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A financially motivated threat actor of Indonesian origin has been observed leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances to carry out illicit crypto mining operations. Cloud security company's Permiso P0 Labs, which first detected the group in November 2021, has assigned it the moniker  GUI-vil  (pronounced Goo-ee-vil). "The group displays a preference for Graphical User Interface (GUI) tools, specifically S3 Browser (version 9.5.5) for their initial operations," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Upon gaining AWS Console access, they conduct their operations directly through the web browser." Attack chains mounted by GUI-vil entail obtaining initial access by weaponizing AWS keys in publicly exposed source code repositories on GitHub or scanning for GitLab instances that are vulnerable to remote code execution flaws (e.g.,  CVE-2021-22205 ). A successful ingress is followed by privilege escalation and

The end of the year is coming, and it's time for security decision-makers to make plans for 2022 and get management approval. Typically, this entails making a solid case regarding why current resources, while yielding significant value, need to be reallocated and enhanced. The Definitive 2022 Security Plan PPT Template is built to simplify this task, providing security decision-makers with an off-the-shelf tool to clearly and easily present their plans and insights to management. While many security decision-makers have the tools and expertise to build their case technologically, effectively communicating their conclusions to the organization's management is a different challenge. Management doesn't think in terms of malware, identity compromise, or zero-day exploits, but in terms of monetary loss and gain: Would investment A in a security product reduce the likelihood of cyberattack derived downtime? Would outsourcing a certain security functionality to a service p

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

Data breaches remain a constant threat, and no industry or organization is immune from the risks. From  Fortune 500  companies to startups, password-related breaches continue to spread seemingly unchecked. As a result of the volume of data breaches and cybersecurity incidents, hackers now have access to a vast swathe of credentials that they can use to power various password-related attacks. One example of this is credential stuffing attacks, which accounted for  1.5 billion  incidents in the last quarter of 2020—a staggering 90% increase from Q1 2020. The rapid pivot to digital in response to the pandemic has been a key contributor to the explosive growth in cybersecurity attacks. With organizations shifting more services online and investing in new applications that facilitate virtual interactions with employees and customers, this has changed the security landscape and presented an array of new avenues for hackers to exploit. However, in a rush to move everything online from mee

Here're a good news and bad news for you. The good news is that if you lose the keys for your TSA-compliant "Travel Sentry" luggage locks then you can just 3D print your very own TSA master keys. The bad news is that anyone can now 3D print their own master keys to open your bags. Yes, the security of 300 Million TSA-approved Travel Sentry luggage locks has been compromised , and now anyone with a 3D printer can unlock every single TSA-approved padlocks. Thanks to a security blunder by the American government agency. A security researcher with online moniker " Xyl2k " published the 3D printing files for a range of master keys with blueprints to GitHub , allowing anyone to 3D print his or her own copies of TSA-approved locks—the ones the authorities can unlock with their keys during airport inspections. How did the Researcher get the Print? A story about the " Secret Life " of Baggage in the hands of the US Transportation Securi

If you have followed the startling revelations about the scope of the US government's surveillance efforts, you may have thought you were reading about the end of privacy, and about the Enemies of the Internet. " My computer was arrested before I was ." a perceptive comment by an internet activist who had been arrested by means of online surveillance.  Online surveillance is a growing danger for journalists, bloggers, citizen-journalists and human rights defenders. Over the last few years, law enforcement agencies have been pushing for unprecedented powers of surveillance and access to your private online communications. This week the PRISM surveillance scandal has consumed the Internet as the implications of massive scale U.S. Government spying begin to sink in. The US National Security Organization (NSA) is almost certainly one of (if not the) most technologically sophisticated, well-funded and secretive organizations in the world. The Prism initiative was launched by Na

Several weeks ago we reviewed Incapsula , a Cloud-based Security service which can significantly enhance the security of your website, while also boosting its performance. Following this review we've received many responses from our readers who wanted to learn more about Incapsula protection services. Specifically, we were asked to explain more about Incapsula Enterprise plan features. To answer these questions, today we are going to take a look at Incapsula DDoS Protection services. Distributed Denial of Service attacks If your business has a web presence, chances are that you've already heard about Distributed Denial of Service attacks. In case you didn't, a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a DoS attack that is usually carried out by a "botnet", a network of computers acting in concert to overwhelm the server by depleting all available resources. Recently we all witnessed a large DDos attacks on U.S. banks by Muslim hacker group , an attack which crippled th

India is set to take steps to protect its cyber infrastructure and designate agencies for carrying out offensive cyber attacks on other countries. Indian Government announce the appointment of   first coordinator for The National cyber security agency. Mr. Gulshan Rai , who presently heads the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN), will be the first coordinator. The move comes at a time when proof shows countries launching cyber attacks not only for intelligence gathering and many nations describing the attacks as an act of war. " The plan is in final stages with certain legal issues being clarified. Among the issues are some objections to the legal powers of the proposed National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre (NCIPC), a command-and-control centre for monitoring the critical infrastructure. NCIPC is to be managed by the technical intelligence agency NTRO (National Technical Research Organisation), and could have all the powers th

Government eavesdropping and security agency GCHQ is developing new tools to sift through them for nuggets of useful data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest. All of these are the source of valuable intelligence that the UK's intelligence agencies want to know about. During a visit to Bletchley Park, UK foreign secretary William Hague launched a 'spy drive' to recruit staff for GCHQ and other intelligence agencies, a National Cipher Challenge for schools, and a £480,000 grant to the home of WW2 code-breaking. " The work involves devising algorithms, testing them and general problem solving in the broad field of language and text processing. This pioneering research work is open to specialist in mathematical/statistics, computational linguists (eg speech recognition and/or language processing) and language engineering ." Job Description explains . " Using data-mining techniques, you will help us to find meaningful patterns and relationships in large

Late in August McAfee Labs discovered a Fake Antivirus program that claims to detect infections, and displays alerts to scare users into purchasing protection. On the contrary, this program is not genuine software and has nothing to do with reliable and effective AV tools. The truth is that this is another scam application developed to enter your PC through vulnerabilities in outdated programs. Trend Micro, which detects the threat as TROJ_FAKEAV.EHM said, " After infecting a user's system, this malware scares its victim into buying the "product" by displaying fake security messages, stating that the computer is infected with spyware or other malware and only this product can remove it after you download the trial version. As soon as the victim downloads Win 8 Security System, it pretends to scan your computer and shows a grossly exaggerated amount of nonexistent threats ". This sort of malware is commonplace, with examples existing for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and even

Security researcher Andres Blanco from CoreSecurity discovered a serious vulnerability in two Wireless Broadcom chipsets used in Smartphones. Broadcom Corporation, a global innovation leader in semiconductor solutions for wired and wireless communications. Broadcom BCM4325 and BCM4329 wireless chipsets have been reported to contain an out-of-bounds read error condition that may be exploited to produce a denial-of-service condition. Other Broadcom chips are not affected. The CVE ID given to issue is  CVE-2012-2619 . In advisory they reported that this error can be leveraged to denial of service attack, and possibly information disclosure. An attacker can send a RSN (802.11i) information element, which causes the Wi-Fi NIC to stop responding. Products containing BCM4325 chipsets: Apple iPhone 3GS Apple iPod 2G HTC Touch Pro 2 HTC Droid Incredible Samsung Spica Acer Liquid Motorola Devour Ford Edge (yes, it's a car) Products containing BCM4329 chipsets: Apple iPhone 4 Ap

This year we have seen some big Security breaches that expose millions of passwords like Yahoo! , LinkedIn , eHarmony and Last.fm , among others , SplashData Reveals Its Annual " 25 Worst Passwords of the Year " List. The three worst passwords haven't changed since 2011; they're password, 123456 and 12345678. The new worst passwords added to this year's list include welcome, jesus, ninja, mustang and password1. Have you ever used one of the most popular passwords of 2012 for your own personal accounts? SplashData CEO Morgan Slain stated " At this time of year, people enjoy focusing on scary costumes, movies and decorations, but those who have been through it can tell you how terrifying it is to have your identity stolen because of a hacked password ." " We're hoping that with more publicity about how risky it is to use weak passwords, more people will start taking simple steps to protect themselves by using stronger passwords and using different p

With Web applications remaining a popular target for attackers, Web app security sometimes seems like a digital version of the " Good, the Bad and the Ugly ." Vulnerabilities in web applications are now the largest vector of enterprise security attacks. Web application security is much more challenging than infrastructure. The top Web application vulnerabilities occur and re-occur time and again. Items such as Cross Site Scripting (XSS), SQL Injection (SQLi) and file inclusion are common vulnerabilities and show up frequently. In his view, the majority of Web application security problems can be solved by applying well known security technology approaches. According to survey results, only 51 percent of organizations currently have coders conduct security testing, and only 40 percent of organizations report they test during development. Vulnerabilities like these fall often outside the traditional expertise of network security managers. To help you understand h

The most common approach to protect data during communication on the Android platform is to use the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols. Thousands of applications in the Google Play market that are using these implementations. A group of researchers including Sascha Fahl, Marian Harbach, Thomas Muders, Matthew Smith from Distributed Computing & Security Group - Leibniz University of Hannover, Hannover, Germany and Lars Baumgärtner, Bernd Freisleben from Department of Math. & Computer Science - Philipps University of Marburg, Marburg, Germany, have presented a paper that  most of these applications contain serious mistakes in the way that SSL/TLS is implemented, that leaving them vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks that could compromise sensitive user data such as banking credentials, credit card numbers and other information. Tests performed on 100 selected apps confirmed that 41 of them were vulnerable to known attacks.  The

The Internet has created many new global business opportunities for enterprises conducting online commerce. However, the many security risks associated with conducting e-commerce have resulted in security becoming a major factor for online success or failure. Whether you are an individual or a company, you should approach online security in the same way that you would approach physical security for your home or business. Not only does it make you feel safer but it also protects people who visit your home, place of business, or website. It is important to understand the potential risks and then make sure you are fully protected against them. In the fast-paced world of technology, it is not always easy to stay abreast of the latest advancements. For this reason it is wise to partner with a reputable Internet security company. Here we have a very cool guide from  Symantec , This guide will de-mystify the technology involved and give you the information you need to make the

Eugene Kaspersky is working with his engineers at Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab to create a secure-by-design OS for ICS. In an interview Kaspersky said " It's true no one else ever tried to make a secure operating system. This may sound weird because of the many efforts Microsoft, Apple and the open source community have made to make their platforms as secure as possible. With all respect, we should admit they were developing a universal solution for a wide range of application and various kinds of users. And security and usability is always a matter of compromise! With a universal OS a developer inevitably sacrifices security for usability ." Companies that maintain ICS are forced to try to patch them on the fly in the event of a malware attack, a process usually easier said than done. Instead, Kaspersky suggests that the solution lies in a secure operating system, one in which ICS can be installed. Such an OS could help ensure that industrial systems stay healthy

Over 2011-2012 we've seen an increase in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and other web attacks on SME's websites. Incapsula is one of the companies whose service is useful to protect your website from all threats and mitigate DDoS attacks which affect your websites, servers, databases, and other essential infrastructure. Incapsula is a cloud-based website security and performance service, including a PCI-certified cloud web application firewall and a content delivery network (CDN) for small and medium-sized businesses. We at ' The Hacker News ' got the chance to review the service using an Enterprise plan account. Really it takes I think 1-2 minutes to join the service and add this extra layer of virtual shield around your Website. You have to make a simple DNS settings change in your domain panel. Your site traffic is then routed through Incapsula's global network of high-powered servers. Incoming traffic is analyzed and a security layer is a

Russian anti-virus company Doctor Web is warning users about the malicious program which is helping attackers carry out mass spam mailings and allow attacker to use victim's PC as slave of his DDOS Army. According to researchers from the company they have discovered a Trojan " Trojan.Proxy.23012 " application that uses a rare method of distribution through peer networks. " The botnet, consisting of Trojan.Proxy.23012-infected computers, is used by criminals to control proxy servers for the purpose of using them to send spam upon command ". An example of such a spam message is shown in the screenshot below. This Malware work as: 1.) Using peer to peer network it will download the executable file and that will be a encrypted malicious module. A very interesting algorithm used by the Trojan to download the infected computer other malware. 2.) After successfully decrypt it launches another module that reads the image in computer memory or other malicious applica

Computer hacking is truly an epidemic. It's not enough to apply the latest patches to your servers and workstations or otherwise defend yourself reactively. If you're in charge of your network's security, you must understand how hackers minds work and what tools they're using for their attacks.  Also one of the best ways to protect yourself is to think like a hacker. Evil hackers aren't just a threat to national security. They're a threat to your privacy and even your livelihood. Your personal information? Nothing more than a commodity in their billion-dollar black-market enterprise. There's no product that can prevent hackers from plastering passwords and usernames on the Web. But some white hat hackers are not only chasing these cybercriminals but also thwarting the attacks before they can be launched. Vulnerabilities appear in your environment every day. For example, everyone wants to use their tablet or smart phone to conduct business. A

Are you running Linux just because you think it's safer than Windows? Think again. Sure, security is a built-in   feature and extends right from the Linux kernel to the desktop, but it still leaves enough room to let someone muck about with your /home folder. Linux might be impervious to viruses and worms written for Windows, but that's just a small subset of the larger issue. Attackers have various tricks up their sleeves to get to those precious bits and bytes that make up everything from your mugshot to your credit card details. Computers that connect to the internet are the ones most exposed to attackers, although computers that never get to see online action are just as vulnerable. We have a small and enough very fast solution for Hardning the security of your Linux machine in few seconds using  Server Shield , It is a lightweight method of protecting and hardening your Linux server. It is easy to install, hard to mess up, and makes your server instantly and effortle

With over 140,000 known computer viruses and 85,000,000 spam emails sent out each day, the likelihood of your PC coming into contact with malware such as viruses, worms, and spyware is almost guaranteed. It is very important to secure your computer just like you would secure your house or car. Your computer can be completely taken over without your permission or knowledge if it is vulnerable and connected to the Internet. Hackers constantly scan the Internet looking for vulnerable hosts, and a computer can be infected by a worm or virus within 15 minutes of connecting to the Internet if certain precautions are not taken. You can avoid most common infections by taking just a few steps, Here is an overview of PC security best practices and tips - " HackerProof : Your Guide To PC Security " This 53 page guide provides an objective, detailed, but easily understood walk through of PC security. By the end of this guide, you will know exactly what PC security means an