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Popular email marketing and newsletter service Mailchimp has disclosed yet another security breach that enabled threat actors to access an internal support and account admin tool to obtain information about 133 customers. "The unauthorized actor conducted a social engineering attack on Mailchimp employees and contractors, and obtained access to select Mailchimp accounts using employee credentials compromised in that attack," the Intuit-owned company  said  in a disclosure. The development was  first reported  by TechCrunch. Mailchimp said it identified the lapse on January 11, 2023, and noted that there is no evidence the unauthorized party breached Intuit systems or other customer information beyond the 133 accounts. It further said the primary contacts for all those affected accounts were notified within 24 hours, and that it has since assisted those users in regaining access to their accounts. The Atlanta-based company, however, did not reveal the duration ...

An ongoing campaign dubbed  Earth Bogle  is leveraging geopolitical-themed lures to deliver the NjRAT remote access trojan to victims across the Middle East and North Africa. "The threat actor uses public cloud storage services such as files[.]fm and failiem[.]lv to host malware, while compromised web servers distribute NjRAT," Trend Micro  said  in a report published Wednesday. Phishing emails, typically tailored to the victim's interests, are loaded with malicious attachments to activate the infection routine. This takes the form of a Microsoft Cabinet (CAB) archive file containing a Visual Basic Script dropper to deploy the next-stage payload. Alternatively, it's suspected that the files are distributed via social media platforms such as Facebook and Discord, in some cases even creating bogus accounts to serve ads on pages impersonating legitimate news outlets. The CAB files, hosted on cloud storage services, also masquerade as sensitive voice recordings to ...

The threat actor known as  BackdoorDiplomacy  has been linked to a new wave of attacks targeting Iranian government entities between July and late December 2022. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, which is tracking the activity under its  constellation-themed  moniker  Playful Taurus , said it observed the government domains attempting to connect to malware infrastructure previously identified as associated with the adversary. Also known by the names APT15, KeChang, NICKEL, and Vixen Panda, the Chinese APT group has a history of cyber espionage campaigns aimed at government and diplomatic entities across North America, South America, Africa, and the Middle East at least since 2010. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET, in June 2021,  unpacked  the intrusions mounted by the hacking crew against diplomatic entities and telecommunication companies in Africa and the Middle East using a custom implant known as Turian. Then in December 2021, Microsoft  announc...

Compliance services are emerging as one of the hottest areas of cybersecurity.  While compliance used to be mainly the province of large enterprises, times have changed, and it is now a day-to-day concern for a growing number of small and medium businesses.  Even when these organizations are not regulated, SMEs often aim to follow compliance and/or security frameworks either for their own risk mitigation or in order to comply with the standards required by their customers. The driver is often their customers’ supply chain concerns and requirements. As large businesses adopt cybersecurity and compliance frameworks and agree to certain standards, they impose similar demands on their suppliers. This is a major opportunity for providers of virtual CISO (vCISO) services assuming they can broaden their offerings to encompass compliance. MSSPs, MSPs, consultanies and other vCISO service providers perform a vital role in building a comprehensive cybersecurity program for their SME...

Security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Netcomm and TP-Link routers, some of which could be weaponized to achieve remote code execution. The flaws, tracked as  CVE-2022-4873  and  CVE-2022-4874 , concern a case of stack-based buffer overflow and authentication bypass and impact Netcomm router models NF20MESH, NF20, and NL1902 running firmware versions earlier than R6B035 . "The two vulnerabilities, when chained together, permit a remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code," the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC)  said  in an advisory published Tuesday. "The attacker can first gain unauthorized access to affected devices, and then use those entry points to gain access to other networks or compromise the availability, integrity, or confidentiality of data being transmitted from the internal network." Security researcher  Brendan Scarvell  has been credited with discovering and reporting the issues in October 2022. In a rel...

The maintainers of the  Git  source code version control system have released updates to remediate two critical vulnerabilities that could be exploited by a malicious actor to achieve remote code execution. The flaws, tracked as  CVE-2022-23521  and  CVE-2022-41903 , impacts the following versions of Git: v2.30.6, v2.31.5, v2.32.4, v2.33.5, v2.34.5, v2.35.5, v2.36.3, v2.37.4, v2.38.2, and v2.39.0. Patched versions include v2.30.7, v2.31.6, v2.32.5, v2.33.6, v2.34.6, v2.35.6, v2.36.4, v2.37.5, v2.38.3, and v2.39.1. X41 D-Sec security researchers Markus Vervier and Eric Sesterhenn as well as GitLab's Joern Schneeweisz have been credited with reporting the bugs. "The most severe issue discovered allows an attacker to trigger a heap-based memory corruption during clone or pull operations, which might result in code execution," the German cybersecurity company  said  of CVE-2022-23521. CVE-2022-41903, also a critical vulnerability, is triggered during...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has  published  four Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories, calling out several security flaws affecting products from Siemens, GE Digital, and Contec. The most critical of the issues have been identified in Siemens SINEC INS that could lead to remote code execution via a path traversal flaw ( CVE-2022-45092 , CVSS score: 9.9) and command injection ( CVE-2022-2068 , CVSS score: 9.8). Also patched by Siemens is an authentication bypass vulnerability in llhttp parser ( CVE-2022-35256 , CVSS score: 9.8) as well as an out-of-bounds write bug in the OpenSSL library ( CVE-2022-2274 , CVSS score: 9.8) that could be exploited to trigger remote code execution. The German automation company, in December 2022,  released  Service Pack 2 Update 1 software to mitigate the flaws. Separately, a critical flaw has also been revealed in GE Digital's Proficy Historian solution that could result in code executio...

Four different Microsoft Azure services have been found vulnerable to server-side request forgery ( SSRF ) attacks that could be exploited to gain unauthorized access to cloud resources. The security issues, which were discovered by Orca between October 8, 2022 and December 2, 2022 in Azure API Management, Azure Functions, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure Digital Twins, have since been addressed by Microsoft. "The discovered Azure SSRF vulnerabilities allowed an attacker to scan local ports, find new services, endpoints, and sensitive files - providing valuable information on possibly vulnerable servers and services to exploit for initial entry and the location of sensitive information to target," Orca researcher Lidor Ben Shitrit  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Two of the vulnerabilities affecting Azure Functions and Azure Digital Twins could be abused without requiring any authentication, enabling a threat actor to seize control of a server without eve...

New research has found that it is possible for threat actors to abuse a legitimate feature in GitHub Codespaces to deliver malware to victim systems. GitHub Codespaces  is a cloud-based configurable development environment that allows users to debug, maintain, and commit changes to a given codebase from a web browser or via an integration in Visual Studio Code. It also comes with a port forwarding feature that makes it possible to access a web application that's running on a particular port within the codespace directly from the browser on a local machine for testing and debugging purposes. "You can also forward a port manually, label forwarded ports, share forwarded ports with members of your organization, share forwarded ports publicly, and add forwarded ports to the codespace configuration," GitHub  explains  in its documentation. It's  important  to note here that any forwarded port that's made public will also permit any party with knowledge of the UR...

It's no secret that the job of SOC teams continues to become increasingly difficult. Increased volume and sophistication of attacks are plaguing under-resourced teams with false positives and analyst burnout. However, like many other industries, cybersecurity is now beginning to lean on and benefit from advancements in automation to not only maintain the status quo, but to attain better security outcomes. Automation across multiple phases of the SOC workflow The need for automation is clear, and it is apparent that it is becoming table stakes for the industry. Of all cyber resilient organizations, IBM estimates that  62%  have deployed automation, AI and machine learning tools and processes.  Up until now, much of these advancements in automation have been focused on response, with SOAR and incident response tools playing an instrumental role in tackling the most urgent phase of the SOC workflow.  Centering the focus only on response, however, means we're treat...

Users of Zoho ManageEngine are being urged to patch their instances against a critical security vulnerability ahead of the release of a proof-of-concept ( PoC ) exploit code. The issue in question is  CVE-2022-47966 , an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability affecting several products due to the use of an outdated third-party dependency, Apache Santuario. "This vulnerability allows an unauthenticated adversary to execute arbitrary code," Zoho  warned  in an advisory issued late last year, noting that it affects all ManageEngine setups that have the SAML single sign-on (SSO) feature enabled, or had it enabled in the past. Horizon3.ai has now released Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) associated with the flaw, stating that it was able to successfully reproduce the exploit against ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus and ManageEngine Endpoint Central products. "The vulnerability is easy to exploit and a good candidate for attackers to 'spray and pray' acr...

A threat actor by the name  Lolip0p  has uploaded three rogue packages to the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that are designed to drop malware on compromised developer systems. The packages – named  colorslib  (versions 4.6.11 and 4.6.12),  httpslib  (versions 4.6.9 and 4.6.11), and  libhttps  (version 4.6.12) – by the author between January 7, 2023, and January 12, 2023. They have since been yanked from PyPI but not before they were cumulatively downloaded over 550 times. The modules come with identical setup scripts that are designed to invoke PowerShell and run a malicious binary (" Oxzy.exe ") hosted on Dropbox, Fortinet  disclosed  in a report published last week. The executable, once launched, triggers the retrieval of a next-stage, also a binary named  update.exe , that runs in the Windows temporary folder ("%USER%\AppData\Local\Temp\"). update.exe is flagged by antivirus vendors on VirusTotal as an information ...

A "large and resilient infrastructure" comprising over 250 domains is being used to distribute information-stealing malware such as  Raccoon  and  Vidar  since early 2020. The infection chain "uses about a hundred of fake cracked software catalogue websites that redirect to several links before downloading the payload hosted on file share platforms, such as GitHub," cybersecurity firm SEKOIA  said  in an analysis published earlier this month. The French cybersecurity company assessed the domains to be operated by a threat actor running a traffic direction system ( TDS ), which allows other cybercriminals to rent the service to distribute their malware. The attacks target users searching for cracked versions of software and games on search engines like Google, surfacing fraudulent websites on top by leveraging a technique called search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning to lure victims into downloading and executing the malicious payloads. The poisone...

When considering authentication providers, many organizations consider the ease of configuration, ubiquity of usage, and technical stability. Organizations cannot always be judged on those metrics alone. There is an increasing need to evaluate company ownership, policies and the stability, or instability, that it brings. How Leadership Change Affects Stability In recent months, a salient example is that of Twitter. The Twitter platform has been around since 2006 and is used by millions worldwide. With many users and a seemingly robust authentication system, organizations used Twitter as a primary or secondary authentication service. Inconsistent leadership and policies mean the stability of a platform is subject to change, which is especially true with Twitter as of late. The ownership change to Elon Musk precipitated widespread changes to staffing and policies. Due to those changes,  a large portion of staff was let go , but this included many individuals responsible for the t...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released several Industrial Control Systems (ICS)  advisories  warning of critical security flaws affecting products from Sewio, InHand Networks, Sauter Controls, and Siemens. The most severe of the flaws relate to Sewio's RTLS Studio, which could be exploited by an attacker to "obtain unauthorized access to the server, alter information, create a denial-of-service condition, gain escalated privileges, and execute arbitrary code,"  according to CISA . This includes CVE-2022-45444 (CVSS score: 10.0), a case of hard-coded passwords for select users in the application's database that potentially grant remote adversaries unrestricted access. Also notable are two command injection flaws (CVE-2022-47911 and CVE-2022-43483, CVSS scores: 9.1) and an out-of-bounds write vulnerability (CVE-2022-41989, CVSS score: 9.1) that could result in denial-of-service condition or code execution. The vulnerabilities...

Unidentified threat actors have deployed a new backdoor that borrows its features from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)'s  Hive  multi-platform  malware suite , the source code of which was  released  by WikiLeaks in November 2017. "This is the first time we caught a variant of the CIA Hive attack kit in the wild, and we named it  xdr33  based on its embedded Bot-side certificate CN=xdr33," Qihoo Netlab 360's Alex Turing and Hui Wang  said  in a technical write-up published last week. xdr33 is said to be propagated by exploiting an unspecified N-day security vulnerability in F5 appliances. It communicates with a command-and-control (C2) server using SSL with forged Kaspersky certificates. The intent of the backdoor, per the Chinese cybersecurity firm, is to harvest sensitive information and act as a launchpad for subsequent intrusions. It improves upon Hive by adding new C2 instructions and functionalities, among other implemen...

DevOps platform CircleCI on Friday disclosed that unidentified threat actors compromised an employee's laptop and leveraged malware to steal their two-factor authentication-backed credentials to breach the company's systems and data last month. The CI/CD service CircleCI said the "sophisticated attack" took place on December 16, 2022, and that the malware went undetected by its antivirus software. "The malware was able to execute session cookie theft, enabling them to impersonate the targeted employee in a remote location and then escalate access to a subset of our production systems," Rob Zuber, CircleCI's chief technology officer,  said  in an incident report. Further analysis of the security lapse revealed that the unauthorized third-party pilfered data from a subset of its databases by abusing the elevated permissions granted to the targeted employee. This included customer environment variables, tokens, and keys. The threat actor is believed t...

A majority of internet-exposed Cacti servers have not been patched against a recently patched critical security vulnerability that has come under active exploitation in the wild. That's according to attack surface management platform Censys, which  found  only 26 out of a total of 6,427 servers to be running a  patched version  of Cacti (1.2.23 and 1.3.0). The  issue  in question relates to  CVE-2022-46169  (CVSS score: 9.8), a combination of authentication bypass and command injection that enables an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code on an affected version of the open-source, web-based monitoring solution. Details about the flaw, which impacts versions 1.2.22 and below, were first revealed by SonarSource. The flaw was reported to the project maintainers on December 2, 2022. "A hostname-based authorization check is not implemented safely for most installations of Cacti," SonarSource researcher Stefan Schiller  noted  e...

Popular short-form video hosting service TikTok has been fined €5 million (about $5.4 million) by the French data protection watchdog for breaking cookie consent rules, making it the latest platform to face similar penalties after  Amazon, Google, Meta , and  Microsoft  since 2020. "Users of 'tiktok[.]com' could not refuse cookies as easily as accepting them and they were not informed in a sufficiently precise way of the objectives of the different cookies," the Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (CNIL)  said  in a statement. The regulator said it conducted several audits between May 2020 and June 2022, finding that the ByteDance-owned company did not offer a straightforward option to refuse all cookies as opposed to just one click for accepting them. The option to "refuse all" cookies was introduced by TikTok in February 2022. "Making the opt-out mechanism more complex is in fact discouraging users from refusing cookies and...

Cisco has warned of two security vulnerabilities affecting end-of-life (EoL) Small Business RV016, RV042, RV042G, and RV082 routers that it said will not be fixed, even as it acknowledged the public availability of proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit. The  issues  are rooted in the router's web-based management interface, enabling a remote adversary to sidestep authentication or execute malicious commands on the underlying operating system. The most severe of the two is CVE-2023-20025 (CVSS score: 9.0), which is the result of improper validation of user input within incoming HTTP packets. A threat actor could exploit it remotely by sending a specially crafted HTTP request to vulnerable routers' web-based management interface to bypass authentication and obtain elevated permissions. The lack of adequate validation is also the reason behind the second flaw tracked as CVE-2023-20026 (CVSS score: 6.5), permitting an attacker with valid admin credentials to achieve root-level priv...