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There's something about craftsmanship. It's personal, its artistry, and it can be incredibly effective in achieving its goals. On the other hand, mass-market production can be effective in other ways, through speed, efficiency, and cost savings. The story of data centers is one of going from craftsmanship – where every individual machine is a pet project, maintained with great care – to mass production with big server farms where individual units are completely disposable. In this article, we take a look at how data centers have changed shape over the decades. We examine the implications for data center workloads, and for the people that run them – who have now lost their pet systems. We'll also review the cybersecurity implications of the new data center landscape. Pet system with a big purpose For any sysadmin who started their career before the advent of virtualization and other cloud and automation technologies, systems were finely crafted pieces of hardware – and ...

ASUSTOR network-attached storage (NAS) devices have become the  latest   victim  of Deadbolt ransomware, less than a month after similar attacks singled out  QNAP NAS appliances . In response to the infections, the company has released firmware updates ( ADM 4.0.4.RQO2 ) to "fix related security issues." The company is also urging users to take the following actions to keep data secure – Change your password Use a strong password Change default HTTP and HTTPS ports. Default ports are 8000 and 8001 respectively Change web server ports (Default ports are 80 and 443) Turn off Terminal/SSH and SFTP services and other services you do not use, and Make regular backups and ensure backups are up to date The attacks primarily affect internet-exposed ASUSTOR NAS models running ADM operating systems including, but not limited to, AS5104T, AS5304T, AS6404T, AS7004T, AS5202T, AS6302T, and AS1104T.  Much like the intrusions targeting QNAP NAS devices, the threat ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has  warned  of active exploitation of two security flaws impacting Zabbix open-source enterprise monitoring platform, adding them to its  Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog . On top of that, CISA is also recommending that Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies patch all systems against the vulnerabilities by March 8, 2022 to reduce their exposure to potential cyberattacks. Tracked as  CVE-2022-23131  (CVSS score: 9.8) and  CVE-2022-23134  (CVSS score: 5.3), the shortcomings could lead to the compromise of complete networks, enabling a malicious unauthenticated actor to escalate privileges and gain admin access to the Zabbix Frontend as well as make configuration changes. Thomas Chauchefoin from SonarSource has been credited with discovering and reporting the two flaws, which affect Zabbix Web Frontend versions up to and including 5.4.8, 5.0.18 and 4.0.36. The issues...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

Intelligence agencies in the U.K. and the U.S. disclosed details of a new botnet malware called  Cyclops Blink  that's been attributed to the Russian-backed Sandworm hacking group and deployed in attacks dating back to 2019. "Cyclops Blink appears to be a replacement framework for the VPNFilter malware exposed in 2018, which exploited network devices, primarily small office/home office (SOHO) routers, and network-attached storage (NAS) devices," the agencies  said . "In common with VPNFilter, Cyclops Blink deployment also appears indiscriminate and widespread." The  joint government advisory  comes from the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the U.S. Sandworm , aka Voodoo Bear, is the name assigned to a  highly advanced adversary  operating out of Russia that's known to be active since at least ...

Cybersecurity firms ESET and Broadcom's Symantec said they discovered a new data wiper malware used in fresh attacks against hundreds of machines in Ukraine, as Russian forces formally launched a full-scale military operation against the country. The Slovak company dubbed the wiper " HermeticWiper " (aka  KillDisk.NCV ), with one of the malware samples compiled on December 28, 2021, implying that preparations for the attacks may have been underway for nearly two months. "The wiper binary is signed using a code signing certificate issued to Hermetica Digital Ltd," ESET said in a series of tweets. "The wiper abuses legitimate drivers from the EaseUS Partition Master software in order to corrupt data. As a final step the wiper reboots [the] computer." Specifically, HermeticWiper is delivered via the benign but signed EaseUS partition management driver that then proceeds to impair the first 512 bytes, the Master Boot Record ( MBR ) for every phys...

Similarities have been unearthed between the Dridex general-purpose malware and a little-known ransomware strain called Entropy , suggesting that the operators are continuing to rebrand their extortion operations under a different name. "The similarities are in the software packer used to conceal the ransomware code, in the malware subroutines designed to find and obfuscate commands (API calls), and in the subroutines used to decrypt encrypted text," cybersecurity firm Sophos  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The commonalities were uncovered following two unrelated incidents targeting an unnamed media company and a regional government agency. In both cases, the deployment of Entropy was preceded by infecting the target networks with Cobalt Strike Beacons and Dridex, granting the attackers remote access. Despite consistency in some aspects of the twin attacks, they also varied significantly with regards to the initial access vector used to worm their way ins...

Researchers from China's Pangu Lab have disclosed details of a "top-tier" backdoor put to use by the Equation Group , an advanced persistent threat (APT) with alleged ties to the cyber-warfare intelligence-gathering unit of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Dubbed " Bvp47 " owing to numerous references to the string "Bvp" and the numerical value "0x47" used in the encryption algorithm, the backdoor was extracted from Linux systems "during an in-depth forensic investigation of a host in a key domestic department" in 2013. The defense research group codenamed the attacks involving the deployment of Bvp47 "Operation Telescreen," with the implant featuring an "advanced covert channel behavior based on TCP SYN packets, code obfuscation, system hiding, and self-destruction design." Bvp47 is said to have been used on more than 287 targets in the academia, economic development, military, science, and telecom s...

Users of Horde Webmail are being urged to disable a feature to contain a nine-year-old unpatched security vulnerability in the software that could be abused to gain complete access to email accounts simply by previewing an attachment. "This gives the attacker access to all sensitive and perhaps secret information a victim has stored in their email account and could allow them to gain further access to the internal services of an organization," SonarSource vulnerability researcher, Simon Scannell,  said  in a report. An " all volunteer " initiative, the Horde Project is a free, browser-based communication suite that allows users to read, send, and organize email messages as well as manage and share calendars, contacts, tasks, notes, files, and bookmarks. The flaw, which was introduced as part of a  code change  pushed on November 30, 2012, relates to a case of an "unusual" stored cross-site scripting flaw (aka persistent XSS) that allows an adversary t...

Another batch of 25 malicious JavaScript libraries have made their way to the official NPM package registry with the goal of stealing Discord tokens and environment variables from compromised systems, more than two months after  17 similar packages  were taken down. The libraries in question leveraged typosquatting techniques and masqueraded as other legitimate packages such as colors.js, crypto-js, discord.js, marked, and  noblox.js , DevOps security firm JFrog said, attributing the packages as the work of "novice malware authors." The complete list of packages is below – node-colors-sync (Discord token stealer) color-self (Discord token stealer) color-self-2 (Discord token stealer) wafer-text (Environment variable stealer) wafer-countdown (Environment variable stealer) wafer-template (Environment variable stealer) wafer-darla (Environment variable stealer) lemaaa (Discord token stealer) adv-discord-utility (Discord token stealer) tools-for-discord (Disco...

Malicious actors took advantage of a smart contract upgrade process in the OpenSea NFT marketplace to carry out a  phishing attack  against 17 of its users that resulted in the theft of virtual assets worth about $1.7 million. NFTs , short for non-fungible tokens, are digital tokens that act like certificates of authenticity for, and in some cases represent ownership of, assets that range from expensive illustrations to collectibles and physical goods. The opportunistic social engineering scam  swindled the users  by using the same email from OpenSea notifying users about the upgrade, with the copycat email redirecting the victims to a lookalike webpage, prompting them to sign a seemingly legitimate transaction, only to steal all the NFTs in one go. "By signing the transaction, an atomicMatch_ request would be sent to the attacker contract," Check Point researchers  explained . "From there, the atomicMatch_ would be forwarded to the OpenSea contract," leadi...

An advanced persistent threat (APT) group operating with objectives aligned with the Chinese government has been linked to an organized supply chain attack on Taiwan's financial sector. The attacks are said to have first commenced at the end of November 2021, with the intrusions attributed to a threat actor tracked as  APT10 , also known as Stone Panda, the MenuPass group, and Bronze Riverside, and known to be active since at least 2009. The second wave of attacks hit a peak between February 10 and 13, 2022, according to a  new report  published by Taiwanese cybersecurity firm CyCraft, which said the wide-ranging supply chain compromise specifically targeted the software systems of financial institutions, resulting in "abnormal cases of placing orders." The infiltration activity, codenamed " Operation Cache Panda ," exploited a vulnerability in the web management interface of the unnamed securities software that has a market share of over 80% in Taiwan, usi...

Vulnerable internet-facing Microsoft SQL (MS SQL) Servers are being targeted by threat actors as part of a new campaign to deploy the Cobalt Strike adversary simulation tool on compromised hosts. "Attacks that target MS SQL servers include attacks to the environment where its vulnerability has not been patched, brute forcing, and  dictionary attack  against poorly managed servers," South Korean cybersecurity company AhnLab Security Emergency Response Center (ASEC)  said  in a report published Monday. Cobalt Strike is a commercial, full-featured  penetration testing framework  that allows an attacker to deploy an agent named "Beacon" on the victim machine, granting the operator remote access to the system. Although billed as a red team threat simulation platform,  cracked versions  of the software have been  actively used  by a wide range of threat actors. Intrusions observed by ASEC involve the unidentified actor scanning port 1433 ...

A new Android banking trojan with over 50,000 installations has been observed distributed via the official Google Play Store with the goal of targeting 56 European banks and carrying out harvesting sensitive information from compromised devices. Dubbed  Xenomorph  by Dutch security firm ThreatFabric, the in-development malware is said to share overlaps with another banking trojan tracked under the moniker Alien while also being "radically different" from its predecessor in terms of the functionalities offered. "Despite being a work-in-progress, Xenomorph is already sporting effective overlays and being actively distributed on official app stores," ThreatFabric's founder and CEO, Han Sahin, said. "In addition, it features a very detailed and modular engine to abuse accessibility services, which in the future could power very advanced capabilities, like ATS." Alien, a remote access trojan (RAT) with notification sniffing and authenticator-based 2FA ...

An investigation into the cyberattack targeting Iranian national media corporation, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), in late January 2022 revealed the deployment of a wiper malware and other custom implants, as the country's national infrastructure continues to face a  wave  of  attacks  aimed at inflicting serious damage. "This indicates that the attackers' aim was also to disrupt the state's broadcasting networks, with the damage to the TV and radio networks possibly more serious than officially reported," Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity firm Check Point  said  in a report published last week. The 10-second attack, which took place on January 27, involved the breach of state broadcaster IRIB to air pictures of Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization ( MKO ) leaders Maryam and Massoud Rajavi alongside a call for the assassination of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. "This is an extremely complex attack and only the owners of this technology ...

For the last few years, the cybersecurity threat landscape has gotten progressively more complex and dangerous. The online world is now rife with data thieves, extortionists, and even state actors looking to exploit vulnerabilities in businesses' digital defenses.  And unfortunately — the bad guys have the upper hand at the moment. Part of the reason for that is the fallout from the rapid digitization made necessary by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to research on the subject,  more than half of businesses  have yet to mitigate the risks created by that digitization. And when you add a persistent shortage of cybersecurity workers to that fact, you have the makings of a scary situation. But businesses aren't helpless. There are plenty of things they can do to augment their defenses as they look to mitigate cyber risks. And best of all, some of those options won't cost them a thing. A great example of that is the open-source security platform  Wazuh . It offers ...

An analysis of SMS phone-verified account (PVA) services has led to the discovery of a rogue platform built atop a botnet involving thousands of infected Android phones, once again underscoring the flaws with relying on SMS for account validation. SMS PVA services, since gaining prevalence in 2018, provide users with alternative mobile numbers that can be used to register for other online services and platforms, and help bypass SMS-based authentication and single sign-on (SSO) mechanisms put in place to verify new accounts. "This type of service can be used by malicious actors to register disposable accounts in bulk or create phone-verified accounts for conducting fraud and other criminal activities," Trend Micro researchers  said  in a report published last week. Telemetry data gathered by the company shows that most of the infections are located in Indonesia (47,357), followed by Russia (16,157), Thailand (11,196), India (8,109), and France (5,548), Peru (4,915), Moroc...