The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

Threat actors leveraged a cloud video hosting service to carry out a supply chain attack on more than  100 real estate websites  operated by Sotheby's Realty that involved injecting malicious skimmers to steal sensitive personal information. "The attacker injected the skimmer JavaScript codes into video, so whenever others import the video, their websites get embedded with skimmer codes as well," Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 researchers  said  in a report published this week. The skimmer attacks, also called formjacking, relates to a type of cyber attack wherein bad actors insert malicious JavaScript code into the target website, most often to checkout or payment pages on shopping and e-commerce portals, to harvest valuable information such as credit card details entered by users. In the latest incarnation of the Magecart attacks, the operators behind the campaign breached the Brightcove account of Sotheby's and deployed malicious code into the player of the ...

Microsoft is warning of continuing attempts by nation-state adversaries and commodity attackers to take advantage of  security vulnerabilities  uncovered in the Log4j open-source logging framework to deploy malware on vulnerable systems. "Exploitation attempts and testing have remained high during the last weeks of December," Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC)  said  in revised guidance published earlier this week. "We have observed many existing attackers adding exploits of these vulnerabilities in their existing malware kits and tactics, from coin miners to hands-on-keyboard attacks." Publicly disclosed by the Apache Software Foundation on December 10, 2021, the remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Apache Log4j 2, aka  Log4Shell , has emerged as a new attack vector for  widespread exploitation  by a variety of threat actors. In the subsequent weeks, four more weaknesses in the utility have come to light —  CVE-2021-45046 ,...

A group of academics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, has demonstrated what it calls a "scalable technique" to vet smart contracts and mitigate state-inconsistency bugs, discovering 47 zero-day vulnerabilities on the Ethereum blockchain in the process. Smart contracts are  programs  stored on the blockchain that are automatically executed when predetermined conditions are met based on the encoded terms of the agreement. They allow trusted transactions and agreements to be carried out between anonymous parties without the need for a central authority. In other words, the code itself is meant to be the final arbiter of "the deal" it represents, with the program controlling all aspects of the execution, and providing an immutable evidentiary audit trail of transactions that are both trackable and irreversible. This also means that vulnerabilities in the code could result in hefty losses, as evidenced by hacks aimed at  the DAO  and more recently,...

A persistent denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability has been discovered in Apple's iOS mobile operating system that's capable of sending affected devices into a crash or reboot loop upon connecting to an Apple Home-compatible appliance. The behavior, dubbed "doorLock," is trivial in that it can be triggered by simply changing the name of a HomeKit device to a string larger than 500,000 characters. This causes an iPhone or iPad that attempts to connect to the device to become unresponsive and enter an indefinite cycle of system failure and restart that can only be mitigated by restoring the affected device from Recovery or DFU (Device Firmware Update) Mode. HomeKit  is Apple's software framework that allows iOS and iPadOS users to configure, communicate with, and control connected accessories and smart-home appliances using Apple devices. "Any device with an affected iOS version installed that loads the string will be disrupted, even after rebooting,...

Trojanized installers of the Telegram messaging application are being used to distribute the Windows-based Purple Fox backdoor on compromised systems. That's according to new research published by Minerva Labs, describing the attack as different from intrusions that typically take advantage of legitimate software for dropping malicious payloads. "This threat actor was able to leave most parts of the attack under the radar by separating the attack into several small files, most of which had very low detection rates by [antivirus] engines, with the final stage leading to Purple Fox rootkit infection," researcher Natalie Zargarov  said . First discovered in 2018, Purple Fox comes with rootkit capabilities that allow the malware to be planted beyond the reach of security solutions and evade detection. A March 2021 report from Guardicore  detailed  its worm-like propagation feature, enabling the backdoor to spread more rapidly. Then in October 2021, Trend Micro researche...

Cybersecurity researchers have proposed a novel approach that harnesses electromagnetic field emanations from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices as a side-channel to glean precise knowledge about the different kinds of malware targeting the embedded systems, even in scenarios where obfuscation techniques have been applied to hinder analysis. With the rapid adoption of IoT appliances presenting an attractive attack surface for threat actors, in part due to them being equipped with higher processing power and capable of running fully functional operating systems, the latest research aims to improve malware analysis to mitigate potential security risks. The findings were presented by a group of academics from the Research Institute of Computer Science and Random Systems (IRISA) at the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference ( ACSAC ) held last month. "[Electromagnetic] emanation that is measured from the device is practically undetectable by the malware," the res...

In May 2017, the first documented ransomware assault on networked medical equipment happened. The worldwide ransomware assault WannaCry compromised radiological and other instruments in several hospitals during its height, after a software failure caused by a cyberattack on its third-party vendor's oncology cloud service, cancer patients having radiation therapy at four healthcare institutions had to reschedule appointments. These examples show how cyberattacks and data breaches may have a significant impact on the healthcare industry, heavily reliant on connected medical equipment. PHI (patient health information) captured and stored in these connected medical devices must be secured. Because PHI is transferred over the cloud via server-based systems, making it very susceptible to hackers. Ransomware attacks on health care professionals have become more common, sophisticated, and severe in recent years. Individual bad actors have been supplanted as the main perpetrators by orga...

Microsoft, over the weekend, rolled out a fix to address an issue that caused email messages to get stuck on its Exchange Server platforms due to what it blamed on a date validation error at around the turn of the year. "The problem relates to a date check failure with the change of the new year and it [is] not a failure of the [antivirus] engine itself," the company  said  in a blog post. "This is not an issue with malware scanning or the malware engine, and it is not a security-related issue. The version checking performed against the signature file is causing the malware engine to crash, resulting in messages being stuck in transport queues." The Windows maker said the issue impacted on-premises versions of Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2019 but didn't specify how widespread the impact was. The issue began to  gain   attention  as the year 2022 kicked in, causing the servers to no longer deliver email messages while throwing the following erro...

A previously unknown rootkit has been found setting its sights on Hewlett-Packard Enterprise's Integrated Lights-Out ( iLO ) server management technology to carry out in-the-wild attacks that tamper with the firmware modules and completely wipe data off the infected systems. The discovery, which is the first instance of real-world malware in iLO firmware, was documented by Iranian cybersecurity firm Amnpardaz this week. "There are numerous aspects of iLO that make it an ideal utopia for malware and APT groups: Extremely high privileges (above any level of access in the operating system), very low-level access to the hardware, being totally out of the sight of the admins, and security tools, the general lack of knowledge and tools for inspecting iLO and/or protecting it, the persistence it provides for the malware to remain even after changing the operating system, and in particular being always running and never shutting down," the researchers  said . Besides managin...

A never-before-seen China-based targeted intrusion adversary dubbed Aquatic Panda has been observed leveraging  critical flaws  in the Apache Log4j logging library as an access vector to perform various post-exploitation operations, including reconnaissance and credential harvesting on targeted systems. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said the infiltration, which was ultimately foiled, was aimed at an unnamed "large academic institution." The state-sponsored group is believed to have been operating since mid-2020 in pursuit of intelligence collection and industrial espionage, with its attacks primarily directed against companies in the telecommunications, technology, and government sectors. The attempted intrusion exploited the newly discovered  Log4Shell  flaw (CVE-2021-44228, CVSS score: 10.0) to gain access to a vulnerable instance of the  VMware Horizon  desktop and app virtualization product, followed by running a series of malicious commands orches...

An ongoing crypto mining campaign has upgraded its arsenal while evolving its defense evasion tactics that enable the threat actors to conceal the intrusions and fly under the radar, new research published today has revealed. Since first detected in 2019, a total of 84 attacks against its honeypot servers have been recorded to date, four of which transpired in 2021, according to researchers from DevSecOps and cloud security firm Aqua Security, who have been tracking the malware operation for the past three years. That said, 125 attacks have been spotted in the wild in the third quarter of 2021 alone, signaling that the attacks have not slowed down. Initial attacks involved executing a malicious command upon running a vanilla image named "alpine:latest" that resulted in the download of a shell script named "autom.sh." "Adversaries commonly use vanilla images along with malicious commands to perform their attacks, because most organizations trust the official...

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) on Tuesday rolled out fresh patches to contain an arbitrary code execution flaw in Log4j that could be abused by threat actors to run malicious code on affected systems, making it the fifth security shortcoming to be discovered in the tool in the span of a month. Tracked as  CVE-2021-44832 , the vulnerability is rated 6.6 in severity on a scale of 10 and impacts all versions of the logging library from 2.0-alpha7 to 2.17.0 with the exception of 2.3.2 and 2.12.4. While Log4j versions 1.x are not affected, users are recommended to upgrade to Log4j 2.3.2 (for Java 6), 2.12.4 (for Java 7), or 2.17.1 (for Java 8 and later). "Apache Log4j2 versions 2.0-beta7 through 2.17.0 (excluding security fix releases 2.3.2 and 2.12.4) are vulnerable to a remote code execution (RCE) attack where an attacker with permission to modify the logging configuration file can construct a malicious configuration using a JDBC Appender with a data source referencing a JND...

Cybersecurity researchers have offered a detailed glimpse into a system called DoubleFeature that's dedicated to logging the different stages of post-exploitation stemming from the deployment of DanderSpritz, a full-featured malware framework used by the  Equation Group . DanderSpritz came to light on April 14, 2017, when a hacking group known as the Shadow Brokers leaked the exploit tool, among others, under a dispatch titled " Lost in Translation ." Also included in the leaks was  EternalBlue , a cyberattack exploit developed by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) that enabled threat actors to carry out the  NotPetya ransomware attack  on unpatched Windows computers. The tool is a modular, stealthy, and fully functional framework that relies on dozens of plugins for post-exploitation activities on Windows and Linux hosts. DoubleFeature is one among them, which functions as a "diagnostic tool for victim machines carrying DanderSpritz," researchers from ...

A number of security flaws have been uncovered in a networking component in Garrett Metal Detectors that could allow remote attackers to bypass authentication requirements, tamper with metal detector configurations, and even execute arbitrary code on the devices. "An attacker could manipulate this module to remotely monitor statistics on the metal detector, such as whether the alarm has been triggered or how many visitors have walked through," Cisco Talos  noted  in a disclosure publicized last week. "They could also make configuration changes, such as altering the sensitivity level of a device, which potentially poses a security risk to users who rely on these metal detectors." Talos security researcher Matt Wiseman has been credited with discovering and reporting these vulnerabilities on August 17, 2021. Patches have been released by the vendor on December 13, 2021. The flaws reside in Garrett  iC Module , which enables users to communicate to walk-through me...

Cybercrime is increasing exponentially and presents devastating risks for most organizations. According to Cybercrime Magazine, global cybercrime damage is predicted to hit $10.5 trillion annually as of 2025. One of the more recent and increasingly popular forms of tackling such issues by identifying is ethical hacking. This method identifies potential security vulnerabilities in its early stages. Certified ethical hackers use advanced tools and strategies to prevent cyberattacks and help organizations strengthen their cybersecurity. Why Companies Should Hire Ethical Hackers As cyberattacks constantly evolve and improve, organizations must ensure that their defense systems and approach can keep up with the level and complexity of cyberattacks. In today's business era, organizations cannot afford to operate without identifying the vulnerabilities in their system and taking preventive measures. As such, ethical hackers provide several advantages: they offer a unique outsider's persp...

Peter Parker might not be a mastermind cryptocurrency criminal, but the name Spiderman is quickly becoming more associated with the mining landscape.  ReasonLabs , a leading provider of cybersecurity prevention and detection software, recently discovered a new form of malware hacking into customer computers in the guise of the latest Spiderman movie.  As perhaps the most  talked-about movie for some time , Spiderman: No Way Home represents an excellent opportunity for hackers. It's a chance to connect with millions of potential targets, and hack into computers all around the globe. All today's malicious actors need to do is promise their victims access to the latest movie, and they get an all-access pass to their PC.  The cryptocurrency mining malware discovered by ReasonLabs disguises itself as a torrent for the Spiderman: No Way Home movie, encouraging viewers around the world to download the file, and open the computer to criminals.  Using a Mask: Trickin...

Researchers have discovered a new Android banking malware that targets Brazil's Itaú Unibanco with the help of lookalike Google Play Store pages to carry out fraudulent financial transactions on victim devices without their knowledge. "This application has a similar icon and name that could trick users into thinking it is a legitimate app related to Itaú Unibanco," Cyble researchers  said  in a report published last week. "The [threat actor] has created a fake Google Play Store page and hosted the malware that targets Itaú Unibanco on it under the name  'sincronizador.apk .'" The tactic of leveraging fake app store pages as a lure is not new. In March, Meta (previously Facebook)  disclosed  details of an attack campaign that used its platform as part of a broader operation to spy on Uyghur Muslims using rogue third-party websites that used replica domains for popular news portals and websites designed to resemble third-party Android app stores, where attacke...

Apple recently fixed a security vulnerability in the macOS operating system that could be potentially exploited by a threat actor to "trivially and reliably" bypass a "myriad of foundational macOS security mechanisms" and run arbitrary code. Security researcher Patrick Wardle  detailed  the discovery in a series of tweets on Thursday. Tracked as CVE-2021-30853 (CVSS score: 5.5), the issue relates to a scenario where a rogue macOS app may circumvent  Gatekeeper  checks, which ensure that only trusted apps can be run and that they have passed an automated process called " app notarization ." The iPhone maker, crediting Gordon Long of Box with reporting the flaw, said it  addressed the weakness  with improved checks as part of macOS 11.6 updates officially released on September 20, 2021. "Such bugs are often particularly impactful to everyday macOS users as they provide a means for adware and malware authors to sidestep macOS security mechanisms, …m...