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Apple recently fixed a security vulnerability in the macOS operating system that could be potentially exploited by a threat actor to "trivially and reliably" bypass a "myriad of foundational macOS security mechanisms" and run arbitrary code. Security researcher Patrick Wardle  detailed  the discovery in a series of tweets on Thursday. Tracked as CVE-2021-30853 (CVSS score: 5.5), the issue relates to a scenario where a rogue macOS app may circumvent  Gatekeeper  checks, which ensure that only trusted apps can be run and that they have passed an automated process called " app notarization ." The iPhone maker, crediting Gordon Long of Box with reporting the flaw, said it  addressed the weakness  with improved checks as part of macOS 11.6 updates officially released on September 20, 2021. "Such bugs are often particularly impactful to everyday macOS users as they provide a means for adware and malware authors to sidestep macOS security mechanisms, …m...

Ransomware groups continue to evolve their tactics and techniques to deploy file-encrypting malware on compromised systems, notwithstanding law enforcement's disruptive actions against the cybercrime gangs to prevent them from victimizing additional companies. "Be it due to law enforcement, infighting amongst groups or people abandoning variants altogether, the RaaS [ransomware-as-a-service] groups dominating the ecosystem at this point in time are completely different than just a few months ago," Intel 471 researchers  said  in a report published this month. "Yet, even with the shift in the variants, ransomware incidents as a whole are still on the rise." Sweeping law enforcement operations  undertaken by government agencies  in recent months have brought about rapid shifts in the RaaS landscape and turned the tables on ransomware syndicates like Avaddon,  BlackMatter ,  Cl0p ,  DarkSide , Egregor, and  REvil , forcing the actors to slow down ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an evasive malware campaign that makes use of valid code signing certificates to sneak past security defenses and stay under the radar with the goal of deploying Cobalt Strike and BitRAT payloads on compromised systems. The binary, a loader, has been dubbed "Blister" by researchers from Elastic Security, with the malware samples having  negligible  to  zero  detections on VirusTotal. As of writing, the infection vector used to stage the attack, as well as the ultimate objectives of the intrusion, remains unknown. A notable aspect of the attacks is that they leverage a valid code signing certificate issued by  Sectigo . The malware has been observed signed with the certificate in question dating back to September 15, 2021. Elastic said it reached out to the company to ensure that the abused certificates are revoked. "Executables with valid code signing certificates are often scrutinized to a lesser degree t...

Cybersecurity agencies from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S. on Wednesday released a joint advisory in response to widespread exploitation of multiple vulnerabilities in Apache's Log4j software library by nefarious adversaries. "These vulnerabilities, especially Log4Shell, are severe," the intelligence agencies said in the  new   guidance . "Sophisticated cyber threat actors are actively scanning networks to potentially exploit  Log4Shell ,  CVE-2021-45046 , and  CVE-2021-45105  in vulnerable systems. These vulnerabilities are likely to be exploited over an extended period." An attacker can exploit Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228) by submitting a specially crafted request to a vulnerable system that causes that system to execute arbitrary code. CVE-2021-45046, on the other hand, allows for remote code execution in certain non-default configurations, while CVE-2021-45105 could be leveraged by a remote attacker to cause a denial-of-service...

By the end of 2021, there will be 12 billion connected IoT devices, and by 2025, that number will rise to 27 billion . All these devices will be connected to the internet and will send useful data that will make industries, medicine, and cars more intelligent and more efficient. However, will all these devices be safe? It's worth asking what you can do to prevent (or at least reduce) becoming a victim of a cybercrime such as data theft or other forms of cybercrime in the future? Will IoT security ever improve? In recent years, the number of security vulnerabilities related to the Internet of Things has increased significantly. Let us start at the very beginning — most IoT devices come with default and publicly disclosed passwords. Moreover, the fact is that there are many cheap and low-capacity Internet of Things devices that lack even the most basic security. And that's not all — security experts are discovering new critical vulnerabilities every day. Numerous IoT devic...

A security flaw has been unearthed in Microsoft's Azure App Service that resulted in the exposure of source code of customer applications written in Java, Node, PHP, Python, and Ruby for at least four years since September 2017. The vulnerability, codenamed " NotLegit ," was reported to the tech giant by Wiz researchers on October 7, 2021, following which mitigations have been undertaken to fix the information disclosure bug in November. Microsoft  said  a "limited subset of customers" are at risk, adding "Customers who deployed code to App Service Linux via Local Git after files were already created in the application were the only impacted customers." The  Azure App Service  (aka Azure Web Apps) is a cloud computing-based platform for building and hosting web applications. It allows users to deploy source code and artifacts to the service using a local  Git  repository, or via repositories hosted on GitHub and Bitbucket. The insecure default be...

Microsoft said it won't be fixing or is pushing patches to a later date for three of the four security flaws uncovered in its Teams business communication platform earlier this March. The disclosure comes from Berlin-based cybersecurity firm Positive Security, which  found  that the implementation of the link preview feature was susceptible to a number of issues that could "allow accessing internal Microsoft services, spoofing the link preview, and, for Android users, leaking their IP address, and DoS'ing their Teams app/channels." Of the four vulnerabilities, Microsoft is said to have addressed only one that results in IP address leakage from Android devices, with the tech giant noting that a fix for the denial-of-service (DoS) flaw will be considered in a future version of the product. The issues were responsibly disclosed to the company on March 10, 2021. Chief among the flaws is a server-side request forgery ( SSRF ) vulnerability in the endpoint "/urlp...

China's internet regulator, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), has temporarily suspended a partnership with Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing subsidiary of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, for six months on account of the fact that it failed to promptly inform the government about a critical security vulnerability affecting the broadly used Log4j logging library. The development was disclosed by  Reuters  and  South China Morning Post , citing a report from 21st Century Business Herald, a Chinese business-news daily newspaper. "Alibaba Cloud did not immediately report vulnerabilities in the popular, open-source logging framework Apache Log4j2 to China's telecommunications regulator," Reuters said. "In response, MIIT suspended a cooperative partnership with the cloud unit regarding cybersecurity threats and information-sharing platforms." Tracked as  CVE-2021-44228  (CVSS score: 10.0) and codenamed  Log4Shell  or LogJam, t...

A short-lived phishing campaign has been observed taking advantage of a novel exploit that bypassed a patch put in place by Microsoft to fix a remote code execution vulnerability affecting the MSHTML component with the goal of delivering Formbook malware. "The attachments represent an escalation of the attacker's abuse of the CVE-2021-40444 bug and demonstrate that even a patch can't always mitigate the actions of a motivated and sufficiently skilled attacker," SophosLabs researchers Andrew Brandt and Stephen Ormandy  said  in a new report published Tuesday. CVE-2021-40444  (CVSS score: 8.8) relates to a remote code execution flaw in MSHTML that could be exploited using specially crafted Microsoft Office documents. Although Microsoft addressed the security weakness as part of its September 2021  Patch Tuesday updates , it has been put to use in  multiple attacks  ever since details pertaining to the flaw became public. That same month, the technology g...

Microsoft is urging customers to patch two security vulnerabilities in Active Directory domain controllers that it  addressed in November  following the availability of a proof-of-concept (PoC) tool on December 12. The two vulnerabilities — tracked as  CVE-2021-42278  and  CVE-2021-42287  — have a severity rating of 7.5 out of a maximum of 10 and concern a privilege escalation flaw affecting the Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) component. Credited with discovering and reporting both the bugs is Andrew Bartlett of Catalyst IT. Active Directory is a  directory service  that runs on Microsoft Windows Server and is used for identity and access management. Although the tech giant marked the shortcomings as " exploitation Less Likely " in its assessment, the public disclosure of the PoC has prompted renewed calls for applying the fixes to mitigate any potential exploitation by threat actors. While CVE-2021-42278 enables an attacker to tamp...