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Cisco has released patches to address a high-severity security flaw impacting its Secure Client software that could be exploited by a threat actor to open a VPN session with that of a targeted user. The networking equipment company described the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-20337 (CVSS score: 8.2), as allowing an unauthenticated, remote attacker to conduct a carriage return line feed ( CRLF ) injection attack against a user. Arising as a result of insufficient validation of user-supplied input, a threat actor could leverage the flaw to trick a user into clicking on a specially crafted link while establishing a VPN session. "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary script code in the browser or access sensitive, browser-based information, including a valid SAML token," the company  said  in an advisory. "The attacker could then use the token to establish a remote access VPN session with the privileges of the affected user. Individual hosts ...

Threat actors have been observed leveraging the  QEMU  open-source hardware emulator as tunneling software during a cyber attack targeting an unnamed "large company" to connect to their infrastructure. While a number of legitimate tunneling tools like Chisel, FRP, ligolo, ngrok, and Plink have been used by adversaries to their advantage, the development marks the first QEMU that has been used for this purpose. "We found that QEMU supported connections between virtual machines: the -netdev option creates network devices (backend) that can then connect to the virtual machines," Kaspersky researchers Grigory Sablin, Alexander Rodchenko, and Kirill Magaskin  said . "Each of the numerous network devices is defined by its type and supports extra options." In other words, the idea is to create a virtual network interface and a socket-type network interface, thereby allowing the virtual machine to communicate with any remote server. The Russian cybersecurit...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday  added  a critical security flaw impacting JetBrains TeamCity On-Premises software to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-27198 (CVSS score: 9.8), refers to an authentication bypass bug that allows for a  complete compromise  of a susceptible server by a remote unauthenticated attacker. It was addressed by JetBrains earlier this week alongside CVE-2024-27199 (CVSS score: 7.3), another moderate-severity authentication bypass flaw that allows for a "limited amount" of information disclosure and system modification. "The vulnerabilities may enable an unauthenticated attacker with HTTP(S) access to a TeamCity server to bypass authentication checks and gain administrative control of that TeamCity server," the company  noted  at the time. Threat actors have been observed weaponizing t...

Threat actors are conducting brute-force attacks against WordPress sites by leveraging malicious JavaScript injections, new findings from Sucuri reveal. The attacks, which take the form of distributed brute-force attacks, "target WordPress websites from the browsers of completely innocent and unsuspecting site visitors," security researcher Denis Sinegubko  said . The activity is part of a  previously documented attack wave  in which compromised WordPress sites were used to inject crypto drainers such as Angel Drainer directly or redirect site visitors to Web3 phishing sites containing drainer malware. The latest iteration is notable for the fact that the injections – found on  over 700 sites  to date – don't load a drainer but rather use a list of common and leaked passwords to brute-force other WordPress sites. The attack unfolds over five stages, enabling a threat actor to take advantage of already compromised websites to launch distributed brute-force ...

The China-linked threat actor known as  Evasive Panda  orchestrated both watering hole and supply chain attacks targeting Tibetan users at least since September 2023. The end goal of the attacks is to deliver malicious downloaders for Windows and macOS that deploy a known backdoor called MgBot and a previously undocumented Windows implant known as Nightdoor. The findings come from ESET, which said the attackers compromised at least three websites to carry out watering-hole attacks as well as a supply-chain compromise of a Tibetan software company. The operation was discovered in January 2024. Evasive Panda, active since 2012 and also known as Bronze Highland and Daggerfly, was  previously disclosed  by the Slovak cybersecurity firm in April 2023 as having targeted an international non-governmental organization (NGO) in Mainland China with MgBot. Another report from Broadcom-owned Symantec around the same time  implicated  the adversary to a cyber espi...

In today's rapidly evolving SaaS environment, the focus is on human users. This is one of the most compromised areas in SaaS security management and requires strict governance of user roles and permissions, monitoring of privileged users, their level of activity (dormant, active, hyperactive), their type (internal/ external), whether they are joiners, movers, or leavers, and more.  Not surprisingly, security efforts have mainly been human-centric. Configuration options include tools like MFA and SSO for human authentication. Role-based access control (RBAC) limits the level of access; password complexity guidelines block unauthorized humans from accessing the application. Yet, in the world of SaaS, there is no shortage of access granted to non-human actors, or in other words, 3rd party connected apps.  Service accounts, OAuth authorizations, and API keys are just a few of the non-human identities that require SaaS access. When viewed through the lens of the application, no...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announced the indictment of a 38-year-old Chinese national and a California resident for allegedly stealing proprietary information from Google while covertly working for two China-based tech companies. Linwei Ding (aka Leon Ding), a former Google engineer who was arrested on March 6, 2024, "transferred sensitive Google trade secrets and other confidential information from Google's network to his personal account while secretly affiliating himself with PRC-based companies in the AI industry," the DoJ  said . The defendant is said to have pilfered from Google over 500 confidential files containing artificial intelligence (AI) trade secrets with the goal of passing them on to two unnamed Chinese companies looking to gain an edge in the ongoing AI race. "While Linwei Ding was employed as a software engineer at Google, he was secretly working to enrich himself and two companies based in the People's Republic of China," sa...

Facebook messages are being used by threat actors to distribute a Python-based information stealer dubbed Snake that's designed to capture credentials and other sensitive data. "The credentials harvested from unsuspecting users are transmitted to different platforms such as Discord, GitHub, and Telegram," Cybereason researcher Kotaro Ogino  said  in a technical report. Details about the campaign  first emerged  on the social media platform X in August 2023. The attacks entail sending prospective users seemingly innocuous RAR or ZIP archive files that, upon opening, activate the infection sequence. The intermediate stages involve two downloaders – a batch script and a cmd script – with the latter responsible for downloading and executing the information stealer from an actor-controlled GitLab repository. Cybereason said it detected three different variants of the stealer, the third one being an executable assembled by PyInstaller. The malware, for its part, is d...

Threat actors have been leveraging fake websites advertising popular video conferencing software such as Google Meet, Skype, and Zoom to deliver a variety of malware targeting both Android and Windows users since December 2023. "The threat actor is distributing Remote Access Trojans (RATs) including  SpyNote RAT  for Android platforms, and  NjRAT  and  DCRat  for Windows systems," Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers  said . The spoofed sites are in Russian and are hosted on domains that closely resemble their legitimate counterparts, indicating that the attackers are using typosquatting tricks to lure prospective victims into downloading the malware. They also come with options to download the app for Android, iOS, and Windows platforms. While clicking on the button for Android downloads an APK file, clicking on the Windows app button triggers the download of a batch script. The malicious batch script is responsible for executing a PowerShell script, ...

Threat actors are targeting misconfigured and vulnerable servers running Apache Hadoop YARN, Docker, Atlassian Confluence, and Redis services as part of an emerging malware campaign designed to deliver a cryptocurrency miner and spawn a reverse shell for persistent remote access. "The attackers leverage these tools to issue exploit code, taking advantage of common misconfigurations and exploiting an N-day vulnerability, to conduct Remote Code Execution (RCE) attacks and infect new hosts," Cado security researcher Matt Muir  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The activity has been codenamed  Spinning YARN  by the cloud security company, with overlaps to cloud attacks attributed to  TeamTNT ,  WatchDog , and a cluster dubbed  Kiss-a-dog . It all starts with deploying four novel Golang payloads that are capable of automating the identification and exploitation of susceptible Confluence, Docker, Hadoop YARN, and Redis hosts. The spreader ut...