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The U.S. government on Tuesday unsealed charges against a Chinese national for allegedly breaking into thousands of Sophos firewall devices globally in 2020. Guan Tianfeng (aka gbigmao and gxiaomao), who is said to have worked at Sichuan Silence Information Technology Company, Limited, has been charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Guan has been accused of developing and testing a zero-day security vulnerability used to conduct the attacks against Sophos firewalls. "Guan Tianfeng is wanted for his alleged role in conspiring to access Sophos firewalls without authorization, cause damage to them, and retrieve and exfiltrate data from both the firewalls themselves and the computers behind these firewalls," the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said . "The exploit was used to infiltrate approximately 81,000 firewalls." The then-zero-day vulnerability in question is CVE-2020-12271 (CVSS score: 9.8), a severe S...

Cyber attackers never stop inventing new ways to compromise their targets. That's why organizations must stay updated on the latest threats.  Here's a quick rundown of the current malware and phishing attacks you need to know about to safeguard your infrastructure before they reach you. Zero-day Attack: Corrupted Malicious Files Evade Detection by Most Security Systems  The analyst team at ANY.RUN recently shared their analysis of an ongoing zero-day attack . It has been active since at least August and still remains unaddressed by most detection software to this day. The attack involves the use of intentionally corrupted Word documents and ZIP archives with malicious files inside. VirusTotal shows 0 detections for one of the corrupted files Due to corruption, security systems cannot properly identify the type of these files and run analysis on them, which results in zero threat detections. Word will ask the user if they want to restore a corrupted file Once these fi...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

Cybersecurity researchers have released a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit that strings together a now-patched critical security flaw impacting Mitel MiCollab with an arbitrary file read zero-day, granting an attacker the ability to access files from susceptible instances. The critical vulnerability in question is CVE-2024-41713 (CVSS score: 9.8), which relates to a case of insufficient input validation in the NuPoint Unified Messaging (NPM) component of Mitel MiCollab that results in a path traversal attack. MiCollab is a software and hardware solution that integrates chat, voice, video, and SMS messaging with Microsoft Teams and other applications. NPM is a server-based voicemail system , which enables users to access their voice messages through various methods, including remotely or through the Microsoft Outlook client. WatchTowr Labs, in a report shared with The Hacker News, said it discovered CVE-2024-41713 as part of its efforts to reproduce CVE-2024-35286 (CVSS score: 9.8...

Cybersecurity researchers have called attention to a novel phishing campaign that leverages corrupted Microsoft Office documents and ZIP archives as a way to bypass email defenses. "The ongoing attack evades #antivirus software, prevents uploads to sandboxes, and bypasses Outlook's spam filters, allowing the malicious emails to reach your inbox," ANY.RUN said in a series of posts on X. The malicious activity entails sending emails containing ZIP archives or Office attachments that are intentionally corrupted in such a way that they cannot be scanned by security tools. These messages aim to trick users into opening the attachments with false promises of employee benefits and bonuses. In other words, the corrupted state of the files means that they are not flagged as suspicious or malicious by email filters and antivirus software. However, the attack still works because it takes advantage of the built-in recovery mechanisms of programs like Word, Outlook, and WinRAR ...

The Russia-aligned threat actor known as RomCom has been linked to the zero-day exploitation of two security flaws, one in Mozilla Firefox and the other in Microsoft Windows, as part of attacks designed to deliver the eponymous backdoor on victim systems. "In a successful attack, if a victim browses a web page containing the exploit, an adversary can run arbitrary code – without any user interaction required (zero click) – which in this case led to the installation of RomCom's backdoor on the victim's computer," ESET said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The vulnerabilities in question are listed below - CVE-2024-9680 (CVSS score: 9.8) - A use-after-free vulnerability in Firefox's Animation component (Patched by Mozilla in October 2024)  CVE-2024-49039 (CVSS score: 8.8) - A privilege escalation vulnerability in Windows Task Scheduler (Patched by Microsoft in November 2024) RomCom , also known as Storm-0978, Tropical Scorpius, UAC-0180, UNC2596, and...

As many as 2,000 Palo Alto Networks devices are estimated to have been compromised as part of a campaign abusing the newly disclosed security flaws that have come under active exploitation in the wild. According to statistics shared by the Shadowserver Foundation, a majority of the infections have been reported in the U.S. (554) and India (461), followed by Thailand (80), Mexico (48), Indonesia (43), Turkey (41), the U.K. (39), Peru (36), and South Africa (35). Earlier this week, Censys revealed that it had identified 13,324 publicly exposed next-generation firewall (NGFW) management interfaces, with 34% of these exposures located in the U.S. However, it's important to note that not all of these exposed hosts are necessarily vulnerable. The flaws in question , CVE-2024-0012 (CVSS score: 9.3) and CVE-2024-9474 (CVSS score: 6.9), are a combination of authentication bypass and privilege escalation that could allow a bad actor to perform malicious actions, including modifying c...

The malware known as Ngioweb has been used to fuel a notorious residential proxy service called NSOCKS, as well as by other services such as VN5Socks and Shopsocks5, new findings from Lumen Technologies reveal. "At least 80% of NSOCKS bots in our telemetry originate from the Ngioweb botnet, mainly utilizing small office/home office (SOHO) routers and IoT devices," the Black Lotus Labs team at Lumen Technologies said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Two-thirds of these proxies are based in the U.S." "The network maintains a daily average of roughly 35,000 working bots, with 40% remaining active for a month or longer." Ngioweb, first documented by Check Point way back in August 2018 in connection with a Ramnit trojan campaign that distributed the malware, has been the subject of extensive analyses in recent weeks by LevelBlue and Trend Micro , the latter of which is tracking the financially motivated threat actor behind the operation as Wate...

Privileged accounts are well-known gateways for potential security threats. However, many organizations focus solely on managing privileged access—rather than securing the accounts and users entrusted with it. This emphasis is perhaps due to the persistent challenges of Privileged Access Management (PAM) deployments. Yet, as the threat landscape evolves, so must organizational priorities. To prevent trust from becoming a liability, the next step in securing privileged access must become a critical focus. In this blog, we explore why managing privileged access alone is insufficient and provide actionable insights to help you craft a security-first strategy for privileged access. The Evolution of PAM Privileged Access Management (PAM) has long been a cornerstone of securing an organization's privileged users and critical resources. PAM's primary goal is to control, monitor, and safeguard privileged accounts, which often have elevated access to critical systems and data. These accou...

Legal documents released as part of an ongoing legal tussle between Meta's WhatsApp and NSO Group have revealed that the Israeli spyware vendor used multiple exploits targeting the messaging app to deliver Pegasus, including one even after it was sued by Meta for doing so. They also show that NSO Group repeatedly found ways to install the invasive surveillance tool on the target's devices as WhatsApp erected new defenses to counter the threat. In May 2019, WhatsApp said it blocked a sophisticated cyber attack that exploited its video calling system to deliver Pegasus malware surreptitiously. The attack leveraged a then zero-day flaw tracked as CVE-2019-3568 (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical buffer overflow bug in the voice call functionality. The documents now show that NSO Group "developed yet another installation vector (known as Erised) that also used WhatsApp servers to install Pegasus." The attack vector – a zero-click exploit that could compromise a victim...

Palo Alto Networks has released new indicators of compromise (IoCs) a day after the network security vendor confirmed that a zero-day vulnerability impacting its PAN-OS firewall management interface has been actively exploited in the wild. To that end, the company said it observed malicious activity originating from below IP addresses and targeting PAN-OS management web interface IP addresses that are accessible over the internet - 136.144.17[.]* 173.239.218[.]251 216.73.162[.]* The company, however, warned that these IP addresses may possibly represent "third-party VPNs with legitimate user activity originating from these IPs to other destinations." Palo Alto Networks' updated advisory indicates that the flaw is being exploited to deploy a web shell on compromised devices, allowing threat actors to gain persistent remote access. The vulnerability, which is yet to be assigned a CVE identifier, carries a CVSS score of 9.3, indicating critical severity. It allow...

A threat actor known as BrazenBamboo has exploited an unresolved security flaw in Fortinet's FortiClient for Windows to extract VPN credentials as part of a modular framework called DEEPDATA . Volexity, which disclosed the findings Friday, said it identified the zero-day exploitation of the credential disclosure vulnerability in July 2024, describing BrazenBamboo as the developer behind DEEPDATA, DEEPPOST, and LightSpy . "DEEPDATA is a modular post-exploitation tool for the Windows operating system that is used to gather a wide range of information from target devices," security researchers Callum Roxan, Charlie Gardner, and Paul Rascagneres said in a technical report. The malware first came to light earlier this week, when BlackBerry detailed the Windows-based surveillance framework as used by the China-linked APT41 threat actor to harvest data from WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, WeChat, LINE, QQ, Skype, Microsoft Outlook, DingDing, Feishu, KeePass, as well as applic...

A newly patched security flaw impacting Windows NT LAN Manager (NTLM) was exploited as a zero-day by a suspected Russia-linked actor as part of cyber attacks targeting Ukraine. The vulnerability in question, CVE-2024-43451 (CVSS score: 6.5), refers to an NTLM hash disclosure spoofing vulnerability that could be exploited to steal a user's NTLMv2 hash. It was patched by Microsoft earlier this week. "Minimal interaction with a malicious file by a user such as selecting (single-click), inspecting (right-click), or performing an action other than opening or executing could trigger this vulnerability," Microsoft revealed in its advisory. Israeli cybersecurity company ClearSky, which discovered the zero-day exploitation of the flaw in June 2024, said it's been abused as part of an attack chain that delivers the open-source Spark RAT malware. "The vulnerability activates URL files, leading to malicious activity," the company said, adding the malicious file...

Microsoft on Tuesday revealed that two security flaws impacting Windows NT LAN Manager ( NTLM ) and Task Scheduler have come under active exploitation in the wild. The security vulnerabilities are among the 90 security bugs the tech giant addressed as part of its Patch Tuesday update for November 2024. Of the 90 flaws, four are rated Critical, 85 are rated Important, and one is rated Moderate in severity. Fifty-two of the patched vulnerabilities are remote code execution flaws. The fixes are in addition to 31 vulnerabilities Microsoft resolved in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of the October 2024 Patch Tuesday update. The two vulnerabilities that have been listed as actively exploited are below - CVE-2024-43451 (CVSS score: 6.5) - Windows NTLM Hash Disclosure Spoofing Vulnerability CVE-2024-49039 (CVSS score: 8.8) - Windows Task Scheduler Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability "This vulnerability discloses a user's NTLMv2 hash to the attacker who c...