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As cyber threats loom around every corner and privileged accounts become prime targets, the significance of implementing a robust  Privileged Access Management (PAM)  solution can't be overstated. With organizations increasingly migrating to cloud environments, the PAM Solution Market is experiencing a transformative shift toward cloud-based offerings. One Identity PAM Essentials stands out among these as a SaaS-based PAM solution that prioritizes security, manageability, and compliance. Security-first, user-centric design   PAM Essentials boasts a user-centric and security-first design – not only prioritizing the protection of critical assets, but also ensuring a seamless user experience. By providing privileged sessions and  access controls , PAM Essentials mitigates the heightened risks associated with unauthorized users, safeguarding critical data against potential breaches. Designed for ease of use, it ensures that robust security does not come at the expense...

Google has announced support for what's called a  V8 Sandbox  in the Chrome web browser in an effort to address memory corruption issues. The sandbox, according to V8 security technical lead Samuel Groß,  aims  to prevent "memory corruption in V8 from spreading within the host process." The search behemoth has  described  V8 Sandbox as a lightweight, in-process sandbox for the JavaScript and WebAssembly engine that's designed to mitigate common V8 vulnerabilities. The idea is to limit the impact of V8 vulnerabilities by restricting the code executed by V8 to a subset of the process' virtual address space ("the sandbox") and isolating it from the rest of the process. Shortcomings affecting V8 have accounted for a significant chunk of the zero-day vulnerabilities that Google has  addressed  between  2021  and  2023 , with as many as 16 security flaws discovered over the time period. "The sandbox assumes that an attacker can arb...

Threat hunters have discovered a new malware called  Latrodectus  that has been distributed as part of email phishing campaigns since at least late November 2023. "Latrodectus is an up-and-coming downloader with various sandbox evasion functionality," researchers from Proofpoint and Team Cymru  said  in a joint analysis published last week, adding it's designed to retrieve payloads and execute arbitrary commands. There is evidence to suggest that the downloader is likely written by the same threat actors behind the  IcedID malware , with the downloader put to use by initial access brokers (IABs) to facilitate the deployment of other malware. Latrodectus has been primarily linked to two different IABs tracked by Proofpoint under the names  TA577  (aka Water Curupira) and TA578, the former of which has also been linked to the distribution of QakBot and PikaBot. As of mid-January 2024, it's been employed almost exclusively by TA578 in email threat ca...

The  ransomware industry surged in 2023  as it saw an alarming 55.5% increase in victims worldwide, reaching a staggering 5,070.  But 2024 is starting off showing a very different picture.  While the numbers skyrocketed in Q4 2023 with 1309 cases, in Q1 2024, the ransomware industry was down to 1,048 cases. This is a 22% decrease in ransomware attacks compared to Q4 2023. Figure 1: Victims per quarter There could be several reasons for this significant drop.  Reason 1: The Law Enforcement Intervention Firstly, law enforcement has upped the ante in 2024 with actions against both LockBit and ALPHV. The LockBit Arrests In February, an international operation named "Operation Cronos" culminated in the arrest of at least three associates of the infamous LockBit ransomware syndicate in Poland and Ukraine.  Law enforcement from multiple countries collaborated to take down LockBit's infrastructure. This included seizing their dark web domains and gaining ac...

A new phishing campaign has set its eyes on the Latin American region to deliver malicious payloads to Windows systems. "The phishing email contained a ZIP file attachment that when extracted reveals an HTML file that leads to a malicious file download posing as an invoice," Trustwave SpiderLabs researcher Karla Agregado  said . The email message, the company said, originates from an email address format that uses the domain "temporary[.]link" and has Roundcube Webmail listed as the User-Agent string. The HTML file points containing a link ("facturasmex[.]cloud") that displays an error message saying "this account has been suspended," but when visited from an IP address geolocated to Mexico, loads a CAPTCHA verification page that uses Cloudflare Turnstile. This step paves the way for a redirect to another domain from where a malicious RAR file is downloaded. The RAR archive comes with a PowerShell script that gathers system metadata as well...

Google has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. against two app developers for allegedly engaging in an "international online consumer investment fraud scheme" that tricked users into downloading bogus Android apps from the Google Play Store and other sources and stealing their funds under the guise of promising higher returns. The individuals in question are Yunfeng Sun (aka Alphonse Sun) and Hongnam Cheung (aka Zhang Hongnim or Stanford Fischer), who are believed to be based in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, respectively. The defendants are said to have uploaded about 87 crypto apps to the Play Store to pull off the social engineering scam since at least 2019, with over 100,000 users downloading them and leading to substantial financial losses. "The gains conveyed by the apps were illusory," the tech giant said in its complaint. "And the scheme did not end there." "Instead, when individual victims attempted to withdraw their balances, defendants and their co...

Threat actors have been found exploiting a critical flaw in Magento to inject a persistent backdoor into e-commerce websites. The attack leverages  CVE-2024-20720  (CVSS score: 9.1), which has been described by Adobe as a case of "improper neutralization of special elements" that could pave the way for arbitrary code execution. It was  addressed  by the company as part of security updates released on February 13, 2024. Sansec said it discovered a "cleverly crafted layout template in the database" that's being used to automatically inject malicious code to execute arbitrary commands. "Attackers combine the Magento layout parser with the beberlei/assert package (installed by default) to execute system commands," the company  said . "Because the layout block is tied to the checkout cart, this command is executed whenever <store>/checkout/cart is requested." The command in question is  sed , which is used to insert a code execution ...

New research has found that artificial intelligence (AI)-as-a-service providers such as Hugging Face are susceptible to two critical risks that could allow threat actors to escalate privileges, gain cross-tenant access to other customers' models, and even take over the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. "Malicious models represent a major risk to AI systems, especially for AI-as-a-service providers because potential attackers may leverage these models to perform cross-tenant attacks," Wiz researchers Shir Tamari and Sagi Tzadik  said . "The potential impact is devastating, as attackers may be able to access the millions of private AI models and apps stored within AI-as-a-service providers." The development comes as machine learning pipelines have emerged as a brand new supply chain attack vector, with repositories like Hugging Face becoming an attractive target for staging adversarial attacks designed to glean sensitive infor...

Bogus installers for Adobe Acrobat Reader are being used to  distribute  a new multi-functional malware dubbed  Byakugan . The starting point of the attack is a PDF file written in Portuguese that, when opened, shows a blurred image and asks the victim to click on a link to download the Reader application to view the content. According to Fortinet FortiGuard Labs, clicking the URL leads to the delivery of an installer ("Reader_Install_Setup.exe") that activates the infection sequence. Details of the campaign were  first disclosed  by the AhnLab Security Intelligence Center (ASEC) last month. The attack chain leverages techniques like DLL hijacking and Windows User Access Control (UAC) bypass to load a malicious dynamic-link library (DLL) file named "BluetoothDiagnosticUtil.dll," which, in turn, loads unleashes the final payload. It also deploys a legitimate installer for a PDF reader like Wondershare PDFelement. The binary is equipped to gather and exfiltra...

Financial organizations in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are being targeted by a new version of an "evolving threat" called  JSOutProx . "JSOutProx is a sophisticated attack framework utilizing both JavaScript and .NET," Resecurity  said  in a technical report published this week. "It employs the .NET (de)serialization feature to interact with a core JavaScript module running on the victim's machine. Once executed, the malware enables the framework to load various plugins, which conduct additional malicious activities on the target." First  identified  in December 2019 by Yoroi, early attacks distributing JSOutProx have been attributed to a threat actor tracked as  Solar Spider . The cyber crime actors behind the malware have a track record of striking banks and other big companies in Asia and Europe. In late 2021, Quick Heal Security Labs  detailed  attacks leveraging the remote access trojan (RAT) to single...

Multiple China-nexus threat actors have been linked to the zero-day exploitation of three security flaws impacting Ivanti appliances (CVE-2023-46805, CVE-2024-21887, and CVE-2024-21893). The clusters are being tracked by Mandiant under the uncategorized monikers  UNC5221 , UNC5266, UNC5291,  UNC5325 , UNC5330, and UNC5337. Also previously linked to the exploitation spree is a Chinese hacking crew called UNC3886 , whose tradecraft is notable for weaponizing zero-day bugs in Fortinet and VMware to breach target networks. The Google Cloud subsidiary said it has also observed financially motivated actors exploiting CVE-2023-46805 and CVE-2024-21887, likely in an attempt to conduct cryptocurrency mining operations. "UNC5266 overlaps in part with UNC3569, a China-nexus espionage actor that has been observed exploiting vulnerabilities in Aspera Faspex, Microsoft Exchange, and Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator, among others, to gain initial access to target environments,...

A suspected Vietnamese-origin threat actor has been observed targeting victims in several Asian and Southeast Asian countries with malware designed to harvest valuable data since at least May 2023. Cisco Talos is tracking the cluster under the name  CoralRaider , describing it as financially motivated. Targets of the campaign include India, China, South Korea, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Vietnam. "This group focuses on stealing victims' credentials, financial data, and social media accounts, including business and advertisement accounts," security researchers Chetan Raghuprasad and Joey Chen  said . "They use RotBot, a customized variant of Quasar RAT, and XClient stealer as payloads." Other commodity malware used by the group comprises a combination of remote access trojans and information stealers such as  AsyncRAT ,  NetSupport RAT , and Rhadamanthys . The targeting of business and advertisement accounts has been of particular focus for attacke...