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The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has added Pacific Network Corp, along with its subsidiary ComNet (USA) LLC, and China Unicom (Americas) Operations Limited, to the list of communications equipment and services that have been deemed a threat to national security. The agency  said  the companies are subject to the Chinese government's exploitation, influence, and control, and could be forced to comply with requests for intercepting and misrouting communications, without the ability to challenge such requests. The Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau further noted that equipment and services from ComNet and China Unicom could present an opportunity for the Chinese government to carry out espionage operations and gather intelligence against the U.S. Alternatively, they could also provide the Chinese government with a strategic capability to "target, collect, alter, block, and reroute network traffic." China Unicom also earned a place on the list fo...

Cybersecurity company Imperva has disclosed that it mitigated a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack with a total of over 25.3 billion requests on June 27, 2022. The "strong attack," which targeted an unnamed Chinese telecommunications company, is said to have lasted for four hours and peaked at 3.9 million requests per second (RPS). "Attackers used HTTP/2 multiplexing, or combining multiple packets into one, to send multiple requests at once over individual connections," Imperva  said  in a report published on September 19. The attack was launched from a botnet that comprised nearly 170,000 different IP addresses spanning routers, security cameras, and compromised servers located in more than 180 countries, primarily the U.S., Indonesia, and Brazil. The disclosure also comes as web infrastructure provider Akamai said it fielded a new DDoS assault aimed at a customer based in Eastern Europe on September 12, with attack traffic spiking at 704.8 million p...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday released an industrial control systems (ICS) advisory warning of seven security flaws in Dataprobe's iBoot-PDU power distribution unit product, mostly used in industrial environments and data centers. "Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could lead to unauthenticated remote code execution on the Dataprobe iBoot-PDU device," the agency  said  in a notice. Credited with disclosing the flaws is industrial cybersecurity firm Claroty, which  said  the weaknesses could be remotely triggered "either through a direct web connection to the device or via the cloud." iBoot-PDU  is a power distribution unit (PDU) that provides users with real-time monitoring capabilities and sophisticated alerting mechanisms via a web interface so as to control the power supply to devices and other equipment in an OT environment. The vulnerabilities assume new significance when taking into c...

Almost every vendor, from email gateway companies to developers of threat intelligence platforms, is positioning themselves as an XDR player. But unfortunately, the noise around XDR makes it harder for buyers to find solutions that might be right for them or, more importantly, avoid ones that don't meet their needs.  Stellar Cyber delivers an Open XDR solution that allows organizations to use whatever security tools they desire in their security stack, feeding alerts and logs into Stellar Cyber. Stellar Cyber's "Open" approach means their platform can work with any product. As a result, a security team can make changes without wondering if the Stellar Cyber Open XDR platform will still work.  Stellar Cyber address the needs of lean enterprise security teams by providing capabilities typically found in NG-SIEM, NDR, and SOAR products in their Open XDR platform, managed by a single license. This consolidation enables customers to eliminate security stack complexity. ...

A threat cluster linked to the Russian nation-state actor tracked as Sandworm has continued its targeting of Ukraine with commodity malware by masquerading as telecom providers, new findings show. Recorded Future said it discovered new infrastructure belonging to UAC-0113 that mimics operators like Datagroup and EuroTransTelecom to deliver payloads such as  Colibri loader  and  Warzone RAT . The attacks are said to be an expansion of the  same campaign  that previously distributed  DCRat  (or DarkCrystal RAT) using phishing emails with legal aid-themed lures against providers of telecommunications in Ukraine. Sandworm is a  destructive Russian threat group  that's best known for carrying out attacks such as the 2015 and 2016 targeting of Ukrainian electrical grid and 2017's NotPetya attacks. It's confirmed to be Unit 74455 of Russia's GRU military intelligence agency. The adversarial collective, also known as Voodoo Bear, sought to dama...

Uber on Monday disclosed more details related to the  security incident  that happened last week, pinning the attack on a threat actor it believes is affiliated to the notorious LAPSUS$ hacking group. "This group typically uses similar techniques to target technology companies, and in 2022 alone has breached Microsoft, Cisco, Samsung, NVIDIA, and Okta, among others," the San Francisco-based company  said  in an update. The financially-motivated extortionist gang was dealt a huge blow in March 2022 when the City of London Police  moved to arrest  seven individuals aged between 16 and 21 for their alleged connections to the group. Two of those juvenile defendants are facing fraud charges. The hacker behind the Uber breach, an 18-year-old teenager who goes by the moniker Tea Pot, has also claimed responsibility for breaking into video game maker  Rockstar Games  over the weekend. Uber said it's working with "several leading digital forensics fi...

American video game publisher Rockstar Games on Monday revealed it was a victim of a "network intrusion" that allowed an unauthorized party to illegally download early footage for the Grand Theft Auto VI. "At this time, we do not anticipate any disruption to our live game services nor any long-term effect on the development of our ongoing projects," the company  said  in a notice shared on its social media handles. The company said that the third-party accessed "confidential information from our systems," although it's not immediately clear if it involved any other data beyond the game footage. The trove of data, contains some 90 videos of clips from the game, leaked over the weekend on  GTAForums  by a user with an alias "teapotuberhacker," hinting that the party is also the same person responsible for the  recent Uber breach . The Uber hacker, who is going by the name  Tea Pot , is believed to be an 18-year-old teenager. No other de...

The Emotet malware is now being leveraged by ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) groups, including Quantum and BlackCat, after  Conti's official retirement  from the threat landscape this year. Emotet  started off as a banking trojan in 2014, but updates added to it over time have transformed the malware into a highly potent threat that's capable of downloading other payloads onto the victim's machine, which would allow the attacker to control it remotely. Although the infrastructure associated with the invasive malware loader was taken down as part of a law enforcement effort in January 2021, the Conti ransomware cartel is said to have  played an instrumental role  in its comeback late last year. "From November 2021 to Conti's dissolution in June 2022, Emotet was an exclusive Conti ransomware tool, however, the Emotet infection chain is currently attributed to Quantum and BlackCat," AdvIntel  said  in an advisory published last week. Typical attack s...

Organizations and security teams work to protect themselves from any vulnerability, and often don't realize that risk is also brought on by configurations in their SaaS apps that have not been hardened. The newly published GIFShell attack method, which occurs through Microsoft Teams, is a perfect example of how threat actors can exploit legitimate features and configurations that haven't been correctly set. This article takes a look at what the method entails and the steps needed to combat it.  The GifShell Attack Method Discovered by Bobby Rauch , the GIFShell attack technique enables bad actors to exploit several Microsoft Teams features to act as a C&C for malware, and exfiltrate data using GIFs without being detected by EDR and other network monitoring tools. This attack method requires a device or user that is already compromised.  Learn how an SSPM can assess, monitor and remediate SaaS misconfigurations and Device-to-SaaS user risk . The main component of this ...

A decryptor for the LockerGoga ransomware has been  made available  by Romanian cybersecurity firm Bitdefender in collaboration with Europol, the No More Ransom project, and Zurich law enforcement authorities. Identified in January 2019, LockerGoga drew headlines for its attacks against the Norwegian aluminum giant  Norsk Hydro . It's said to have infected more than 1,800 victims in 71 countries, causing an estimated $104 million in damages. The ransomware operation received a significant blow in October 2021 when 12 people in connection with the group, alongside MegaCortex and Dharma, were apprehended as part of an  international law enforcement effort . The arrests, which took place in Ukraine and Switzerland, also saw the seizure of cash worth $52,000, five luxury vehicles, and a number of electronic devices. One of the accused is currently in pretrial detention in Zurich. The Zurich Cantonal Police further said it spent the past months examining the data s...

Microsoft said it's tracking an ongoing large-scale click fraud campaign targeting gamers by means of stealthily deployed browser extensions on compromised systems. "[The] attackers monetize clicks generated by a browser node-webkit or malicious browser extension secretly installed on devices," Microsoft Security Intelligence said in a sequence of tweets over the weekend. The tech giant's cybersecurity division is tracking the developing threat cluster under the name DEV-0796. Attack chains mounted by the adversary commence with an ISO file that's downloaded onto a victim's machine upon clicking on a malicious ad or comments on YouTube. The ISO file, when opened, is designed to install a browser node-webkit (aka  NW.js ) or rogue browser extension. It's worth noting that the  ISO file  masquerades as hacks and cheats for the Krunker first-person shooter game. Cheats are programs that help gamers gain an added advantage beyond the available capabili...

Uber, in an update, said there is "no evidence" that users' private information was compromised in a breach of its internal computer systems that was discovered late Thursday. "We have no evidence that the incident involved access to sensitive user data (like trip history)," the company  said . "All of our services including Uber, Uber Eats, Uber Freight, and the Uber Driver app are operational." The ride-hailing company also said it's brought back online all the internal software tools it took down previously as a precaution, reiterating it's notified law enforcement of the matter. It's not immediately clear if the incident resulted in the theft of any other information or how long the intruder was inside Uber's network. Uber has not provided more specifics of how the incident played out beyond saying its investigation and response efforts are ongoing. But independent security researcher Bill Demirkapi characterized the company...