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The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has warned of critical security vulnerabilities in Emergency Alert System (EAS) encoder/decoder devices. If left unpatched, the issues could allow an adversary to issue fraudulent emergency alerts over TV, radio, and cable networks. The August 1 advisory comes courtesy of DHS' Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). CYBIR security researcher Ken Pyle has been credited with discovering the shortcoming. EAS is a U.S. national  public warning system  that enables state authorities to disseminate information within 10 minutes during an emergency. Such alerts can interrupt radio and television to broadcast emergency alert information. Details of the flaw have been kept under wraps to prevent active exploitation by malicious actors, although it's expected to be publicized as a proof-of-concept at the DEF CON conference to be held in Las Vegas next week. "In short, the vulnerability is public knowledge and will be demons...

Conflicting business requirements is a common problem – and you find it in every corner of an organization, including in information technology. Resolving these conflicts is a must, but it isn't always easy – though sometimes there is a novel solution that helps. In IT management there is a constant struggle between security and operations teams. Yes, both teams ultimately want to have secure systems that are harder to breach. However, security can come at the expense of availability – and vice versa. In this article, we'll look at the availability vs. security conflict, and a solution that helps to resolve that conflict. Ops team focus on availability… security teams lock down Operations teams will always have stability, and therefore availability, as a top priority. Yes, ops teams will make security a priority too but only as far as it touches on either stability or availability, never as an absolute goal. It plays out in the "five nines" uptime goal that sets an incredibly high...

A nascent service called Dark Utilities has already attracted 3,000 users for its ability to provide command-and-control (C2) services with the goal of commandeering compromised systems. "It is marketed as a means to enable remote access, command execution, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and cryptocurrency mining operations on infected systems," Cisco Talos  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Dark Utilities, which emerged in early 2022, is advertised as a "C2-as-a-Service" (C2aaS), offering access to infrastructure hosted on the clearnet as well as the TOR network and associated payloads with support for Windows, Linux, and Python-based implementations for a mere €9.99. Authenticated users on the platform are presented with a dashboard that makes it possible to generate new payloads tailored to a specific operating system that can then be deployed and executed on victim hosts. Additionally, users are provided an administrative panel ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added a recently disclosed high-severity vulnerability in the Zimbra email suite to its  Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog , citing  evidence of active exploitation . The issue in question is  CVE-2022-27924  (CVSS score: 7.5), a command injection flaw in the platform that could lead to the execution of arbitrary Memcached commands and theft of sensitive information. "Zimbra Collaboration (ZCS) allows an attacker to inject memcached commands into a targeted instance which causes an overwrite of arbitrary cached entries," CISA said. Specifically, the bug relates to a case of insufficient validation of user input that, if successfully exploited, could enable attackers to steal cleartext credentials from users of targeted Zimbra instances. The issue was  disclosed  by SonarSource in June, with  patches  released by Zimbra on May 10, 2022, in versions 8.8.15 P31....

Imagine this: a company-wide lockout to the company CRM, like Salesforce, because the organization's external admin attempts to disable MFA for themselves. They don't think to consult with the security team and don't consider the security implications, only the ease which they need for their team to use their login.  This CRM, however, defines MFA as a top-tier security setting; for example, Salesforce has a "High Assurance Login Value" configuration and immediately locks out all users as a safety precaution. The entire organization hits a standstill and is frustrated and confused.  Deeply concerning, this is not a one-off event, admins for business-critical SaaS apps often sit outside the security department and have profound control. Untrained and not focused on security measures, these admins are working towards their departmental KPIs. For instance, Hubspot is usually owned by the marketing department, likewise, Salesforce is often owned by the business dep...

As many as 29 different router models from DrayTek have been identified as affected by a new critical, unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability that, if successfully exploited, could lead to full compromise of the devices and unauthorized access to the broader network. "The attack can be performed without user interaction if the management interface of the device has been configured to be internet facing," Trellix researcher Philippe Laulheret  said . "A one-click attack can also be performed from within the LAN in the default device configuration." Filed under CVE-2022-32548, the vulnerability has received the maximum severity rating of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system, owing to its ability to completely allow an adversary to seize control of the routers. At its core, the shortcoming is the result of a buffer overflow flaw in the web management interface ("/cgi-bin/wlogin.cgi"), which can be weaponized by a malicious actor by supplying spec...

An unknown threat actor has been targeting Russian entities with a newly discovered remote access trojan called Woody RAT for at least a year as part of a spear-phishing campaign. The advanced custom backdoor is said to be delivered via either of two methods: archive files or Microsoft Office documents leveraging the now-patched "Follina" support diagnostic tool vulnerability ( CVE-2022-30190 ) in Windows. Like other implants engineered for espionage-oriented operations, Woody RAT sports a wide range of features that enables the threat actor to remotely commandeer and steal sensitive information from the infected systems. "The earliest versions of this RAT were typically archived into a ZIP file pretending to be a document specific to a Russian group," Malwarebytes researchers Ankur Saini and Hossein Jazi  said  in a Wednesday report. "When the Follina vulnerability became known to the world, the threat actor switched to it to distribute the payload....

A threat actor is said to have "highly likely" exploited a security flaw in an outdated Atlassian Confluence server to deploy a never-before-seen backdoor against an unnamed organization in the research and technical services sector. The attack, which transpired over a seven-day-period during the end of May, has been attributed to a threat activity cluster tracked by cybersecurity firm Deepwatch as  TAC-040 . "The evidence indicates that the threat actor executed malicious commands with a parent process of tomcat9.exe in Atlassian's Confluence directory," the company  said . "After the initial compromise, the threat actor ran various commands to enumerate the local system, network, and Active Directory environment." The Atlassian vulnerability suspected to have been exploited is  CVE-2022-26134 , an Object-Graph Navigation Language (OGNL) injection flaw that paves the way for arbitrary code execution on a Confluence Server or Data Center instance....

Phishing incidents are on the rise. A report from IBM shows that phishing was the most popular attack vector in 2021, resulting in one in five employees falling victim to phishing hacking techniques. The Need for Security Awareness Training  Although technical solutions protect against phishing threats, no solution is 100% effective . Consequently, companies have no choice but to involve their employees in the fight against hackers. This is where security awareness training comes into play.  Security awareness training gives companies the confidence that their employees will execute the right response when they discover a phishing message in their inbox. As the saying goes, "knowledge is power," but the effectiveness of knowledge depends heavily on how it is delivered. When it comes to phishing attacks, simulations are among the most effective forms of training because the events in training simulations directly mimic how an employee would react in the event of an actu...

Cisco on Wednesday rolled out patches to address eight security vulnerabilities , three of which could be weaponized by an unauthenticated attacker to gain remote code execution (RCE) or cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition on affected devices. The most critical of the flaws impact Cisco Small Business RV160, RV260, RV340, and RV345 Series routers. Tracked as CVE-2022-20842 (CVSS score: 9.8), the weakness stems from an insufficient validation of user-supplied input to the web-based management interface of the appliances. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted HTTP input to an affected device," Cisco said in an advisory. "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code as the root user on the underlying operating system or cause the device to reload, resulting in a DoS condition." A second shortcoming relates to a command injection vulnerability residing in the routers' web filter database update featur...

A late-stage candidate encryption algorithm that was meant to withstand decryption by powerful quantum computers in the future has been trivially cracked by using a computer running Intel Xeon CPU in an hour's time. The algorithm in question is SIKE — short for Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation — which made it to the  fourth round  of the Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standardization process initiated by the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). "Ran on a single core, the appended  Magma   code  breaks the Microsoft  SIKE challenges  $IKEp182 and $IKEp217 in about 4 minutes and 6 minutes, respectively," KU Leuven researchers Wouter Castryck and Thomas Decru  said  in a new paper. "A run on the SIKEp434 parameters, previously believed to meet NIST's quantum security level 1, took about 62 minutes, again on a single core." The code was executed on an Intel  Xeon CPU E5-2630v2 ...

Threat actors are increasingly mimicking legitimate applications like Skype, Adobe Reader, and VLC Player as a means to abuse trust relationships and increase the likelihood of a successful social engineering attack. Other most impersonated legitimate apps by icon include 7-Zip, TeamViewer, CCleaner, Microsoft Edge, Steam, Zoom, and WhatsApp, an analysis from VirusTotal has revealed. "One of the simplest social engineering tricks we've seen involves making a malware sample seem a legitimate program," VirusTotal  said  in a Tuesday report. "The icon of these programs is a critical feature used to convince victims that these programs are legitimate." It's no surprise that threat actors resort to a variety of approaches to compromise endpoints by tricking unwitting users into downloading and running seemingly innocuous executables. This, in turn, is primarily achieved by taking advantage of genuine domains in a bid to get around IP-based firewall defenses...