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The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday published an Industrial Controls Systems Advisory (ICSA) warning of multiple vulnerabilities in the Airspan Networks Mimosa equipment that could be abused to gain remote code execution, create a denial-of-service (DoS) condition, and obtain sensitive information. "Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to gain user data (including organization details) and other sensitive data, compromise Mimosa's AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud EC2 instance and S3 Buckets, and execute unauthorized remote code on all cloud-connected Mimosa devices," CISA  said  in the alert. The seven flaws, which were discovered and reported to CISA by industrial cybersecurity company Claroty, affect the following products — Mimosa Management Platform ( MMP ) running versions prior to v1.0.3 Point-to-Point ( PTP ) C5c and C5x running versions prior to v2.8.6.1, and Point-to-Multipoint ( ...

A threat actor, likely Chinese in origin, is actively attempting to exploit a zero-day vulnerability in the Zimbra open-source email platform as part of spear-phishing campaigns that commenced in December 2021. The espionage operation — codenamed " EmailThief " — was detailed by cybersecurity company Volexity in a technical report published Thursday, noting that successful exploitation of the cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability could result in the execution of arbitrary JavaScript code in the context of the user's Zimbra session. Volexity attributed the intrusions, which started on December 14, 2021, to a previously undocumented hacking group it's tracking under the moniker TEMP_HERETIC, with the assaults aimed at European government and media entities. The zero-day bug impacts the most recent open-source edition of Zimbra running  version 8.8.15 . The attacks are believed to have occurred in two phases; the first stage aimed at reconnaissance and distribut...

Cisco has patched multiple critical  security vulnerabilities  impacting its RV Series routers that could be weaponized to elevate privileges and execute arbitrary code on affected systems, while also warning of the existence of proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code targeting some of these bugs. Three of the 15 flaws, tracked as CVE-2022-20699, CVE-2022-20700, and CVE-2022-20707, carry the highest CVSS rating of 10.0, and affect its Small Business RV160, RV260, RV340, and RV345 Series routers. Additionally, the flaws could be exploited to bypass authentication and authorization protections, retrieve and run unsigned software, and even cause denial-of-service (DoS) conditions. The networking equipment maker acknowledged that it's "aware that proof-of-concept exploit code is available for several of the vulnerabilities" but didn't share any further specifics on the nature of the exploit or the identity of the threat actors that may be exploiting them. CVE-2022-20699...

An ongoing search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning attack campaign has been observed abusing trust in legitimate software utilities to trick users into downloading BATLOADER malware on compromised machines. "The threat actor used 'free productivity apps installation' or 'free software development tools installation' themes as SEO keywords to lure victims to a compromised website and to download a malicious installer," researchers from Mandiant  said  in a report published this week. In  SEO poisoning  attacks, adversaries artificially increase the search engine ranking of websites (genuine or otherwise) hosting their malware to make them show up on top of search results so that users searching for specific apps like TeamViewer, Visual Studio, and Zoom are infected with malware. The installer, while packing the legitimate software, is also bundled with the BATLOADER payload that's executed during the installation process. The malware then acts as a ...

An accountant and a security expert walk into a bar… SOC2 is no joke.  Whether you're a publicly held or private company, you are probably considering going through a Service Organization Controls (SOC) audit. For publicly held companies, these reports are required by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and executed by a Certified Public Accountant (CPA). However, customers often ask for SOC2 reports as part of their vendor due diligence process.  Out of the three types of SOC reports, SOC2 is the standard to successfully pass regulatory requirements and signals high security and resilience within the organization — and is based on the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) attestation requirements. The purpose of this report is to evaluate an organization's information systems relevant to security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy — over a period of time (roughly six to twelve months).  As part of a SOC2 au...

Microsoft on Wednesday shed light on a previously undocumented Mac trojan that it said has undergone several iterations since its first appearance in September 2020, effectively granting it an "increasing progression of sophisticated capabilities." The company's Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team dubbed the new malware family " UpdateAgent ," charting its evolution from a barebones information stealer to a second-stage payload distributor as part of multiple attack waves observed in 2021. "The latest campaign saw the malware installing the evasive and persistent Adload adware, but UpdateAgent's ability to gain access to a device can theoretically be further leveraged to fetch other, potentially more dangerous payloads," the researchers  said . The actively in-development malware is said to be propagated via drive-by downloads or advertisement pop-ups that masquerade as legitimate software like video applications and support agents...

Cybersecurity researchers have turned the spotlight on a new wave of offensive cyberattacks targeting Palestinian activists and entities starting around October 2021 using politically-themed phishing emails and decoy documents. The intrusions are part of what Cisco Talos calls a longstanding espionage and information theft campaign undertaken by the  Arid Viper hacking group  using a Delphi-based implant called Micropsia dating all the way back to  June 2017 . The threat actor's  activities , also tracked under the monikers Desert Falcon and the APT-C-23, were first documented in  February 2015  by Kasperksy and subsequently in 2017, when Qihoo 360 disclosed details of  cross-platform   backdoors  developed by the group to strike Palestinian institutions. The Russian cybersecurity company-branded Arid Viper the "first exclusively Arabic APT group." Then in April 2021, Meta (formerly Facebook), which pointed out the group's affiliations ...

The threat actor behind the supply chain compromise of SolarWinds has continued to expand its malware arsenal with new tools and techniques that were deployed in attacks as early as 2019, once indicative of the elusive nature of the campaigns and the adversary's ability to maintain persistent access for years. According to cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which  detailed the novel tactics  adopted by the Nobelium hacking group last week, two sophisticated malware families were placed on victim systems — a Linux variant of GoldMax and a new implant dubbed TrailBlazer — long before the scale of the attacks came to light. Nobelium, the Microsoft-assigned moniker for the  SolarWinds intrusion  in December 2020, is also tracked by the wider cybersecurity community under the names UNC2452 (FireEye), SolarStorm (Unit 42), StellarParticle (CrowdStrike), Dark Halo (Volexity), and Iron Ritual (Secureworks). The  malicious activities  have since been attributed to...

We hear about the need for better visibility in the cybersecurity space – detecting threats earlier and more accurately. We often hear about the dwell time and the time to identify and contain a data breach. Many of us are familiar with IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report that has been tracking this statistic for years. In the 2021 report, IBM found that, on average, it takes an average of 212 days to identify a breach and then another 75 days to contain the breach, for a total of 287 days. A new  solution overview document  provides insights on how XDR provider Cynet tackles the difficult problem of greatly improving threat visibility. Cynet takes a modern approach that includes a greater level of native technology integration and advanced automation purposely designed for organizations with smaller security teams than Fortune 500 organizations. A live webinar will discuss the same topic ( Register here ) Cynet's Keys for Threat Visibility Einstein said that the definition...

As many as 23 new high severity security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in different implementations of Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ( UEFI ) firmware used by numerous vendors, including Bull Atos, Fujitsu, HP, Juniper Networks, Lenovo, among others. The vulnerabilities reside in Insyde Software's InsydeH2O UEFI firmware, according to enterprise firmware security company  Binarly , with a majority of the anomalies diagnosed in the System Management Mode ( SMM ). UEFI is a software specification that provides a standard programming interface connecting a computer's firmware to its operating system during the booting process. In x86 systems, the UEFI firmware is usually stored in the flash memory chip of the motherboard. "By exploiting these vulnerabilities, attackers can successfully install malware that survives operating system re-installations and allows the bypass of endpoint security solutions (EDR/AV),  Secure Boot , and Virtualization-Based Securit...

A politically motivated hacker group tied to a series of espionage and sabotage attacks on Israeli entities in 2021 incorporated a previously undocumented remote access trojan (RAT) that masquerades as the Windows Calculator app as part of a conscious effort to stay under the radar. Cybersecurity company Cybereason, which has been tracking the operations of the Iranian actor known as Moses Staff, dubbed the malware " StrifeWater ." "The StrifeWater RAT appears to be used in the initial stage of the attack and this stealthy RAT has the ability to remove itself from the system to cover the Iranian group's tracks," Tom Fakterman, Cybereason security analyst,  said  in a report. "The RAT possesses other capabilities, such as command execution and screen capturing, as well as the ability to download additional extensions." Moses Staff came to light towards the end of last year when Check Point Research  unmasked  a series of attacks aimed at Israeli or...

A WordPress plugin with over one million installs has been found to contain a critical vulnerability that could result in the execution of arbitrary code on compromised websites. The plugin in question is  Essential Addons for Elementor , which provides WordPress site owners with a library of over 80 elements and extensions to help design and customize pages and posts. "This vulnerability allows any user, regardless of their authentication or authorization status, to perform a local file inclusion attack," Patchstack  said  in a report. "This attack can be used to include local files on the filesystem of the website, such as /etc/passwd. This can also be used to perform RCE by including a file with malicious PHP code that normally cannot be executed." That said, the vulnerability only exists if widgets like dynamic gallery and product gallery are used, which utilize the vulnerable function, resulting in local file inclusion – an attack technique in which a web ...

In a sign that threat actors continuously shift tactics and update their defensive measures, the operators of the SolarMarker information stealer and backdoor have been found leveraging stealthy Windows Registry tricks to establish long-term persistence on compromised systems. Cybersecurity firm Sophos, which spotted the new behavior, said that the remote access implants are still being detected on targeted networks despite the campaign witnessing a decline in November 2021. Boasting of information harvesting and backdoor capabilities, the .NET-based malware has been linked to at least three different attack waves in 2021. The first set,  reported in April , took advantage of search engine poisoning techniques to trick business professionals into visiting sketchy Google sites that installed SolarMarker on the victim's machines. Then in August, the malware was  observed  targeting healthcare and education sectors with the goal of gathering credentials and sensitive in...

An advanced persistent threat group with links to Iran has updated its malware toolset to include a novel PowerShell-based implant called PowerLess Backdoor , according to new research published by Cybereason. The Boston-headquartered cybersecurity company attributed the malware to a hacking group known as Charming Kitten (aka Phosphorous, APT35, or  TA453 ), while also calling out the backdoor's evasive PowerShell execution. "The PowerShell code runs in the context of a .NET application, thus not launching 'powershell.exe' which enables it to evade security products," Daniel Frank, senior malware researcher at Cybereason,  said . "The toolset analyzed includes extremely modular, multi-staged malware that decrypts and deploys additional payloads in several stages for the sake of both stealth and efficacy." The threat actor, which is active since at least 2017, has been behind a series of campaigns in recent years, including those wherein the adversa...

Cybersecurity researchers on Monday said they uncovered evidence of attempted attacks by a Russia-linked hacking operation targeting a Ukrainian entity in July 2021. Broadcom-owned Symantec, in a new report published Monday, attributed the attacks to an actor tracked as Gamaredon (aka Shuckworm or Armageddon), a cyber-espionage collective known to be active since at least 2013. In November 2021, Ukrainian intelligence agencies  branded  the group as a "special project" of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), in addition to pointing fingers at it for carrying out over 5,000 cyberattacks against public authorities and critical infrastructure located in the country. Gamaredon attacks typically originate with phishing emails that trick the recipients into installing a custom remote access trojan called Pterodo. Symantec disclosed that, between July 14, 2021 and August 18, 2021, the actor installed several variants of the backdoor as well as deployed additional scripts...

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are making headlines almost every day.  2021 saw a 434%  upsurge in DDoS attacks, 5.5 times higher than 2020.  Q3 2021 saw a 24%  increase in the number of DDoS attacks in comparison to Q3 2020.  Advanced DDoS attacks that are typically targeted, known as smart attacks, rose by 31% in the same period. Further,  73% of DDoS attacks  in Q3 2021 were multi-vector attacks that combined multiple techniques to attack the targeted systems. The largest percentage of DDoS targets (40.8%) was in the US Banks, and financial institutions were the biggest DDoS and DoS attack targets in the past couple of years.  Does this mean businesses and organizations that aren't in the banking and financial services sector are safe from  DDoS attacks ? Most definitely not! Every business is a potential DDoS target. Read on to know why and what measures to take to keep your business effectively protected.  Common D...

Details have emerged about a previously undocumented malware campaign undertaken by the Iranian MuddyWater advanced persistent threat (APT) group targeting Turkish private organizations and governmental institutions. "This campaign utilizes malicious PDFs, XLS files and Windows executables to deploy malicious PowerShell-based downloaders acting as initial footholds into the target's enterprise," Cisco Talos researchers Asheer Malhotra and Vitor Ventura  said  in a newly published report. The  development  comes as the U.S. Cyber Command, earlier this month,  linked the APT  to the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). The intrusions, which are believed to have been orchestrated as recently as November 2021, were directed against Turkish government entities, including the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey ( TÜBİTAK ), using weaponized Excel documents and PDF files hosted on attacker-controlled or media-sharing websit...

A number of security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in 42 Gears' SureMDM device management solution that could be weaponized by attackers to perform a supply chain compromise against affected organizations. Cybersecurity firm Immersive Labs, in a  technical write-up  detailing the findings, said that 42Gears released a series of updates between November 2021 and January 2022 to close out multiple flaws affecting both the platform's Linux agent and the web console. The India-based company's  SureMDM  is a cross-platform mobile device management service that allows enterprises to remotely monitor, manage, and secure a fleet of company-owned systems for dedicated-use and employee-owned devices. 42Gears  claims  that SureMDM is used by over 10,000 companies worldwide. The issues identified in the web dashboard are also of critical in nature, potentially allowing an attacker to gain code execution over individual devices, desktops, or servers. Further...

Samba has issued  software updates  to address multiple security vulnerabilities that, if successfully exploited, could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code with the highest privileges on affected installations. Chief among them is  CVE-2021-44142 , which  impacts  all versions of Samba before 4.13.17 and concerns an  out-of-bounds  heap read/write vulnerability in the VFS module " vfs_fruit " that provides compatibility with Apple SMB clients. Samba  is a popular freeware implementation of the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol that allows users to access files, printers, and other commonly shared resources over a network. "All versions of Samba prior to 4.13.17 are vulnerable to an out-of-bounds heap read write vulnerability that allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code as root on affected Samba installations that use the VFS module vfs_fruit," the maintainers said in an advisory published on January 31. According to ...