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The npm package registry has emerged as the target of yet another highly targeted attack campaign that aims to entice developers into downloading malevolent modules. Software supply chain security firm Phylum told The Hacker News the activity exhibits similar behaviors to that of a previous attack wave  uncovered in June , which has since been  linked to North Korean threat actors . As many as nine packages have been identified as uploaded to npm between August 9 and 12, 2023. This includes: ws-paso-jssdk, pingan-vue-floating, srm-front-util, cloud-room-video, progress-player, ynf-core-loader, ynf-core-renderer, ynf-dx-scripts, and ynf-dx-webpack-plugins. "Due to the sophisticated nature of the attack and the small number of affected packages, we suspect this is another highly targeted attack, likely with a social engineering aspect involved in order to get targets to install these packages," the company  said . The attack chain commences with the package.json file ...

A new remote access trojan (RAT) called  QwixxRAT  is being advertised for sale by its threat actor through Telegram and Discord platforms. "Once installed on the victim's Windows platform machines, the RAT stealthily collects sensitive data, which is then sent to the attacker's Telegram bot, providing them with unauthorized access to the victim's sensitive information," Uptycs  said  in a new report published today. The cybersecurity company, which discovered the malware earlier this month, said it's "meticulously designed" to harvest web browser histories, bookmarks, cookies, credit card information, keystrokes, screenshots, files matching certain extensions, and data from apps like Steam and Telegram. The tool is offered for 150 rubles for weekly access and 500 rubles for a lifetime license. It also comes in a limited free version. A C#-based binary, QwixxRAT comes with various anti-analysis features to remain covert and evade detection. Thi...

E-commerce sites using Adobe's Magento 2 software are the target of an ongoing campaign that has been active since at least January 2023. The attacks, dubbed  Xurum  by Akamai, leverage a now-patched critical security flaw ( CVE-2022-24086 , CVSS score: 9.8) in Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source that, if successfully exploited, could lead to arbitrary code execution. "The attacker seems to be interested in payment stats from the orders in the victim's Magento store placed in the past 10 days," Akamai researchers  said  in an analysis published last week, attributing the campaign to actors of Russian origin. Some of the websites have also been observed to be infected with simple JavaScript-based skimmers that's designed to collect credit card information and transmit it to a remote server. The exact scale of the campaign remains unclear. In the attack chains observed by the company, CVE-2022-24086 is weaponized for initial access, subsequently exploiting ...

Why SaaS Security Is a Challenge In today's digital landscape, organizations are increasingly relying on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications to drive their operations. However, this widespread adoption has also opened the doors to new security risks and vulnerabilities. The SaaS security attack surface continues to widen. It started with managing misconfigurations and now requires a holistic approach to handling the entire SaaS ecosystem. This includes the continuous monitoring and management of user access, roles and permissions, 3rd party apps installed by users, risks deriving from SaaS user devices and Identity Threat Detection & Response (ITDR). There are a variety of reasons that SaaS security is so complex today. Firstly, there are a diverse range of applications, each having its own UI and terminology. And those environments are dynamic, from SaaS vendors understanding the importance of security and continually enhancing their applications with modern security...

Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) has warned of cyber attacks targeting Iranian persons and organizations in the country since the end of 2022. "The cyber attacks were mainly directed against dissident organizations and individuals – such as lawyers, journalists, or human rights activists – inside and outside Iran," the agency  said  in an advisory. The intrusions have been attributed to a threat actor called  Charming Kitten , which is also tracked under the names APT35, Mint Sandstorm, TA453, and Yellow Garuda. While Iranian nation-state actors lag behind their Russian and Chinese counterparts in sophistication, they have demonstrated a continued advancement of tools and techniques, adding an arsenal of custom malware to facilitate information gathering and rapidly exploiting n-day security flaws to obtain initial access. Charming Kitten, in particular, has a long,  storied history  of leveraging elaborate social engin...

Users in Latin America (LATAM) are the target of a financial malware called  JanelaRAT  that's capable of capturing sensitive information from compromised Microsoft Windows systems. "JanelaRAT mainly targets financial and cryptocurrency data from LATAM bank and financial institutions," Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers Gaetano Pellegrino and Sudeep Singh  said , adding it "abuses DLL side-loading techniques from legitimate sources (like VMWare and Microsoft) to evade endpoint detection." The exact starting point of the infection chain is unclear, but the cybersecurity company, which discovered the campaign in June 2023, said the unknown vector is used to deliver a ZIP archive file containing a Visual Basic Script. The VBScript is engineered to fetch a second ZIP archive from the attackers' server as well as drop a batch file used to establish persistence of the malware. The ZIP archive is packed with two components, the JanelaRAT payload and a legitimate ...

The Indian President Droupadi Murmu on Friday granted assent to the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill ( DPDPB ) after it was unanimously passed by both houses of the parliament last week, marking a significant step towards securing people's information. "The Bill provides for the processing of digital personal data in a manner that recognizes both the rights of the individuals to protect their personal data and the need to process such personal data for lawful purposes and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto," the Indian government  said . The  long-awaited data protection law  comes months after the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) released a  draft version  of the bill in November 2022. It has been in the making for over five years, with a first draft released in July 2018. A year before, India's Supreme Court  upheld  privacy as a  fundamental right . The legislative framework, which applies ...

Multiple security vulnerabilities impacting CyberPower's PowerPanel Enterprise Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) platform and Dataprobe's iBoot Power Distribution Unit (PDU) could be potentially exploited to gain unauthenticated access to these systems and inflict catastrophic damage in target environments. The nine vulnerabilities, from CVE-2023-3259 through CVE-2023-3267, carry severity scores ranging from 6.7 to 9.8, enabling threat actors to shut down entire data centers and compromise data center deployments to steal data or launch massive attacks at a massive scale. "An attacker could chain these vulnerabilities together to gain full access to these systems," Trellix security researchers Sam Quinn, Jesse Chick, and Philippe Laulheret  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Furthermore, both products are vulnerable to remote code injection that could be leveraged to create a backdoor or an entry point to the broader network of connect...

Multiple security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in AudioCodes desk phones and Zoom's Zero Touch Provisioning ( ZTP ) that could be potentially exploited by a malicious attacker to conduct remote attacks. "An external attacker who leverages the vulnerabilities discovered in AudioCodes Ltd.'s desk phones and Zoom's Zero Touch Provisioning feature can gain full remote control of the devices," SySS security researcher Moritz Abrell  said  in an analysis published Friday. The unfettered access could then be weaponized to eavesdrop on rooms or phone calls, pivot through the devices and attack corporate networks, and even build a botnet of infected devices. The research was  presented  at the Black Hat USA security conference earlier this week. The problems are rooted in Zoom's ZTP, which allows IT administrators to configure VoIP devices in a centralized manner such that it makes it easy for organizations to monitor, troubleshoot and update the devices as...

European and U.S. law enforcement agencies have announced the dismantling of a bulletproof hosting service provider called  Lolek Hosted , which cybercriminals have used to launch cyber-attacks across the globe. "Five of its administrators were arrested, and all of its servers seized, rendering LolekHosted.net no longer available," Europol  said  in a statement. "The service facilitated the distribution of information-stealing malware, and also the launching of DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks, fictitious online shops, botnet server management, and distribution of spam messages worldwide," it added. Polish authorities, who made the arrests,  said  three other detainees have been subjected to preventive measures in the form of police supervision, bail, and a ban on leaving the country. Alongside the arrests, hundreds of servers containing terabytes of data, computer equipment, and mobile phones have been confiscated. The seizure, carried out on ...

A high-severity security flaw has been disclosed in the Python URL parsing function that could be exploited to bypass domain or protocol filtering methods implemented with a blocklist, ultimately resulting in arbitrary file reads and command execution. "urlparse has a parsing problem when the entire URL starts with blank characters," the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) said in a Friday advisory. "This problem affects both the parsing of hostname and scheme, and eventually causes any blocklisting methods to fail." The flaw has been assigned the identifier  CVE-2023-24329  and carries a CVSS score of 7.5. Security researcher Yebo Cao has been credited with discovering and reporting the issue in August 2022. It has been addressed in the following versions - >= 3.12 3.11.x >= 3.11.4 3.10.x >= 3.10.12 3.9.x >= 3.9.17 3.8.x >= 3.8.17, and  3.7.x >= 3.7.17 urllib.parse  is a widely used parsing function that makes it possible to break dow...

A hitherto undocumented threat actor operating for nearly a decade and codenamed  MoustachedBouncer has been attributed to cyber espionage attacks aimed at foreign embassies in Belarus. "Since 2020, MoustachedBouncer has most likely been able to perform adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attacks at the ISP level, within Belarus, in order to compromise its targets," ESET security researcher Matthieu Faou  said , describing the group as skilled and advanced. The adversary, active since at least 2014, is assessed to be aligned with Belarusian interests, likely employing a lawful interception system such as  SORM  to conduct its AitM attacks as well as deploy disparate tools called NightClub and Disco. Both the Windows malware frameworks support additional spying plugins including a screenshotter, an audio recorder, and a file stealer. The oldest sample of NightClub dates back to November 19, 2014, when it was uploaded to VirusTotal from Ukraine. Embassy staff from fo...