software development | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Freelance software developers are the target of an ongoing campaign that leverages job interview-themed lures to deliver cross-platform malware families known as BeaverTail and InvisibleFerret. The activity, linked to North Korea, has been codenamed DeceptiveDevelopment, which overlaps with clusters tracked under the names Contagious Interview (aka CL-STA-0240 ), DEV#POPPER, Famous Chollima, PurpleBravo, and Tenacious Pungsan. The campaign has been ongoing since at least late 2023. "DeceptiveDevelopment targets freelance software developers through spear-phishing on job-hunting and freelancing sites, aiming to steal cryptocurrency wallets and login information from browsers and password managers," cybersecurity company ESET said in a report shared with The Hacker News. In November 2024, ESET confirmed to The Hacker News the overlaps between DeceptiveDevelopment and Contagious Interview, classifying it as a new Lazarus Group activity that operates with an aim to conduc...

The maintainers of the Python Package Index (PyPI) registry have announced a new feature that allows package developers to archive a project as part of efforts to improve supply chain security . "Maintainers can now archive a project to let users know that the project is not expected to receive any more updates," Facundo Tuesca, senior engineer at Trail of Bits, said . In doing so, the idea is to clearly signal to developers that the Python libraries are no longer being actively maintained and that no future security fixes or product updates should be expected. That said, projects labeled as archived will continue to remain available on PyPI and users can continue to install it without any issues. In a separate blog post detailing the feature, Tuesca said the maintainers are considering additional maintainer-controlled statuses to better communicate a project's status to downstream consumers. PyPI also recommends that package developers release a final version pr...

The Need For Unified Security Google Workspace is where teams collaborate, share ideas, and get work done. But while it makes work easier, it also creates new security challenges. Cybercriminals are constantly evolving, finding ways to exploit misconfigurations, steal sensitive data, and hijack user accounts. Many organizations try to secure their environment by piecing together different security tools, hoping that multiple layers of protection will keep them safe.  But in reality, this patchwork approach often creates blind spots, making it harder—not easier—to defend against threats. To truly secure Google Workspace, businesses need a unified security strategy that offers complete protection without unnecessary complexity. The problem with most security solutions is that they only solve part of the puzzle. Point solutions, like tools that block malware or phishing attacks, might work well for a specific type of threat but fail to recognize suspicious user behavior, unauthori...

Microsoft has announced that it's making an "unexpected change" to the way .NET installers and archives are distributed, requiring developers to update their production and DevOps infrastructure. "We expect that most users will not be directly affected, however, it is critical that you validate if you are affected and to watch for downtime or other kinds of breakage," Richard Lander, a program manager on the .NET team, said in a statement last week. The move is the result of the fact that some .NET binaries and installers are hosted on Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) domains that end in .azureedge[.]net -- dotnetcli.azureedge.net and dotnetbuilds.azureedge.net -- which are hosted on Edgio. Last month, web infrastructure and security company Akamai acquired select assets from Edgio following its bankruptcy. As part of this transition, the Edgio platform is scheduled to end service on January 15, 2025. Given that the .azureedge[.]net domains could ceas...

Having been at ActiveState for nearly eight years, I've seen many iterations of our product. However, one thing has stayed true over the years: Our commitment to the open source community and companies using open source in their code. ActiveState has been helping enterprises manage open source for over a decade. In the early days, open source was in its infancy. We focused mainly on the developer case, helping to get open source on platforms like Windows. Over time, our focus shifted from helping companies run open source to supporting enterprises managing open source when the community wasn't producing it in the way they needed it. We began managing builds at scale, and supporting enterprises in understanding what open source they're using and if it's compliant and safe. Managing open source at scale in a large organization can be complex. To help companies overcome this and bring structure to their open source DevSecOps practice, we're unveiling our end-to-end platform to help m...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a far-off dream—it's here, changing the way we live. From ordering coffee to diagnosing diseases, it's everywhere. But while you're creating the next big AI-powered app, hackers are already figuring out ways to break it. Every AI app is an opportunity—and a potential risk. The stakes are huge: data leaks, downtime, and even safety threats if security isn't built in. With AI adoption moving fast, securing your projects is no longer optional—it's a must. Join Liqian Lim, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Snyk, for an exclusive webinar that's all about securing the future of AI development. Titled " Building Tomorrow, Securely: Securing the Use of AI in App Development ," this session will arm you with the knowledge and tools to tackle the challenges of AI-powered innovation. What You'll Learn: Get AI-Ready: How to make your AI projects secure from the start. Spot Hidden Risks: Uncover threats you might not see coming. Understand the Ma...

According to research from GitGuardian and CyberArk, 79% of IT decision-makers reported having experienced a secrets leak , up from 75% in the previous year's report. At the same time, the number of leaked credentials has never been higher, with over 12.7 million hardcoded credentials in public GitHub repositories alone . One of the more troubling aspects of this report is that over 90% of valid secrets found and reported remained valid for more than 5 days. According to the same research, on average, it takes organizations 27 days to remediate leaked credentials. Combine that with the fact that non-human identities outnumber human identities by at least 45:1 , and it is easy to see why many organizations are realizing stopping secrets sprawl means finding a way to deal with this machine identity crisis. Unfortunately, the research also shows that many teams are confused about who owns the security of these identities. It is a perfect storm of risk.  Why Does Rotation Take So L...

Microsoft is further delaying the release of its controversial Recall feature for Windows Copilot+ PCs, stating it's taking the time to improve the experience. The development was first reported by The Verge. The artificial intelligence-powered tool was initially slated for a preview release starting in October. "We are committed to delivering a secure and trusted experience with Recall," the company said in an updated statement released Thursday. "To ensure we deliver on these important updates, we're taking additional time to refine the experience before previewing it with Windows Insiders. Originally planned for October, Recall will now be available for preview with Windows Insiders on Copilot+ PCs by December" Microsoft unveiled Recall earlier this May, describing it as a way for users to explore a "visual timeline" of their screens over time and help find things from apps, websites, images, and documents. The search experience was meant...

LottieFiles has revealed that its npm package "lottie-player" was compromised as part of a supply chain attack, prompting it to release an updated version of the library. "On October 30th ~6:20 PM UTC - LottieFiles were notified that our popular open source npm package for the web player @lottiefiles/lottie-player had unauthorized new versions pushed with malicious code," the company said in a statement on X. "This does not impact our dotlottie player and/or SaaS service." LottieFiles is an animation workflow platform that enables designers to create, edit, and share animations in a JSON-based animation file format called Lottie. It's also the developer behind an npm package named lottie-player , which allows for embedding and playing Lottie animations on websites. According to the company, "a large number of users using the library via third-party CDNs without a pinned version were automatically served the compromised version as the latest ...

A now-patched security flaw in the Opera web browser could have enabled a malicious extension to gain unauthorized, full access to private APIs. The attack, codenamed CrossBarking , could have made it possible to conduct actions such as capturing screenshots, modifying browser settings, and account hijacking, Guardio Labs said. To demonstrate the issue, the company said it managed to publish a seemingly harmless browser extension to the Chrome Web Store that could then exploit the flaw when installed on Opera, making it an instance of a cross-browser-store attack. "This case study not only highlights the perennial clash between productivity and security but also provides a fascinating glimpse into the tactics used by modern threat actors operating just below the radar," Nati Tal, head of Guardio Labs, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The issue has been addressed by Opera as of September 24, 2024, following responsible disclosure. That said, this is not th...

Apple has publicly made available its Private Cloud Compute (PCC) Virtual Research Environment (VRE), allowing the research community to inspect and verify the privacy and security guarantees of its offering. PCC, which Apple unveiled earlier this June, has been marketed as the "most advanced security architecture ever deployed for cloud AI compute at scale." With the new technology, the idea is to offload computationally complex Apple Intelligence requests to the cloud in a manner that doesn't sacrifice user privacy. Apple said it's inviting "all security and privacy researchers — or anyone with interest and a technical curiosity — to learn more about PCC and perform their own independent verification of our claims." To further incentivize research, the iPhone maker said it's expanding the Apple Security Bounty program to include PCC by offering monetary payouts ranging from $50,000 to $1,000,000 for security vulnerabilities identified in it. Th...

Cybersecurity researchers have found that entry points could be abused across multiple programming ecosystems like PyPI, npm, Ruby Gems, NuGet, Dart Pub, and Rust Crates to stage software supply chain attacks. "Attackers can leverage these entry points to execute malicious code when specific commands are run, posing a widespread risk in the open-source landscape," Checkmarx researchers Yehuda Gelb and Elad Rapaport said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The software supply chain security company noted that entry-point attacks offer threat actors a more sneaky and persistent method of compromising systems in a manner that can bypass traditional security defenses. Entry points in a programming language like Python refer to a packaging mechanism that allows developers to expose certain functionality as a command-line wrapper (aka console_scripts). Alternatively, they can also serve to load plugins that augment a package's features. Checkmarx noted that while en...

A critical security flaw has been disclosed in the Apache Avro Java Software Development Kit (SDK) that, if successfully exploited, could allow the execution of arbitrary code on susceptible instances. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-47561 (CVSS score: 9.3), impacts all versions of the software prior to 1.11.4. "Schema parsing in the Java SDK of Apache Avro 1.11.3 and previous versions allows bad actors to execute arbitrary code," the project maintainers said in an advisory released last week. "Users are recommended to upgrade to version 1.11.4 or 1.12.0, which fix this issue." Apache Avro, analogous to Google's Protocol Buffers ( protobuf ), is an open-source project that provides a language-neutral data serialization framework for large-scale data processing. The Avro team notes that the vulnerability affects any application if it allows users to provide their own Avro schemas for parsing. Kostya Kortchinsky from the Databricks security team has been cr...

Google has revealed that its transition to memory-safe languages such as Rust as part of its secure-by-design approach has led to the percentage of memory-safe vulnerabilities discovered in Android dropping from 76% to 24% over a period of six years. The tech giant said focusing on Safe Coding for new features not only reduces the overall security risk of a codebase, but also makes the switch more "scalable and cost-effective." Eventually, this leads to a drop in memory safety vulnerabilities as new memory unsafe development slows down after a certain period of time, and new memory safe development takes over, Google's Jeff Vander Stoep and Alex Rebert said in a post shared with The Hacker News. Perhaps even more interestingly, the number of memory safety vulnerabilities tends to register a drop notwithstanding an increase in the quantity of new memory unsafe code. The paradox is explained by the fact that vulnerabilities decay exponentially, with a study finding ...

SolarWinds has released fixes to address two security flaws in its Access Rights Manager (ARM) software, including a critical vulnerability that could result in remote code execution. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-28991 , is rated 9.0 out of a maximum of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. It has been described as an instance of deserialization of untrusted data. "SolarWinds Access Rights Manager (ARM) was found to be susceptible to a remote code execution vulnerability," the company said in an advisory. "If exploited, this vulnerability would allow an authenticated user to abuse the service, resulting in remote code execution." Security researcher Piotr Bazydlo of the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on May 24, 2024. The ZDI, which has assigned the shortcoming a CVSS score of 9.9, said it exists within a class called JsonSerializationBinder and stems from a lack of proper validation of user...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new set of malicious Python packages that target software developers under the guise of coding assessments. "The new samples were tracked to GitHub projects that have been linked to previous, targeted attacks in which developers are lured using fake job interviews," ReversingLabs researcher Karlo Zanki said . The activity has been assessed to be part of an ongoing campaign dubbed VMConnect that first came to light in August 2023. There are indications that it is the handiwork of the North Korea-backed Lazarus Group . The use of job interviews as an infection vector has been adopted widely by North Korean threat actors, either approaching unsuspecting developers on sites such as LinkedIn or tricking them into downloading rogue packages as part of a purported skills test. These packages, for their part, have been published directly on public repositories like npm and PyPI, or hosted on GitHub repositories under their control. ...

Threat actors have long leveraged typosquatting as a means to trick unsuspecting users into visiting malicious websites or downloading booby-trapped software and packages. These attacks typically involve registering domains or packages with names slightly altered from their legitimate counterparts (e.g., goog1e.com vs. google.com). Adversaries targeting open-source repositories across platforms have relied on developers making typing errors to initiate software supply chain attacks through PyPI, npm, Maven Central, NuGet, RubyGems, and Crate. The latest findings from cloud security firm Orca show that even GitHub Actions , a continuous integration and continuous delivery ( CI/CD ) platform, is not immune from the threat. "If developers make a typo in their GitHub action that matches a typosquatter's action, applications could be made to run malicious code without the developer even realizing," security researcher Ofir Yakobi said in a report shared with The Ha...

Roblox developers are the target of a persistent campaign that seeks to compromise systems through bogus npm packages, once again underscoring how threat actors continue to exploit the trust in the open-source ecosystem to deliver malware. "By mimicking the popular 'noblox.js' library, attackers have published dozens of packages designed to steal sensitive data and compromise systems," Checkmarx researcher Yehuda Gelb said in a technical report. Roblox is an online game platform and game creation system with nearly 80 million daily active users , and thus makes for an attractive target for threat actors. It was launched in September 2006 for Windows, before debuting in other platforms, including iOS, Android, Xbox One, Meta Quest, and PlayStation 4. Details about the activity were first documented by ReversingLabs in August 2023 as part of a campaign that delivered a stealer called Luna Token Grabber, which it said was a "replay of an attack uncovered two ...