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As ransomware attacks against critical infrastructure skyrocket, new research shows that threat actors behind such disruptions are increasingly shifting from using email messages as an intrusion route to purchasing access from cybercriminal enterprises that have already infiltrated major targets. "Ransomware operators often buy access from independent cybercriminal groups who infiltrate major targets and then sell access to the ransomware actors for a slice of the ill-gotten gains," researchers from Proofpoint said in a write-up shared with The Hacker News. "Cybercriminal threat groups already distributing banking malware or other trojans may also become part of a ransomware affiliate network." Besides angling for a piece of the illegal profits, the email and cloud security firm said it is currently tracking at least 10 different threat actors who play the role of "initial access facilitators" to supply affiliates and other cybercrime groups with an e...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday issued an advisory regarding a critical software supply-chain flaw impacting ThroughTek's software development kit (SDK) that could be abused by an adversary to gain improper access to audio and video streams. "Successful exploitation of this vulnerability could permit unauthorized access to sensitive information, such as camera audio/video feeds," CISA  said  in the alert. ThroughTek's point-to-point ( P2P ) SDK is widely used by IoT devices with video surveillance or audio/video transmission capability such as IP cameras, baby and pet monitoring cameras, smart home appliances, and sensors to provide remote access to the media content over the internet. Tracked as CVE-2021-32934 (CVSS score: 9.1), the shortcoming affects ThroughTek P2P products, versions 3.1.5 and before as well as SDK versions with nossl tag, and stems from a lack of sufficient protection when transferring data between ...

Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday disclosed "distinctive" tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) adopted by operators of Hades ransomware that set it apart from the rest of the pack, attributing it to a financially motivated threat group called  GOLD WINTER . "In many ways, the GOLD WINTER threat group is a typical post-intrusion ransomware threat group that pursues high-value targets to maximize how much money it can extort from its victims," researchers from SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit (CTU) said in an analysis shared with The Hacker News. "However, GOLD WINTER's operations have quirks that distinguish it from other groups." The findings come from a study of incident response efforts the Atlanta-based cybersecurity firm engaged in the first quarter of 2021. Since first emerging in the threat landscape in December 2020, Hades has been classified as INDRIK SPIDER's successor to  WastedLocker  ransomware with "additional code o...

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Instagram has patched a new flaw that allowed anyone to view archived posts and stories posted by private accounts without having to follow them. "This bug could have allowed a malicious user to view targeted media on Instagram," security researcher Mayur Fartade  said  in a Medium post today. "An attacker could have been able to see details of private/archived posts, stories, reels, IGTV without following the user using Media ID." Fartade disclosed the issue to Facebook's security team on April 16, 2021, following which the shortcoming was patched on June 15. He was also awarded $30,000 as part of the company's bug bounty program. Although the attack requires knowing the media ID associated with an image, video, or album, by brute-forcing the identifiers, Fartade demonstrated that it was possible to craft a POST request to a GraphQL endpoint and retrieve sensitive data. As a consequence of the flaw, details such as like/comment/save count, display_...

Apple on Monday shipped out-of-band security patches to address two zero-day vulnerabilities in iOS 12.5.3 that it says are being actively exploited in the wild. The latest update, iOS 12.5.4 , comes with fixes for three security bugs, including a memory corruption issue in ASN.1 decoder (CVE-2021-30737) and two flaws concerning its WebKit browser engine that could be abused to achieve remote code execution — CVE-2021-30761  - A memory corruption issue that could be exploited to gain arbitrary code execution when processing maliciously crafted web content. The flaw was addressed with improved state management. CVE-2021-30762  - A use-after-free issue that could be exploited to gain arbitrary code execution when processing maliciously crafted web content. The flaw was resolved with improved memory management. Both CVE-2021-30761 and CVE-2021-30762 were reported to Apple anonymously, with the Cupertino-based company stating in its advisory that it's aware of reports th...

Google on Monday announced that it's rolling out client-side encryption to Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), thereby giving its enterprise customers direct control of encryption keys and the identity service they choose to access those keys. "With client-side encryption, customer data is indecipherable to Google, while users can continue to take advantage of Google's native web-based collaboration, access content on mobile devices, and share encrypted files externally," the search giant  said .  "When combined with our other encryption capabilities, customers can add new levels of data protection for their Google Workspace data." The development coincides with the Google Workspace and Google Chat's  broader availability to all users  with a Google account. Workspace is the company's enterprise offering consisting of Gmail, Chat, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, and other tools. Businesses using Google Workspace have the choice o...

A new cyber espionage group named Gelsemium has been linked to a  supply chain attack targeting the NoxPlayer  Android emulator that was disclosed earlier this year. The findings come from a systematic analysis of multiple campaigns undertaken by the APT crew, with evidence of the earliest attack dating back all the way to 2014 under the codename  Operation TooHash  based on malware payloads deployed in those intrusions. "Victims of these campaigns are located in East Asia as well as the Middle East and include governments, religious organizations, electronics manufacturers and universities," cybersecurity firm ESET  said  in an analysis published last week. "Gelsemium's whole chain might appear simple at first sight, but the exhaustive configurations, implanted at each stage, modify on-the-fly settings for the final payload, making it harder to understand." Targeted countries include China, Mongolia, North and South Korea, Japan, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, ...

In response to malicious actors targeting US federal IT systems and their supply chain, the President released the " Executive Order on Improving the Nation's Cybersecurity  (Executive Order)." Although directed at Federal departments and agencies, the Executive Order will likely have a ripple effect through the Federal technology supply stream. Private companies and enterprises will look to the Executive Order to build their best practices. At a high level, the Executive Order includes information-sharing requirements, a push toward cloud and Zero Trust architectures, and enhancing transparency throughout the software supply chain. Understanding the fundamentals of the White House Executive Order on Improving the Nation's Cybersecurity The bulk of the Executive Order focuses on administrative tasks associated with it, including redefining contract language, setting timelines, and defining agency roles and responsibilities. For enterprises that don't supply technolog...

Even as a massive data breach affecting Air India came to light the previous month, India's flag carrier airline appears to have suffered a separate cyber assault that lasted for a period of at least two months and 26 days, new research has revealed, which attributed the incident with moderate confidence to a Chinese nation-state threat actor called APT41. Group-IB dubbed the campaign "ColunmTK" based on the names of command-and-control (C2) server domains that were used for facilitating communications with the compromised systems.  "The potential ramifications of this incident for the entire airline industry and carriers that might yet discover traces of ColunmTK in their networks are significant," the Singapore-headquartered threat hunting company  said . While Group-IB alluded that this may have been a supply chain attack targeting SITA, the Swiss aviation information technology company told The Hacker News that they are two different security incidents. ...

Google's upcoming plans to replace third-party cookies with a less invasive ad targeted mechanism have a number of issues that could defeat its privacy objectives and allow for significant linkability of user behavior, possibly even identifying individual users. "FLoC is premised on a compelling idea: enable ad targeting without exposing users to risk,"  said  Eric Rescorla, author of TLS standard and chief technology officer of Mozilla. "But the current design has a number of privacy properties that could create significant risks if it were to be widely deployed in its current form." Short for Federated Learning of Cohorts,  FLoC  is part of Google's fledgling  Privacy Sandbox  initiative that aims to develop alternate solutions to satisfy cross-site use cases without resorting to third-party cookies or other opaque tracking mechanisms. Essentially, FLoC allows marketers to guess users' interests without having to uniquely identify them, thereby eli...

Multiple critical security flaws have been disclosed in Samsung's pre-installed Android apps, which, if successfully exploited, could have allowed adversaries access to personal data without users' consent and take control of the devices.  "The impact of these bugs could have allowed an attacker to access and edit the victim's contacts, calls, SMS/MMS, install arbitrary apps with device administrator rights, or read and write arbitrary files on behalf of a system user which could change the device's settings," Sergey Toshin, founder of mobile security startup Oversecured,  said  in an analysis published Thursday. Toshin reported the flaws to Samsung in February 2021, following which  patches were issued  by the manufacturer as part of its monthly security updates for April and May. The list of the seven vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2021-25356  - Third-party authentication bypass in Managed Provisioning CVE-2021-25388  - Arbitrary app...

Organizations' cybersecurity capabilities have improved over the past decade, mostly out of necessity. As their defenses get better, so do the methods, tactics, and techniques malicious actors devise to penetrate their environments. Instead of the standard virus or trojan, attackers today will deploy a variety of tools and methods to infiltrate an organization's environment and attack it from the inside. In an interesting twist of fate, one of the tools organizations have used to audit and improve their defenses has also become a popular tool attackers use to infiltrate. Cobalt Strike is an Adversary Simulation and Red Team Operations tool that allows organizations to simulate advanced attacks and test their security stacks in a close-to-real-world simulation. A new research webinar from XDR provider Cynet ( register here ) offers a better look at Cobalt Strike. The webinar, led by Cyber Operations Analyst for the Cynet MDR Team Yuval Fischer, will take a deep dive into the thr...

A seven-year-old privilege escalation vulnerability discovered in the polkit system service could be exploited by a malicious unprivileged local attacker to bypass authorization and escalate permissions to the root user. Tracked as  CVE-2021-3560  (CVSS score: 7.8), the flaw affects polkit versions between 0.113 and 0.118 and was discovered by GitHub security researcher Kevin Backhouse, who said the issue was  introduced in a code commit  made on Nov. 9, 2013. Red Hat's Cedric Buissart  noted  that Debian-based distributions, based on polkit 0.105, are also vulnerable. Polkit  (née PolicyKit) is a toolkit for defining and handling authorizations in Linux distributions, and is used for allowing unprivileged processes to communicate with privileged processes. "When a requesting process disconnects from dbus-daemon just before the call to polkit_system_bus_name_get_creds_sync starts, the process cannot get a unique uid and pid of the process and it c...

Cybersecurity researchers on Thursday took the wraps off a new cyber espionage group that has been behind a series of targeted attacks against diplomatic entities and telecommunication companies in Africa and the Middle East since at least 2017. Dubbed " BackdoorDiplomacy ," the campaign involves targeting weak points in internet-exposed devices such as web servers to perform a panoply of cyber hacking activities, including laterally moving across the network to deploy a custom implant called Turian that's capable of exfiltrating sensitive data stored in removable media. "BackdoorDiplomacy shares tactics, techniques, and procedures with other Asia-based groups. Turian likely represents a next stage evolution of  Quarian , the backdoor last observed in use in 2013 against diplomatic targets in Syria and the U.S," said Jean-Ian Boutin, head of threat research at Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET. Engineered to target both Windows and Linux operating systems, th...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) Thursday said it disrupted and took down the infrastructure of an underground marketplace known as " Slilpp " that specialized in trading stolen login credentials as part of an international law enforcement operation. Over a dozen individuals have been charged or arrested in connection with the illegal marketplace. The cyber crackdown, which involved the joint efforts of the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, and Romania, also commandeered a set of servers hosting its infrastructure as well as the multiple domains the group operated. Operational since 2012, Slilpp was a marketplace for allegedly stolen online account login credentials belonging to 1,400 companies worldwide, offering for sale more than 80 million plundered usernames and passwords for bank accounts, online payment accounts, mobile phone accounts, retailer accounts, and other online accounts, which were abused to conduct unauthorized transactions, such as wire transfers, fro...

An emerging ransomware strain in the threat landscape claims to have breached 30 organizations in just four months since it went operational by riding on the coattails of a notorious ransomware syndicate. First observed in February 2021, " Prometheus " is an offshoot of another well-known ransomware variant called  Thanos , which was previously deployed against state-run organizations in the Middle East and North Africa last year. The affected entities are believed to be government, financial services, manufacturing, logistics, consulting, agriculture, healthcare services, insurance agencies, energy and law firms in the U.S., U.K., and a dozen more countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and South America, according to new research published by Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 threat intelligence team. Like other ransomware gangs, Prometheus takes advantage of double-extortion tactics and hosts a dark web leak site, where it names and shames new victims and makes stol...