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Ransomware groups continue to evolve their tactics and techniques to deploy file-encrypting malware on compromised systems, notwithstanding law enforcement's disruptive actions against the cybercrime gangs to prevent them from victimizing additional companies. "Be it due to law enforcement, infighting amongst groups or people abandoning variants altogether, the RaaS [ransomware-as-a-service] groups dominating the ecosystem at this point in time are completely different than just a few months ago," Intel 471 researchers  said  in a report published this month. "Yet, even with the shift in the variants, ransomware incidents as a whole are still on the rise." Sweeping law enforcement operations  undertaken by government agencies  in recent months have brought about rapid shifts in the RaaS landscape and turned the tables on ransomware syndicates like Avaddon,  BlackMatter ,  Cl0p ,  DarkSide , Egregor, and  REvil , forcing the actors to slow down ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an evasive malware campaign that makes use of valid code signing certificates to sneak past security defenses and stay under the radar with the goal of deploying Cobalt Strike and BitRAT payloads on compromised systems. The binary, a loader, has been dubbed "Blister" by researchers from Elastic Security, with the malware samples having  negligible  to  zero  detections on VirusTotal. As of writing, the infection vector used to stage the attack, as well as the ultimate objectives of the intrusion, remains unknown. A notable aspect of the attacks is that they leverage a valid code signing certificate issued by  Sectigo . The malware has been observed signed with the certificate in question dating back to September 15, 2021. Elastic said it reached out to the company to ensure that the abused certificates are revoked. "Executables with valid code signing certificates are often scrutinized to a lesser degree t...

Cybersecurity agencies from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S. on Wednesday released a joint advisory in response to widespread exploitation of multiple vulnerabilities in Apache's Log4j software library by nefarious adversaries. "These vulnerabilities, especially Log4Shell, are severe," the intelligence agencies said in the  new   guidance . "Sophisticated cyber threat actors are actively scanning networks to potentially exploit  Log4Shell ,  CVE-2021-45046 , and  CVE-2021-45105  in vulnerable systems. These vulnerabilities are likely to be exploited over an extended period." An attacker can exploit Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228) by submitting a specially crafted request to a vulnerable system that causes that system to execute arbitrary code. CVE-2021-45046, on the other hand, allows for remote code execution in certain non-default configurations, while CVE-2021-45105 could be leveraged by a remote attacker to cause a denial-of-service...

By the end of 2021, there will be 12 billion connected IoT devices, and by 2025, that number will rise to 27 billion . All these devices will be connected to the internet and will send useful data that will make industries, medicine, and cars more intelligent and more efficient. However, will all these devices be safe? It's worth asking what you can do to prevent (or at least reduce) becoming a victim of a cybercrime such as data theft or other forms of cybercrime in the future? Will IoT security ever improve? In recent years, the number of security vulnerabilities related to the Internet of Things has increased significantly. Let us start at the very beginning — most IoT devices come with default and publicly disclosed passwords. Moreover, the fact is that there are many cheap and low-capacity Internet of Things devices that lack even the most basic security. And that's not all — security experts are discovering new critical vulnerabilities every day. Numerous IoT devic...

A security flaw has been unearthed in Microsoft's Azure App Service that resulted in the exposure of source code of customer applications written in Java, Node, PHP, Python, and Ruby for at least four years since September 2017. The vulnerability, codenamed " NotLegit ," was reported to the tech giant by Wiz researchers on October 7, 2021, following which mitigations have been undertaken to fix the information disclosure bug in November. Microsoft  said  a "limited subset of customers" are at risk, adding "Customers who deployed code to App Service Linux via Local Git after files were already created in the application were the only impacted customers." The  Azure App Service  (aka Azure Web Apps) is a cloud computing-based platform for building and hosting web applications. It allows users to deploy source code and artifacts to the service using a local  Git  repository, or via repositories hosted on GitHub and Bitbucket. The insecure default be...

Microsoft said it won't be fixing or is pushing patches to a later date for three of the four security flaws uncovered in its Teams business communication platform earlier this March. The disclosure comes from Berlin-based cybersecurity firm Positive Security, which  found  that the implementation of the link preview feature was susceptible to a number of issues that could "allow accessing internal Microsoft services, spoofing the link preview, and, for Android users, leaking their IP address, and DoS'ing their Teams app/channels." Of the four vulnerabilities, Microsoft is said to have addressed only one that results in IP address leakage from Android devices, with the tech giant noting that a fix for the denial-of-service (DoS) flaw will be considered in a future version of the product. The issues were responsibly disclosed to the company on March 10, 2021. Chief among the flaws is a server-side request forgery ( SSRF ) vulnerability in the endpoint "/urlp...

China's internet regulator, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), has temporarily suspended a partnership with Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing subsidiary of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, for six months on account of the fact that it failed to promptly inform the government about a critical security vulnerability affecting the broadly used Log4j logging library. The development was disclosed by  Reuters  and  South China Morning Post , citing a report from 21st Century Business Herald, a Chinese business-news daily newspaper. "Alibaba Cloud did not immediately report vulnerabilities in the popular, open-source logging framework Apache Log4j2 to China's telecommunications regulator," Reuters said. "In response, MIIT suspended a cooperative partnership with the cloud unit regarding cybersecurity threats and information-sharing platforms." Tracked as  CVE-2021-44228  (CVSS score: 10.0) and codenamed  Log4Shell  or LogJam, t...

A short-lived phishing campaign has been observed taking advantage of a novel exploit that bypassed a patch put in place by Microsoft to fix a remote code execution vulnerability affecting the MSHTML component with the goal of delivering Formbook malware. "The attachments represent an escalation of the attacker's abuse of the CVE-2021-40444 bug and demonstrate that even a patch can't always mitigate the actions of a motivated and sufficiently skilled attacker," SophosLabs researchers Andrew Brandt and Stephen Ormandy  said  in a new report published Tuesday. CVE-2021-40444  (CVSS score: 8.8) relates to a remote code execution flaw in MSHTML that could be exploited using specially crafted Microsoft Office documents. Although Microsoft addressed the security weakness as part of its September 2021  Patch Tuesday updates , it has been put to use in  multiple attacks  ever since details pertaining to the flaw became public. That same month, the technology g...

Microsoft is urging customers to patch two security vulnerabilities in Active Directory domain controllers that it  addressed in November  following the availability of a proof-of-concept (PoC) tool on December 12. The two vulnerabilities — tracked as  CVE-2021-42278  and  CVE-2021-42287  — have a severity rating of 7.5 out of a maximum of 10 and concern a privilege escalation flaw affecting the Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) component. Credited with discovering and reporting both the bugs is Andrew Bartlett of Catalyst IT. Active Directory is a  directory service  that runs on Microsoft Windows Server and is used for identity and access management. Although the tech giant marked the shortcomings as " exploitation Less Likely " in its assessment, the public disclosure of the PoC has prompted renewed calls for applying the fixes to mitigate any potential exploitation by threat actors. While CVE-2021-42278 enables an attacker to tamp...

The transportation industry and government agencies related to the sector are the victims of an ongoing campaign since July 2020 by a sophisticated and well-equipped cyberespionage group in what appears to be yet another uptick in malicious activities that are "just the tip of the iceberg." "The group tried to access some internal documents (such as flight schedules and documents for financial plans) and personal information on the compromised hosts (such as search histories)," Trend Micro researchers Nick Dai, Ted Lee, and Vickie Su  said  in a report published last week. Earth Centaur, also known by the monikers  Pirate Panda  and Tropic Trooper, is a long-running threat group focused on information theft and espionage that has led targeted campaigns against government, healthcare, transportation, and high-tech industries in Taiwan, the Philippines, and Hong Kong dating all the way back to 2011. The hostile agents, believed to be a Chinese-speaking actor, are...

Even with the growing awareness about cybersecurity, many myths about it are prevalent. These misconceptions can be a barrier to effective security.  The first step to ensure the security of your business is to separate the false information, myths, and rumors from the truth. Here, we're busting some common cybersecurity myths. Read on to find out which of the following you thought were true. Cybersecurity Myths vs. Truths Myth #1 — Too much security diminishes productivity There is a common idea that increased security makes it difficult for even employees to access what they need, not just hackers. Strict security policies such as regular monitoring and access control are believed to hinder productivity at work. However, doing away with security may have far-reaching consequences for your business. A successful attack like a  DDoS attack or ransomware can bring your business to a standstill. Employees might not be able to access important files, networks, and info...

Multiple backdoors have been discovered during a penetration test in the firmware of a widely used voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) appliance from Auerswald, a German telecommunications hardware manufacturer, that could be abused to gain full administrative access to the devices. "Two backdoor passwords were found in the firmware of the  COMpact 5500R PBX ," researchers from RedTeam Pentesting said in a  technical   analysis  published Monday. "One backdoor password is for the secret user ' Schandelah ', the other can be used for the highest-privileged user ' admin .' No way was discovered to disable these backdoors." The vulnerability has been assigned the identifier  CVE-2021-40859  and carries a critical severity rating of 9.8. Following responsible disclosure on September 10, Auerswald addressed the problem in a firmware update (version 8.2B) released in November 2021. "Firmware Update 8.2B contains important security updates that you...

Facebook's parent company Meta Platforms on Monday said it has filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. state of California against bad actors who operated more than 39,000 phishing websites that impersonated its digital properties to mislead unsuspecting users into divulging their login credentials. The social engineering scheme involved the creation of rogue webpages that masqueraded as the login pages of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, on which victims were prompted to enter their usernames and passwords that were then harvested by the defendants. The tech giant is also seeking $500,000 from the anonymous actors. The attacks were carried out using a relay service, Ngrok , that redirected internet traffic to the phishing websites in a manner that concealed the true location of the fraudulent infrastructure. Meta said the volume of these phishing attacks ramped up in volume since March 2021 and that it worked with the relay service to suspend thousands of URLs to the...

Researchers have disclosed security vulnerabilities in handover, a fundamental mechanism that undergirds modern cellular networks, which could be exploited by adversaries to launch denial-of-service (DoS) and man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks using low-cost equipment. The "vulnerabilities in the handover procedure are not limited to one handover case only but they impact all different handover cases and scenarios that are based on unverified measurement reports and signal strength thresholds," researchers Evangelos Bitsikas and Christina Pöpper from the New York University Abu Dhabi said in a  new paper . "The problem affects all generations since 2G (GSM), remaining unsolved so far." Handover , also known as handoff, is a process in telecommunications in which a phone call or a data session is transferred from one  cell site  (aka base station) to another cell tower without losing connectivity during the transmission. This method is crucial to establishing cellul...

The last several years have seen an ever-increasing number of cyber-attacks, and while the frequency of such attacks has increased, so too has the resulting damage. One needs only to look at  CISA's list of significant cyber incidents  to appreciate the magnitude of the problem. In May of 2021, for example, a ransomware attack brought down the Colonial Pipeline, causing a serious fuel disruption for much of the United States. Just last month, a hacking group gained access to call logs and text messages from telecommunications carriers all over the world. These are just two of dozens of cyber-attacks occurring this year. Because of these and other cyber security incidents, the Department of Homeland Security issues a  compulsory directive  to federal agencies to better protect federal information systems and the data that they contain against cyber-attack. This directive is based around  CISA's catalog of vulnerabilities  that are known to pose a signific...

A U.S. federal government commission associated with international rights has been targeted by a backdoor that reportedly compromised its internal network in what the researchers described as a "classic APT-type operation."  "This attack could have given total visibility of the network and complete control of a system and thus could be used as the first step in a multi-stage attack to penetrate this, or other networks more deeply," Czech security company Avast  said  in a report published last week. The name of the federal entity was not disclosed, but reports from  Ars Technica  and  The Record  tied it to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom ( USCIRF ). Avast said it was making its findings public after unsuccessful attempts to directly notify the agency about the intrusion and through other channels put in place by the U.S. government. At this stage, only "parts of the attack puzzle" have been uncovered, leaving the door open ...