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Microsoft on Wednesday acknowledged that a newly disclosed critical security flaw in Exchange Server has been actively exploited in the wild, a day after it released fixes for the vulnerability as part of its  Patch Tuesday updates . Tracked as  CVE-2024-21410  (CVSS score: 9.8), the issue has been described as a case of privilege escalation impacting the Exchange Server. "An attacker could target an NTLM client such as Outlook with an NTLM credentials-leaking type vulnerability," the company  said  in an advisory published this week. "The leaked credentials can then be relayed against the Exchange server to gain privileges as the victim client and to perform operations on the Exchange server on the victim's behalf." Successful exploitation of the flaw could permit an attacker to relay a user's leaked Net-NTLMv2 hash against a susceptible Exchange Server and authenticate as the user, Redmond added. The tech giant, in an update to its bulletin, revised...

Nation-state actors associated with Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China are experimenting with artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) to complement their ongoing cyber attack operations. The findings come from a report published by Microsoft in collaboration with OpenAI, both of which  said  they disrupted efforts made by five state-affiliated actors that used its AI services to perform malicious cyber activities by terminating their assets and accounts. "Language support is a natural feature of LLMs and is attractive for threat actors with continuous focus on social engineering and other techniques relying on false, deceptive communications tailored to their targets' jobs, professional networks, and other relationships," Microsoft  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. While no significant or novel attacks employing the LLMs have been detected to date, adversarial exploration of AI technologies has transcended various phases of t...

Cybersecurity researchers have found that it's possible for threat actors to exploit a well-known utility called command-not-found to recommend their own rogue packages and compromise systems running Ubuntu operating system. "While 'command-not-found' serves as a convenient tool for suggesting installations for uninstalled commands, it can be inadvertently manipulated by attackers through the snap repository, leading to deceptive recommendations of malicious packages," cloud security firm Aqua said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Installed by default on Ubuntu systems, command-not-found  suggests  packages to install in interactive bash sessions when attempting to run commands that are not available. The suggestions include both the Advanced Packaging Tool ( APT ) and  snap packages . While the tool uses an internal database ("/var/lib/command-not-found/commands.db") to suggest APT packages, it relies on the " advise-snap " comman...

The landscape of cybersecurity in financial services is undergoing a rapid transformation. Cybercriminals are exploiting advanced technologies and methodologies, making traditional security measures obsolete. The challenges are compounded for community banks that must safeguard sensitive financial data against the same level of sophisticated threats as larger institutions, but often with more limited resources. The FinServ Threat Landscape Recent trends show an alarming increase in sophisticated cyber-attacks. Cybercriminals now deploy advanced techniques like deep fake technology and AI-powered attacks, making it increasingly difficult for banks to differentiate between legitimate and malicious activities. These developments necessitate a shift towards more sophisticated and adaptive cybersecurity measures. Take these industry statistics, for example. Financial firms report 703 cyberattack attempts per week.1 On average, 270 attacks (entailing unauthorized access of data, appl...

The infamous malware loader and initial access broker known as  Bumblebee  has resurfaced after a four-month absence as part of a new phishing campaign observed in February 2024. Enterprise security firm Proofpoint said the activity targets organizations in the U.S. with voicemail-themed lures containing links to OneDrive URLs. "The URLs led to a Word file with names such as "ReleaseEvans#96.docm" (the digits before the file extension varied)," the company  said  in a Tuesday report. "The Word document spoofed the consumer electronics company Humane." Opening the document leverages VBA macros to launch a PowerShell command to download and execute another PowerShell script from a remote server that, in turn, retrieves and runs the Bumblebee loader. Bumblebee,  first spotted  in March 2022, is mainly designed to download and execute follow-on payloads such as ransomware. It has been put to use by multiple crimeware threat actors that previously observe...

A newly disclosed security flaw in the Microsoft Defender SmartScreen has been exploited as a zero-day by an advanced persistent threat actor called  Water Hydra  (aka DarkCasino) targeting financial market traders. Trend Micro, which began tracking the campaign in late December 2023, said it entails the exploitation of CVE-2024-21412, a security bypass vulnerability related to Internet Shortcut Files (.URL).  "In this attack chain, the threat actor leveraged CVE-2024-21412 to bypass Microsoft Defender SmartScreen and infect victims with the DarkMe malware," the cybersecurity firm  said  in a Tuesday report. Microsoft, which  addressed  the flaw in its February Patch Tuesday update, said an unauthenticated attacker could exploit the flaw by sending the targeted user a specially crafted file in order to bypass displayed security checks. However, successful exploitation banks on the prerequisite that the threat actor convinces the victim to click o...

Microsoft has released patches to address  73 security flaws  spanning its software lineup as part of its Patch Tuesday updates for February 2024, including two zero-days that have come under active exploitation. Of the 73 vulnerabilities, 5 are rated Critical, 65 are rated Important, and three and rated Moderate in severity. This is in addition to  24 flaws  that have been fixed in the Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of the January 2024 Patch Tuesday updates . The two flaws that are listed as under active attack at the time of release are below - CVE-2024-21351  (CVSS score: 7.6) - Windows SmartScreen Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability CVE-2024-21412  (CVSS score: 8.1) - Internet Shortcut Files Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability "The vulnerability allows a malicious actor to inject code into  SmartScreen  and potentially gain code execution, which could potentially lead to some data exposure, lack of system availabilit...

The  Glupteba  botnet has been found to incorporate a previously undocumented Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ( UEFI ) bootkit feature, adding another layer of sophistication and stealth to the malware. "This bootkit can intervene and control the [operating system] boot process, enabling Glupteba to hide itself and create a stealthy persistence that can be extremely difficult to detect and remove," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers Lior Rochberger and Dan Yashnik  said  in a Monday analysis. Glupteba is a fully-featured information stealer and backdoor capable of facilitating illicit cryptocurrency mining and deploying proxy components on infected hosts. It's also known to leverage the Bitcoin blockchain as a backup command-and-control (C2) system, making it  resilient to takedown efforts . Some of the other functions allow it to deliver additional payloads, siphon credentials, and credit card data, perform ad fraud, and even exploit routers to ga...

The threat actors behind the PikaBot malware have made significant changes to the malware in what has been described as a case of "devolution." "Although it appears to be in a new development cycle and testing phase, the developers have reduced the complexity of the code by removing advanced obfuscation techniques and changing the network communications," Zscaler ThreatLabz researcher Nikolaos Pantazopoulos  said . PikaBot,  first documented  by the cybersecurity firm in May 2023, is a malware loader and a backdoor that can execute commands and inject payloads from a command-and-control (C2) server as well as allow the attacker to control the infected host. It is also known to halt its execution should the system's language be Russian or Ukrainian, indicating that the operators are either based in Russia or Ukraine. In recent months, both PikaBot and another loader called DarkGate have emerged as  attractive replacements  for threat actors such as  Wa...

The Midnight Blizzard and Cloudflare-Atlassian cybersecurity incidents raised alarms about the vulnerabilities inherent in major SaaS platforms. These incidents illustrate the stakes involved in SaaS breaches — safeguarding the integrity of SaaS apps and their sensitive data is critical but is not easy. Common threat vectors such as sophisticated spear-phishing, misconfigurations and vulnerabilities in third-party app integrations demonstrate the complex security challenges facing IT systems. In the case of Midnight Blizzard, password spraying against a test environment was the initial attack vector. For Cloudflare-Atlassian, threat actors initiated the attack via compromised  OAuth tokens  from a prior breach at Okta, a SaaS identity security provider.  What Exactly Happened? Microsoft Midnight Blizzard Breach Microsoft was targeted by the Russian "Midnight Blizzard" hackers (also known as Nobelium, APT29, or Cozy Bear) who are linked to the SVR, the Kremlin's forei...