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A new Go-based malware loader called  CherryLoader  has been discovered by threat hunters in the wild to deliver additional payloads onto compromised hosts for follow-on exploitation. Arctic Wolf Labs, which discovered the new attack tool in two recent intrusions, said the loader's icon and name masquerades as the legitimate CherryTree note-taking application to dupe potential victims into installing it. "CherryLoader was used to drop one of two privilege escalation tools,  PrintSpoofer  or  JuicyPotatoNG , which would then run a batch file to establish persistence on the victim device," researchers Hady Azzam, Christopher Prest, and Steven Campbell  said . In another novel twist, CherryLoader also packs modularized features that allow the threat actor to swap exploits without recompiling code. It's currently not known how the loader is distributed, but the attack chains examined by the cybersecurity firm show that CherryLoader ("cherrytree.exe") and i

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday  added  a now-patched critical flaw impacting Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) and MobileIron Core to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, stating it's being actively exploited in the wild. The vulnerability in question is  CVE-2023-35082  (CVSS score: 9.8), an authentication bypass that's a patch bypass for another flaw in the same solution tracked as CVE-2023-35078 (CVSS score: 10.0), which was actively exploited in attacks targeted Norwegian government entities as a zero-day in April 2023. "If exploited, this vulnerability enables an unauthorized, remote (internet-facing) actor to potentially access users' personally identifiable information and make limited changes to the server," Ivanti  noted  in August 2023. All versions of Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) 11.10, 11.9 and 11.8, and MobileIron Core 11.7 and below are impacted by the vulnerability. Cyb

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,

As many as five different malware families were deployed by suspected nation-state actors as part of post-exploitation activities leveraging  two zero-day vulnerabilities  in Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) VPN appliances since early December 2023. "These families allow the threat actors to circumvent authentication and provide backdoor access to these devices," Mandiant  said  in an analysis published this week. The Google-owned threat intelligence firm is tracking the threat actor under the moniker  UNC5221 .  The attacks leverage an exploit chain comprising an authentication bypass flaw (CVE-2023-46805) and a code injection vulnerability (CVE-2024-21887) to take over susceptible instances. Volexity, which attributed the activity to a suspected Chinese espionage actor named UTA0178, said the twin flaws were used to gain initial access, deploy webshells, backdoor legitimate files, capture credentials and configuration data, and pivot further into the victim environment. Ac

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has  added  a critical security vulnerability impacting Microsoft SharePoint Server to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The issue, tracked as  CVE-2023-29357  (CVSS score: 9.8), is a privilege escalation flaw that could be exploited by an attacker to gain administrator privileges. Microsoft  released patches  for the bug as part of its June 2023 Patch Tuesday updates. "An attacker who has gained access to spoofed JWT authentication tokens can use them to execute a network attack which bypasses authentication and allows them to gain access to the privileges of an authenticated user," Redmond said. "The attacker needs no privileges nor does the user need to perform any action." Security researcher Nguyễn Tiến Giang (Jang) of StarLabs SG  demonstrated an exploit  for the flaw at the Pwn2Own Vancouver hacking contest last year, earning a $100,000 prize. The  pr

A pair of zero-day flaws identified in Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) and Policy Secure have been chained by suspected China-linked nation-state actors to breach less than 10 customers. Cybersecurity firm Volexity, which  identified  the activity on the network of one of its customers in the second week of December 2023, attributed it to a hacking group it tracks under the name  UTA0178 . There is evidence to suggest that the VPN appliance may have been compromised as early as December 3, 2023. The two vulnerabilities that have been exploited in the wild to achieve unauthenticated command execution on the ICS device are as follows - CVE-2023-46805  (CVSS score: 8.2) - An authentication bypass vulnerability in the web component of Ivanti Connect Secure (9.x, 22.x) and Ivanti Policy Secure allows a remote attacker to access restricted resources by bypassing control checks. CVE-2024-21887  (CVSS score: 9.1) - A command injection vulnerability in web components of Ivanti Connect Secur

Ivanti has released security updates to address a critical flaw impacting its Endpoint Manager (EPM) solution that, if successfully exploited, could result in remote code execution (RCE) on susceptible servers. Tracked as CVE-2023-39336, the vulnerability has been rated 9.6 out of 10 on the CVSS scoring system. The shortcoming impacts EPM 2021 and EPM 2022 prior to SU5. "If exploited, an attacker with access to the internal network can leverage an unspecified SQL injection to execute arbitrary SQL queries and retrieve output without the need for authentication," Ivanti  said  in an advisory. "This can then allow the attacker control over machines running the EPM agent. When the core server is configured to use SQL express, this might lead to RCE on the core server." The disclosure arrived weeks after the company  resolved  nearly two dozen security flaws in its Avalanche enterprise mobile device management (MDM) solution. Of the 21 issues, 13 are rated critical (CVSS scores: 9.8

The  Operation Triangulation  spyware attacks targeting Apple iOS devices leveraged never-before-seen exploits that made it possible to even bypass pivotal hardware-based security protections erected by the company. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, which  discovered  the  campaign  at the beginning of 2023 after becoming one of the targets,  described  it as the "most sophisticated attack chain" it has ever observed to date. The campaign is believed to have been active since 2019. Operation Triangulation gets its name from the use of a fingerprinting technique called canvas fingerprinting to draw a yellow triangle on a pink background with Web Graphics Library ( WebGL ) in the device's memory. The exploitation activity involved the use of four zero-day flaws that were fashioned into a chain to obtain an unprecedented level of access and backdoor target devices running iOS versions up to iOS 16.2 with the ultimate goal of gathering sensitive information. The starti

A new zero-day security flaw has been discovered in Apache OfBiz, an open-source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that could be exploited to bypass authentication protections. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2023-51467 , resides in the login functionality and is the result of an incomplete patch for another critical vulnerability ( CVE-2023-49070 , CVSS score: 9.8) that was released earlier this month. "The  security measures  taken to patch CVE-2023-49070 left the root issue intact and therefore the authentication bypass was still present," the SonicWall Capture Labs threat research team, which discovered the bug,  said  in a statement shared with The Hacker News. CVE-2023-49070 refers to a pre-authenticated remote code execution flaw impacting versions prior to 18.12.10 that, when successfully exploited, could allow threat actors to gain full control over the server and siphon sensitive data. It is caused due to a deprecated XML-RPC component within Apache

Barracuda has revealed that Chinese threat actors exploited a new zero-day in its Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliances to deploy backdoors on a "limited number" of devices. Tracked as  CVE-2023-7102 , the issue relates to a case of  arbitrary code execution  that resides within a third-party and open-source library named Spreadsheet::ParseExcel that's used by the Amavis scanner within the gateway to screen Microsoft Excel email attachments for malware. The company attributed the activity to a threat actor tracked by Google-owned Mandiant as  UNC4841 , which was previously linked to the  active exploitation  of another zero-day in Barracuda devices (CVE-2023-2868, CVSS score: 9.8) earlier this year. Successful exploitation of the new flaw is accomplished by means of a specially crafted Microsoft Excel email attachment. This is followed by the deployment of new variants of known implants called  SEASPY and SALTWATER  that are equipped to offer persistence and comman

A new phishing campaign is leveraging decoy Microsoft Word documents as bait to deliver a backdoor written in the  Nim programming language . "Malware written in uncommon programming languages puts the security community at a disadvantage as researchers and reverse engineers' unfamiliarity can hamper their investigation," Netskope researchers Ghanashyam Satpathy and Jan Michael Alcantara  said . Nim-based malware has been a rarity in the threat landscape, although that has been slowly changing in recent years as attackers continue to either develop custom tools from scratch using the language or port existing versions of their nefarious programs to it. This has been demonstrated in the case of loaders such as  NimzaLoader ,  Nimbda ,  IceXLoader , as well as ransomware families tracked under the names  Dark Power  and  Kanti . The attack chain documented by Netskope begins with a phishing email containing a Word document attachment that, when opened, urges the recipi

A new analysis of the sophisticated commercial spyware called Predator has revealed that its ability to persist between reboots is offered as an "add-on feature" and that it depends on the licensing options opted by a customer. "In 2021, Predator spyware couldn't survive a reboot on the infected Android system (it had it on iOS)," Cisco Talos researchers Mike Gentile, Asheer Malhotra, and Vitor Ventura  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "However, by April 2022, that capability was being offered to their customers." Predator is the product of a consortium called the Intellexa Alliance, which includes Cytrox (subsequently acquired by WiSpear), Nexa Technologies, and Senpai Technologies. Both Cytrox and Intellexa were  added  to the Entity List by the U.S. in July 2023 for "trafficking in cyber exploits used to gain access to information systems." The latest findings come more than six months after the cybersecurity vendor detai

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned of active exploitation of a  high-severity Adobe ColdFusion vulnerability  by unidentified threat actors to gain initial access to government servers. "The vulnerability in ColdFusion (CVE-2023-26360) presents as an improper access control issue and exploitation of this CVE can result in arbitrary code execution," CISA  said , adding an unnamed federal agency was targeted between June and July 2023. The shortcoming affects ColdFusion 2018 (Update 15 and earlier versions) and ColdFusion 2021 (Update 5 and earlier versions). It has been addressed in versions Update 16 and Update 6, respectively, released on March 14, 2023. It was added by CISA to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog a day later, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. Adobe, in an advisory released around that time, said it's aware of the flaw being "exploited in the wild in very limited attacks."

Google has rolled out security updates to fix seven security issues in its Chrome browser, including a zero-day that has come under active exploitation in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2023-6345 , the high-severity vulnerability has been described as an integer overflow bug in Skia, an open source 2D graphics library. Benoît Sevens and Clément Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) have been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on November 24, 2023. As is typically the case, the search giant  acknowledged  that "an exploit for CVE-2023-6345 exists in the wild," but stopped short of sharing additional information surrounding the nature of attacks and the threat actors that may be weaponizing it in real-world attacks. It's worth noting that Google released patches for a similar integer overflow flaw in the same component ( CVE-2023-2136 ) in April 2023 that had also come under active exploitation as a zero-day, raising the possibility that CVE-202

An active malware campaign is leveraging two zero-day vulnerabilities with remote code execution (RCE) functionality to rope routers and video recorders into a Mirai-based distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet. "The payload targets routers and network video recorder (NVR) devices with default admin credentials and installs Mirai variants when successful," Akamai  said  in an advisory published this week. Details of the flaws are currently under wraps to allow the two vendors to publish patches and prevent other threat actors from abusing them. The fixes for one of the vulnerabilities are expected to be shipped next month. The attacks were first discovered by the web infrastructure and security company against its honeypots in late October 2023. The perpetrators of the attacks have not been identified as yet. The botnet, which has been codenamed InfectedSlurs due to the use of racial and offensive language in the command-and-control (C2) servers and hard-coded strings, is a 

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added three security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog based on evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The  vulnerabilities  are as follows - CVE-2023-36584  (CVSS score: 5.4) - Microsoft Windows Mark-of-the-Web (MotW) Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability CVE-2023-1671  (CVSS score: 9.8) - Sophos Web Appliance Command Injection Vulnerability CVE-2020-2551  (CVSS score: 9.8) - Oracle Fusion Middleware Unspecified Vulnerability CVE-2023-1671 relates to a critical  pre-auth command injection vulnerability  that allows for the execution of arbitrary code. CVE-2020-2551 is a  flaw  in the WLS Core Components that allows an unauthenticated attacker with network access to compromise the WebLogic Server. There are currently no public reports documenting in-the-wild attacks leveraging CVE-2023-1671, but Cybernews disclosed in July 2023 that it had identified a subdomain of t

A zero-day flaw in the Zimbra Collaboration email software was exploited by four different groups in real-world attacks to pilfer email data, user credentials, and authentication tokens. "Most of this activity occurred after the initial fix became public on GitHub," Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG)  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2023-37580  (CVSS score: 6.1), is a  reflected cross-site scripting  (XSS) vulnerability impacting versions before 8.8.15 Patch 41. It was  addressed  by Zimbra as part of patches released on July 25, 2023. Successful exploitation of the shortcoming could allow execution of malicious scripts on the victims' web browser simply by tricking them into clicking on a specially crafted URL, effectively initiating the XSS request to Zimbra and reflecting the attack back to the user. Google TAG, whose researcher Clément Lecigne was credited with discovering and reporting the bug, said it discovered multipl

A hacking group that leveraged a recently disclosed security flaw in the WinRAR software as a zero-day has now been categorized as an entirely new advanced persistent threat (APT). Cybersecurity company NSFOCUS has described  DarkCasino  as an "economically motivated" actor that first came to light in 2021. "DarkCasino is an APT threat actor with strong technical and learning ability, who is good at integrating various popular APT attack technologies into its attack process," the company  said  in an analysis. "Attacks launched by the APT group DarkCasino are very frequent, demonstrating a strong desire to steal online property." DarkCasino was most recently linked to the zero-day exploitation of  CVE-2023-38831  (CVSS score: 7.8), a security flaw that can be weaponized to launch malicious payloads. In August 2023, Group-IB disclosed real-world attacks weaponizing the vulnerability and aimed at online trading forums at least since April 2023 to deli