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Every company has some level of tech debt. Unless you're a brand new start-up, you most likely have a patchwork of solutions that have been implemented throughout the years, often under various leadership teams with different priorities and goals. As those technologies age, they can leave your organization vulnerable to cyber threats. While replacing legacy technologies can be costly, those costs may pale in comparison to a breach – both in terms of immediate financial impact and reputational damage.  Here are three ways you can communicate risk to your leadership team as you work to replace legacy infrastructure. 1: Make the Risk Real Leadership teams are driven by quantifiable business implications. The best way to get support for updating or replacing legacy technology is to make the risk to the business real - and measurable - in a language they understand. One way to do this is to look at the list of critical vulnerabilities that you've identified, then evaluate the impa...

A nation-state activity group originating from China has been linked to cyber attacks on dozens of organizations in Taiwan as part of a suspected espionage campaign. The Microsoft Threat Intelligence team is tracking the activity under the name  Flax Typhoon , which is also known as Ethereal Panda. "Flax Typhoon gains and maintains long-term access to Taiwanese organizations' networks with minimal use of malware, relying on tools built into the operating system, along with some normally benign software to quietly remain in these networks," the company  said . It further said it hasn't observed the group weaponize the access to conduct data-collection and exfiltration. A majority of the targets include government agencies, educational institutions, critical manufacturing, and information technology organizations in Taiwan. A smaller number of victims have also been detected in Southeast Asia, North America, and Africa. The group is suspected to have been active si...

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is warning that Barracuda Networks Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliances patched against a recently disclosed critical flaw continue to be at risk of potential compromise from suspected Chinese hacking groups. It also  deemed  the fixes as "ineffective" and that it "continues to observe active intrusions and considers all affected Barracuda ESG appliances to be compromised and vulnerable to this exploit." Tracked as  CVE-2023-2868  (CVSS score: 9.8), the zero-day bug is said to have been weaponized as early as October 2022, more than seven months before the security hole was plugged. Google-owned Mandiant is tracking the China-nexus activity cluster under the name  UNC4841 . The remote command injection vulnerability, impacting versions 5.1.3.001 through 9.2.0.006, allows for unauthorized execution of system commands with administrator privileges on the ESG product. In the attacks observed so far, a successf...

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as Lazarus Group has been observed exploiting a now-patched critical security flaw impacting Zoho ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus to distribute a remote access trojan called such as  QuiteRAT . Targets include internet backbone infrastructure and healthcare entities in Europe and the U.S., cybersecurity company Cisco Talos said in a  two-part   analysis  published today. What's more, a closer examination of the adversary's recycled attack infrastructure used in its cyber assaults on enterprises has led to the discovery of a new threat dubbed  CollectionRAT . The fact that the Lazarus Group continues to rely on the same tradecraft despite those components being well-documented over the years underscores the threat actor's confidence in their operations, Talos pointed out. QuiteRAT is said to be a successor to  MagicRAT , itself a follow-up to TigerRAT, while CollectionRAT appears to share overlaps with  Early...

A new financially motivated operation is leveraging a malicious Telegram bot to help threat actors scam their victims. Dubbed  Telekopye , a portmanteau of Telegram and kopye (meaning "spear" in Russian), the toolkit functions as an  automated means  to create a phishing web page from a premade template and send the URL to potential victims, codenamed Mammoths by the criminals. "This toolkit is implemented as a Telegram bot that, when activated, provides several easy-to-navigate menus in the form of clickable buttons that can accommodate many scammers at once," ESET researcher Radek Jizba  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The exact origins of the threat actors, dubbed Neanderthals, are unclear, but evidence points to Russia as the country of origin of the toolkit's authors and users, owing to the use of Russian SMS templates and the fact that a majority of the targeted online marketplaces are popular in the country. Multiple versions of Teleko...

Public Wi-Fi, which has long since become the norm, poses threats to not only individual users but also businesses. With the rise of remote work, people can now work from virtually anywhere: a cafe close to home, a hotel in a different city, or even while waiting for a plane at the airport. Next, let's explore the risks of connecting to public Wi-Fi, both for you personally and for businesses. According to the  Forbes Advisor  the majority of people (56%) connect to public Wi-Fi networks that don't require a password. This convenience comes at a price, and many are unaware that attackers can steal card details, passwords, and other sensitive information. Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) Attacks:  This is one of the most common threats on public Wi-Fi. In an MITM attack, the hacker secretly intercepts and possibly alters the communication between two parties. The user believes they are directly communicating with a website, email server, or another user, but the hacker is rela...

The SmokeLoader malware is being used to deliver a new Wi-Fi scanning malware strain called  Whiffy Recon  on compromised Windows machines. "The new malware strain has only one operation. Every 60 seconds it triangulates the infected systems' positions by scanning nearby Wi-Fi access points as a data point for Google's geolocation API," Secureworks Counter Threat Unit (CTU)  said  in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "The location returned by Google's  Geolocation API  is then sent back to the adversary." SmokeLoader , as the name implies, is a loader malware whose sole purpose is to drop additional payloads onto a host. Since 2014, the malware has been  offered for sale  to Russian-based threat actors. It's traditionally distributed via phishing emails. Whiffy Recon works by checking for the WLAN AutoConfig service (WLANSVC) on the infected system and terminating itself if the service name doesn't exist. It's worth noting that th...

A recently patched security flaw in the popular WinRAR archiving software has been exploited as a zero-day since April 2023, new findings from Group-IB reveal. The vulnerability, cataloged as  CVE-2023-38831 , allows threat actors to spoof file extensions, thereby making it possible to launch malicious scripts contained within an archive that masquerades as seemingly innocuous image or text files. It was addressed in  version 6.23  released on August 2, 2023, alongside CVE-2023-40477. In attacks discovered by the Singapore-based firm in July 2023, specially crafted ZIP or RAR archive files distributed via trading-related forums such as Forex Station have been used to deliver a variety of malware families such as DarkMe,  GuLoader , and  Remcos RAT . "After infecting devices, the cybercriminals withdraw money from broker accounts," Group-IB malware analyst Andrey Polovinkin  said , adding as many as 130 traders' devices have been compromised as part of ...

Thousands of  Openfire XMPP servers  are unpatched against a recently disclosed high-severity flaw and are susceptible to a new exploit, according to a  new report  from VulnCheck. Tracked as  CVE-2023-32315  (CVSS score: 7.5), the vulnerability relates to a path traversal vulnerability in Openfire's administrative console that could permit an unauthenticated attacker to access otherwise restricted pages reserved for privileged users. It affects all versions of the software released since April 2015, starting with version 3.10.0. It was remediated by its developer, Ignite Realtime, earlier this May with the release of versions 4.6.8, 4.7.5, and 4.8.0. "Path traversal protections were already in place to protect against exactly this kind of attack, but didn't defend against certain non-standard URL encoding for UTF-16 characters that were not supported by the embedded web server that was in use at the time," the maintainers  said  in a detailed...

The U.S. Justice Department (DoJ) on Wednesday  unsealed an indictment  against two founders of the now-sanctioned Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixer service, charging them with laundering more than $1 billion in criminal proceeds. Both the individuals, Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, have been charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to commit sanctions violations, and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business. Storm, 34, is said to have been arrested in the U.S. state of Washington. Semenov, 35, remains at large in Dubai. They are alleged to have "made millions of dollars in profits" from promoting and operating the service. Tornado Cash is estimated to have processed upwards of $7 billion worth of crypto assets over a period of three years. In a related move, the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned  Semenov and  eight cryptocurrency addresses  connected to him, days after ...

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Tuesday warned that threat actors affiliated with North Korea may attempt to cash out stolen cryptocurrency worth more than $40 million. The law enforcement agency  attributed  the blockchain activity to an adversary the U.S. government tracks as TraderTraitor, which is also known by the name Jade Sleet. An investigation undertaken by the FBI found that the group moved approximately 1,580 bitcoin from several cryptocurrency heists over the past 24 hours and are currently said to be holding those funds in six different wallets. North Korea is known to blur the lines among cyber warfare, espionage, and financial crime.  TraderTraitor , in particular, has been linked to a string of attacks targeting blockchain and cryptocurrency exchanges with the goal of plundering digital assets to generate illicit revenue for the sanctions-hit nation. This includes the $60 million theft of virtual currency from Alphapo on June 22, 2...

Meta has once again reaffirmed its plans to roll out support for end-to-end encryption ( E2EE ) by default for one-to-one friends and family chats on Messenger by the end of the year. As part of that effort, the social media giant said it's upgrading "millions more people's chats" effective August 22, 2023, exactly seven months after it  started gradually expanding the feature  to more users in January 2023. The changes are part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's "privacy-focused vision for social networking" that was announced in 2019, although it has since encountered significant technical challenges, causing it to  delay its plans  by a year. "Like many messaging services, Messenger and Instagram DMs were originally designed to function via servers," Timothy Buck, product manager for Messenger,  said . "Meta's servers act as the gateway between the message sender and receiver, what we call the clients." However, the addition of an ...