authentication bypass that could lead to arbitrary remote code execution (RCE). ADSelfService Plus builds up to 6113 are impacted. ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus is an integrated self-service password management and a single sign-on solution for Active Directory and cloud apps, enabling admins to enforce two-factor authentication for application logins and users to reset their passwords. "CVE-2021-40539 has been detected in exploits in the wild. A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system," CISA  said , urging companies to apply the latest security update to their ManageEngine servers and "ensure ADSelfService Plus is not directl

A critical security vulnerability has been disclosed in  HAProxy , a widely used open-source load balancer and proxy server, that could be abused by an adversary to possibly smuggle HTTP requests, resulting in unauthorized access to sensitive data and execution of arbitrary commands, effectively opening the door to an array of attacks. Tracked as  CVE-2021-40346 , the Integer Overflow vulnerability has a severity rating of 8.6 on the CVSS scoring system and has been rectified in HAProxy versions 2.0.25, 2.2.17, 2.3.14 and 2.4.4. HTTP Request Smuggling, as the name implies, is a web application attack that tampers the manner a website processes sequences of HTTP requests received from more than one user. Also called HTTP desynchronization, the technique takes advantage of parsing inconsistencies in how front-end servers and back-end servers process requests from the senders. Front-end servers are typically load balancers or reverse proxies that are used by websites to manage a chai

Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday released new findings that reveal a year-long mobile espionage campaign against the Kurdish ethnic group to deploy two Android backdoors that masquerade as legitimate apps. Active since at least March 2020, the attacks leveraged as many as six dedicated Facebook profiles that claimed to offer tech and pro-Kurd content — two aimed at Android users while the other four appeared to provide news for the Kurdish supporters — only to share links to spying apps on public Facebook groups. All the six profiles have since been taken down. "It targeted the Kurdish ethnic group through at least 28 malicious Facebook posts that would lead potential victims to download Android 888 RAT or SpyNote," ESET researcher Lukas Stefanko  said . "Most of the malicious Facebook posts led to downloads of the commercial, multi-platform 888 RAT, which has been available on the black market since 2018." The Slovakian cybersecurity firm attributed the at

The maintainers of Jenkins—a popular open-source automation server software—have disclosed a security breach after unidentified threat actors gained access to one of their servers by exploiting a recently disclosed vulnerability in Atlassian Confluence service to install a cryptocurrency miner. The "successful attack," which is believed to have occurred last week, was mounted against its Confluence service that had been deprecated since October 2019, leading the team to take the server offline, rotate privileged credentials, and reset passwords for developer accounts. "At this time we have no reason to believe that any Jenkins releases, plugins, or source code have been affected," the company  said  in a statement published over the weekend. The disclosure comes as the U.S. Cyber Command  warned  of ongoing mass exploitation attempts in the wild targeting a now-patched critical security vulnerability affecting Atlassian Confluence deployments. Tracked as CVE-2

An ongoing campaign has been found to leverage a network of websites acting as a "dropper as a service" to deliver a bundle of malware payloads to victims looking for "cracked" versions of popular business and consumer applications. "These malware included an assortment of click fraud bots, other information stealers, and even ransomware," researchers from cybersecurity firm Sophos  said  in a report published last week. The attacks work by taking advantage of a number of bait pages hosted on WordPress that contain "download" links to software packages, which, when clicked, redirect the victims to a different website that delivers potentially unwanted browser plug-ins and malware, such as installers for  Raccoon Stealer , Stop ransomware, the Glupteba backdoor, and a variety of malicious cryptocurrency miners that masquerade as antivirus solutions. "Visitors who arrive on these sites are prompted to allow notifications; If they allow th

Networking, storage and security solutions provider Netgear on Friday  issued patches  to address three security vulnerabilities affecting its smart switches that could be abused by an adversary to gain full control of a vulnerable device. The flaws, which were discovered and reported to Netgear by Google security engineer Gynvael Coldwind, impact the following models - GC108P (fixed in firmware version 1.0.8.2) GC108PP (fixed in firmware version 1.0.8.2) GS108Tv3 (fixed in firmware version 7.0.7.2) GS110TPP (fixed in firmware version 7.0.7.2) GS110TPv3 (fixed in firmware version 7.0.7.2) GS110TUP (fixed in firmware version 1.0.5.3) GS308T (fixed in firmware version 1.0.3.2) GS310TP (fixed in firmware version 1.0.3.2) GS710TUP (fixed in firmware version 1.0.5.3) GS716TP (fixed in firmware version 1.0.4.2) GS716TPP (fixed in firmware version 1.0.4.2) GS724TPP (fixed in firmware version 2.0.6.3) GS724TPv2 (fixed in firmware version 2.0.6.3) GS728TPPv2 (fixed in firmware

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

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details about a new malware family that relies on the Common Log File System ( CLFS ) to hide a second-stage payload in registry transaction files in an attempt to evade detection mechanisms. FireEye's Mandiant Advanced Practices team, which made the discovery, dubbed the malware PRIVATELOG , and its installer, STASHLOG . Specifics about the identities of the threat actor or their motives remain unclear. Although the malware is yet to be detected in real-world attacks aimed at customer environments or be spotted launching any second-stage payloads, Mandiant suspects that PRIVATELOG could still be in development, the work of a researcher, or deployed as part of a highly targeted activity. CLFS is a general-purpose logging subsystem in Windows that's accessible to both kernel-mode as well as user-mode applications such as database systems, OLTP systems, messaging clients, and network event management systems for building and sharing h

A recent wave of spear-phishing campaigns leveraged weaponized Windows 11 Alpha-themed Word documents with Visual Basic macros to drop malicious payloads, including a JavaScript implant, against a point-of-sale (PoS) service provider located in the U.S. The attacks, which are believed to have taken place between late June to late July 2021, have been attributed with "moderate confidence" to a financially motivated threat actor dubbed FIN7, according to researchers from cybersecurity firm Anomali. "The specified targeting of the Clearmind domain fits well with FIN7's preferred modus operandi," Anomali Threat Research  said  in a technical analysis published on September 2. "The group's goal appears to have been to deliver a variation of a JavaScript backdoor used by FIN7 since at least 2018." An Eastern European group active since at least mid-2015, FIN7 has a checkered history of targeting restaurant, gambling, and hospitality industries in th

A set of new security vulnerabilities has been disclosed in commercial Bluetooth stacks that could enable an adversary to execute arbitrary code and, worse, crash the devices via denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.  Collectively dubbed " BrakTooth " (referring to the Norwegian word "Brak" which translates to "crash"), the 16 security weaknesses span across 13 Bluetooth chipsets from 11 vendors such as Intel, Qualcomm, Zhuhai Jieli Technology, and Texas Instruments, covering an estimated 1,400 or more commercial products, including laptops, smartphones, programmable logic controllers, and IoT devices. The flaws were disclosed by researchers from the ASSET (Automated Systems SEcuriTy) Research Group at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). "All the vulnerabilities […] can be triggered without any previous pairing or authentication," the researchers noted. "The impact of our discovered vulnerabilities is categorized into

The operators of the Mozi IoT botnet have been taken into custody by Chinese law enforcement authorities, nearly two years after the malware emerged on the threat landscape in September 2019. News of the arrest, which originally  happened  in June, was  disclosed  by researchers from Netlab, the network research division of Chinese internet security company Qihoo 360, earlier this Monday, detailing its involvement in the operation. "Mozi uses a P2P [peer-to-peer] network structure, and one of the 'advantages' of a P2P network is that it is robust, so even if some of the nodes go down, the whole network will carry on, and the remaining nodes will still infect other vulnerable devices, that is why we can still see Mozi spreading," said Netlab, which spotted the botnet for the first time in late 2019. The development also comes less than two weeks after Microsoft Security Threat Intelligence Center  revealed  the botnet's new capabilities that enable it to inter

Network-attached storage (NAS) appliance maker QNAP said it's  currently   investigating  two recently patched security flaws in OpenSSL to determine their potential impact, adding it will release security updates should its products turn out to be vulnerable. Tracked as CVE-2021-3711 (CVSS score: 7.5) and CVE-2021-3712 (CVSS score: 4.4), the  weaknesses  concern a high-severity buffer overflow in SM2 decryption function and a buffer overrun issue when processing ASN.1 strings that could be abused by adversaries to run arbitrary code, cause a denial-of-service condition, or result in disclosure of private memory contents, such as private keys, or sensitive plaintext — CVE-2021-3711  - OpenSSL SM2 decryption buffer overflow CVE-2021-3712  - Read buffer overruns processing ASN.1 strings "A malicious attacker who is able present SM2 content for decryption to an application could cause attacker chosen data to overflow the buffer by up to a maximum of 62 bytes altering the c

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Microsoft is warning of a widespread credential phishing campaign that leverages  open redirector links  in email communications as a vector to trick users into visiting malicious websites while effectively bypassing security software. "Attackers combine these links with social engineering baits that impersonate well-known productivity tools and services to lure users into clicking," Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team  said  in a report published this week. "Doing so leads to a series of redirections — including a CAPTCHA verification page that adds a sense of legitimacy and attempts to evade some automated analysis systems — before taking the user to a fake sign-in page. This ultimately leads to credential compromise, which opens the user and their organization to other attacks." Although redirect links in email messages serve a vital tool to take recipients to third-party websites or track click rates and measure the success of sales and marketin

Cloud infrastructure security company Wiz on Thursday revealed details of a now-fixed Azure Cosmos database vulnerability that could have been potentially exploited to grant any Azure user full admin access to other customers' database instances without any authorization. The flaw, which grants read, write, and delete privileges, has been dubbed " ChaosDB ," with Wiz researchers noting that "the vulnerability has a trivial exploit that doesn't require any previous access to the target environment, and impacts thousands of organizations, including numerous Fortune 500 companies." Cosmos DB is Microsoft's proprietary  NoSQL database  that's advertised as "a fully managed service" that "takes database administration off your hands with automatic management, updates and patching." The Wiz Research Team reported the issue to Microsoft on August 12, after which the Windows maker took steps to mitigate the issue within 48 hours of r

VMware on Wednesday shipped  security updates  to address vulnerabilities in multiple products that could be potentially exploited by an attacker to take control of an affected system. The six security weaknesses (from CVE-2021-22022 through CVE-2021-22027, CVSS scores: 4.4 - 8.6) affect VMware vRealize Operations (prior to version 8.5.0), VMware Cloud Foundation (versions 3.x and 4.x), and vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager (version 8.x), as listed below - CVE-2021-22022  (CVSS score: 4.4) - Arbitrary file read vulnerability in vRealize Operations Manager API, leading to information disclosure CVE-2021-22023  (CVSS score: 6.6) - Insecure direct object reference vulnerability in vRealize Operations Manager API, enabling an attacker with administrative access to alter other users' information and seize control of an account CVE-2021-22024  (CVSS score: 7.5) - Arbitrary log-file read vulnerability in vRealize Operations Manager API, resulting in sensitive information disclosure

A financially motivated threat actor notorious for setting its sights on retail, hospitality, and entertainment industries has been observed deploying a completely new backdoor on infected systems, indicating the operators are continuously retooling their malware arsenal to avoid detection and stay under the radar. The previously undocumented malware has been dubbed " Sardonic " by Romanian cybersecurity technology company Bitdefender, which it encountered during a  forensic investigation  in the wake of an unsuccessful attack carried out by FIN8 aimed at an unnamed financial institution located in the U.S. Said to be under active development, "Sardonic backdoor is extremely potent and has a wide range of capabilities that help the threat actor leverage new malware on the fly without updating components," Bitdefender researchers Eduard Budaca and Victor Vrabie said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Since emerging on the scene in January 2016, FIN8 has

A previously undisclosed "zero-click" exploit in Apple's iMessage was abused by Israeli surveillance vendor NSO Group to circumvent iOS security protections and target nine Bahraini activists. "The hacked activists included three members of Waad (a secular Bahraini political society), three members of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, two exiled Bahraini dissidents, and one member of Al Wefaq (a Shiite Bahraini political society)," researchers from University of Toronto's Citizen Lab  said  in a report published today, with four of the targets hacked by an actor it tracks as LULU and believed to be the government of Bahrain. Citizen Lab called the new exploit chain "FORCEDENTRY." It's also a zero-click exploit, meaning that it can be used to trigger an infection simply by sending a malicious message to the target, even without having to click a link or view the message in question. "As always, if NSO receives reliable information r