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A nascent botnet called  Andoryu  has been found to  exploit  a now-patched critical security flaw in the Ruckus Wireless Admin panel to break into vulnerable devices. The  flaw , tracked as  CVE-2023-25717  (CVSS score: 9.8), stems from improper handling of HTTP requests, leading to unauthenticated remote code execution and a complete compromise of wireless Access Point (AP) equipment. Andoryu was  first documented  by Chinese cybersecurity firm QiAnXin earlier this February, detailing its ability to communicate with command-and-control (C2) servers using the  SOCKS5 protocol . While the malware is known to weaponize remote code execution flaws in GitLab ( CVE-2021-22205 ) and Lilin DVR for propagation, the addition of CVE-2023-25717 shows that Andoryu is actively expanding its exploit arsenal to ensnare more devices into the botnet. "It contains DDoS attack modules for different protocols and communicates with its command-and-control server using SOCKS5 proxies," Fort

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of cyber attacks perpetrated by Russian nation-state hackers targeting various government bodies in the country. The agency  attributed  the phishing campaign to APT28, which is also known by the names Fancy Bear, Forest Blizzard, FROZENLAKE, Iron Twilight, Sednit, and Sofacy. The email messages come with the subject line "Windows Update" and purportedly contain instructions in the Ukrainian language to run a PowerShell command under the pretext of security updates. Running the script loads and executes a next-stage PowerShell script that's designed to collect basic system information through commands like  tasklist  and  systeminfo , and exfiltrate the details via an HTTP request to a  Mocky API . To trick the targets into running the command, the emails impersonate system administrators of the targeted government entities using fake Microsoft Outlook email accounts created with the employees'

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,

A significant number of victims in the consumer and enterprise sectors located across Australia, Japan, the U.S., and India have been affected by an evasive information-stealing malware called  ViperSoftX . ViperSoftX was first documented by Fortinet in 2020, with cybersecurity company Avast detailing a campaign in November 2022 that  leveraged  the malware to distribute a malicious Google Chrome extension capable of siphoning cryptocurrencies from wallet applications. Now a  new analysis  from Trend Micro has revealed the malware's adoption of "more sophisticated encryption and basic anti-analysis techniques, such as byte remapping and web browser communication blocking." The arrival vector of ViperSoftX is typically a software crack or a key generator (keygen), while also employing actual non-malicious software like multimedia editors and system cleaner apps as "carriers." One of the key steps performed by the malware before downloading a first-stage Po

The browser serves as the primary interface between the on-premises environment, the cloud, and the web in the modern enterprise. Therefore, the browser is also exposed to multiple types of cyber threats and operational risks.  In light of this significant challenge, how are CISOs responding? LayerX, Browser Security platform provider, has polled more than 150 CISOs across multiple verticals and geolocations. They asked them about their security practices for SaaS access, BYOD, phishing, browser data loss and browser security. The results of this extensive poll can be found in the report "2023 Browser Security Survey". In this article, we bring a taste of the report. You can read all the results and analysis here . Main Highlights Organizations in the cloud are exposed to web-borne attacks. 87% of all-SaaS adopters and 79% of CISOs in a hybrid environment experienced a web-borne security threat in the past 12 months. Account takeover is a top concern. 48% list credential phis

Google on Tuesday rolled out emergency fixes to address another actively exploited high-severity zero-day flaw in its Chrome web browser. The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2023-2136 , is  described  as a case of  integer overflow  in  Skia , an open source 2D graphics library. Clément Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on April 12, 2023. "Integer overflow in Skia in Google Chrome prior to 112.0.5615.137 allowed a remote attacker who had compromised the renderer process to potentially perform a sandbox escape via a crafted HTML page,"  according  to the NIST's National Vulnerability Database (NVD). The tech giant, which also fixed seven other security issues with the latest update, said it's aware of active exploitation of the flaw, but did not disclose additional details to prevent further abuse. The development marks the second Chrome zero-day vulnerability to be exploited by malicious actors th

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed the inner workings of a highly evasive loader named " in2al5d p3in4er " (read: invalid printer) that's used to deliver the Aurora information stealer malware. "The in2al5d p3in4er loader is compiled with  Embarcadero RAD Studio  and targets endpoint workstations using advanced anti-VM (virtual machine) technique," cybersecurity firm Morphisec  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Aurora  is a Go-based information stealer that emerged on the threat landscape in late 2022. Offered as a commodity malware to other actors, it's distributed through  YouTube videos  and SEO-poised fake cracked software download websites. Clicking the links present in YouTube video descriptions redirects the victim to decoy websites where they are enticed into downloading the malware under the garb of a seemingly-legitimate utility. The loader analyzed by Morphisec is designed to query the vendor ID of the graphics card install

Threat actors associated with the Vice Society ransomware gang have been observed using a bespoke PowerShell-based tool to fly under the radar and automate the process of exfiltrating data from compromised networks. "Threat actors (TAs) using built-in  data exfiltration   methods  like [living off the land binaries and scripts] negate the need to bring in external tools that might be flagged by security software and/or human-based security detection mechanisms," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researcher Ryan Chapman  said . "These methods can also hide within the general operating environment, providing subversion to the threat actor." Vice Society , tracked by Microsoft under the name DEV-0832, is an extortion-focused hacking group that emerged on the scene in May 2021. It's known to rely on ransomware binaries sold on the criminal underground to meet its goals. In December 2022, SentinelOne detailed the group's use of a ransomware variant, dubbed  PolyVi

U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday  signed an executive order  that restricts the use of commercial spyware by federal government agencies. The order said the spyware ecosystem "poses significant counterintelligence or security risks to the United States Government or significant risks of improper use by a foreign government or foreign person." It also seeks to ensure that the government's use of such tools is done in a manner that's "consistent with respect for the rule of law, human rights, and democratic norms and values." To that end, the order lays out the various criteria under which commercial spyware could be disqualified for use by U.S. government agencies. They include - The purchase of commercial spyware by a foreign government or person to target the U.S. government, A commercial spyware vendor that uses or discloses sensitive data obtained from the cyber surveillance tool without authorization and operates under the control of a foreign g

Bitcoin ATM maker General Bytes disclosed that unidentified threat actors stole cryptocurrency from hot wallets by exploiting a zero-day security flaw in its software. "The attacker was able to upload his own java application remotely via the master service interface used by terminals to upload videos and run it using 'batm' user privileges," the company  said  in an advisory published over the weekend. "The attacker scanned the Digital Ocean cloud hosting IP address space and identified running CAS services on ports 7741, including the General Bytes Cloud service and other GB ATM operators running their servers on Digital Ocean," it further added. The company said that the server to which the malicious Java application was uploaded was by default configured to start applications present in the deployment folder ("/batm/app/admin/standalone/deployments/"). In doing so, the attack allowed the threat actor to access the database; read and decry

A new piece of malware dubbed  dotRunpeX  is being used to distribute numerous known malware families such as  Agent Tesla ,  Ave Maria ,  BitRAT ,  FormBook ,  LokiBot ,  NetWire ,  Raccoon Stealer ,  RedLine Stealer ,  Remcos ,  Rhadamanthys , and  Vidar . "DotRunpeX is a new injector written in .NET using the Process Hollowing technique and used to infect systems with a variety of known malware families," Check Point  said  in a report published last week. Said to be in active development, dotRunpeX arrives as a second-stage malware in the infection chain, often deployed via a downloader (aka loader) that's transmitted through phishing emails as malicious attachments. Alternatively, it's known to leverage malicious Google Ads on search result pages to direct unsuspecting users searching for popular software such as AnyDesk and LastPass to copycat sites hosting trojanized installers. The latest DotRunpeX artifacts, first spotted in October 2022, add an extra o

An Android voice phishing (aka vishing) malware campaign known as FakeCalls has reared its head once again to target South Korean users under the guise of over 20 popular financial apps. "FakeCalls malware possesses the functionality of a Swiss army knife, able not only to conduct its primary aim but also to extract private data from the victim's device," cybersecurity firm Check Point said . FakeCalls was previously documented by Kaspersky in April 2022, describing the malware's capabilities to imitate phone conversations with a bank customer support agent. In the observed attacks, users who install the rogue banking app are enticed into calling the financial institution by offering a fake low-interest loan. At the point where the phone call actually happens, a pre-recorded audio with instructions from the real bank is played. Simultaneously, the malware conceals the phone number with the bank's legitimate number to give the impression that a conversation

In the modern corporate IT environment, which relies on cloud connectivity, global connections and large volumes of data, the browser is now the most important work interface. The browser connects employees to managed resources, devices to the web, and the on-prem environment to the cloud one. Yet, and probably unsurprisingly, this browser prominence has significantly increased the number of threats that adversaries target the browser with. Attackers are now leveraging the browser's core functionality - rendering and executing web pages for users to access - to perform attacks. The browser is now an attack surface, as well as an attack vector for malicious access to corporate SaaS and web applications through account takeover and the use of compromised credentials. To address this issue, a new guide was recently published ( Download Here ). It analyzes what a solution to these threats would look like. The guide, "Protection from web-borne threats starts with Browser Securit

The cryptojacking group known as  TeamTNT  is suspected to be behind a previously undiscovered strain of malware used to mine Monero cryptocurrency on compromised systems. That's according to Cado Security, which  found  the  sample  after Sysdig detailed a sophisticated attack known as  SCARLETEEL  aimed at containerized environments to ultimately steal proprietary data and software. Specifically, the early phase of the attack chain involved the use of a cryptocurrency miner, which the cloud security firm suspected was deployed as a decoy to conceal the detection of data exfiltration. The artifact – uploaded to VirusTotal late last month – "bear[s] several syntactic and semantic similarities to prior TeamTNT payloads, and includes a wallet ID that has previously been attributed to them," a new analysis from Cado Security has  revealed . TeamTNT , active since at least 2019, has been documented to repeatedly strike cloud and container environments to deploy cryptocur

Multiple threat actors, including a nation-state group, exploited a critical three-year-old security flaw in Progress Telerik to break into an unnamed federal entity in the U.S. The  disclosure  comes from a  joint advisory  issued by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC). "Exploitation of this vulnerability allowed malicious actors to successfully execute remote code on a federal civilian executive branch (FCEB) agency's Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) web server," the agencies  said . The indicators of compromise (IoCs) associated with the digital break-in were identified from November 2022 through early January 2023. Tracked as  CVE-2019-18935  (CVSS score: 9.8), the issue relates to a .NET  deserialization vulnerability  affecting Progress Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX that, if left unpatched, could  lead to remote code exec

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday update for March 2023 is rolling out with remediations for a set of  80 security flaws , two of which have come under active exploitation in the wild. Eight of the 80 bugs are rated Critical, 71 are rated Important, and one is rated Moderate in severity. The updates are in  addition to 29 flaws  the tech giant fixed in its Chromium-based Edge browser in recent weeks. The two vulnerabilities that have come under active attack include a Microsoft Outlook privilege escalation flaw ( CVE-2023-23397 , CVSS score: 9.8) and a Windows SmartScreen security feature bypass ( CVE-2023-24880 , CVSS score: 5.1). CVE-2023-23397 is "triggered when an attacker sends a message with an extended MAPI property with a UNC path to an SMB (TCP 445) share on a threat actor-controlled server," Microsoft  said  in a standalone advisory. A threat actor could leverage this flaw by sending a specially crafted email, activating it automatically when it is retrieved and pr

A widespread malicious cyber operation has hijacked thousands of websites aimed at East Asian audiences to redirect visitors to adult-themed content since early September 2022. The ongoing campaign entails injecting malicious JavaScript code to the hacked websites, often connecting to the target web server using legitimate FTP credentials the threat actor previously obtained via an unknown method. "In many cases, these were highly secure auto-generated FTP credentials which the attacker was somehow able to acquire and leverage for website hijacking," Wiz  said  in a report published this month. The fact that the breached websites – owned by both small firms and multinational corporations – utilize different tech stacks and hosting service providers has made it difficult to trace a common attack vector, the cloud security company noted. That having said, one of the common denominators between the websites is that a majority of them are either hosted in China or hosted in

The  Dark Pink  advanced persistent threat (APT) actor has been linked to a fresh set of attacks targeting government and military entities in Southeast Asian countries with a malware called KamiKakaBot. Dark Pink, also called Saaiwc, was extensively profiled by Group-IB earlier this year, describing its use of custom tools such as TelePowerBot and KamiKakaBot to run arbitrary commands and exfiltrate sensitive information. The threat actor is suspected to be of Asia-Pacific origin and has been active since at least mid-2021, with an increased tempo observed in 2022. "The latest attacks, which took place in February 2023, were almost identical to previous attacks," Dutch cybersecurity company EclecticIQ  disclosed  in a new report published last week. "The main difference in the February campaign is that the malware's obfuscation routine has improved to better evade anti-malware measures." The attacks play out in the form of social engineering lures that