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The PCI DSS landscape is evolving rapidly. With the Q1 2025 deadline looming ever larger, businesses are scrambling to meet the stringent new requirements of PCI DSS v4.0. Two sections in particular, 6.4.3 and 11.6.1, are troublesome as they demand that organizations rigorously monitor and manage payment page scripts and use a robust change detection mechanism. With the deadline fast approaching and the consequences of non-compliance so severe, there is no room for complacency, so, in this article, we look at the best way to meet these complex coding requirements. PCI DSS v4: Understanding Requirements 6.4.3 and 11.6.1 These changes to PCI DSS in v4.0 acknowledge the urgent need to tighten client-side security in the face of pervasive supply-chain threats. They call for beefed-up payment page security to keep customers' sensitive payment details safe from malicious script injection attacks: 6.4.3: To meet this requirement your organization needs to monitor and manage all payment

A "simplified Chinese-speaking actor" has been linked to a new campaign that has targeted multiple countries in Asia and Europe with the end goal of performing search engine optimization (SEO) rank manipulation. The black hat SEO cluster has been codenamed DragonRank by Cisco Talos, with victimology footprint scattered across Thailand, India, Korea, Belgium, the Netherlands, and China. "DragonRank exploits targets' web application services to deploy a web shell and utilizes it to collect system information and launch malware such as PlugX and BadIIS, running various credential-harvesting utilities," security researcher Joey Chen said . The attacks have led to compromises of 35 Internet Information Services ( IIS ) servers with the end goal of deploying the BadIIS malware, which was first documented by ESET in August 2021. It's specifically designed to facilitate proxy ware and SEO fraud by turning the compromised IIS server into a relay point for mal

Since its emergence, Generative AI has revolutionized enterprise productivity. GenAI tools enable faster and more effective software development, financial analysis, business planning, and customer engagement. However, this business agility comes with significant risks, particularly the potential for sensitive data leakage. As organizations attempt to balance productivity gains with security concerns, many have been forced to choose between unrestricted GenAI usage to banning it altogether. A new e-guide by LayerX titled 5 Actionable Measures to Prevent Data Leakage Through Generative AI Tools is designed to help organizations navigate the challenges of GenAI usage in the workplace. The guide offers practical steps for security managers to protect sensitive corporate data while still reaping the productivity benefits of GenAI tools like ChatGPT. This approach is intended to allow companies to strike the right balance between innovation and security. Why Worry About ChatGPT? The e

Certificate authority (CA) DigiCert has warned that it will be revoking a subset of SSL/TLS certificates within 24 hours due to an oversight with how it verified if a digital certificate is issued to the rightful owner of a domain. The company said it will be taking the step of revoking certificates that do not have proper Domain Control Validation ( DCV ). "Before issuing a certificate to a customer, DigiCert validates the customer's control or ownership over the domain name for which they are requesting a certificate using one of several methods approved by the CA/Browser Forum ( CABF )," it said . One of the ways this is done hinges on the customer setting up a DNS CNAME record containing a random value provided to them by DigiCert, which then performs a DNS lookup for the domain in question to make sure that the random values are the same. The random value, per DigiCert, is prefixed with an underscore character so as to prevent a possible collision with an actu

A group of security researchers from the Graz University of Technology have demonstrated a new side-channel attack known as SnailLoad that could be used to remotely infer a user's web activity. "SnailLoad exploits a bottleneck present on all Internet connections," the researchers said in a study released this week. "This bottleneck influences the latency of network packets, allowing an attacker to infer the current network activity on someone else's Internet connection. An attacker can use this information to infer websites a user visits or videos a user watches." A defining characteristic of the approach is that it obviates the need for carrying out an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attack or being in physical proximity to the Wi-Fi connection to sniff network traffic. Specifically, it entails tricking a target into loading a harmless asset (e.g., a file, an image, or an ad) from a threat actor-controlled server, which then exploits the victim's

Google has taken steps to block ads for e-commerce sites that use the Polyfill.io service after a Chinese company acquired the domain and modified the JavaScript library ("polyfill.js") to redirect users to malicious and scam sites. "Protecting our users is our top priority. We detected a security issue recently that may affect websites using certain third-party libraries," the company said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "To help potentially impacted advertisers secure their websites, we have been proactively sharing information on how to quickly mitigate the issue." More than 110,000 sites that embed the library are impacted by the supply chain attack, Sansec said in a Tuesday report. Polyfill is a popular library that incorporates support for modern functions in web browsers. Earlier this February, concerns were raised following its purchase by China-based content delivery network (CDN) company Funnull. The original creator of the pr

A previously undocumented threat actor dubbed Boolka has been observed compromising websites with malicious scripts to deliver a modular trojan codenamed BMANAGER . "The threat actor behind this campaign has been carrying out opportunistic SQL injection attacks against websites in various countries since at least 2022," Group-IB researchers Rustam Mirkasymov and Martijn van den Berk said in a report published last week. "Over the last three years, the threat actors have been infecting vulnerable websites with malicious JavaScript scripts capable of intercepting any data entered on an infected website." Boolka gets its name from the JavaScript code inserted into the website that beacons out to a command-and-control server named "boolka[.]tk" every time an unsuspecting visitor lands on the infected site. The JavaScript is also designed to collect and exfiltrate user inputs and interactions in a Base64-encoded format, indicating the use of the malware

Multiple WordPress plugins have been backdoored to inject malicious code that makes it possible to create rogue administrator accounts with the aim of performing arbitrary actions. "The injected malware attempts to create a new administrative user account and then sends those details back to the attacker-controlled server," Wordfence security researcher Chloe Chamberland said in a Monday alert. "In addition, it appears the threat actor also injected malicious JavaScript into the footer of websites that appears to add SEO spam throughout the website." The admin accounts have the usernames "Options" and "PluginAuth," with the account information exfiltrated to the IP address 94.156.79[.]8. It's currently not known how the unknown attackers behind the campaign managed to compromise the plugins, but the earliest signs of the software supply chain attack date back to June 21, 2024. The plugins in question are no longer available for downlo

Are your tags really safe with Google Tag Manager? If you've been thinking that using GTM means that your tracking tags and pixels are safely managed , then it might be time to think again. In this article we look at how a big-ticket seller that does business on every continent came unstuck when it forgot that you can't afford to allow tags to go unmanaged or become misconfigured.  Read the full case study here . Google Tag Manager saves website owners time and money. Its visual interface lets them attach tracking tags to their sites and then modify them as needed without the need to call a developer every time. Such tags gather the marketing and analytics data that power growth, and GTM makes them easier to manage, but with strict rules around data privacy to consider, you can't trust it completely; it needs active oversight. The ticket seller A case in point that we recently became aware of involves a global company that sells tickets to live events. With global operations i

A high-severity flaw impacting the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress is being actively exploited by threat actors to create rogue admin accounts on susceptible websites. The  findings  come from WPScan, which said that the vulnerability ( CVE-2023-40000 , CVSS score: 8.3) has been leveraged to set up bogus admin users with the names wpsupp‑user and wp‑configuser. CVE-2023-40000, which was  disclosed  by Patchstack in February 2024, is a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that could permit an unauthenticated user to elevate privileges by means of specially crafted HTTP requests. The flaw was addressed in October 2023 in version 5.7.0.1. It's worth noting that the latest version of the plugin is 6.2.0.1, which was  released  on April 25, 2024. LiteSpeed Cache has over 5 million active installations, with statistics showing that versions other than 5.7, 6.0, 6.1, and 6.2 are still active on 16.8% of all websites. According to the Automattic-owned company, the ma

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a credit card skimmer that's concealed within a fake  Meta Pixel tracker script  in an attempt to evade detection. Sucuri said that the malware is injected into websites through tools that allow for custom code, such as WordPress plugins like  Simple Custom CSS and JS  or the " Miscellaneous Scripts " section of the Magento admin panel. "Custom script editors are popular with bad actors because they allow for external third party (and malicious) JavaScript and can easily pretend to be benign by leveraging naming conventions that match popular scripts like Google Analytics or libraries like JQuery," security researcher Matt Morrow  said . The bogus Meta Pixel tracker script identified by the web security company contains similar elements as its legitimate counterpart, but a closer examination reveals the addition of JavaScript code that substitutes references to the domain "connect.facebook[.]net" with "

Cybersecurity researchers have shared details of a now-patched security vulnerability in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow ( MWAA ) that could be potentially exploited by a malicious actor to hijack victims' sessions and achieve remote code execution on underlying instances. The vulnerability, now addressed by AWS, has been codenamed  FlowFixation  by Tenable. "Upon taking over the victim's account, the attacker could have performed tasks such as reading connection strings, adding configurations and triggering directed acyclic graphs (DAGS)," senior security researcher Liv Matan  said  in a technical analysis. "Under certain circumstances such actions can result in RCE on the instance that underlies the MWAA, and in lateral movement to other services." The root cause of the vulnerability, per the cybersecurity firm, is a combination of  session fixation  on the web management panel of AWS MWAA and an AWS domain misconfigura

A massive malware campaign dubbed  Sign1  has compromised over 39,000 WordPress sites in the last six months, using malicious JavaScript injections to redirect users to scam sites. The most recent variant of the malware is estimated to have infected no less than 2,500 sites over the past two months alone, Sucuri said in a report published this week. The attacks entail injecting rogue JavaScript into legitimate HTML widgets and plugins that allow for arbitrary JavaScript and other code to be inserted, providing attackers with an opportunity to add their malicious code. The XOR-encoded JavaScript code is subsequently decoded and used to execute a JavaScript file hosted on a remote server, which ultimately facilitates redirects to a  VexTrio -operated traffic distribution system (TDS) but only if certain criteria are met. What's more, the malware uses time-based randomization to fetch dynamic URLs that change every 10 minutes to get around blocklists. These domains are registere

Ivanti has disclosed details of a critical remote code execution flaw impacting Standalone Sentry, urging customers to apply the fixes immediately to stay protected against potential cyber threats. Tracked as  CVE-2023-41724 , the vulnerability carries a CVSS score of 9.6. "An unauthenticated threat actor can execute arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system of the appliance within the same physical or logical network," the company  said . The flaw impacts all supported versions 9.17.0, 9.18.0, and 9.19.0, as well as older versions. The company said it has made available a patch (versions 9.17.1, 9.18.1, and 9.19.1) that can be downloaded via the standard download portal. It credited Vincent Hutsebaut, Pierre Vivegnis, Jerome Nokin, Roberto Suggi Liverani and Antonin B. of NATO Cyber Security Centre for "their collaboration on this issue." Ivanti emphasized that it's not aware of any customers affected by CVE-2023-41724, and  added  that "

Google on Thursday announced an enhanced version of Safe Browsing to provide real-time, privacy-preserving URL protection and safeguard users from visiting potentially malicious sites. "The  Standard protection mode for Chrome  on desktop and iOS will check sites against Google's server-side list of known bad sites in real-time," Google's Jonathan Li and Jasika Bawa  said . "If we suspect a site poses a risk to you or your device, you'll see a warning with more information. By checking sites in real time, we expect to block 25% more phishing attempts." Up until now, the Chrome browser used a locally-stored list of known unsafe sites that's updated every 30 to 60 minutes, and then leveraging a  hash-based approach  to compare every site visited against the database. Google  first revealed  its plans to switch to real-time server-side checks without sharing users' browsing history with the company in September 2023. The reason for the change, the search giant said, is motivated b

Threat actors are conducting brute-force attacks against WordPress sites by leveraging malicious JavaScript injections, new findings from Sucuri reveal. The attacks, which take the form of distributed brute-force attacks, "target WordPress websites from the browsers of completely innocent and unsuspecting site visitors," security researcher Denis Sinegubko  said . The activity is part of a  previously documented attack wave  in which compromised WordPress sites were used to inject crypto drainers such as Angel Drainer directly or redirect site visitors to Web3 phishing sites containing drainer malware. The latest iteration is notable for the fact that the injections – found on  over 700 sites  to date – don't load a drainer but rather use a list of common and leaked passwords to brute-force other WordPress sites. The attack unfolds over five stages, enabling a threat actor to take advantage of already compromised websites to launch distributed brute-force attacks against other po

Threat hunters have discovered a rogue WordPress plugin that's capable of creating bogus administrator users and injecting malicious JavaScript code to steal credit card information. The skimming activity is part of a  Magecart campaign  targeting e-commerce websites, according to Sucuri. "As with many other malicious or fake WordPress plugins it contains some deceptive information at the top of the file to give it a veneer of legitimacy," security researcher Ben Martin  said . "In this case, comments claim the code to be 'WordPress Cache Addons.'" Malicious plugins typically find their way to WordPress sites via either a  compromised admin user  or the  exploitation of security flaws  in another plugin already installed on the site. Post installation, the plugin replicates itself to the  mu-plugins  (or must-use plugins) directory so that it's automatically enabled and conceals its presence from the admin panel. "Since the only way to re