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Google today announced  plans  to implement support for passwordless logins in Android and the Chrome web browser to allow users to seamlessly and securely sign in across different devices and websites irrespective of the platform. "This will simplify sign-ins across devices, websites, and applications no matter the platform — without the need for a single password," Google  said . Apple and Microsoft are also expected to extend the support to iOS, macOS, and Windows operating systems as well as Safari and Edge browsers. The common Fast IDentity Online ( FIDO ) sign-in system does away with passwords entirely in favor of displaying a prompt asking a user to unlock the phone when signing into a website or an application. This is made possible by storing a cryptographically-secured FIDO credential called a passkey on the phone that's used to log in to the online account after unlocking the device. "Once you've done this, you won't need your phone again a...

The developers who create the software, applications and programs that drive digital business have become the lifeblood of many organizations. Most modern businesses would not be able to (profitably) function, without competitive applications and programs, or without 24-hour access to their websites and other infrastructure. And yet, these very same touchpoints are also often the gateway that hackers and other nefarious users employ in order to steal information, launch attacks and springboard to other criminal activities such as fraud and ransomware.  Successful attacks remain prevalent, even though spending on cybersecurity in most organizations is way up, and even though movements  like DevSecOps  are shifting security towards those developers who are the lifeblood of business today. Developers understand the importance of security, and overwhelmingly want to deploy secure and quality code, but software vulnerabilities continue to be exploited.  Why? For the ...

Two high-severity security vulnerabilities, which went undetected for several years, have been discovered in a  legitimate driver  that's part of Avast and AVG antivirus solutions. "These vulnerabilities allow attackers to escalate privileges enabling them to disable security products, overwrite system components, corrupt the operating system, or perform malicious operations unimpeded," SentinelOne researcher Kasif Dekel  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Tracked as CVE-2022-26522 and CVE-2022-26523, the flaws reside in a legitimate anti-rootkit kernel driver named aswArPot.sys and are said to have been introduced in Avast version 12.1, which was released in June 2016. Specifically, the shortcomings are rooted in a socket connection handler in the kernel driver that could lead to privilege escalation by running code in the kernel from a non-administrator user, potentially causing the operating system to crash and display a blue screen of death ( BSo...

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...

Salesforce-owned subsidiary Heroku on Thursday acknowledged that the theft of GitHub integration OAuth tokens further involved unauthorized access to an internal customer database. The company, in an  updated notification , revealed that a compromised token was abused to breach the database and "exfiltrate the hashed and salted passwords for customers' user accounts." As a consequence, Salesforce said it's resetting all Heroku user passwords and ensuring that potentially affected credentials are refreshed. It also emphasized that internal Heroku credentials were rotated and extra detections have been put in place. The attack campaign, which GitHub  discovered  on April 12, related to an unidentified actor leveraging stolen OAuth user tokens issued to two third-party OAuth integrators, Heroku and Travis-CI, to download data from dozens of organizations, including NPM. The timeline of events as shared by the cloud platform is as follows - April 7, 2022  - Threa...

An ElasticSearch server instance that was left open on the Internet without a password contained sensitive financial information about loans from Indian and African financial services. The leak, which was discovered by researchers from information security company UpGuard, amounted to 5.8GB and consisted of a total of 1,686,363 records. "Those records included personal information like name, loan amount, date of birth, account number, and more," UpGuard  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "A total of 48,043 unique email addresses were in the collection, some of which were for the product administrators, corporate clients, and collection agents assigned to each case." The exposed instance, used as data storage for a  debt collection platform  called ENCollect, was detected on February 16, 2022. The leaky server has since been rendered non-accessible to the public as of February 28 following intervention from the Indian Computer Emergency Response Tea...

Cisco Systems on Wednesday shipped security patches to contain three flaws impacting its Enterprise NFV Infrastructure Software ( NFVIS ) that could permit an attacker to fully compromise and take control over the hosts. Tracked as CVE-2022-20777, CVE-2022-20779, and CVE-2022-20780, the vulnerabilities "could allow an attacker to escape from the guest virtual machine (VM) to the host machine, inject commands that execute at the root level, or leak system data from the host to the VM," the company  said . Credited for discovering and reporting the issues are Cyrille Chatras, Pierre Denouel, and Loïc Restoux of Orange Group. Updates have been released in version 4.7.1. The networking equipment company said the flaws affect Cisco Enterprise NFVIS in the default configuration. Details of the three bugs are as follows - CVE-2022-20777  (CVSS score: 9.9) - An issue with insufficient guest restrictions that allows an authenticated, remote attacker to escape from the guest VM ...

Cloud security and application delivery network ( ADN ) provider F5 on Wednesday released patches to contain 43 bugs spanning its products. Of the  43 issues addressed , one is rated Critical, 17 are rated High, 24 are rated Medium, and one is rated low in severity. Chief among the flaws is  CVE-2022-1388 , which carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10 and stems from a lack of authentication check, potentially allowing an attacker to take control of an affected system. "This vulnerability may allow an unauthenticated attacker with network access to the BIG-IP system through the management port and/or self IP addresses to execute arbitrary system commands, create or delete files, or disable services," F5 said in an advisory. "There is no data plane exposure; this is a control plane issue only." The security vulnerability, which the company said was discovered internally, affects BIG-IP products with the following versions - 16.1.0 - 16.1.2 15.1.0 ...

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday announced that it will expand and rebrand its Cyber Unit to fight against cyber-related threats and protect investors in cryptocurrency markets. To that end, the SEC is renaming the Cyber Unit within the  Division of Enforcement  to Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit and plans to infuse 20 additional positions with the goal of investigating wrongdoing in the crypto markets. The goal, per the agency, is to tackle cryptocurrency fraud and crackdown on  malicious actors  attempting to profit from crypto marketplaces. The Cyber Unit was  instituted  in September 2017 with a focus on addressing cyber-based threats and protecting retail investors. But given the dramatic evolution of the digital assets markets in recent years, the new unit is expected to focus on securities law violations pertaining to - Crypto asset offerings Crypto asset exchanges Crypto asset lending and staking products Decentral...

An elusive and sophisticated cyberespionage campaign orchestrated by the China-backed Winnti group has managed to fly under the radar since at least 2019. Dubbed " Operation CuckooBees " by Israeli cybersecurity company Cybereason, the massive intellectual property theft operation enabled the threat actor to exfiltrate hundreds of gigabytes of information. Targets included technology and manufacturing companies primarily located in East Asia, Western Europe, and North America. "The attackers targeted intellectual property developed by the victims, including sensitive documents, blueprints, diagrams, formulas, and manufacturing-related proprietary data," the researchers  said . "In addition, the attackers collected information that could be used for future cyberattacks, such as details about the target company's business units, network architecture, user accounts and credentials, employee emails, and customer data." Winnti, also tracked by other ...

A pre-authenticated remote code execution vulnerability has been disclosed in dotCMS, an open-source content management system written in Java and " used by over 10,000 clients in over 70 countries around the globe, from Fortune 500 brands and mid-sized businesses." The critical flaw, tracked as CVE-2022-26352 , stems from a directory traversal attack when performing file uploads, enabling an adversary to execute arbitrary commands on the underlying system. "An attacker can upload arbitrary files to the system," Shubham Shah of Assetnote  said  in a report. "By uploading a JSP file to the tomcat's root directory, it is possible to achieve code execution, leading to command execution." In other words, the arbitrary file upload flaw can be abused to replace already existing files in the system with a web shell, which can then be used to gain persistent remote access. Although the exploit made it possible to write to arbitrary JavaScript files bei...

A  growing number of threat actors  are using the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war as a lure in various phishing and malware campaigns, even as critical infrastructure entities continue to be heavily targeted. "Government-backed actors from China, Iran, North Korea and Russia, as well as various unattributed groups, have used various Ukraine war-related themes in an effort to get targets to open malicious emails or click malicious links," Google Threat Analysis Group's (TAG) Billy Leonard  said  in a report. "Financially motivated and criminal actors are also using current events as a means for targeting users," Leonard added. One notable threat actor is Curious Gorge, which TAG has attributed to China People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force (PLA SSF) and has been observed striking government, military, logistics and manufacturing organizations in Ukraine, Russia and Central Asia. Attacks aimed at Russia have singled out several governmental entiti...

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed as many as five severe security flaws in the implementation of TLS protocol in several models of Aruba and Avaya network switches that could be abused to gain remote access to enterprise networks and steal valuable information. The findings follow the March disclosure of  TLStorm , a set of three critical flaws in APC Smart-UPS devices that could permit an attacker to take over control and, worse, physically damage the appliances. IoT security firm Armis, which uncovered the shortcomings, noted that the design flaws can be traced back to a common source: a misuse of  NanoSSL , a standards-based SSL developer suite from Mocana, a DigiCert subsidiary. The new set of flaws, dubbed  TLStorm 2.0 , renders Aruba and Avaya network switches vulnerable to remote code execution vulnerabilities, enabling an adversary to commandeer the devices, move laterally across the network, and exfiltrate sensitive data. Affected devices include Avay...