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Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloudflare, and Google on Tuesday said they took steps to mitigate record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that relied on a novel technique called HTTP/2 Rapid Reset. The  layer 7 attacks  were detected in late August 2023, the companies said in a coordinated disclosure. The cumulative susceptibility to this attack is being tracked as  CVE-2023-44487 , and carries a CVSS score of 7.5 out of a maximum of 10. While the attacks aimed at Google's cloud infrastructure peaked at  398 million requests per second  (RPS), the ones that struck AWS and Cloudflare exceeded a volume of 155 million and 201 million RPS, respectively. HTTP/2 Rapid Reset refers to a zero-day flaw in the HTTP/2 protocol that can be exploited to carry out DDoS attacks. A significant feature of HTTP/2 is multiplexing requests over a single TCP connection, which manifests in the form of concurrent streams. What's more, a client that wants to abor...

Google on Tuesday announced the ability for all users to set up passkeys by default, five months after it  rolled out support  for the FIDO Alliance-backed passwordless standard for Google Accounts on all platforms. "This means the next time you sign in to your account, you'll start seeing prompts to create and use passkeys, simplifying your future sign-ins," Google's Sriram Karra and Christiaan Brand  said . "It also means you'll see the ' skip password when possible ' option toggled on in your Google Account settings." Passkeys are a new form of authentication that entirely eliminate the need for usernames and passwords, or even provide any additional authentication factor. In other words, it's a passwordless login mechanism that leverages public-key cryptography to authenticate users' access to websites and apps, with the private key saved securely in the device and the public key stored in the server. Each passkey is unique and...

Certain online risks to children are on the rise, according to a recent report from Thorn , a technology nonprofit whose mission is to build technology to defend children from sexual abuse. Research shared in the  Emerging Online Trends in Child Sexual Abuse 2023 report , indicates that minors are increasingly taking and sharing sexual images of themselves. This activity may occur consensually or coercively, as youth also report an increase in risky online interactions with adults. "In our digitally connected world, child sexual abuse material is easily and increasingly shared on the platforms we use in our daily lives," said John Starr, VP of Strategic Impact at Thorn. "Harmful interactions between youth and adults are not isolated to the dark corners of the web. As fast as the digital community builds innovative platforms, predators are co-opting these spaces to exploit children and share this egregious content." These trends and others shared in the Emerging O...

While phishing and ransomware dominate headlines, another critical risk quietly persists across most enterprises: exposed Git repositories leaking sensitive data. A risk that silently creates shadow access into core systems Git is the backbone of modern software development, hosting millions of repositories and serving thousands of organizations worldwide. Yet, amid the daily hustle of shipping code, developers may inadvertently leave behind API keys, tokens, or passwords in configuration files and code files, effectively handing attackers the keys to the kingdom. This isn't just about poor hygiene; it's a systemic and growing supply chain risk. As cyber threats become more sophisticated, so do compliance requirements. Security frameworks like NIS2, SOC2, and ISO 27001 now demand proof that software delivery pipelines are hardened and third-party risk is controlled. The message is clear: securing your Git repositories is no longer optional, it's essential. Below, we look at the ris...

A previously undocumented threat actor of unknown provenance has been linked to a number of attacks targeting organizations in the manufacturing, IT, and biomedical sectors in Taiwan. The Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom, attributed the attacks to an advanced persistent threat (APT) it tracks under the name  Grayling . Evidence shows that the campaign began in February 2023 and continued until at least May 2023. Also likely targeted as part of the activity is a government agency located in the Pacific Islands, as well as entities in Vietnam and the U.S. "This activity stood out due to the use by Grayling of a distinctive DLL side-loading technique that uses a custom decryptor to deploy payloads," the company  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The motivation driving this activity appears to be intelligence gathering." The initial foothold to victim environments is said to have been achieved by exploiting public-facing infrastructure, ...

A sophisticated  Magecart  campaign has been observed manipulating websites' default 404 error page to conceal malicious code in what's been described as the latest evolution of the attacks. The activity, per Akamai, targets Magento and WooCommerce websites, with some of the victims belonging to large organizations in the food and retail industries. "In this campaign, all the victim websites we detected were directly exploited, as the malicious code snippet was injected into one of their first-party resources," Akamai security researcher Roman Lvovsky  said  in a Monday analysis. This involves inserting the code directly into the HTML pages or within one of the first-party scripts that were loaded as part of the website. The attacks are realized through a multi-stage chain, in which the loader code retrieves the main payload during runtime in order to capture the sensitive information entered by visitors on checkout pages and exfiltrate it to a remote server. ...

A new security flaw has been disclosed in the libcue library impacting GNOME Linux systems that could be exploited to achieve remote code execution (RCE) on affected hosts. Tracked as  CVE-2023-43641  (CVSS score: 8.8), the  issue  is described as a case of memory corruption in libcue, a library designed for parsing  cue sheet files . It impacts versions 2.2.1 and prior. libcue is incorporated into Tracker Miners , a search engine tool that's included by default in GNOME and indexes files in the system for easy access. The problem is rooted in an out-of-bounds array access in the track_set_index function that allows for achieving code execution on the machine simply by tricking a victim into clicking a malicious link and downloading a .cue file. "A user of the GNOME desktop environment can be exploited by downloading a cue sheet from a malicious webpage," according to a  description  of the vulnerability in the National Vulnerability Database (NV...

A recently disclosed critical flaw in Citrix NetScaler ADC and Gateway devices is being exploited by threat actors to conduct a credential harvesting campaign. IBM X-Force, which uncovered the activity last month,  said  adversaries exploited "CVE-2023-3519 to attack unpatched NetScaler Gateways to insert a malicious script into the HTML content of the authentication web page to capture user credentials." CVE-2023-3519  (CVSS score: 9.8), addressed by Citrix in July 2023, is a critical code injection vulnerability that could lead to unauthenticated remote code execution. Over the past few months, it has been  heavily   exploited  to  infiltrate vulnerable devices  and gain persistent access for follow-on attacks. In the latest attack chain discovered by IBM X-Force, the operators sent a specially crafted web request to trigger the exploitation of CVE-2023-3519 and deploy a PHP-based web shell. The access afforded by the web shell is subseque...

An ad fraud botnet dubbed  PEACHPIT  leveraged an army of hundreds of thousands of Android and iOS devices to generate illicit profits for the threat actors behind the scheme. The botnet is part of a larger China-based operation codenamed  BADBOX , which also entails selling off-brand mobile and connected TV (CTV) devices on popular online retailers and resale sites that are backdoored with an  Android malware strain  called  Triada . "The PEACHPIT botnet's conglomerate of associated apps were found in 227 countries and territories, with an estimated peak of 121,000 devices a day on Android and 159,000 devices a day on iOS," HUMAN  said . The infections are said to have been realized through a collection of 39 apps that were installed more than 15 million times. Devices fitted with the BADBOX malware allowed the operators to steal sensitive data, create residential proxy exit peers, and commit ad fraud through the bogus apps. It's currently not c...

Senior executives working in U.S.-based organizations are being targeted by a new phishing campaign that leverages a popular adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) phishing toolkit named  EvilProxy  to conduct credential harvesting and account takeover attacks. Menlo Security said the activity started in July 2023, primarily singling out banking and financial services, insurance, property management and real estate, and manufacturing sectors. "The threat actors leveraged an open redirection vulnerability on the job search platform 'indeed.com,'redirecting victims to malicious phishing pages impersonating Microsoft," security researcher Ravisankar Ramprasad  said  in a report published last week. EvilProxy , first documented by Resecurity in September 2022, functions as a reverse proxy that's set up between the target and a legitimate login page to intercept credentials, two-factor authentication (2FA) codes, and session cookies to hijack accounts of interest. The th...

In today's rapidly evolving technological landscape, the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) has become ubiquitous across various industries. This wave of innovation promises improved efficiency and performance, but lurking beneath the surface are complex vulnerabilities and unforeseen risks that demand immediate attention from cybersecurity professionals. As the average small and medium-sized business leader or end-user is often unaware of these growing threats, it falls upon cybersecurity service providers – MSPs, MSSPs, consultants and especially vCISOs - to take a proactive stance in protecting their clients. At Cynomi, we experience the risks associated with generative AI daily, as we use these technologies internally and work with MSP and MSSP partners to enhance the services they provide to small and medium businesses. Being committed to staying ahead of the curve and empowering virtual vCISOs to swiftly implement cutting-edge secur...

"Of course, here's an example of simple code in the Python programming language that can be associated with the keywords "MyHotKeyHandler," "Keylogger," and "macOS," this is a message from ChatGPT followed by a piece of malicious code and a brief remark not to use it for illegal purposes. Initially published by  Moonlock Lab , the screenshots of ChatGPT writing code for a keylogger malware is yet another example of trivial ways to hack large language models and exploit them against their policy of use. In the case of Moonlock Lab, their malware research engineer told ChatGPT about a dream where an attacker was writing code. In the dream, he could only see the three words: "MyHotKeyHandler," "Keylogger," and "macOS." The engineer asked ChatGPT to completely recreate the malicious code and help him stop the attack. After a brief conversation, the AI finally provided the answer. "At times, the code generated isn...