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Vulnerability analysis results in  Orange Cyberdefenses' Security Navigator  show that some vulnerabilities first discovered in 1999 are still found in networks today. This is concerning. Age of VOC findings Our Vulnerability Scans are performed on a recurring basis, which provides us the opportunity to examine the difference between when a scan was performed on an Asset, and when a given finding on that Asset was reported. We can call that the finding 'Age'. If the findings first reported are not addressed, they will occur in more scans over time with increasing Age, and so we can track how the Age of reported findings changes over time. As the chart below clearly illustrates, the majority of real findings in our dataset, across all Severity levels, are between 75 and 225 days old. There is a second 'peak' at around 300 days, which we suspect has more to do with the age of the data in the dataset and can therefore be ignored. Finally, there is a fascinating ...

The Emotet malware operation has continued to refine its tactics in an effort to fly under the radar, while also acting as a conduit for other dangerous malware such as Bumblebee and IcedID. Emotet, which officially  reemerged  in late 2021 following a coordinated takedown of its infrastructure by authorities earlier that year, has continued to be a persistent threat that's distributed via phishing emails. Attributed to a cybercrime group tracked as  TA542  (aka Gold Crestwood or Mummy Spider), the virus has  evolved  from a banking trojan to a malware distributor since its first appearance in 2014. The malware-as-a-service (MaaS) is also modular, capable of deploying an array of proprietary and freeware components that can exfiltrate sensitive information from compromised machines and carry out other post-exploitation activities. Two latest additions to Emotet's module arsenal comprise an  SMB spreader  that's designed to facilitate lateral...

Apple has backported fixes for a recently disclosed critical security flaw affecting older devices, citing evidence of active exploitation. The issue, tracked as  CVE-2022-42856 , is a type confusion vulnerability in the WebKit browser engine that could result in arbitrary code execution when processing maliciously crafted web content. While it was originally addressed by the company on November 30, 2022, as part of iOS 16.1.2 update, the patch was subsequently expanded to a broader set of Apple devices with iOS 15.7.2, iPadOS 15.7.2, macOS Ventura 13.1, tvOS 16.2, and Safari 16.2. "Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited against versions of iOS released before iOS 15.1," the iPhone maker  said  in an advisory published Monday. To that end, the latest update, iOS 12.5.7, is available for iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPad Air, iPad mini 2, iPad mini 3, and iPod touch (6th generation). Clément Lecigne of Google's Threat Anal...

Meta Platforms on Monday announced that it has started to expand global testing of end-to-end encryption ( E2EE ) in Messenger chats by default. "Over the next few months, more people will continue to see some of their chats gradually being upgraded with an extra layer of protection provided by end-to-end encryption," Meta's Melissa Miranda  said . The social media behemoth said it intends to notify users in select individual chat threads as the security feature is enabled, while emphasizing that the process of choosing and upgrading the conversations to support E2EE is random. "It's designed to be random so that there isn't a negative impact on our infrastructure and people's chat experience," Miranda further explained. Along with flipping the switch on E2EE, Meta has also added more features into its encrypted chat experience, including support for themes, custom emojis and reactions, group profile photos, link previews, and active status. T...

Two security flaws have been disclosed in Samsung's Galaxy Store app for Android that could be exploited by a local attacker to stealthily install arbitrary apps or direct prospective victims to fraudulent landing pages on the web. The issues, tracked as  CVE-2023-21433 and CVE-2023-21434 , were  discovered  by NCC Group and notified to the South Korean chaebol in November and December 2022. Samsung  classified  the bugs as moderate risk and released fixes in version 4.5.49.8 shipped earlier this month. Samsung Galaxy Store, previously known as Samsung Apps and Galaxy Apps, is a dedicated app store used for Android devices manufactured by Samsung. It was launched in September 2009. The first of the two vulnerabilities is CVE-2023-21433, which could enable an already installed rogue Android app on a Samsung device to install any application available on the Galaxy Store. Samsung described it as a case of improper access control that it said has been patched...

The move to SaaS and other cloud tools has put an emphasis on Identity & Access Management (IAM). After all, user identity is one of the only barriers standing between sensitive corporate data and any unauthorized access.  The tools used to define IAM make up its identity fabric. The stronger the fabric, the more resistant identities are to pressure from threat actors. However, those pressures are only increasing. Decentralized IT, evolving threats, and zero-trust tools are pushing many IAM tools to their limits.  To maintain their effectiveness, IAM are shifting to operating as an agile, interconnected identity fabric rather than just siloed IAM tools. The demands of today's IT operating environment are forcing IAM to support decentralized IT environments while still providing centralized management and governance for its users. Interestingly, many of the identity fabric principles they define are currently found in leading SSPM tools. It's important to note that iden...

The legitimate command-and-control (C2) framework known as Sliver is  gaining   more traction  from threat actors as it emerges as an open source alternative to  Cobalt Strike  and Metasploit. The findings come from Cybereason, which  detailed  its inner workings in an exhaustive analysis last week. Sliver, developed by cybersecurity company BishopFox, is a Golang-based cross-platform post-exploitation framework that's designed to be used by security professionals in their red team operations. Its myriad features for adversary simulation – including dynamic code generation, in-memory payload execution, and process injection – have also made it an appealing tool for threat actors looking to gain elevated access to the target system upon gaining an initial foothold. In other words, the software is used as a second-stage to conduct next steps of the attack chain after already compromising a machine using one of the initial intrusion vectors such as...

Researchers have shut down an "expansive" ad fraud scheme that spoofed more than 1,700 applications from 120 publishers and impacted roughly 11 million devices.  "VASTFLUX was a malvertising attack that injected malicious JavaScript code into digital ad creatives, allowing the fraudsters to stack numerous invisible video ad players behind one another and register ad views," fraud prevention firm HUMAN  said . The operation gets its name from the use of a DNS evasion technique called  Fast Flux  and  VAST , a Digital Video Ad Serving Template that's employed to serve ads to video players. The sophisticated operation particularly exploited the restricted in-app environments that run ads on iOS to place bids for displaying ad banners. Should the auction be won, the hijacked ad slot is leveraged to inject rogue JavaScript that establishes contact with a remote server to retrieve the list of apps to be targeted. This includes the  bundle IDs  that bel...

Threat actors associated with the Roaming Mantis attack campaign have been observed delivering an updated variant of their patent mobile malware known as Wroba to infiltrate Wi-Fi routers and undertake Domain Name System ( DNS ) hijacking. Kaspersky, which carried out an  analysis  of the malicious artifact, said the feature is designed to target specific Wi-Fi routers located in South Korea. Roaming Mantis, also known as Shaoye, is a long-running financially motivated operation that singles out Android smartphone users with malware capable of stealing bank account credentials as well as harvesting other kinds of sensitive information. Although primarily  targeting the Asian region  since 2018, the hacking crew was detected  expanding  its  victim range  to include France and Germany for the first time in early 2022 by camouflaging the malware as the Google Chrome web browser application. The attacks leverage smishing messages as the initial...

The Russian state-sponsored cyber espionage group known as Gamaredon has continued its digital onslaught against Ukraine, with recent attacks leveraging the popular messaging app Telegram to strike military and law enforcement sectors in the country. "The Gamaredon group's network infrastructure relies on multi-stage Telegram accounts for victim profiling and confirmation of geographic location, and then finally leads the victim to the next stage server for the final payload," the BlackBerry Research and Intelligence Team  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This kind of technique to infect target systems is new." Gamaredon , also known by names such as Actinium, Armageddon, Iron Tilden, Primitive Bear, Shuckworm, Trident Ursa, and Winterflounder, is known for its assaults aimed at Ukrainian entities since at least 2013. Last month, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42  disclosed  the threat actor's unsuccessful attempts to break into an unnamed petrol...

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) on Thursday imposed fresh fines of €5.5 million against Meta's WhatsApp for violating data protection laws when processing users' personal information. At the heart of the ruling is an update to the messaging platform's Terms of Service that was imposed in the days leading to the enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation ( GDPR ) in May 2018, requiring that users agree to the revised terms in order to continue using the service or risk losing access. The complaint, filed by privacy non-profit NOYB, alleged that WhatsApp breached the regulation by compelling its users to "consent to the processing of their personal data for service improvement and security" by "making the accessibility of its services conditional on users accepting the updated Terms of Service." "WhatsApp Ireland is not entitled to rely on the contract legal basis for the delivery of service improvement and security," th...

A suspected China-nexus threat actor exploited a recently patched vulnerability in Fortinet FortiOS SSL-VPN as a zero-day in attacks targeting a European government entity and a managed service provider (MSP) located in Africa. Telemetry evidence gathered by Google-owned Mandiant indicates that the exploitation occurred as early as October 2022, at least nearly two months before fixes were released. "This incident continues China's pattern of exploiting internet facing devices, specifically those used for managed security purposes (e.g., firewalls, IPS\IDS appliances etc.)," Mandiant researchers  said  in a technical report. The attacks entailed the use of a sophisticated backdoor dubbed  BOLDMOVE , a Linux variant of which is specifically designed to run on Fortinet's FortiGate firewalls. The intrusion vector in question relates to the exploitation of  CVE-2022-42475 , a heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability in FortiOS SSL-VPN that could result in unauthent...

A new critical remote code execution (RCE) flaw discovered impacting multiple services related to Microsoft Azure could be exploited by a malicious actor to completely take control of a targeted application. "The vulnerability is achieved through  CSRF  (cross-site request forgery) on the ubiquitous SCM service Kudu," Ermetic researcher Liv Matan  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "By abusing the vulnerability, attackers can deploy malicious ZIP files containing a payload to the victim's Azure application." The Israeli cloud infrastructure security firm, which dubbed the shortcoming  EmojiDeploy , said it could further enable the theft of sensitive data and lateral movement to other Azure services. Microsoft has since fixed the vulnerability as of December 6, 2022, following responsible disclosure on October 26, 2022, in addition to awarding a bug bounty of $30,000. The Windows maker  describes  Kudu as the "engine behind a number of...