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At least half of dozen GitHub accounts from fake researchers associated with a fraudulent cybersecurity company have been observed pushing malicious repositories on the code hosting service. All seven repositories, which are still available as of writing, claim to be a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for purported zero-day flaws in Discord, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Exchange Server. VulnCheck, which discovered the activity,  said , "the individuals creating these repositories have put significant effort into making them look legitimate by creating a network of accounts and Twitter profiles, pretending to be part of a non-existent company called High Sierra Cyber Security." The cybersecurity firm said it first came across the rogue repositories in early May when they were observed releasing similar PoC exploits for zero-day bugs in Signal and WhatsApp. The repositories hosting the two PoCs have since been taken down. Besides sharing some of the purported findings on Tw...

A security flaw has been uncovered in the WooCommerce Stripe Gateway WordPress plugin that could lead to the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information. The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2023-34000 , impacts versions 7.4.0 and below. It was addressed by the plugin maintainers in version 7.4.1, which shipped on May 30, 2023. WooCommerce Stripe Gateway  allows  e-commerce websites to directly accept various payment methods through Stripe's payment processing API. It boasts of over 900,000 active installations. According to Patchstack security researcher Rafie Muhammad, the plugin suffers from what's called an unauthenticated Insecure direct object references ( IDOR ) vulnerability, which allows a bad actor to bypass authorization and access resources. Specially, the problem stems from the insecure handling of order objects and a lack of adequate access control mechanism in the plugin's 'javascript_params' and 'payment_fields' functions of the plugin. ...

Microsoft has rolled out fixes for its Windows operating system and other software components to remediate major security shortcomings as part of  Patch Tuesday updates  for June 2023. Of the 73 flaws, six are rated Critical, 63 are rated Important, two are rated Moderate, and one is rated Low in severity. This also includes three issues the tech giant addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser. It's worth noting that Microsoft also closed out  26 other flaws  in Edge – all of them rooted in Chromium itself – since the release of May Patch Tuesday updates. This comprises  CVE-2023-3079 , a zero-day bug that Google disclosed as being actively exploited in the wild last week. The June 2023 updates also mark the first time in several months that doesn't feature any zero-day flaw in Microsoft products that's publicly known or under active attack at the time of release. Topping the list of fixes is  CVE-2023-29357  (CVSS score: 9.8), a privilege esc...

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...

A novel multi-stage loader called  DoubleFinger  has been observed delivering a cryptocurrency stealer dubbed GreetingGhoul in what's an advanced attack targeting users in Europe, the U.S., and Latin America. "DoubleFinger is deployed on the target machine, when the victim opens a malicious PIF attachment in an email message, ultimately executing the first of DoubleFinger's loader stages," Kaspersky researcher Sergey Lozhkin  said  in a Monday report. The starting point of the attacks is a modified version of  espexe.exe  – which refers to Microsoft Windows Economical Service Provider application – that's engineered to execute shellcode responsible for retrieving a PNG image file from the image hosting service Imgur. The image employs steganographic trickery to conceal an encrypted payload that triggers a four-stage compromise chain which eventually culminates in the execution of the GreetingGhoul stealer on the infected host. A notable aspect of Gree...

It might come as a surprise, but secrets management has become the elephant in the AppSec room. While security vulnerabilities like Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) often make headlines in the cybersecurity world, secrets management remains an overlooked issue that can have immediate and impactful consequences for corporate safety.  A recent study by GitGuardian found that 75% of IT decision-makers in the US and the UK reported at least one secret leaked from an application, with 60% causing issues for the company or employees. Shockingly, less than half of respondents (48%) were confident in their ability to protect application secrets "to a great extent." The study, named  Voice of Practitioners: The State of Secrets in AppSec  (available for free download  here ), provides a fresh perspective on managing secrets, which is often reduced to clichés that do not reflect the operational reality in engineering departments.  Despite their ubiquity in ...

"Dozens" of organizations across the world have been targeted as part of a broad business email compromise ( BEC ) campaign that involved the use of adversary-in-the-middle ( AitM ) techniques to carry out the attacks. "Following a successful phishing attempt, the threat actor gained initial access to one of the victim employee's account and executed an 'adversary-in-the-middle' attack to bypass Office 365 authentication and gain persistence access to that account," Sygnia researchers  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Once gaining persistence, the threat actor exfiltrated data from the compromised account and used his access to spread the phishing attacks against other victim's employees along with several external targeted organizations." The findings come less than a week after Microsoft  detailed  a similar combination of an AitM phishing and a BEC attack aimed at banking and financial services organizations. Sygnia t...

Believe it or not, your attack surface is expanding faster than you realize. How? APIs, of course! More formally known as application programming interfaces, API calls are growing twice as fast as HTML traffic, making APIs an ideal candidate for new security solutions aimed at protecting customer data, according to Cloudflare. According to the "Quantifying the Cost of API Insecurity" report, US businesses incurred upwards of $23 billion in losses from API-related breaches in 2022. In fact, 76% of cybersecurity professionals admitted to experiencing an API-related security incident. This is why you can't afford to ignore your API security posture , especially when you consider that APIs don't exist in a vacuum. The infrastructure components powering those critical APIs can suffer from security misconfigurations as well, leaving you open to unexpected breaches. However, this isn't something you or your AppSec teams can take on alone, both in terms of volume and ...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) has charged two Russian nationals in connection with masterminding the 2014 digital heist of the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox. According to unsealed indictments released last week, Alexey Bilyuchenko, 43, and Aleksandr Verner, 29, have been accused of conspiring to launder approximately 647,000 bitcoins stolen from September 2011 through at least May 2014 as a result of unauthorized access to a server holding crypto wallets used by Mt. Gox customers. "Starting in 2011, Bilyuchenko and Verner stole a massive amount of cryptocurrency from Mt. Gox, contributing to the exchange's ultimate insolvency," Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite, Jr.  said  in a statement. "Armed with the ill-gotten gains from Mt. Gox, Bilyuchenko allegedly went on to help set up the notorious  BTC-e virtual currency exchange , which laundered funds for cyber criminals worldwide." Bilyuchenko and Verner are also alleged to hav...

Fortinet on Monday disclosed that a  newly patched critical flaw  impacting FortiOS and FortiProxy may have been "exploited in a limited number of cases" in attacks targeting government, manufacturing, and critical infrastructure sectors. The  vulnerability , dubbed XORtigate and tracked as  CVE-2023-27997  (CVSS score: 9.2), concerns a  heap-based buffer overflow  vulnerability in FortiOS and FortiProxy SSL-VPN that could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code or commands via specifically crafted requests. LEXFO security researchers Charles Fol and Dany Bach have been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. It was addressed by Fortinet on June 9, 2023 in the following versions - FortiOS-6K7K version 7.0.12 or above FortiOS-6K7K version 6.4.13 or above FortiOS-6K7K version 6.2.15 or above FortiOS-6K7K version 6.0.17 or above FortiProxy version 7.2.4 or above FortiProxy version 7.0.10 or above FortiProxy version 2.0.13 ...

Security researchers have warned about an "easily exploitable" flaw in the Microsoft Visual Studio installer that could be abused by a malicious actor to impersonate a legitimate publisher and distribute malicious extensions. "A threat actor could impersonate a popular publisher and issue a malicious extension to compromise a targeted system," Varonis researcher Dolev Taler  said . "Malicious extensions have been used to steal sensitive information, silently access and change code, or take full control of a system." The vulnerability, which is tracked as  CVE-2023-28299  (CVSS score: 5.5), was addressed by Microsoft as part of its  Patch Tuesday updates  for April 2023, describing it as a spoofing flaw. The bug discovered by Varonis has to do with the Visual Studio user interface, which allows for spoofed publisher digital signatures. Specifically, it trivially bypasses a restriction that prevents users from entering information in the "product ...

The term " attack surface management " (ASM) went from unknown to ubiquitous in the cybersecurity space over the past few years. Gartner and Forrester have both highlighted the  importance of ASM  recently, multiple solution providers have emerged in the space, and investment and acquisition activity have seen an uptick. Many concepts come and go in cybersecurity, but attack surface management promises to have staying power. As it evolves into a critical component of threat and exposure management strategies, it's worth examining why attack surface management has grown to become a key category, and why it will continue to be a necessity for organizations worldwide. What is Attack Surface Management?  Attack surfaces are rapidly expanding. The attack surface includes any IT asset connected to the internet – applications, IoT devices, Kubernetes clusters, cloud platforms – that threat actors could infiltrate and exploit to perpetuate an attack. A company's attack s...

A fully undetectable (FUD) malware obfuscation engine named  BatCloak  is being used to deploy various malware strains since September 2022, while persistently evading antivirus detection. The samples grant "threat actors the ability to load numerous malware families and exploits with ease through highly obfuscated batch files," Trend Micro researchers  said . About 79.6% of the total 784 artifacts unearthed have no detection across all security solutions, the cybersecurity firm added, highlighting BatCloak's ability to circumvent traditional detection mechanisms. The BatCloak engine forms the crux of an off-the-shelf batch file builder tool called Jlaive, which comes with capabilities to bypass Antimalware Scan Interface ( AMSI ) as well as compress and encrypt the primary payload to achieve heightened security evasion. The open-source tool, although taken down since it was made available via GitHub and GitLab in September 2022 by a developer named ch2sh, has been ...