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The U.S. government on Tuesday announced the takedown of the IPStorm botnet proxy network and its infrastructure, as the Russian and Moldovan national behind the operation pleaded guilty. "The botnet infrastructure had infected Windows systems then further expanded to infect Linux, Mac, and Android devices, victimizing computers and other electronic devices around the world, including in Asia, Europe, North America and South America," the Department of Justice (DoJ)  said  in a press statement. Sergei Makinin, who developed and deployed the malicious software to infiltrate thousands of internet-connected devices from June 2019 through December 2022, faces a maximum of 30 years in prison. The Golang-based botnet malware, prior to its dismantling,  turned the infected devices into proxies  as part of a for-profit scheme, which was then offered to other customers via proxx[.]io and proxx[.]net. "IPStorm is a botnet that abuses a legitimate peer-to-peer (p2p) netwo...

Cybersecurity researchers have demonstrated a new technique that exploits a critical security flaw in Apache ActiveMQ to achieve arbitrary code execution in memory. Tracked as  CVE-2023-46604  (CVSS score: 10.0), the vulnerability is a remote code execution bug that could permit a threat actor to run arbitrary shell commands. It was patched by Apache in ActiveMQ versions 5.15.16, 5.16.7, 5.17.6, or 5.18.3 released late last month. The vulnerability has since  come under   active exploitation  by ransomware outfits to deploy ransomware such as HelloKitty and a strain that shares similarities with TellYouThePass as well as a remote access trojan called SparkRAT. According to  new findings  from VulnCheck, threat actors weaponizing the flaw are  relying  on a public proof-of-concept ( PoC ) exploit originally disclosed on October 25, 2023. The attacks have been found to use  ClassPathXmlApplicationContext , a class that's part of the...

What do basketball teams, government agencies, and car manufacturers have in common? Each one has been breached, having confidential, proprietary, or private information stolen and exposed by insiders. In each case, the motivations and methods varied, but the risk remained the same: insiders have access to too much data with too few controls. Insider threats  continue to prove difficult for organizations to combat because — unlike an outsider — insiders can navigate sensitive data undetected and typically without suspicion. Cybersecurity is not the first industry to tackle insider threats, however. Espionage has a long history of facing and defending against insiders by using the "CIA Triad" principles of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Varonis' modern cybersecurity answer to insider risk is the data security triad of "sensitivity, access, and activity." Using these three dimensions of data security, you can help reduce the risk and impact of an insider attack. ...

Intel has released fixes to close out a high-severity flaw codenamed  Reptar  that impacts its desktop, mobile, and server CPUs. Tracked as  CVE-2023-23583  (CVSS score: 8.8), the  issue  has the potential to "allow escalation of privilege and/or information disclosure and/or denial of service via local access." Successful exploitation of the vulnerability could also permit a bypass of the CPU's security boundaries, according to Google Cloud, which described it as an issue stemming from how redundant prefixes are interpreted by the processor. "The impact of this vulnerability is demonstrated when exploited by an attacker in a multi-tenant virtualized environment, as the exploit on a guest machine causes the host machine to crash resulting in a Denial of Service to other guest machines running on the same host," Google Cloud's Phil Venables  said . "Additionally, the vulnerability could potentially lead to information disclosure or privilege escal...

Microsoft has released fixes to address  63 security bugs  in its software for the month of November 2023, including three vulnerabilities that have come under active exploitation in the wild. Of the 63 flaws, three are rated Critical, 56 are rated Important, and four are rated Moderate in severity. Two of them have been listed as publicly known at the time of the release. The updates are in addition to  more than 35 security shortcomings  addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of Patch Tuesday updates for October 2023. The five zero-days that are of note are as follows - CVE-2023-36025  (CVSS score: 8.8) - Windows SmartScreen Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability CVE-2023-36033  (CVSS score: 7.8) - Windows DWM Core Library Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2023-36036  (CVSS score: 7.8) - Windows Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2023-36038  (CVSS score: 8.2) - ASP.NET C...

VMware is warning of a critical and unpatched security flaw in Cloud Director that could be exploited by a malicious actor to get around authentication protections. Tracked as  CVE-2023-34060  (CVSS score: 9.8), the vulnerability impacts instances that have been upgraded to version 10.5 from an older version. "On an upgraded version of VMware Cloud Director Appliance 10.5, a malicious actor with network access to the appliance can bypass login restrictions when authenticating on port 22 (ssh) or port 5480 (appliance management console)," the company  said  in an alert. "This bypass is not present on port 443 (VCD provider and tenant login). On a new installation of VMware Cloud Director Appliance 10.5, the bypass is not present." The virtualization services company further noted that the impact is due to the fact that it utilizes a version of sssd from the underlying Photon OS that is affected by  CVE-2023-34060 . Dustin Hartle from IT solutions provider ...

A group of academics has disclosed a new "software fault attack" on AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization ( SEV ) technology that could be potentially exploited by threat actors to infiltrate encrypted virtual machines (VMs) and even perform privilege escalation. The attack has been codenamed  CacheWarp  (CVE-2023-20592) by researchers from the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and the Graz University of Technology. It impacts AMD CPUs supporting all variants of SEV. "For this research, we specifically looked at AMD's newest TEE, AMD SEV-SNP, relying on the experience from previous attacks on Intel's TEE," security researcher Ruiyi Zhang told The Hacker News. "We found the 'INVD' instruction [flush a processor's cache contents] could be abused under the threat model of AMD SEV." SEV, an  extension  to the AMD-V architecture and introduced in 2016, is designed to isolate VMs from the hypervisor by encrypting the me...

In 2023, the global average cost of a data breach reached  $4.45 million . Beyond the immediate financial loss, there are long-term consequences like diminished customer trust, weakened brand value, and derailed business operations. In a world where the frequency and cost of data breaches are skyrocketing, organizations are coming face-to-face with a harsh reality: traditional cybersecurity measures might not be cutting it anymore.  Against this backdrop, businesses must find ways to strengthen their measures to safeguard precious data and critical assets. At the heart of this shift lies a key strategy: continuous monitoring. Understanding Continuous Security Monitoring in Cybersecurity Continuous monitoring is a dynamic approach that encompasses several techniques to fulfil a multi-layered defense strategy. These techniques can include:  Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (RBVM): Continuous vulnerability assessments across your network with remediation prioritiza...

Publicly-accessible Docker Engine API instances are being targeted by threat actors as part of a campaign designed to co-opt the machines into a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet dubbed  OracleIV . "Attackers are exploiting this misconfiguration to deliver a malicious Docker container, built from an image named 'oracleiv_latest' and containing Python malware compiled as an ELF executable," Cado researchers Nate Bill and Matt Muir  said . The malicious activity starts with attackers using an HTTP POST request to Docker's API to retrieve a malicious image from Docker Hub, which, in turn, runs a command to retrieve a shell script (oracle.sh) from a command-and-control (C&C) server. Oracleiv_latest  purports to be a MySQL image for docker and has been pulled 3,500 times to date. In a perhaps not-so-surprising twist, the image also includes additional instructions to fetch an XMRig miner and its configuration from the same server. That said, the clo...

Have you heard about Dependabot? If not, just ask any developer around you, and they'll likely rave about how it has revolutionized the tedious task of checking and updating outdated dependencies in software projects.  Dependabot not only takes care of the checks for you, but also provides suggestions for modifications that can be approved with just a single click. Although Dependabot is limited to GitHub-hosted projects, it has set a new standard for continuous providers to offer similar capabilities. This automation of "administrative" tasks has become a norm, enabling developers to integrate and deploy their work faster than ever before. Continuous integration and deployment workflows have become the cornerstone of software engineering, propelling the DevOps movement to the forefront of the industry. But a  recent advisory  by security firm Checkmarx sheds light on a concerning incident. Malicious actors have recently attempted to exploit the trust associated with D...

Government entities in the Middle East are the target of new phishing campaigns that are designed to deliver a new initial access downloader dubbed IronWind . The activity, detected between July and October 2023, has been  attributed  by Proofpoint to a threat actor it tracks under the name  TA402 , which is also known as Molerats, Gaza Cyber Gang, and shares  tactical overlaps  with a pro-Hamas hacking crew known as  APT-C-23  (aka Arid Viper). "When it comes to state-aligned threat actors, North Korea, Russia, China, and Iran generally reap the lion's share of attention," Joshua Miller, senior threat researcher at Proofpoint, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "But TA402, a Middle Eastern advanced persistent threat (APT) group that historically has operated in the interests of the Palestinian Territories, has consistently proven to be an intriguing threat actor capable of highly sophisticated cyber espionage with a focus on intellig...