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The pressure on small to medium-sized enterprises to protect their organizations against cyberthreats is astronomical. These businesses face the same threats as the largest enterprises, experience the same (relative) damages and consequences when breaches occur as the largest enterprises but are forced to protect their organizations with a fraction of the resources as the largest enterprises.  Cybersecurity company Cynet just released findings from a survey of 200 CISOs in charge of small security teams ( Download here ) to shine "a spotlight into the challenges of small security teams everywhere." In addition to better understanding the challenges these CISOs face, the 2021 Survey of CISOs with Small Security Teams delves into the strategies CISOs will employ to ensure their organizations are protected from the ongoing onslaught of cyber threats - all while saddled with limited budgets and headcount. The survey findings will also be presented in a live webinar,  register...

A "persistent attacker group" with alleged ties to Hezbollah has retooled its malware arsenal with a new version of a remote access Trojan (RAT) to break into companies worldwide and extract valuable information. In a  new report  published by the ClearSky research team on Thursday, the Israeli cybersecurity firm said it identified at least 250 public-facing web servers since early 2020 that have been hacked by the threat actor to gather intelligence and steal the company's databases. The orchestrated intrusions hit a slew of companies located in the U.S., the U.K., Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority, with a majority of the victims representing telecom operators (Etisalat, Mobily, Vodafone Egypt), internet service providers (SaudiNet, TE Data), and hosting and infrastructure service providers (Secured Servers LLC, iomart). First documented in 2015,  Volatile Cedar  (or Lebanese Cedar) has been known to penetrate a large n...

Researchers have disclosed a new family of Android malware that abuses accessibility services in the device to hijack user credentials and record audio and video. Dubbed " Oscorp " by Italy's CERT-AGID and spotted by  AddressIntel , the malware "induce(s) the user to install an accessibility service with which [the attackers] can read what is present and what is typed on the screen." So named because of the title of the login page of its command-and-control (C2) server, the malicious APK (called "Assistenzaclienti.apk" or "Customer Protection") is  distributed  via a domain named "supportoapp[.]com," which upon installation, requests intrusive permissions to enable the accessibility service and establishes communications with a C2 server to retrieve additional commands. Furthermore, the malware repeatedly reopens the Settings screen every eight seconds until the user turns on permissions for accessibility and device usage stati...

U.S. and Bulgarian authorities this week took control of the dark web site used by the NetWalker ransomware cybercrime group to publish data stolen from its victims. "We are striking back against the growing threat of ransomware by not only bringing criminal charges against the responsible actors, but also disrupting criminal online infrastructure and, wherever possible, recovering ransom payments extorted from victims,"  said  Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicholas L. McQuaid of the Justice Department's Criminal Division. "Ransomware victims should know that coming forward to law enforcement as soon as possible after an attack can lead to significant results like those achieved in today's multi-faceted operation." In connection with the takedown, a Canadian national named Sebastien Vachon-Desjardins from the city of Gatineau was charged in the U.S. state of Florida for extorting $27.6 million in cryptocurrency from ransom payments. Separately, the...

Law enforcement agencies from as many as eight countries dismantled the infrastructure of Emotet , a notorious email-based Windows malware behind several botnet-driven spam campaigns and ransomware attacks over the past decade. The coordinated takedown of the botnet on Tuesday — dubbed " Operation Ladybird " — is the result of a joint effort between authorities in the Netherlands, Germany, the U.S., the U.K., France, Lithuania, Canada, and Ukraine to take control of servers used to run and maintain the malware network. "The Emotet infrastructure essentially acted as a primary door opener for computer systems on a global scale," Europol  said . "What made Emotet so dangerous is that the malware was offered for hire to other cybercriminals to install other types of malware, such as banking Trojans or ransomware, onto a victim's computer." More Than a Malware  Since its first identification in 2014,  Emotet  has evolved from its initial roots as a cr...

Cybersecurity researcher Paul Litvak today disclosed an unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft Azure Functions that could be used by an attacker to escalate privileges and escape the Docker container used for hosting them. The findings come as part of Intezer Lab 's investigations into the Azure compute infrastructure. Following disclosure to Microsoft, the Windows maker is said to have "determined that the vulnerability has no security impact on Function users, since the host itself is still protected by another defense boundary against the elevated position we reached in the container host." Azure Functions , analogous to Amazon AWS Lambda, is a serverless solution that allows users to run event-triggered code without having to provision or manage infrastructure explicitly while simultaneously making it possible to scale and allocate compute and resources based on demand. By incorporating Docker into the mix, it makes it possible for developers to easily deploy and ...

Newly discovered security vulnerabilities in ADT's Blue (formerly LifeShield) home security cameras could have been exploited to hijack both audio and video streams. The  vulnerabilities  (tracked as CVE-2020-8101) were identified in the video doorbell camera by Bitdefender researchers in February 2020 before they were eventually addressed on August 17, 2020. LifeShield was acquired by Florida-based ADT Inc. in 2019, with Lifeshield's DIY home security solutions rebranded as Blue as of January 2020. The company's products had a 33.6% market share in the U.S. last year. The security issues in the doorbell camera allow an attacker to Obtain the administrator password of the camera by simply knowing its MAC address, which is used to identify a device uniquely Inject commands locally to gain root access, and Access audio and video feeds using an unprotected  RTSP  (Real-Time Streaming Protocol) server The doorbell is designed to periodically send heartbeat mes...

A newly devised variant of the  NAT Slipstreaming attack  can be leveraged to compromise and expose any device in an internal network, according to the latest research. Detailed by enterprise IoT security firm Armis, the  new attack  (CVE-2020-16043 and CVE-2021-23961) builds on the previously disclosed technique to bypass routers and firewalls and reach any unmanaged device within the internal network from the Internet. First  disclosed  by security researcher Samy Kamkar in late October 2020, the JavaScript-based attack relied on luring a user into visiting a malicious website to circumvent browser-based port restrictions and allow the attacker to remotely access TCP/UDP services on the victim's device, even those that were protected by a firewall or NAT. Although partial mitigations were released on November 11 to thwart the attack in  Chrome 87 ,  Firefox 84 , and  Safari  by preventing connections on port 5060 or 5061, Armis re...

With so much of the world transitioning to working, shopping, studying, and streaming online during the coronavirus pandemic, cybercriminals now have access to a larger base of potential victims than ever before. "Zoombomb"  became the new photobomb—hackers would gain access to a private meeting or online class hosted on Zoom and shout  profanities and racial slurs  or flash  pornographic images . Nation-state hacker groups mounted attacks against organizations involved in the coronavirus pandemic response, including the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some in an attempt to politicize the pandemic. Even garden-variety cyber attacks like email phishing, social engineering, and refund theft took on a darker flavor in response to the widespread economic precarity brought on by the pandemic.  "Hackers were mostly trying to take advantage of people's fear by offering medical equipment like thermometers and masks for cheap...

Creating workflows around verifying password resets can be challenging for organizations, especially since many have shifted work due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. With the numbers of cyberattacks against businesses exploding and compromised credentials often being the culprit, companies have to bolster security around resetting passwords on user accounts. How can organizations bolster the security of password resets for remote workers? One security workflow might involve having manager approval before IT helpdesk technicians can change a remote worker's password. In this way, the user's manager is involved in the process. Additionally, some organizations might opt to allow managers themselves the ability to change end-user passwords. How can this be configured in Active Directory? Also, is there a more seamless solution for requiring manager approval for password resets? Why password reset security is critical This past year has undoubtedly created many IT helpdesk st...

Apple on Tuesday released updates for iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS with fixes for three security vulnerabilities that it says may have been actively exploited in the wild. Reported by an anonymous researcher, the three  zero-day   flaws  — CVE-2021-1782, CVE-2021-1870, and CVE-2021-1871 — could have allowed an attacker to elevate privileges and achieve remote code execution. The iPhone maker did not disclose how widespread the attack was or reveal the identities of the attackers actively exploiting them. While the privilege escalation bug in the kernel (CVE-2021-1782) was noted as a race condition that could cause a malicious application to elevate its privileges, the other two shortcomings — dubbed a "logic issue" — were discovered in the WebKit browser engine (CVE-2021-1870 and CVE-2021-1871), permitting an attacker to achieve arbitrary code execution inside Safari. Apple said the race condition and the WebKit flaws were addressed with improved locking and restrictions, ...

Throughout 2020, businesses, in general, have had their hands full with IT challenges. They had to rush to accommodate a sudden shift to remote work. Then they had to navigate a rapid adoption of automation technologies. And as the year came to a close, more businesses began trying to assemble the safety infrastructure required to return to some semblance of normal in 2021. But at the end of the year,  news of a massive breach  of IT monitoring software vendor SolarWinds introduced a new complication – the possibility of a wave of secondary data breaches and cyber-attacks. And because SolarWinds' products have a presence in so many business networks, the size of the threat is massive. So far, though, most of the attention is getting paid to large enterprises like Microsoft and Cisco (and the US Government), who were the primary target of the SolarWinds breach. What nobody's talking about is the rest of the 18,000 or so SolarWinds clients who may have been affected. For the...

An evolving phishing campaign observed at least since May 2020 has been found to target high-ranking company executives across manufacturing, real estate, finance, government, and technological sectors with the goal of obtaining sensitive information. The campaign hinges on a social engineering trick that involves sending emails to potential victims containing fake Office 365 password expiration notifications as lures. The messages also include an embedded link to retain the same password that, when clicked, redirects users to a phishing page for credential harvesting. "The attackers target high profile employees who may not be as technically or cybersecurity savvy, and may be more likely to be deceived into clicking on malicious links," Trend Micro researchers  said  in a Monday analysis. "By selectively targeting C-level employees, the attacker significantly increases the value of obtained credentials as they could lead to further access to sensitive personal and ...

Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday disclosed a now-patched security flaw in TikTok that could have potentially enabled an attacker to build a database of the app's users and their associated phone numbers for future malicious activity. Although this flaw only impacts those users who have linked a phone number with their account or logged in with a phone number, a successful exploitation of the vulnerability could have resulted in data leakage and privacy violation, Check Point Research said in an analysis shared with The Hacker News. TikTok has deployed a fix to address the shortcoming following responsible disclosure from Check Point researchers. The newly discovered bug resides in TikTok's " Find friends " feature that allows users to sync their contacts with the service to identify potential people to follow. The contacts are uploaded to TikTok via an HTTP request in the form of a list that consists of hashed contact names and the corresponding phone numbe...