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The financially motivated FIN7 cybercrime gang has masqueraded as yet another fictitious cybersecurity company called "Bastion Secure" to recruit unwitting software engineers under the guise of penetration testing in a likely lead-up to a ransomware scheme. "With FIN7's latest fake company, the criminal group leveraged true, publicly available information from various legitimate cybersecurity companies to create a thin veil of legitimacy around Bastion Secure," Recorded Future's Gemini Advisory unit said in a report. "FIN7 is adopting disinformation tactics so that if a potential hire or interested party were to fact check Bastion Secure, then a cursory search on Google would return 'true' information for companies with a similar name or industry to FIN7's Bastion Secure." FIN7 , also known as Carbanak, Carbon Spider, and Anunak, has a track record of striking restaurant, gambling, and hospitality industries in the U.S. to infect ...

A newly identified rootkit has been found with a valid digital signature issued by Microsoft that's used to proxy traffic to internet addresses of interest to the attackers for over a year targeting online gamers in China. Bucharest-headquartered cybersecurity technology company Bitdefender named the malware " FiveSys ," calling out its possible credential theft and in-game-purchase hijacking motives. The Windows maker has since revoked the signature following responsible disclosure. "Digital signatures are a way of establishing trust," Bitdefender researchers said in a white paper, adding "a valid digital signature helps the attacker navigate around the operating system's restrictions on loading third-party modules into the kernel. Once loaded, the rootkit allows its creators to gain virtually unlimited privileges." Rootkits are both evasive and stealthy as they offer threat actors an entrenched foothold onto victims' systems and conceal ...

An effective cybersecurity strategy can be challenging to implement correctly and often involves many layers of security. Part of a robust security strategy involves performing what is known as a penetration test (pen test). The penetration test helps to discover vulnerabilities and weaknesses in your security defenses before the bad guys discover these. They can also help validate remedial efforts and solutions put in place to overcome previously discovered security vulnerabilities.  Let's look more closely at the pen test. What is included in a penetration test? How are they performed, and by whom? What steps should be taken after a penetration test? What is a penetration test? 1 — Simulated cyberattack A penetration test is, for all practical purposes, a simulated cyberattack on your business. However, it is carried out by the "good guys." An outside resource often conducts a penetration test, whether a third-party security consulting company or another security entity. Sec...

Is Managing Customer Logins and Data Giving You Headaches? You're Not Alone! Today, we all expect super-fast, secure, and personalized online experiences. But let's be honest, we're also more careful about how our data is used. If something feels off, trust can vanish in an instant. Add to that the lightning-fast changes AI is bringing to everything from how we log in to spotting online fraud, and it's a whole new ball game! If you're dealing with logins, data privacy, bringing new users on board, or building digital trust, this webinar is for you . Join us for " Navigating Customer Identity in the AI Era ," where we'll dive into the Auth0 2025 Customer Identity Trends Report . We'll show you what's working, what's not, and how to tweak your strategy for the year ahead. In just one session, you'll get practical answers to real-world challenges like: How AI is changing what users expect – and where they're starting to push ba...

A new security weakness has been disclosed in the WinRAR trialware file archiver utility for Windows that could be abused by a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on targeted systems, underscoring how vulnerabilities in such software could beсome a gateway for a roster of attacks. Tracked as CVE-2021-35052, the bug impacts the trial version of the software running version 5.70. "This vulnerability allows an attacker to intercept and modify requests sent to the user of the application," Positive Technologies' Igor Sak-Sakovskiy  said  in a technical write-up. "This can be used to achieve remote code execution (RCE) on a victim's computer." The issue has since been addressed in WinRAR version 6.02 released on June 14, 2021. Sak-Sakovskiy noted that an investigation into WinRAR began after observing a JavaScript error rendered by MSHTML (aka Trident), a proprietary browser engine for the now-discontinued Internet Explorer and which is used in Office...

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications have gone from novelty to business necessity in a few short years, and its positive impact on organizations is clear. It's safe to say that most industries today run on SaaS applications, which is undoubtedly positive, but it does introduce some critical new challenges to organizations.  As SaaS application use expands, as well as the number of touchpoints they create, the attack surface also becomes significantly larger. As an answer to this emerging challenge, XDR provider Cynet has added a new SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) tool to its existing platform ( you can learn more here ). Regardless of the size of an organization or its security team, managing the security policy and posture of dozens to hundreds of SaaS applications is a complex task, and one that requires the right tools to expedite and optimize. Using SSPM can centralize many of the management and logistics requirements and offer a more unified way to establish s...

Three JavaScript libraries uploaded to the official NPM package repository have been unmasked as crypto-mining malware, once again demonstrating how open-source software package repositories are becoming a lucrative target for executing an array of attacks on Windows, macOS, and Linux systems. The malicious packages in question — named  okhsa ,  klow , and  klown  — were published by the same developer and falsely claimed to be JavaScript-based user-agent string parsers designed to extract hardware specifics from the " User-Agent " HTTP header. But unbeknownst to the victims who imported them, the author hid cryptocurrency mining malware inside the libraries. The bad actor's NPM account has since been deactivated, and all the three libraries, each of which were downloaded 112, 4, and 65 times respectively, have been removed from the repository as of October 15, 2021. Attacks involving the three libraries worked by detecting the current operating system, before p...

The U.S. Commerce Department on Wednesday announced new rules barring the sales of hacking software and equipment to authoritarian regimes and potentially facilitate human rights abuse for national security (NS) and anti-terrorism (AT) reasons. The  mandate , which is set to go into effect in 90 days, will forbid the export, reexport and transfer of "cybersecurity items" to countries of "national security or weapons of mass destruction concern" such as China and Russia without a license from the department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS). "The United States Government opposes the misuse of technology to abuse human rights or conduct other malicious cyber activities, and these new rules will help ensure that U.S. companies are not fueling authoritarian practices," BIS  said  in a press release. The rule does not cover "intrusion software" itself, but rather the following — Systems, equipment, and components specially designed or...

Since at least late 2019, a network of hackers-for-hire have been hijacking the channels of YouTube creators, luring them with bogus collaboration opportunities to broadcast cryptocurrency scams or sell the accounts to the highest bidder. That's according to a new report published by Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG), which said it disrupted financially motivated phishing campaigns targeting the video platform with cookie theft malware. The actors behind the infiltration have been attributed to a group of hackers recruited in a Russian-speaking forum. "Cookie Theft, also known as 'pass-the-cookie attack,' is a session hijacking technique that enables access to user accounts with session cookies stored in the browser," TAG's Ashley Shen  said . "While the technique has been around for decades, its resurgence as a top security risk could be due to a wider adoption of multi-factor authentication (MFA) making it difficult to conduct abuse, and shif...

Two Eastern European nationals have been sentenced in the U.S. for offering "bulletproof hosting" services to cybercriminals, who used the technical infrastructure to distribute malware and attack financial institutions across the country between 2009 to 2015. Pavel Stassi, 30, of Estonia, and Aleksandr Shorodumov, 33, of Lithuania, have been each sentenced to 24 months and 48 months in prison, respectively, for their roles in the scheme. Court documents showed that both the individuals worked as administrators for an unnamed bulletproof hosting service provider that rented out IP addresses, servers, and domains to cybercriminal clients to disseminate malware such as Zeus, SpyEye, Citadel, and the Blackhole Exploit kit that were used to gain access to victims' machines, co-opt them to a botnet, and siphon banking credentials. The development comes months after Stassi and Shorodumov, along with the service's Russian founders Aleksandr Grichishkin and Andrei Skvort...

A newly disclosed vulnerability affecting Intel processors could be abused by an adversary to gain access to sensitive information stored within enclaves and even run arbitrary code on vulnerable systems. The vulnerability ( CVE-2021-0186 , CVSS score: 8.2) was discovered by a group of academics from ETH Zurich, the National University of Singapore, and the Chinese National University of Defense Technology in early May 2021, who used it to stage a confidential data disclosure attack called " SmashEx " that can corrupt private data housed in the enclave and break its integrity. Introduced with Intel's Skylake processors, SGX (short for Software Guard eXtensions) allows developers to run selected application modules in a completely isolated secure compartment of memory, called an enclave or a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), which is designed to be protected from processes running at higher privilege levels like the operating system. SGX ensures that data is secure ...

Code injection attacks, the infamous king of vulnerabilities, have lost the top spot to broken access control as the worst of the worst, and developers need to take notice. In this increasingly chaotic world, there have always been a few constants that people could reliably count on: The sun will rise in the morning and set again at night, Mario will always be cooler than Sonic the Hedgehog, and code injection attacks will always occupy the top spot on the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) list of the  top ten most common  and dangerous vulnerabilities that attackers are actively exploiting. Well, the sun will rise tomorrow, and Mario still has "one-up" on Sonic, but code injection attacks have fallen out of the number one spot on the infamous OWASP list, refreshed in 2021. One of the oldest forms of attacks,  code injection vulnerabilities  have been around almost as long as computer networking. The blanket vulnerability is responsible for a wide rang...

A highly sophisticated adversary named LightBasin has been identified as behind a string of attacks targeting the telecom sector with the goal of collecting "highly specific information" from mobile communication infrastructure, such as subscriber information and call metadata.  "The nature of the data targeted by the actor aligns with information likely to be of significant interest to signals intelligence organizations," researchers from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike  said  in an analysis published Tuesday. Known to be active as far back as 2016, LightBasin (aka UNC1945) is believed to have compromised 13 telecommunication companies across the world since 2019 by leveraging custom tools and their extensive knowledge of telecommunications protocols for scything through organizations' defenses. The identities of the targeted entities were not disclosed, nor did the findings link the cluster's activity to a specific country. Indeed, a recent incident in...

Microsoft has published a new advisory warning of a security bypass vulnerability affecting Surface Pro 3 convertible laptops that could be exploited by an adversary to introduce malicious devices within enterprise networks and defeat the device attestation mechanism. Tracked as  CVE-2021-42299  (CVSS score: 5.6), the issue has been codenamed " TPM Carte Blanche " by Google software engineer Chris Fenner, who is credited with discovering and reporting the attack technique. As of writing, other Surface devices, including the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book, have been deemed unaffected, although other non-Microsoft machines using a similar BIOS may be vulnerable. "Devices use Platform Configuration Registers ( PCRs ) to record information about device and software configuration to ensure that the boot process is secure," the Windows maker noted in a bulletin. "Windows uses these PCR measurements to determine device health. A vulnerable device can masquerade as...

Researchers have disclosed an out-of-bounds read vulnerability in the Squirrel programming language that can be abused by attackers to break out of the sandbox restrictions and execute arbitrary code within a SquirrelVM, thus giving a malicious actor complete access to the underlying machine.  Tracked as CVE-2021-41556 , the issue occurs when a game library referred to as Squirrel Engine is used to execute untrusted code and affects stable release branches 3.x and 2.x of Squirrel. The vulnerability was responsibly disclosed on August 10, 2021. Squirrel is an open-source, object-oriented programming language that's used for scripting video games and as well as in IoT devices and distributed transaction processing platforms such as Enduro/X. "In a real-world scenario, an attacker could embed a malicious Squirrel script into a community map and distribute it via the trusted Steam Workshop," researchers Simon Scannell and Niklas Breitfeld said in a report shared with ...

Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday took the wraps off a mass volume email attack staged by a prolific cybercriminal gang affecting a wide range of industries, with one of its region-specific operations notably targeting Germany and Austria. Enterprise security firm Proofpoint tied the malware campaign with high confidence to  TA505 , which is the name assigned to the financially motivated threat group that's been active in the cybercrime business since at least 2014, and is behind the infamous Dridex banking trojan and an arsenal of other malicious tools such as FlawedAmmyy, FlawedGrace, Neutrino botnet, and Locky ransomware, among others. Cybersecurity company Morphisec Labs is tracking the same attack chain under the independent moniker " MirrorBlast ." The attacks are said to have started as a series of low-volume email waves, delivering only several thousand messages in each phase, before ramping up in late September and as recently as October 13, resulting in ...

A threat actor, previously known for striking organizations in the energy and telecommunications sectors across the Middle East as early as April 2018, has evolved its malware arsenal to strike two entities in Tunisia. Security researchers at Kaspersky, who presented their findings at the VirusBulletin VB2021 conference earlier this month, attributed the attacks to a group tracked as  Lyceum  (aka Hexane), which was first  publicly documented  in 2019 by Secureworks. "The victims we observed were all high-profile Tunisian organizations, such as telecommunications or aviation companies," researchers Aseel Kayal, Mark Lechtik, and Paul Rascagneres  detailed . "Based on the targeted industries, we assume that the attackers might have been interested in compromising such entities to track the movements and communications of individuals of interest to them." Analysis of the threat actor's toolset has shown that the attacks have shifted from leveraging a combinat...

Patching really, really matters – patching is what keeps technology solutions from becoming like big blocks of Swiss cheese, with endless security vulnerabilities punching hole after hole into critical solutions. But anyone who's spent any amount of time maintaining systems will know that patching is often easier said than done. Yes, in some instances, you can just run a command line to install that patch, and that's it. These instances are increasingly rare though – given the complexity of the technology environment, you're more likely faced with a complex process to achieve patching best practice. In this article, we'll outline why database patching matters (yes, databases are vulnerable too!), explain what the problem is with patching databases, and point to a novel solution that takes the pain out of database patching. Watch out – your database services are vulnerable too We know that database services are critical – databases underpin IT operations in countle...