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Google Project Zero called 2021 a "record year for in-the-wild 0-days," as  58 security vulnerabilities  were detected and disclosed during the course of the year. The development marks more than a two-fold jump from the previous maximum when 28 0-day exploits were tracked in 2015. In contrast, only 25 0-day exploits were detected in 2020. "The large uptick in in-the-wild 0-days in 2021 is due to increased detection and disclosure of these 0-days, rather than simply increased usage of 0-day exploits," Google Project Zero security researcher  Maddie Stone   said . "Attackers are having success using the same bug patterns and exploitation techniques and going after the same attack surfaces," Stone added. The tech giant's in-house security team characterized the exploits as similar to previous and publicly known vulnerabilities, with only two of them markedly different for the technical sophistication and use of logic bugs to escape the sandbox. B...

Details have emerged about a now-patched security vulnerability in the Snort intrusion detection and prevention system that could trigger a denial-of-service (DoS) condition and render it powerless against malicious traffic. Tracked as  CVE-2022-20685 , the vulnerability is rated 7.5 for severity and resides in the Modbus preprocessor of the Snort detection engine. It affects all open-source Snort project releases earlier than 2.9.19 as well as version 3.1.11.0. Maintained by Cisco,  Snort  is an open-source intrusion detection system (IDS) and intrusion prevention system (IPS) that offers real-time network traffic analysis to spot potential signs of malicious activity based on predefined rules. "The vulnerability, CVE-2022-20685, is an integer-overflow issue that can cause the Snort Modbus OT preprocessor to enter an infinite  while loop ," Uri Katz, a security researcher with Claroty,  said  in a report published last week. "A successful exploit keep...

Are you a CISO, CIO, or IT Director? In your role, you're responsible for breach protection – which means you oversee and govern the process of designing, building, maintaining, and continuously enhancing your organization's security program.  But getting buy-in from leadership can be difficult when they are a non-technical audience. On top of managing your organization's breach protection activity 24/7, you have to find time to figure out how to effectively articulate the risks, potential impacts, and appropriate steps necessary in a way that will convince leadership to invest in the resources required to keep your organization safe. Compounding this is the fact that, while you are focused on things like malware, exploits, and network traffic – your leadership is primarily concerned with operational loss and calculated risk.  How do you bridge the gap and help leadership understand your priorities and your team's business impact? You must identify the security i...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

Identity and access management provider Okta on Tuesday said it concluded its probe into the  breach  of a third-party vendor in late January 2022 by the LAPSUS$ extortionist gang and that it was far more limited in scope. Stating that the "impact of the incident was significantly less than the maximum potential impact" the company had previously shared last month, Okta  said  the intrusion impacted only two customer tenants, down from 366 as was initially assumed. The  security event  took place on January 21 when the LAPSUS$ hacking group gained unauthorized remote access to a workstation belonging to a Sitel support engineer. But it only became public knowledge nearly two months later when the adversary  posted  screenshots of Okta's internal systems on their Telegram channel. In addition to accessing two active customer tenants within the SuperUser application — which is used to perform basic management functions — the hacker group is sai...

A security flaw in the Windows Print Spooler component that was patched by Microsoft in February is being actively exploited in the wild, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has warned . To that end, the agency has added the shortcoming to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog , requiring Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to address the issues by May 10, 2022. Tracked as CVE-2022-22718 (CVSS score: 7.8), the security vulnerability is one among the four privilege escalation flaws in the Print Spooler that Microsoft resolved as part of its Patch Tuesday updates on February 8, 2022. It's worth noting that the Redmond-based tech giant has remediated a number of Print Spooler flaws since the critical PrintNightmare remote code execution vulnerability came to light last year, including 15 elevation of privilege vulnerabilities in April 2022. Specifics about the nature of the attacks and the identity of the threat actors that m...

Three high-impact Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) security vulnerabilities have been discovered impacting various Lenovo consumer laptop models, enabling malicious actors to deploy and execute firmware implants on the affected devices. Tracked as CVE-2021-3970, CVE-2021-3971, and CVE-2021-3972, the latter two "affect firmware drivers originally meant to be used only during the manufacturing process of Lenovo consumer notebooks," ESET researcher Martin Smolár  said  in a report published today. "Unfortunately, they were mistakenly included also in the production BIOS images without being properly deactivated," Smolár added. Successful exploitation of the flaws could permit an attacker to disable SPI flash protections or Secure Boot, effectively granting the adversary the ability to install persistent malware that can survive system reboots. CVE-2021-3970, on the other hand, relates to a case of memory corruption in the System Management Mode ( SMM...

A previously unknown zero-click exploit in Apple's iMessage was used to install mercenary spyware from  NSO Group  and  Candiru  against at least 65 individuals as part of a "multi-year clandestine operation." "Victims included Members of the European Parliament, Catalan Presidents, legislators, jurists, and members of civil society organizations," the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab  said  in a new report. "Family members were also infected in some cases." Of the 65 individuals, 63 were targeted with Pegasus and four others were infected with Candiru, with iPhones belonging to at least two compromised with both. The incidents are said to have mostly occurred between 2017 and 2020. The attacks involved the weaponization of an iOS exploit dubbed HOMAGE that made it possible to penetrate the devices running versions prior to iOS 13.2, which was released on October 28, 2019. It's worth noting that the latest version of iOS is iOS 15.4.1. ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Treasury Department, warned of a new set of ongoing cyber attacks carried out by the Lazarus Group targeting blockchain companies. Calling the activity cluster  TraderTraitor , the infiltrations involve the North Korean state-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT) actor striking entities operating in the Web3.0 industry since at least 2020. Targeted organizations include cryptocurrency exchanges, decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, play-to-earn cryptocurrency video games, cryptocurrency trading companies, venture capital funds investing in cryptocurrency, and individual holders of large amounts of cryptocurrency or valuable non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The attack chains commence with the threat actor reaching out to victims via different communication platforms to lure them into downloading weaponized cryptocurrency apps for Windows and macOS, s...

GitHub on Monday noted that it had notified all victims of an attack campaign, which involved an unauthorized party downloading private repository contents by taking advantage of third-party OAuth user tokens maintained by Heroku and Travis CI. "Customers should also continue to monitor Heroku and Travis CI for updates on their own investigations into the affected OAuth applications," the company  said  in an updated post. The  incident  originally came to light on April 12 when GitHub uncovered signs that a malicious actor had leveraged the stolen OAuth user tokens issued to Heroku and Travis CI to download data from dozens of organizations, including NPM. The Microsoft-owned platform also said that it will alert customers promptly should the ongoing investigation identify additional victims. Furthermore, it cautioned that the adversary may also be digging into the repositories for secrets that could be used in other attacks. Heroku, which has pulled supp...

An 18-month-long analysis of the PYSA ransomware operation has revealed that the cybercrime cartel followed a five-stage software development cycle from August 2020, with the malware authors prioritizing features to improve the efficiency of its workflows. This included a user-friendly tool like a full-text search engine to facilitate the extraction of metadata and enable the threat actors to find and access victim information quickly. "The group is known to carefully research high-value targets before launching its attacks, compromising enterprise systems and forcing organizations to pay large ransoms to restore their data," Swiss cybersecurity company PRODAFT  said  in an exhaustive report published last week. PYSA, short for "Protect Your System, Amigo" and a successor to the Mespinoza ransomware, was first observed in December 2019 and has emerged as the third most prevalent ransomware strain detected during the fourth quarter of 2021. Since September 2020,...

How well do your Linux security practices stack up in today's challenging operating environment? Are you following the correct processes to keep systems up-to-date and protected against the latest threats? Now you can find out thanks to research independently conducted by the Ponemon Institute. The research sponsored by  TuxCare  sought to understand better how organizations are currently managing the security and stability of their Linux-based systems. The results allow all organizations operating Linux-based systems to benchmark their processes against their peers and best practices. You can get a copy of the complete report  HERE  if you can't wait to see the findings, but we've highlighted the key takeaways below if you'd like a preview. Research Goals  Understanding the current State of Enterprise Linux Security Management has never been more imperative. The number of high and critical vulnerabilities continues to grow each year significantly, and expl...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed an advanced version of the SolarMarker malware that packs in new improvements with the goal of updating its defense evasion abilities and staying under the radar. "The recent version demonstrated an evolution from Windows Portable Executables (EXE files) to working with Windows installer package files (MSI files)," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers  said  in a report published this month. "This campaign is still in development and going back to using executables files (EXE) as it did in its earlier versions." SolarMarker, also called Jupyter, leverages manipulated search engine optimization (SEO) tactics as its primary infection vector. It's known for its information stealing and backdoor features, enabling the attackers to steal data stored in web browsers and execute arbitrary commands retrieved from a remote server. In February 2022, the operators of SolarMarker were  observed  using stealthy Windows Registry...