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Google on Thursday shipped emergency patches to address two security issues in its Chrome web browser, one of which it says is being actively exploited in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2022-1364 , the tech giant described the high-severity bug as a case of type confusion in the V8 JavaScript engine. Clément Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group has been credited with reporting the flaw on April 13, 2022. As is typically the case with actively exploited zero-day flaws, the company acknowledged it's "aware that an exploit for CVE-2022-1364 exists in the wild." Additional details about the flaw and the identity of the threat actors have been withheld to prevent further abuse. With the latest fix, Google has patched a total of three zero-day vulnerabilities in Chrome since the start of the year. It's also the second type confusion-related bug in V8 to be squashed in less than a month - CVE-2022-0609  - Use-after-free in Animation CVE-2022-1096  - Type confusio...

A U.S. court has sentenced former Ethereum developer Virgil Griffith to five years and three months in prison and pay a $100,000 fine for conspiring with North Korea to help use cryptocurrencies to circumvent sanctions imposed on the country. "There is no question North Korea poses a national security threat to our nation, and the regime has shown time and again it will stop at nothing to ignore our laws for its own benefit," U.S. Attorney Damian Williams  said  in a statement. The sentencing comes more than six months after Griffith  pleaded guilty  to violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act ( IEEPA ) by offering technical advice to the hermit kingdom with regards to the use of digital currency to bypass economic restrictions. Griffith was arrested in November 2019. North Korea is known to  rely on   cryptocurrency heists  to get around international sanctions and use it to help fund programs to build weapons of mass destructio...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a now-fixed security flaw in the Rarible non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace that, if successfully exploited, could have led to account takeover and theft of cryptocurrency assets. "By luring victims to click on a malicious NFT, an attacker can take full control of the victim's crypto wallet to steal funds," Check Point researchers Roman Zaikin, Dikla Barda, and Oded Vanunu  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Rarible, an NFT marketplace that enables users to create, buy, and sell digital NFT art like photographs, games, and memes, has over 2.1 million active users. "There is still a huge gap between, in terms of security, between Web2 and Web3 infrastructure," Vanunu, head of products vulnerabilities research at Check Point, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "Any small vulnerability can possibly allow cyber criminals to hijack crypto wallets behind the scenes. We are still in a state...

A threat group that pursues crypto mining and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks has been linked to a new botnet called Enemybot, which has been discovered enslaving routers and Internet of Things (IoT) devices since last month. "This botnet is mainly derived from  Gafgyt 's source code but has been observed to borrow several modules from  Mirai 's original source code," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs  said  in a report this week. The botnet has been attributed to an actor named Keksec (aka  Kek Security , Necro, and  FreakOut ), which has been linked to multiple botnets such as  Simps ,  Ryuk  (not to be confused with the ransomware of the same name), and  Samael , and has a history of targeting cloud infrastructure to carry out crypto mining and DDoS operations. Primarily targeting routers from Seowon Intech, D-Link, and iRZ to propagate its infections and grow in volume, an analysis of the malware specimen has highlighted En...

Microsoft and a consortium of cybersecurity companies took legal and technical steps to disrupt the ZLoader botnet , seizing control of 65 domains that were used to control and communicate with the infected hosts. "ZLoader is made up of computing devices in businesses, hospitals, schools, and homes around the world and is run by a global internet-based organized crime gang operating malware as a service that is designed to steal and extort money," Amy Hogan-Burney, general manager of Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit (DCU),  said . The operation, Microsoft said, was undertaken in collaboration with ESET, Lumen's Black Lotus Labs, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, Avast, Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), and Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center (H-ISAC). As a result of the disruption, the domains are now redirected to a sinkhole, effectively preventing the botnet's criminal operators from contacting the compromised devices....

The U.S. government on Wednesday warned of nation-state actors deploying specialized malware to maintain access to industrial control systems (ICS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) devices. "The APT actors have developed custom-made tools for targeting ICS/SCADA devices," multiple U.S. agencies  said  in an alert. "The tools enable them to scan for, compromise, and control affected devices once they have established initial access to the operational technology (OT) network." The joint federal advisory comes courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The custom-made tools are specifically designed to single out Schneider Electric programmable logic controllers (PLCs), OMRON Sysmac NEX PLCs, and Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) servers. On top of that, the unnamed actors...

A week after VMware released patches to remediate eight security vulnerabilities in VMware Workspace ONE Access, threat actors have begun to actively exploit one of the critical flaws in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2022-22954 , the security shortcoming relates to a remote code execution vulnerability that stems from server-side template injection in VMware Workspace ONE Access and Identity Manager. The bug is rated 9.8 in severity. "A malicious actor with network access can trigger a server-side  template injection  that may result in remote code execution," the company  noted  in its advisory. The virtualization services provider has since revised its bulletin to warn customers of confirmed exploitation of CVE-2022-22954 occurring in the wild. Cybersecurity firm Bad Packets also  corroborated  that it detected attempts to weaponize the vulnerability. Source:  Bad Packets It's worth noting that the patches shipped last week address seven...

Extended detection and response (XDR) is expected to be the future of cybersecurity, merging security technologies with the evolving approach to the way we do cybersecurity. And while many organizations are scrambling to integrate XDR into their cybersecurity strategies – even more are still trying to figure out what XDR really is and if it's even the right solution for their organization.  But there are some organizations that are getting lost in the debate and are wondering if there is a place for them in this new frontier of cybersecurity: organizations with lean security teams and limited resources.  Fortunately, Cynet, a cybersecurity company, is hosting an upcoming webinar in partnership with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) that will explore how choosing the right XDR can be impactful for companies lean security teams [ register here ]. During the webinar, Jon Oltsik, Senior Principal Analyst with ESG, and George Tubin, Director of Product Strategy at Cynet, will cove...

The Chinese-backed Hafnium hacking group has been linked to a piece of a new malware that's used to maintain persistence on compromised Windows environments. The threat actor is said to have targeted entities in the telecommunication, internet service provider and data services sectors from August 2021 to February 2022, expanding from the initial victimology patterns observed during its attacks exploiting the then zero-day flaws in  Microsoft Exchange Servers  in March 2021. Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC), which dubbed the defense evasion malware " Tarrask ," characterized it as a tool that creates "hidden" scheduled tasks on the system. "Scheduled task abuse is a very common method of persistence and defense evasion — and an enticing one, at that," the researchers  said . Hafnium, while most notable for Exchange Server attacks, has since leveraged unpatched zero-day vulnerabilities as initial vectors to drop web shells and other mal...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) on Tuesday  disclosed  that it thwarted a cyberattack by Sandworm , a hacking group affiliated with Russia's military intelligence, to sabotage the operations of an unnamed energy provider in the country. "The attackers attempted to take down several infrastructure components of their target, namely: Electrical substations, Windows-operated computing systems, Linux-operated server equipment, [and] active network equipment," the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine (SSSCIP)  said  in a statement. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET, which collaborated with CERT-UA to analyze the attack, said the attempted intrusion involved the use of ICS-capable malware and regular disk wipers, with the adversary unleashing an updated variant of the  Industroyer  malware, which was first deployed in a 2016 assault on Ukraine's power grid. "The Sandworm attackers made an attemp...

An international law enforcement operation raided and took down RaidForums, one of the world's largest hacking forums notorious for selling access to hacked personal information belonging to users. Dubbed Tourniquet, the seizure of the cybercrime website involved authorities from the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Portugal, and Romania, with the criminal investigation resulting in the  arrest  of the forum's administrator at his home last month in Croydon, England. The three confiscated domains associated with the illicit marketplace include "raidforums[.]com," "Rf[.]ws," and "Raid[.]lol." Diogo Santos Coelho (aka "Omnipotent"), the said founder and chief administrator, was apprehended in the U.K. on January 31 and is pending extradition to the U.S. Santos Coelho has been charged with conspiracy, access device fraud, and aggravated identity theft. In addition to detailing Santos Coelho's central role in designing and administering the soft...

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday updates for the month of April have addressed a  total of 128 security vulnerabilities  spanning across its software product portfolio, including Windows, Defender, Office, Exchange Server, Visual Studio, and Print Spooler, among others. 10 of the 128 bugs fixed are rated Critical, 115 are rated Important, and three are rated Moderate in severity, with one of the flaws listed as publicly known and another under active attack at the time of the release. The updates are in addition to  26 other flaws  resolved by Microsoft in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the start of the month. The actively exploited flaw ( CVE-2022-24521 , CVSS score: 7.8) relates to an elevation of privilege vulnerability in the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS). Credited with reporting the flaw are the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and CrowdStrike researchers Adam Podlosky and Amir Bazine. The second publicly-known zero-day flaw ( CVE-2022-26904 , C...

Unsurprisingly, here at  Rewind , we've got a lot of data to protect (over 2 petabytes worth). One of the databases we use is called Elasticsearch (ES or Opensearch, as it is currently known in AWS). To put it simply, ES is a document database that facilitates lightning-fast search results. Speed is essential when customers are looking for a particular file or item that they need to restore using  Rewind . Every second of downtime counts, so our search results need to be fast, accurate, and reliable. Another consideration was disaster  recovery . As part of our  System and Organization Controls Level 2 (SOC2)  certification process, we needed to ensure we had a working disaster recovery plan to restore service in the unlikely event that the entire AWS region was down. "An entire AWS region?? That will never happen!" (Except for  when it did )  Anything is possible, things go wrong, and in order to meet our SOC2 requirements we needed to have a work...