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Apple last year fixed a new set of macOS vulnerabilities that exposed Safari browser to attack, potentially allowing malicious actors to access users' online accounts, microphone, and webcam. Security researcher Ryan Pickren, who discovered and reported the bugs to the iPhone maker, was compensated with a $100,500 bug bounty, underscoring the severity of the issues. By exploiting a chain of security issues with iCloud Sharing and Safari 15, it enables the attacker to hijack the multimedia permission and gain "full access to every website ever visited by the victim" in Safari, including Gmail, iCloud, Facebook, and PayPal accounts. The  issues  specifically concern ShareBear, an iCloud file-sharing mechanism that prompts users upon attempting to open a shared document for the first time. Taking advantage of the fact that users are never displayed the prompt again once they accept to open the file, Pickren found that it's possible to alter the file's content to...

An Israeli national was sentenced to 97 months in prison in connection with operating the DeepDotWeb ( DDW ) clearnet website, nearly a year after the individual pleaded guilty to the charges. Tal Prihar, 37, an Israeli citizen residing in Brazil, is said to have played the role of an administrator of DDW since the website became functional in October 2013. He  pleaded guilty  to money laundering charges in March 2021 and agreed to forfeit the illegally amassed profits. DDW, until its seizure in May 2019, ostensibly  served  as a "news" website that connected internet users with underground marketplaces on the dark web that operate via darknets such as Tor, enabling the purchase of illegal firearms, malware and hacking tools, stolen financial data, heroin, fentanyl, and other illicit materials. Prihar, acting in cohorts with co-defendant Michael Phan, 34, of Israel, provided direct links to illegal marketplaces and in return for advertising these links, reaped s...

Microsoft has disclosed details of a large-scale, multi-phase phishing campaign that uses stolen credentials to register devices on a victim's network to further propagate spam emails and widen the infection pool. The tech giant said the attacks manifested through accounts that were not secured using multi-factor authentication (MFA), thereby making it possible for the adversary to take advantage of the target's bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy and introduce their own rogue devices using the pilfered credentials. The attacks took place in two stages. "The first campaign phase involved stealing credentials in target organizations located predominantly in Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand," Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team  said  in a technical report published this week. "Stolen credentials were then leveraged in the second phase, in which attackers used compromised accounts to expand their foothold within the organization via la...

2021 was a year peppered by cyberattacks, with numerous data breaches happening. Not only that, but ransomware has also become a prominent player in the hackers' world. Now, more than ever, it's important for enterprises to step up cybersecurity measures. They can do this through several pieces of technology, such as an open-source security platform like Wazuh .  Wazuh is a free and open source security platform that unifies XDR and SIEM capabilities, which not only enables companies to detect sophisticated threats, but can also help immensely in preventing data breaches and leaks from happening. As a result, it can save businesses from costly fixes that can ultimately end in their closure. It is also possible to integrate Wazuh with a number of external services and tools. Some of them are VirusTotal, YARA, Amazon Macie, Slack, and Fortigate Firewall. Consequently, companies can improve their security against hackers from penetrating their networks. What's great abou...

The notorious  Lazarus Group  actor has been observed mounting a new campaign that makes use of the Windows Update service to execute its malicious payload, expanding the arsenal of living-off-the-land (LotL) techniques leveraged by the APT group to further its objectives. The Lazarus Group, also known as  APT38 , Hidden Cobra, Whois Hacking Team, and Zinc, is the moniker assigned to the North Korea-based nation-state hacking group that's been active since at least 2009. Last year, the threat actor was  linked  to an elaborate  social engineering campaign  targeting security researchers. The latest spear-phishing attacks, which  Malwarebytes  detected on January 18, originate from weaponized documents with job-themed lures impersonating the American global security and aerospace company Lockheed Martin. Opening the decoy Microsoft Word file triggers the execution of a malicious macro embedded within the document that, in turn, executes a...

A cyberespionage group with ties to North Korea has resurfaced with a stealthier variant of its remote access trojan called Konni to attack political institutions located in Russia and South Korea. "The authors are constantly making code improvements," Malwarebytes researcher Roberto Santos  said . "Their efforts are aimed at breaking the typical flow recorded by sandboxes and making detection harder, especially via regular signatures as critical parts of the executable are now encrypted." Most  recent intrusions  staged by the group, believed to be operating under the Kimsuky umbrella, involved targeting the Russian Federation's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) with New Year lures to compromise Windows systems with malware. The infections, as with other attacks of this kind, starts with a malicious Microsoft Office document that, when opened, initiates a mult-stage process that involves several moving parts that help the attackers elevate privileges, eva...

Microsoft this week revealed that it had fended off a record number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks aimed at its customers in 2021, three of which surpassed 2.4 terabit per second (Tbps). One of the DDoS attacks took place in November, targeting an unnamed Azure customer in Asia and lasted a total of 15 minutes. It hit a peak throughput of 3.47 Tbps and a packet rate of 340 million packets per second (pps), making it the largest attack ever reported in history. "This was a distributed attack originating from approximately 10,000 sources and from multiple countries across the globe, including the United States, China, South Korea, Russia, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Iran, Indonesia, and Taiwan," Alethea Toh, product manager of Azure Networking,  said . DDoS attacks occur when several compromised devices are employed as a conduit to overwhelm a targeted server, service, or network with a flood of internet traffic with the goal of overloading the systems and d...

Taiwanese company QNAP has warned customers to secure network-attached storage (NAS) appliances and routers against a new ransomware variant called DeadBolt . "DeadBolt has been widely targeting all NAS exposed to the Internet without any protection and encrypting users' data for Bitcoin ransom," the company  said . "QNAP urges all QNAP NAS users to […] immediately update QTS to the latest available version." A query on IoT search engine Censys shows that at least 3,687 devices have been encrypted by the DeadBolt ransomware so far, with most NAS devices located in the U.S., Taiwan, France, Italy, the U.K., Hong Kong, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and South Korea. In addition, QNAP is also urging users to check if their NAS devices are public-facing, and if so, take steps to turn off the port forwarding function of the router and disable the Universal Plug and Play ( UPnP ) function of the QNAP NAS. The advisory comes as  Bleeping Computer  revealed t...

There are three things you can be sure of in life: death, taxes – and new CVEs. For organizations that rely on CentOS 8, the inevitable has now happened, and it didn't take long. Just two weeks after reaching the official end of life, something broke spectacularly, leaving  CentOS 8  users at major risk of a severe attack – and with no support from CentOS. You'd think that this issue no longer affects a significant number of organizations because by now, companies would have migrated away from CentOS 8 to an OS that is actively supported by vendors. After all, vendor support is critical for security and compliance. But as it always is with these things, you can count on the fact that a big chunk of CentOS 8 users are soldiering on with an unsupported OS, despite being aware of the risks. With that risk now crystallizing we're using this article to examine  CVE-2021-4122 , the newly discovered vulnerability in LUKS encryption, and to discuss your options for mitigating ...

A financially-motivated malware campaign has compromised over 800 WordPress websites to deliver a banking trojan dubbed Chaes targeting Brazilian customers of Banco do Brasil, Loja Integrada, Mercado Bitcoin, Mercado Livre, and Mercado Pago. First documented by  Cybereason  in November 2020, the info-stealing malware is delivered via a sophisticated infection chain that's engineered to harvest sensitive consumer information, including login credentials, credit card numbers, and other financial information. "Chaes is characterized by the multiple-stage delivery that utilizes scripting frameworks such as JScript, Python, and NodeJS, binaries written in Delphi, and malicious Google Chrome extensions," Avast researchers Anh Ho and Igor Morgenstern  said . "The ultimate goal of Chaes is to steal credentials stored in Chrome and intercept logins of popular banking websites in Brazil." The attack sequence is triggered when users visit one of the infected websites...

Researchers from the Bitdefender Mobile Threats team said they have intercepted more than 100,000 malicious SMS messages attempting to distribute  Flubot  malware since the beginning of December. "Findings indicate attackers are modifying their subject lines and using older yet proven scams to entice users to click," the Romanian cybersecurity firm  detailed  in a report published Wednesday. "Additionally, attackers are rapidly changing the countries they are targeting in this campaign." The new wave of attacks is said to have been most active in Australia, Germany, Poland, Spain, Austria, and Italy, among others, with attacks spreading to newer countries like Romania, the Netherlands, and Thailand starting mid-January. FluBot (aka Cabassous) campaigns use smishing as the primary delivery method to target potential victims, wherein users receive an SMS message with the question "Is this you in this video?" and are tricked into clicking a link that inst...

A new, sophisticated phishing attack has been observed delivering the AsyncRAT trojan as part of a malware campaign that's believed to have commenced in September 2021. "Through a simple email phishing tactic with an HTML attachment, threat attackers are delivering AsyncRAT (a remote access trojan) designed to remotely monitor and control its infected computers through a secure, encrypted connection," Michael Dereviashkin, security researcher at enterprise breach prevention firm Morphisec,  said  in a report. The intrusions commence with an email message containing an HTML attachment that's disguised as an order confirmation receipt (e.g., Receipt-<digits>.html). Opening the decoy file redirects the message recipient to a web page prompting the user to save an ISO file. But unlike other attacks that route the victim to a phishing domain set up explicitly for downloading the next-stage malware, the latest RAT campaign cleverly uses JavaScript to locally crea...

Apple on Wednesday  released  iOS 15.3 and macOS Monterey 12.2 with a fix for the privacy-defeating bug in Safari, as well as to contain a zero-day flaw, which it said has been exploited in the wild to break into its devices. Tracked as  CVE-2022-22587 , the vulnerability relates to a memory corruption issue in the IOMobileFrameBuffer component that could be abused by a malicious application to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges. The iPhone maker said it's "aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited," adding it addressed the issue with improved input validation. It did not reveal the nature of the attacks, how widespread they are, or the identities of the threat actors exploiting them. An anonymous researcher along with Meysam Firouzi and Siddharth Aeri have been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. CVE-2022-22587 is the third zero-day vulnerability discovered in IOMobileFrameBuffer in a span of six months after  ...

An initial access broker group tracked as Prophet Spider has been linked to a set of malicious activities that exploits the Log4Shell vulnerability in unpatched VMware Horizon Servers. According to new research published by BlackBerry Research & Intelligence and Incident Response (IR) teams today, the cybercrime actor has been opportunistically weaponizing the shortcoming to download a second-stage payload onto the victimized systems. The payloads observed include cryptocurrency miners, Cobalt Strike Beacons, and web shells, corroborating a previous advisory from the U.K. National Health Service (NHS) that  sounded the alarm  on active exploitation of the vulnerabilities in VMware Horizon servers to drop malicious web shells and establish persistence on affected networks for follow-on attacks. Log4Shell  is a moniker used to refer to an exploit affecting the popular Apache Log4j library that results in remote code execution by logging a specially crafted string...

The subject of threat visibility is a recurring one in cybersecurity. With an expanding attack surface due to the remote work transformation, cloud and SaaS computing and the proliferation of personal devices, seeing all the threats that are continuously bombarding the company is beyond challenging. This especially rings true for small to medium-sized enterprises with limited security budgets and lean IT security teams. An upcoming webinar ( register here ) tries to help lean security teams understand how to tackle this intractable problem. While adding security solutions to cover blind spots seems logical, the webinar will argue that this just leads to more alarms and more noise. While this approach might be workable for large security teams, smaller teams simply don't have the bandwidth to handle an increase in alerts. Instead, organizations need broad threat visibility to cover the current blind spots, but then needs the ability to combine, rank and filter alarms by importanc...

Google on Tuesday announced that it is abandoning its controversial plans for replacing third-party cookies in favor of a new Privacy Sandbox proposal called  Topics , which categorizes users' browsing habits into approximately 350 topics. The new mechanism , which takes the place of  FLoC  (short for Federated Learning of Cohorts), slots users' browsing history for a given week into a handful of top pre-designated interests (i.e., topics), which are retained only on the device for a revolving period of three weeks. Subsequently, when a user visits a participating site, the Topics API selects three of the interests — one topic from each of the past three weeks — to share with the site and its advertising partners. To give more control over the framework, users can not only see the topics but also remove topics or disable it altogether. By labeling each website with a recognizable, high-level topic and sharing the most frequent topics associated with the browsing his...