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New research into the infrastructure behind an emerging DDoS botnet named Abcbot has uncovered "clear" links with a cryptocurrency-mining botnet attack that came to light in December 2020. Attacks involving Abcbot, first  disclosed  by Qihoo 360's Netlab security team in November 2021, are  triggered  via a malicious shell script that targets insecure cloud instances operated by cloud service providers such as Huawei, Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba Cloud to download malware that co-opts the machine to a botnet, but not before terminating processes from competing threat actors and establishing persistence. The shell script in question is itself an iteration of an earlier version originally  discovered  by Trend Micro in October 2021 hitting vulnerable ECS instances inside Huawei Cloud. But in an interesting twist, continued analysis of the botnet by mapping all known Indicators of Compromise (IoCs), including IP addresses, URLs, and samples, has revealed A...

Threat hunters have shed light on the tactics, techniques, and procedures embraced by an Indian-origin hacking group called Patchwork as part of a renewed campaign that commenced in late November 2021, targeting Pakistani government entities and individuals with a research focus on molecular medicine and biological science. "Ironically, all the information we gathered was possible thanks to the threat actor infecting themselves with their own [remote access trojan], resulting in captured keystrokes and screenshots of their own computer and virtual machines," Malwarebytes Threat Intelligence Team  said  in a report published on Friday. Prominent victims that were successfully infiltrated include Pakistan's Ministry of Defense, National Defence University of Islamabad, Faculty of Bio-Sciences at UVAS Lahore, International Center for Chemical and Biological Sciences (ICCBS), H.E.J. Research Institute of Chemistry, and the Salim Habib University (SBU). Believed to have b...

Meta Platforms, the company formerly known as Facebook, on Friday announced the launch of a centralized Privacy Center that aims to "educate people" about its approach with regards to how it collects and processes personal information across its family of social media apps. "Privacy Center provides helpful information about five common privacy topics: sharing, security, data collection, data use and ads," the social technology firm  said  in a press release. The first module, Security, will offer easy access to common tools such as account security settings and two-factor authentication. Sharing will provide specifics about post visibility and settings to archive or trash old posts. Collection and Use will give users a quick glance into the type of data Meta harvests and learn how and why it's used, respectively. Lastly, the Ads section will furnish information regarding a user's ad preferences. The learning hub is expected to be initially limited to a s...

The digital security team at the U.K. National Health Service (NHS) has raised the alarm on active exploitation of Log4Shell vulnerabilities in unpatched  VMware Horizon  servers by an unknown threat actor to drop malicious web shells and establish persistence on affected networks for follow-on attacks. "The attack likely consists of a reconnaissance phase, where the attacker uses the Java Naming and Directory InterfaceTM (JNDI) via Log4Shell payloads to call back to malicious infrastructure," the non-departmental public body  said  in an alert. "Once a weakness has been identified, the attack then uses the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) to retrieve and execute a malicious Java class file that injects a web shell into the VM Blast Secure Gateway service." The web shell, once deployed, can serve as a conduit to carry out a multitude of post-exploitation activities such as deploying additional malicious software, data exfiltration, or deployment of r...

Researchers have disclosed a security flaw affecting H2 database consoles that could result in remote code execution in a manner that echoes the Log4j "Log4Shell" vulnerability that came to light last month. The issue, tracked as  CVE-2021-42392 , is the "first critical issue published since Log4Shell, on a component other than Log4j, that exploits the same root cause of the Log4Shell vulnerability, namely JNDI remote class loading," JFrog researchers Andrey Polkovnychenko and Shachar Menashe  said . H2  is an open-source relational database management system written in Java that can be embedded within applications or run in a client-server mode. According to the  Maven Repository , the H2 database engine is used by 6,807 artifacts. JNDI, short for Java Naming and Directory Interface, refers to an API that provides naming and directory functionality for Java applications, which can use the API in conjunction with LDAP to locate a specific resource that it might...

The Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (CNIL), France's data protection watchdog, has slapped Facebook (now Meta Platforms) and Google with fines of €150 million ($170 million) and €60 million ($68 million) for violating E.U. privacy rules by failing to provide users with an easy option to reject cookie tracking technology. "The websites facebook.com, google.fr and youtube.com offer a button allowing the user to immediately accept cookies," the  authority   said . "However, they do not provide an equivalent solution (button or other) enabling the Internet user to easily refuse the deposit of these cookies." Facebook told  TechCrunch  that it was reviewing the ruling, while Google said it's working to change its practices in response to the CNIL fines. HTTP cookies are small pieces of data created while a user is browsing a website and placed on the user's computer or other device by the user's web browser to track online ...

A North Korean cyberespionage group named Konni has been linked to a series of targeted attacks aimed at the Russian Federation's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) with New Year lures to compromise Windows systems with malware. "This activity cluster demonstrates the patient and persistent nature of advanced actors in waging multi-phased campaigns against perceived high-value networks," researchers from Lumen Technologies' Black Lotus Labs  said  in an analysis shared with The Hacker News. The Konni group's tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) are known to overlap with threat actors belonging to the broader  Kimsuky  umbrella, which is also tracked by the cybersecurity community under the monikers Velvet Chollima, ITG16, Black Banshee, and Thallium. The most recent attacks involved the actor gaining access to the target networks through stolen credentials, exploiting the foothold to load malware for intelligence gathering purposes, with early signs of t...

When I want to know the most recently published best practices in cyber security, I visit The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). From the latest password requirements (NIST 800-63) to IoT security for manufacturers (NISTIR 8259), NIST is always the starting point. NIST plays a key role as a US standard-setter, due to the organization's professionalism and the external experts who help to create NIST documents. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) was initially released in 2014 and last updated in 2018. The framework enables organizations to improve the security and resilience of critical infrastructure with a well-planned and easy-to-use framework. The continuing growth in SaaS, and the major changes to the work environment due to COVID-19 bring new security challenges. Although the CSF was written and updated while SaaS was on the rise, it is still geared towards the classic legacy critical infrastructure security challenges. However, organizations can bet...

Researchers have disclosed a novel technique by which malware on iOS can achieve persistence on an infected device by faking its shutdown process, making it impossible to physically determine if an iPhone is off or otherwise. The discovery — dubbed " NoReboot " — comes courtesy of mobile security firm ZecOps, which found that it's possible to block and then simulate an iOS rebooting operation, deceiving the user into believing that the phone has been powered off when, in reality, it's still running. The San Francisco-headquartered company  called  it the "ultimate persistence bug […] that cannot be patched because it's not exploiting any persistence bugs at all — only playing tricks with the human mind." NoReboot works by interfering with the routines used in iOS to shutdown and restart the device, effectively preventing them from ever happening in the first place and allowing a trojan to achieve persistence without persistence as the device is never...

VMWare has shipped updates to Workstation, Fusion, and ESXi products to address an "important" security vulnerability that could be weaponized by a threat actor to take control of affected systems. The issue relates to a heap-overflow vulnerability — tracked as  CVE-2021-22045  (CVSS score: 7.7) — that, if successfully exploited, results in the execution of arbitrary code. The company credited Jaanus Kääp, a security researcher with Clarified Security, for reporting the flaw. "A malicious actor with access to a virtual machine with CD-ROM device emulation may be able to exploit this vulnerability in conjunction with other issues to execute code on the hypervisor from a virtual machine," VMware  said  in an advisory published on January 4. "Successful exploitation requires [a] CD image to be attached to the virtual machine." The error affects ESXi versions 6.5, 6.7, and 7.0; Workstation versions 16.x; and Fusion versions 12.x, with the company yet to ...