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Microsoft on Wednesday disclosed details of a targeted phishing campaign that leveraged a now-patched zero-day flaw in its MSHTML platform using specially-crafted Office documents to deploy Cobalt Strike Beacon on compromised Windows systems. "These attacks used the vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2021-40444 , as part of an initial access campaign that distributed custom Cobalt Strike Beacon loaders," Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center  said  in a technical write-up. "These loaders communicated with an infrastructure that Microsoft associates with multiple cybercriminal campaigns, including human-operated ransomware." Details about CVE-2021-40444 (CVSS score: 8.8) first  emerged  on September 7 after researchers from EXPMON alerted the Windows maker about a "highly sophisticated zero-day attack" aimed at Microsoft Office users by taking advantage of a remote code execution vulnerability in MSHTML (aka Trident), a proprietary browser engine for the now...

Microsoft on Wednesday announced a new passwordless mechanism that allows users to access their accounts without a password by using Microsoft Authenticator, Windows Hello, a security key, or a verification code sent via SMS or email. The change is expected to be rolled out in the coming weeks. "Except for auto-generated passwords that are nearly impossible to remember, we largely create our own passwords,"  said  Vasu Jakkal, Microsoft's corporate vice president for Security, Compliance, and Identity. "But, given the vulnerability of passwords, requirements for them have gotten increasingly complex in recent years, including multiple symbols, numbers, case sensitivity, and disallowing previous passwords." "Passwords are incredibly inconvenient to create, remember, and manage across all the accounts in our lives," Jakkal added. Over the years, weak passwords have emerged as the entry point for a vast majority of attacks across enterprise and cons...

Microsoft on Tuesday addressed a quartet of security flaws as part of its  Patch Tuesday updates  that could be abused by adversaries to target Azure cloud customers and elevate privileges as well as allow for remote takeover of vulnerable systems. The list of flaws, collectively called OMIGOD by researchers from Wiz, affect a little-known software agent called Open Management Infrastructure that's automatically deployed in many Azure services - CVE-2021-38647  (CVSS score: 9.8) - Open Management Infrastructure Remote Code Execution Vulnerability CVE-2021-38648  (CVSS score: 7.8) - Open Management Infrastructure Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2021-38645  (CVSS score: 7.8) - Open Management Infrastructure Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2021-38649  (CVSS score: 7.0) - Open Management Infrastructure Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability Open Management Infrastructure ( OMI ) is an open-source  analogous equivalent  of Win...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Tuesday disclosed it fined three intelligence community and military personnel $1.68 million in penalties for their role as cyber-mercenaries working on behalf of a U.A.E.-based cybersecurity company. The trio in question — Marc Baier, 49, Ryan Adams, 34, and Daniel Gericke, 40 — are accused of "knowingly and willfully combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with each other to commit offenses, "furnishing defense services to persons and entities in the country over a three year period beginning around December 2015 and continuing through November 2019, including developing invasive spyware capable of breaking into mobile devices without any action by the targets. "The defendants worked as senior managers at a United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.)-based company (U.A.E. CO) that supported and carried out computer network exploitation (CNE) operations (i.e., 'hacking') for the benefit of the U.A.E. government," the DoJ  said...

In the classic children's movie 'The Princess Bride,' one of the characters utters the phrase, " You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means ." It's freely used as a response to someone's misuse or misunderstanding of a word or phrase. "Response Automation" is another one of those phrases that have different meanings to different people. It's bantered around by the security vendor community so much that its precise meaning, when used, is unclear. Many vendors throw the term out without explaining exactly what they mean by the phrase. One vendor's response automation might, and often do, perform very differently from another vendor's response automation capabilities. But, hey, they have "response automation!" A recently published guide is meant to make sense of Response Automation ( Download here ). It discusses the evolution of response automation and distinguishes five increasingly capabl...

A day after  Apple  and  Google  rolled out urgent security updates, Microsoft has  pushed software fixes  as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday release cycle to plug 66 security holes affecting Windows and other components such as Azure, Office, BitLocker, and Visual Studio, including an  actively exploited zero-day  in its MSHTML Platform that came to light last week.  Of the 66 flaws, three are rated Critical, 62 are rated Important, and one is rated Moderate in severity. This is aside from the  20 vulnerabilities  in the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser that the company addressed since the start of the month. The most important of the updates concerns a patch for  CVE-2021-40444  (CVSS score: 8.8), an actively exploited remote code execution vulnerability in MSHTML that leverages malware-laced Microsoft Office documents, with EXPMON researchers noting "the exploit uses logical flaws so the exploitation is perfe...

Users searching for TeamViewer remote desktop software on search engines like Google are being redirected to malicious links that drop  ZLoader  malware onto their systems while simultaneously embracing a stealthier infection chain that allows it to linger on infected devices and evade detection by security solutions. "The malware is downloaded from a Google advertisement published through Google Adwords," researchers from SentinelOne  said  in a report published on Monday. "In this campaign, the attackers use an indirect way to compromise victims instead of using the classic approach of compromising the victims directly, such as by phishing." First discovered in 2016, ZLoader (aka Silent Night and ZBot) is a  fully-featured banking trojan  and a fork of another banking malware called ZeuS, with newer versions implementing a VNC module that grants adversaries remote access to victim systems. The malware is in active development, with criminal actors spa...

Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday disclosed details about a high-severity flaw in the HP OMEN driver software that impacts millions of gaming computers worldwide, leaving them open to an array of attacks. Tracked as  CVE-2021-3437  (CVSS score: 7.8), the vulnerabilities could allow threat actors to escalate privileges to kernel mode without requiring administrator permissions, allowing them to disable security products, overwrite system components, and even corrupt the operating system. Cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, which discovered and reported the shortcoming to HP on February 17, said it found no evidence of in-the-wild exploitation. The computer hardware company has since released a security update to its customers to address these vulnerabilities. The issues themselves are rooted in a component called  OMEN Command Center  that comes pre-installed on HP OMEN-branded laptops and desktops and can also be downloaded from the Microsoft Store. The software,...

Every once in a while, an industry term will get overused by marketing to the point of becoming a cliche. "Zero Trust" may have reached this threshold. In some ways, we understand why this is happening. Security perimeters have become obsolete as people use mobile devices and cloud applications to work from anywhere. Zero Trust deployment — moving all your apps and data to the cloud and assuming no user or device is trustworthy until proven otherwise in order to gain access — has been rapidly introduced as a result of the pandemic. However, most attempts at achieving Zero Trust access today are a patchwork of disparate products from different vendors connected to virtual private networks (VPN), with rudimentary on-off access controls based on limited visibility. Cloud security company,  Lookout , believes a modern approach to Zero Trust needs to take into account the fact that data has moved to the cloud and users are working from anywhere, on any device, and connecting o...

Apple has released  iOS 14.8, iPadOS 14.8 ,  watchOS 7.6.2 ,  macOS Big Sur 11.6 , and  Safari 14.1.2  to fix two actively exploited vulnerabilities, one of which defeated extra security protections built into the operating system. The list of two flaws is as follows - CVE-2021-30858  (WebKit) - A use after free issue that could result in arbitrary code execution when processing maliciously crafted web content. The flaw has been addressed with improved memory management. CVE-2021-30860  (CoreGraphics) - An integer overflow vulnerability that could lead to arbitrary code execution when processing a maliciously crafted PDF document. The bug has been remediated with improved input validation. "Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited," the iPhone maker noted in its advisory. The updates arrive weeks after researchers from the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab revealed details of a zero-day exploit called " FOR...

Google on Monday released security updates for Chrome web browser to address a total of 11 security issues, two of which it says are actively exploited zero-days in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2021-30632  and  CVE-2021-30633 , the  vulnerabilities  concern an out of bounds write in V8 JavaScript engine and a use after free flaw in Indexed DB API respectively, with the internet giant crediting anonymous researchers for reporting the bugs on September 8. As is typically the case, the company said it's "aware that exploits for CVE-2021-30632 and CVE-2021-30633 exist in the wild" without sharing additional specifics about how, when, and where the vulnerabilities were exploited, or the threat actors that may be abusing them. With these two security shortcomings, Google has addressed a total of 11 zero-day vulnerabilities in Chrome since the start of the year — CVE-2021-21148  - Heap buffer overflow in V8 CVE-2021-21166  - Object recycle issue in audi...

Researchers on Monday took the wraps off a newly discovered Linux and Windows re-implementation of  Cobalt Strike Beacon  that's actively set its sights on government, telecommunications, information technology, and financial institutions in the wild. The as-yet undetected version of the penetration testing tool — codenamed "Vermilion Strike" — marks one of the  rare Linux ports , which has been traditionally a Windows-based red team tool heavily repurposed by adversaries to mount an array of targeted attacks. Cobalt Strike bills itself as a " threat emulation software ," with Beacon being the payload engineered to model an advanced actor and duplicate their post-exploitation actions. "The stealthy sample uses Cobalt Strike's command-and-control (C2) protocol when communicating to the C2 server and has remote access capabilities such as uploading files, running shell commands and writing to files," Intezer researchers said in a report publishe...

A widely used NPM package called ' Pac-Resolver ' for the JavaScript programming language has been remediated with a fix for a high-severity remote code execution vulnerability that could be abused to run malicious code inside Node.js applications whenever HTTP requests are sent.  The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2021-23406 , has a severity rating of 8.1 on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system and affects Pac-Resolver versions before 5.0.0. A Proxy Auto-Configuration ( PAC ) file is a JavaScript function that determines whether web browser requests should be routed directly to the destination or forwarded to a web proxy server for a given hostname. PAC files are how proxy rules are distributed in enterprise environments. "This package is used for PAC file support in  Pac-Proxy-Agent , which is used in turn in  Proxy-Agent , which then used all over the place as the standard go-to package for HTTP proxy auto-detection and configuration in Node.js," Tim Perry  said...

A newly discovered side-channel attack demonstrated on modern processors can be weaponized to successfully overcome  Site Isolation protections  weaved into Google Chrome and Chromium browsers and leak sensitive data in a  Spectre-style   speculative execution  attack. Dubbed " Spook.js " by academics from the University of Michigan, University of Adelaide, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Tel Aviv University, the technique is a  JavaScript-based line of attack  that specifically aims to get around barriers Google put in place to potentially prevent leakage by ensuring that content from different domains is not shared in the same address space after Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities came to light in January 2018. "An attacker-controlled webpage can know which other pages from the same websites a user is currently browsing, retrieve sensitive information from these pages, and even recover login credentials (e.g., username and password) when t...

Russian internet giant Yandex has been the target of a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack by a new botnet called Mēris. The botnet is believed to have pummeled the company's web infrastructure with millions of HTTP requests, before hitting a peak of 21.8 million requests per second (RPS), dwarfing a recent botnet-powered attack that came to light last month,  bombarding  an unnamed Cloudflare customer in the financial industry with 17.2 million RPS. Russian DDoS mitigation service Qrator Labs, which disclosed details of the attack on Thursday, called  Mēris  — meaning "Plague" in the Latvian language — a "botnet of a new kind."  "It is also clear that this particular botnet is still growing. There is a suggestion that the botnet could grow in force through password brute-forcing, although we tend to neglect that as a slight possibility. That looks like some vulnerability that was either kept secret before the massive campaign...

WhatsApp on Friday  announced  it will roll out support for end-to-end encrypted chat backups on the cloud for Android and iOS users, paving the way for storing information such as chat messages and photos in Apple iCloud or Google Drive in a cryptographically secure manner. The optional feature, which will go live to all of its two billion users in the coming weeks, is expected to only work on the primary devices tied to their accounts, and not companion devices such as desktops or laptops that simply mirror the content of WhatsApp on the phones. The development marks an escalation in the growing tussle over encryption technology and meeting law enforcement needs, wherein privacy-preserving technologies have created impenetrable barriers to comply with legal demands to access vast swathes of digital information stored on smartphones and the cloud — a phenomenon referred to as the "going dark" problem. While the Facebook-owned messaging platform flipped the switch on end-...

The Linux community was caught unprepared when, in December 2020, as part of a change in the way Red Hat supports and develops CentOS, Red Hat suddenly announced that it's cutting the official CentOS 8 support window from ten years – to just two, with support ending Dec 31, 2021. It created a peculiar situation where CentOS 7 users that did the right thing and upgraded quickly to CentOS 8 were left using an OS with just a year's official support remaining – while users of CentOS 7 still get full support until June 30, 2024. Worse, the fact that stable releases of CentOS were discontinued in exchange for the rolling-release CentOS Stream means that to secure their workloads most CentOS 8 users have to opt for an entirely different Linux distribution, with just a year to choose, evaluate and implement an alternative. Red Hat's unexpected decision underlined to what degree software users depend on official support windows for their software security. Countless organization...