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As many as 2,000 Palo Alto Networks devices are estimated to have been compromised as part of a campaign abusing the newly disclosed security flaws that have come under active exploitation in the wild. According to statistics shared by the Shadowserver Foundation, a majority of the infections have been reported in the U.S. (554) and India (461), followed by Thailand (80), Mexico (48), Indonesia (43), Turkey (41), the U.K. (39), Peru (36), and South Africa (35). Earlier this week, Censys revealed that it had identified 13,324 publicly exposed next-generation firewall (NGFW) management interfaces, with 34% of these exposures located in the U.S. However, it's important to note that not all of these exposed hosts are necessarily vulnerable. The flaws in question , CVE-2024-0012 (CVSS score: 9.3) and CVE-2024-9474 (CVSS score: 6.9), are a combination of authentication bypass and privilege escalation that could allow a bad actor to perform malicious actions, including modifying c...

The China-aligned advanced persistent threat (APT) actor known as Gelsemium has been observed using a new Linux backdoor dubbed WolfsBane as part of cyber attacks likely targeting East and Southeast Asia. That's according to findings from cybersecurity firm ESET based on multiple Linux samples uploaded to the VirusTotal platform from Taiwan, the Philippines, and Singapore in March 2023. WolfsBane has been assessed to be a Linux version of the threat actor's Gelsevirine backdoor, a Windows malware put to use as far back as 2014. Also discovered by the company is another previously undocumented implant named FireWood that's connected to a different malware toolset known as Project Wood . FireWood has been attributed to Gelsemium with low confidence, given the possibility that it could be shared by multiple China-linked hacking crews. "The goal of the backdoors and tools discovered is cyber espionage targeting sensitive data such as system information, user crede...

Privileged access management (PAM) plays a pivotal role in building a strong security strategy. PAM empowers you to significantly reduce cybersecurity risks, gain tighter control over privileged access, achieve regulatory compliance, and reduce the burden on your IT team.  As an established provider of a PAM solution , we've witnessed firsthand how PAM transforms organizational security. In this article, we aim to show you how PAM can secure your company in real, impactful ways.  1. Enforcing the principle of least privilege Giving users just enough access to perform their duties is fundamental to maintaining a robust security posture. PAM solutions enable you to grant minimum permissions to employees essential for their work, helping you prevent privilege misuse and potential security incidents. For example, with PAM, you can securely grant access to sensitive payment systems exclusively for your finance department. When you enforce the principle of least privilege at t...

Threat actors with ties to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) are impersonating U.S.-based software and technology consulting businesses in order to further their financial objectives as part of a broader information technology (IT) worker scheme. "Front companies, often based in China, Russia, Southeast Asia, and Africa, play a key role in masking the workers' true origins and managing payments," SentinelOne security researchers Tom Hegel and Dakota Cary said in a report shared with The Hacker News. North Korea's network of IT workers, both in an individual capacity and under the cover of front companies, is seen as a technique to evade international sanctions imposed on the country and generate illicit revenues. The global campaign, which is also tracked as Wagemole by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, entails using forged identities to obtain employment at various companies in the U.S. and elsewhere, and send back a huge portion of their wages bac...

As a relatively new security category, many security operators and executives I've met have asked us "What are these Automated Security Validation (ASV) tools?" We've covered that pretty extensively in the past, so today, instead of covering the " What is ASV?" I wanted to address the " Why ASV?" question. In this article, we'll cover some common use cases and misconceptions of how people misuse and misunderstand ASV tools daily (because that's a lot more fun). To kick things off, there's no place to start like the beginning. Automated security validation tools are designed to provide continuous, real-time assessment of an organization's cybersecurity defenses. These tools are continuous and use exploitation to validate defenses like EDR, NDR, and WAFs. They're more in-depth than vulnerability scanners because they use tactics and techniques that you'll see in manual penetration tests. Vulnerability scanners won't relay hashes or combine vulnerabilities to further attacks, whic...

New research has uncovered more than 145,000 internet-exposed Industrial Control Systems (ICS) across 175 countries, with the U.S. alone accounting for over one-third of the total exposures. The analysis , which comes from attack surface management company Censys, found that 38% of the devices are located in North America, 35.4% in Europe, 22.9% in Asia, 1.7% in Oceania, 1.2% in South America, and 0.5% in Africa. The countries with the most ICS service exposures include the U.S. (more than 48,000), Turkey, South Korea, Italy, Canada, Spain, China, Germany, France, the U.K., Japan, Sweden, Taiwan, Poland, and Lithuania. The metrics are derived from the exposure of several commonly-used ICS protocols like Modbus, IEC 60870-5-104, CODESYS, OPC UA, and others. One important aspect that stands out is that the attack surfaces are regionally unique: Modbus, S7, and IEC 60870-5-104 are more widely observed in Europe, while Fox, BACnet, ATG, and C-more are more commonly found in North Ame...

Five alleged members of the infamous Scattered Spider cybercrime crew have been indicted in the U.S. for targeting employees of companies across the country using social engineering techniques to harvest credentials and using them to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data and break into crypto accounts to steal digital assets worth millions of dollars. All of the accused parties have been charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, one count of conspiracy, and one count of aggravated identity theft. They include - Ahmed Hossam Eldin Elbadawy, 23, aka AD, of College Station, Texas Noah Michael Urban, 20, aka Sosa and Elijah, of Palm Coast, Florida Evans Onyeaka Osiebo, 20, of Dallas, Texas Joel Martin Evans, 25, aka joeleoli, of Jacksonville, North Carolina; and Tyler Robert Buchanan, 22, aka tylerb, of the U.K. While the name Scattered Spider  is not directly referenced in the indictment document, it has been described as "a loosely organized financi...

Google has revealed that its AI-powered fuzzing tool, OSS-Fuzz, has been used to help identify 26 vulnerabilities in various open-source code repositories, including a medium-severity flaw in the OpenSSL cryptographic library. "These particular vulnerabilities represent a milestone for automated vulnerability finding: each was found with AI, using AI-generated and enhanced fuzz targets," Google's open-source security team said in a blog post shared with The Hacker News. The OpenSSL vulnerability in question is CVE-2024-9143 (CVSS score: 4.3), an out-of-bounds memory write bug that can result in an application crash or remote code execution. The issue has been addressed in OpenSSL versions 3.3.3, 3.2.4, 3.1.8, 3.0.16, 1.1.1zb, and 1.0.2zl. Google, which added the ability to leverage large language models (LLMs) to improve fuzzing coverage in OSS-Fuzz in August 2023, said the vulnerability has likely been present in the codebase for two decades and that it "wo...

Threat hunters are warning about an updated version of the Python-based NodeStealer that's now equipped to extract more information from victims' Facebook Ads Manager accounts and harvest credit card data stored in web browsers. "They collect budget details of Facebook Ads Manager accounts of their victims, which might be a gateway for Facebook malvertisement," Netskope Threat Labs researcher Jan Michael Alcantara said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "New techniques used by NodeStealer include using Windows Restart Manager to unlock browser database files, adding junk code, and using a batch script to dynamically generate and execute the Python script." NodeStealer , first publicly documented by Meta in May 2023, started off as JavaScript malware before evolving into a Python stealer capable of gathering data related to Facebook accounts in order to facilitate their takeover. It's assessed to be developed by Vietnamese threat actors, who...

Threat actors are increasingly banking on a new technique that leverages near-field communication (NFC) to cash out victim's funds at scale. The technique, codenamed Ghost Tap by ThreatFabric, enables cybercriminals to cash-out money from stolen credit cards linked to mobile payment services such as Google Pay or Apple Pay and relaying NFC traffic. "Criminals can now misuse Google Pay and Apple Pay to transmit your tap-to-pay information globally within seconds," the Dutch security company told The Hacker News in a statement. "This means that even without your physical card or phone, they can make payments from your account anywhere in the world." These attacks typically work by tricking victims into downloading mobile banking malware that can capture their banking credentials and one-time passwords using an overlay attack or a keylogger. Alternatively, it can involve a voice phishing component. Once in possession of the card details, the threat actors m...