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The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday  added  a high-severity flaw in the Service Location Protocol (SLP) to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. Tracked as  CVE-2023-29552  (CVSS score: 7.5), the issue relates to a denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability that could be weaponized to launch massive DoS amplification attacks. It was  disclosed  by Bitsight and Curesec earlier this April. "The Service Location Protocol (SLP) contains a denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to register services and use spoofed UDP traffic to conduct a denial-of-service (DoS) attack with a significant amplification factor," CISA  said . SLP is a protocol that allows systems on a local area network (LAN) to discover each other and establish communications. The exact details surrounding the nature of exploitation of the flaw a...

Cybersecurity researchers have developed what's the first fully undetectable cloud-based cryptocurrency miner leveraging the Microsoft  Azure Automation  service without racking up any charges. Cybersecurity company SafeBreach said it discovered three different methods to run the miner, including one that can be executed on a victim's environment without attracting any attention. "While this research is significant because of its potential impact on cryptocurrency mining, we also believe it has serious implications for other areas, as the techniques could be used to achieve any task that requires code execution on Azure," security researcher Ariel Gamrian  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The study mainly set out to identify an "ultimate crypto miner" that offers unlimited access to computational resources, while simultaneously requiring little-to-no maintenance, is cost-free, and undetectable. That's where Azure Automation comes in. ...

Meta-owned WhatsApp is officially rolling out a  new privacy feature  in its messaging service called "Protect IP Address in Calls" that masks users' IP addresses to other parties by relaying the calls through its servers. "Calls are end-to-end encrypted, so even if a call is relayed through WhatsApp servers, WhatsApp cannot listen to your calls," the company said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. The core idea is to make it harder for bad actors in the call to infer a user's location by securely relaying the connection through WhatsApp servers. However, a tradeoff to enabling the privacy option is a slight dip in call quality. Viewed in that light, it's akin to Apple's  iCloud Private Relay , which adds an anonymity layer by  routing users' Safari browsing sessions  through two secure internet relays. It's worth noting that the "Protect IP Address in Calls" feature has been under development since at least late Augu...

A new set of malicious Python packages has slithered their way to the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository with the ultimate aim of stealing sensitive information from compromised developer systems. The packages masquerade as seemingly innocuous obfuscation tools, but harbor a piece of malware called  BlazeStealer , Checkmarx said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "[BlazeStealer] retrieves an additional malicious script from an external source, enabling a Discord bot that gives attackers complete control over the victim's computer," security researcher Yehuda Gelb said. The campaign, which commenced in January 2023, entails a total of eight packages named Pyobftoexe, Pyobfusfile, Pyobfexecute, Pyobfpremium, Pyobflite, Pyobfadvance, Pyobfuse, and pyobfgood, the last of which was published in October.  These modules come with setup.py and init.py files that are designed to retrieve a Python script hosted on transfer[.]sh, which gets executed immediately upon...

Download the free guide , "It's a Generative AI World: How vCISOs, MSPs and MSSPs Can Keep their Customers Safe from Gen AI Risks." ChatGPT now boasts anywhere from 1.5 to 2 billion visits per month. Countless sales, marketing, HR, IT executive, technical support, operations, finance and other functions are feeding data prompts and queries into generative AI engines. They use these tools to write articles, create content, compose emails, answer customer questions and generate plans and strategies.  However, gen AI usage is happening far in advance of efforts to implement safeguards and cybersecurity constraints. Three primary areas of security concern associated with generative AI are: sensitive data included in gen AI scripts, outcomes produced by these tools that may put an organization at risk, and potential hazards related to utilizing third-party generative AI tools. Unchecked AI usage in organizations can lead to:  Major data breaches.  Compromised identities...

SaaS applications make up 70% of total company software usage, and as businesses increase their reliance on SaaS apps, they also increase their reliance on those applications being secure. These SaaS apps store an incredibly large volume of data so safeguarding the organization's SaaS app stack and data within is paramount. Yet, the path to implementing an effective SaaS security program is  not  straightforward.  There are numerous potential attack vectors. Security teams need to handle the challenge of gaining control over a diverse range of applications, each having its own unique characteristics. Additionally, the SaaS app environments are dynamic and the proactive configurations needing adjustments from updates, onboarding, deprovisioning, changing roles and permissions and much more, is endless.  If that's not enough complexity, these applications are managed by various business departments, making it impractical for the security team to exercise complete co...

Cybersecurity researchers have unmasked a prolific threat actor known as farnetwork, who has been linked to five different ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) programs over the past four years in various capacities. Singapore-headquartered Group-IB, which attempted to infiltrate a private RaaS program that uses the  Nokoyawa   ransomware  strain, said it underwent a "job interview" process with the threat actor, learning several valuable insights into their background and role within those RaaS programs. "Throughout the threat actor's cybercriminal career, which began in 2019, farnetwork has been involved in several connected ransomware projects, including JSWORM, Nefilim, Karma, and Nemty, as part of which they helped develop ransomware and manage the RaaS programs before launching their own RaaS program based on Nokoyawa ransomware," Nikolay Kichatov, threat intelligence analyst at Group-IB,  said . The latest disclosure comes nearly six months after the cyber...

The North Korea-linked nation-state group called BlueNoroff has been attributed to a previously undocumented macOS malware strain dubbed  ObjCShellz . Jamf Threat Labs, which disclosed details of the malware, said it's used as part of the RustBucket malware campaign, which came to light earlier this year. "Based on previous attacks performed by BlueNoroff, we suspect that this malware was a late stage within a multi-stage malware delivered via social engineering," security researcher Ferdous Saljooki said in a report shared with The Hacker News. BlueNoroff, also tracked under the names APT38, Nickel Gladstone, Sapphire Sleet, Stardust Chollima, and TA444, is a subordinate element of the infamous  Lazarus Group  that specializes in financial crime, targeting banks and the crypto sector as a way to  evade sanctions  and  generate illicit profits  for the regime. The development arrives days after Elastic Security Labs disclosed the Lazarus Group's...

A new variant of the  GootLoader malware  called GootBot has been found to facilitate lateral movement on compromised systems and evade detection. "The GootLoader group's introduction of their own custom bot into the late stages of their attack chain is an attempt to avoid detections when using off-the-shelf tools for C2 such as CobaltStrike or RDP," IBM X-Force researchers Golo Mühr and Ole Villadsen  said . "This new variant is a lightweight but effective malware allowing attackers to rapidly spread throughout the network and deploy further payloads." GootLoader, as the name implies, is a malware capable of downloading next-stage malware after luring potential victims using search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning tactics. It's linked to a threat actor tracked as  Hive0127  (aka UNC2565). The use of GootBot points to a tactical shift, with the implant downloaded as a payload after a Gootloader infection in lieu of post-exploitation frameworks such...

Numerous industries—including technology, financial services, energy, healthcare, and government—are rushing to incorporate cloud-based and containerized web applications.  The benefits are undeniable; however, this shift presents new security challenges.  OPSWAT's 2023 Web Application Security report  reveals: 75% of organizations have modernized their infrastructure this year. 78% have increased their security budgets. Yet just 2% are confident in their security posture. Let's explore why confidence in security lags infrastructure upgrades and how OPSWAT closes that gap. Evolving Infrastructure Outpaces Security Upgrades. The pace of security upgrades struggles to keep up with technological advancements. This gap is especially visible in file upload security. Companies are updating their infrastructure by embracing distributed, scalable applications that leverage microservices and cloud solutions—creating new avenues of attack for criminals. Cloud Hosting...