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Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered the modus operandi of an elusive threat group that hacks into the high-profile military and diplomatic entities in Eastern Europe for espionage. The findings are part of a collaborative analysis by cybersecurity firm ESET and the impacted firms, resulting in an extensive look into InvisiMole's operations and the group's tactics, tools, and procedures (TTPs). "ESET researchers conducted an investigation of these attacks in cooperation with the affected organizations and were able to uncover the extensive, sophisticated tool-sets used for delivery, lateral movement, and execution of InvisiMole's backdoors," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Cooperation with the Gamaredon Group First discovered in 2018 , InvisiMole has been active at least since 2013 in connection with targeted cyber-espionage operations in Ukraine and Russia. After slipping under the radar, the threat actor returned late ...

Cybersecurity researchers today took the wraps off a new sophisticated cyber-espionage campaign directed against aerospace and military organizations in Europe and the Middle East with an aim to spy on key employees of the targeted firms and, in some case, even to siphon money. The campaign, dubbed " Operation In(ter)ception " because of a reference to "Inception" in the malware sample, took place between September to December 2019, according to a new report cybersecurity firm ESET shared with The Hacker News. "The primary goal of the operation was espionage," the researchers told The Hacker News. "However, in one of the cases we investigated, the attackers tried to monetize access to a victim's email account through a business email compromise (BEC) attack as the final stage of the operation." The financial motivation behind the attacks, coupled with similarities in targeting and development environment, have led ESET to suspect Laz...

The Department of Homeland Security and CISA ICS-CERT today issued a critical security advisory warning about over a dozen newly discovered vulnerabilities affecting billions of Internet-connected devices manufactured by many vendors across the globe. Dubbed " Ripple20 ," the set of 19 vulnerabilities resides in a low-level TCP/IP software library developed by Treck, which, if weaponized, could let remote attackers gain complete control over targeted devices—without requiring any user interaction. According to Israeli cybersecurity company JSOF—who discovered these flaws—the affected devices are in use across various industries, ranging from home/consumer devices to medical, healthcare, data centers, enterprises, telecom, oil, gas, nuclear, transportation, and many others across critical infrastructure. "Just a few examples: data could be stolen off of a printer, an infusion pump behavior changed, or industrial control devices could be made to malfunction. An ...

If your business operations and security of sensitive data rely on Oracle's E-Business Suite (EBS) , make sure you recently updated and are running the latest available version of the software. In a report released by enterprise cybersecurity firm Onapsis and shared with The Hacker News, the firm today disclosed technical details for vulnerabilities it reported in its integrated group of applications designed to automate CRM, ERP, and SCM operations for organizations. The two vulnerabilities, dubbed " BigDebIT " and rated a CVSS score of 9.9, were patched by Oracle in a critical patch update (CPU) pushed out earlier this January. But the company said an estimated 50 percent of Oracle EBS customers have not deployed the patches to date. The security flaws could be exploited by bad actors to target accounting tools such as General Ledger in a bid to steal sensitive information and commit financial fraud. According to the researchers, "an unauthenticated hacker...

Atlassian solutions are widely used in the software development industry. Many teams practicing agile software development rely on these applications to manage their projects. Issue-tracking application Jira, Git repository BitBucket, continuous integration and deployment server Bamboo, and team collaboration platform Confluence are all considered to be proven agile tools. Considering how popular agile has become, it's no wonder Atlassian now serves 83 percent of Fortune 500 companies and has over 10 million active users worldwide. To help create a better experience for these users,  Alpha Serve  has developed WebAuthn add-ons to bring passwordless authentication to various Atlassian products. Having a more convenient and secure way to login to their Atlassian instances should be a welcome development for development teams. How WebAuthn Works WebAuthn is a browser-based security standard recommended by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that allows web apps to si...

High impact vulnerabilities in modern communication protocol used by mobile network operators (MNOs) can be exploited to intercept user data and carry out impersonation, fraud, and denial of service (DoS) attacks, cautions a newly published research. The findings are part of a new Vulnerabilities in LTE and 5G Networks 2020 report published by London-based cybersecurity firm Positive Technologies last week. "This paper encompasses the results of security assessments performed during the 2018–2019 timeframe on behalf of 28 telecom operators in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America." Called the GPRS Tunnelling Protocol ( GTP ), the affected Internet Protocol (IP)-based communications standard defines a set of rules governing data traffic over 2G, 3G, and 4G networks. It also forms the basis for GPRS core network and its successor Evolved Packet Core ( EPC ), thus making it possible for users to keep connected to the Internet while moving from one place to the ot...

You might not believe it, but it's possible to spy on secret conversations happening in a room from a nearby remote location just by observing a light bulb hanging in there—visible from a window—and measuring the amount of light it emits. A team of cybersecurity researchers has developed and demonstrated a novel side-channel attacking technique that can be applied by eavesdroppers to recover full sound from a victim's room that contains an overhead hanging bulb. The findings were published in a new paper  by a team of academics—Ben Nassi, Yaron Pirutin, Adi Shamir, Yuval Elovici and Boris Zadov—from the Israeli's Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Weizmann Institute of Science, which will also be presented at the Black Hat USA 2020 conference later this August. The technique for long-distance eavesdropping, called " Lamphone ," works by capturing minuscule sound waves optically through an electro-optical sensor directed at the bulb and using it t...

Cybersecurity researchers at Reason Labs, the threat research arm of security solutions provider Reason Labs , today disclosed details of a vulnerability they recently discovered in the Facebook Messenger application for Windows. The vulnerability, which resides in Messenger version 460.16, could allow attackers to leverage the app to potentially execute malicious files already present on a compromised system in an attempt to help malware gain persistent/extended access. Reason Labs shared its findings with Facebook in April, after which the social media company quickly patched the flaw with the release of an updated version of Facebook Messenger for Windows users via the Microsoft store. According to researchers, the vulnerable app triggers a call to load Windows Powershell from the C:\python27 path. This path is typically created when installing version 2.7 of the Python and does not commonly exist in most Windows installations. Attackers can hijack such calls that att...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two distinct attacks that could be exploited against modern Intel processors to leak sensitive information from the CPU's trusted execution environments (TEE). Called SGAxe , the first of the flaws is an evolution of the previously uncovered CacheOut attack (CVE-2020-0549) earlier this year that allows an attacker to retrieve the contents from the CPU's L1 Cache. "By using the extended attack against the Intel-provided and signed architectural SGX enclaves, we retrieve the secret attestation key used for cryptographically proving the genuinity of enclaves over the network, allowing us to pass fake enclaves as genuine," a group of academics from the University of Michigan said. The second line of attack, dubbed CrossTalk by researchers from the VU University Amsterdam, enables attacker-controlled code executing on one CPU core to target SGX enclaves running on a completely different core, and determine the enclave...

A team of cybersecurity researchers today outed a little-known Indian IT firm that has secretly been operating as a global hackers-for-hire service or hacking-as-a-service platform. Based in Delhi, BellTroX InfoTech allegedly targeted thousands of high-profile individuals and hundreds of organizations across six continents in the last seven years. Hack-for-hire services do not operate as a state-sponsored group but likely as a hack-for-hire company that conducts commercial cyberespionage against given targets on behalf of private investigators and their clients. According to the latest report published by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, BellTroX—dubbed ' Dark Basin ' as a hacking group—targeted advocacy groups, senior politicians, government officials, CEOs, journalists, and human rights defenders. "Over the course of our multi-year investigation, we found that Dark Basin likely conducted commercial espionage on behalf of their clients against oppo...

Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered a new critical vulnerability affecting the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol that could allow attackers to leak kernel memory remotely, and when combined with a previously disclosed "wormable" bug, the flaw can be exploited to achieve remote code execution attacks. Dubbed " SMBleed " ( CVE-2020-1206 ) by cybersecurity firm ZecOps, the flaw resides in SMB's decompression function — the same function as with SMBGhost or EternalDarkness bug ( CVE-2020-0796 ), which came to light three months ago, potentially opening vulnerable Windows systems to malware attacks that can propagate across networks. The newly discovered vulnerability impacts Windows 10 versions 1903 and 1909, for which Microsoft today released security patches as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday updates for June . The development comes as the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an advisory last week warning Windows 10...

Microsoft today released its June 2020 batch of software security updates that patches a total of 129 newly discovered vulnerabilities affecting various versions of Windows operating systems and related products. This is the third Patch Tuesday update since the beginning of the global Covid-19 outbreak, putting some extra pressure on security teams struggling to keep up with patch management while proceeding with caution that should not break anything during this lockdown season. The 129 bugs in the June 2020 bucket for sysadmins and billions of users include 11 critical vulnerabilities—all leading to remote code execution attacks—and 118 classified as important in severity, mostly leading to privilege escalation and spoofing attacks. According to the advisories Microsoft released today, hackers, fortunately, don't appear to be exploiting any of the zero-day vulnerabilities in the wild, and details for none of the flaws addressed this month was disclosed publicly before thi...