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Cisco this week shipped patches to address a new round of critical security vulnerabilities affecting Expressway Series and Cisco TelePresence Video Communication Server (VCS) that could be exploited by an attacker to gain elevated privileges and execute arbitrary code. The two flaws – tracked as  CVE-2022-20754 and CVE-2022-20755  (CVSS scores: 9.0) – relate to an arbitrary file write and a command injection flaw in the API and web-based management interfaces of the two products that could have serious impacts on affected systems. The company said both the issues stem from insufficient input validation of user-supplied command arguments, a weakness that could be weaponized by an authenticated, remote attacker to carry out directory traversal attacks, overwrite arbitrary files, and run malicious code on the underlying operating system as the root user. "These vulnerabilities were found during internal security testing by Jason Crowder of the Cisco Advanced Security Initia...

In the midst of 'The Great Resignation,' the damage from employees (or contractors) leaving an organization might be one of the greatest risks facing IT teams today. The reality is that in the busy enterprise computing environment, user onboarding and offboarding is a fact of daily life.  When employee counts range into the five-figure territory — and entire networks of contractors have to be accounted for as well — it's easy to lose track of who's, literally, coming and going. Oftentimes, there are "offboarding" steps that are forgotten about — disabling or removing the user from Active Directory or IAM is not sufficient as the user may have local credentials on some of the SaaS platforms or other sensitive systems.  Technically speaking, there are ways to automate offboarding using protocols such as SCIM and JIT mapping; however, it requires a high level of maturity in an IT environment and the staff to implement it. For organizations not implementing SC...

American chipmaking company NVIDIA on Tuesday confirmed that its network was breached as a result of a cyber attack, enabling the perpetrators to gain access to sensitive data, including source code purportedly associated with its Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology. "We have no evidence of ransomware being deployed on the NVIDIA environment or that this is related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict," the company  said  in a security notice. "However, we are aware that the threat actor took employee passwords and some NVIDIA proprietary information from our systems and has begun leaking it online." The incident is said to have come to light on February 23, with the company noting that it's taken steps to analyze the leaked information and that it's enforcing all of its employees to change their passwords with immediate effect. The confirmation comes days after  The Telegraph  last week reported that the company is investigating a potential cyber ...

An analysis of data crowdsourced from more than 200,000 network-connected infusion pumps used in hospitals and healthcare entities has revealed that 75% of those medical devices contain security weaknesses that could put them at risk of potential exploitation. "These shortcomings included exposure to one or more of some 40 known cybersecurity vulnerabilities and/or alerts that they had one or more of some 70 other types of known security shortcomings for IoT devices," Unit 42 security researcher Aveek Das  said  in a report published Wednesday. Palo Alto Networks' threat intelligence team said it obtained the scans from seven medical device manufacturers. On top of that, 52.11% of all infusion pumps scanned were susceptible to two known vulnerabilities that were disclosed in 2019 as part of 11 flaws collectively called " URGENT/11 " – CVE-2019-12255  (CVSS score: 9.8) – A buffer overflow flaw in the TCP component of Wind River VxWorks CVE-2019-12264  (CVS...

The U.S. Senate unanimously  passed  the " Strengthening American Cybersecurity Act " on Tuesday in an attempt to bolster the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure owners in the country. The new  bipartisan legislation , among other things, stipulates entities that experience a cyber incident to report the attacks within 72 hours to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), in addition to alerting the agency about ransomware payments within 24 hours. Furthermore, affected organizations are required to preserve relevant data and promptly share updates "to a previously submitted covered cyber incident report if substantial new or different information becomes available or if the covered entity makes a ransom payment after submitting a covered cyber incident report." The Strengthening American Cybersecurity Act of 2022 combines three different bills: the Cyber Incident Reporting Act ( CIRA ), the Federal Information Security Management A...

Details of a new nation-state sponsored phishing campaign have been uncovered setting its sights on European governmental entities in what's seen as an attempt to obtain intelligence on refugee and supply movement in the region. Enterprise security company Proofpoint, which detected the malicious emails for the first time on February 24, 2022, dubbed the social engineering attacks " Asylum Ambuscade ." "The email included a malicious macro attachment which utilized social engineering themes pertaining to the Emergency Meeting of the NATO Security Council held on February 23, 2022," researchers Michael Raggi and Zydeca Cass  said  in a report published Tuesday. "The email also contained a malicious attachment which attempted to download malicious Lua malware named SunSeed and targeted European government personnel tasked with managing transportation and population movement in Europe." The findings build on an  advisory  issued by the State Service...

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks leveraging a new amplification technique called TCP Middlebox Reflection have been detected for the first time in the wild, six months after the novel attack mechanism was presented in theory. "The attack […] abuses vulnerable firewalls and content filtering systems to reflect and amplify TCP traffic to a victim machine, creating a powerful DDoS attack," Akamai researchers  said  in a report published Tuesday. "This type of attack dangerously lowers the bar for DDoS attacks, as the attacker needs as little as 1/75th (in some cases) the amount of bandwidth from a volumetric standpoint," the researchers added. A distributed reflective denial-of-service ( DRDoS ) is a form of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that relies on publicly accessible UDP servers and bandwidth amplification factors (BAFs) to overwhelm a victim's system with a high volume of UDP responses. In these attacks, the adversary sends a ...

With the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to impact, and perhaps permanently changing, how we work, cybercriminals again leveraged the distraction in new waves of cyberattacks. Over the course of 2021 we saw an increase in multiple attack approaches; some old, some new. Phishing and ransomware continued to grow from previous years, as expected, while new attacks on supply chains and cryptocurrencies captured our attention. We also saw an uptick in critical Windows vulnerabilities, again proving that no matter how many vulnerabilities are found, more will always exist.  As we enter 2022, we are seeing novel attacks originating from the conflict in Ukraine, which will certainly make their way into criminal attacks on worldwide businesses. In an upcoming webinar ( register here ), Cybersecurity company Cynet will provide an in-depth review of the high-profile attacks we saw in 2021 and provide guidance to cybersecurity professionals for 2022. What are the top cyberattacks in 2021 that...

As many as five security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in the PJSIP open-source multimedia communication library that could be abused by an attacker to trigger arbitrary code execution and denial-of-service (DoS) in applications that use the protocol stack. The weaknesses were  identified and reported  by JFrog's Security Research team, following which the project maintainers released patches ( version 2.12 ) last week on February 24, 2022. PJSIP is an open-source embedded  SIP protocol  suite written in C that supports audio, video, and instant messaging features for popular communication platforms such as  WhatsApp  and BlueJeans. It's also  used  by  Asterisk , a widely-used private branch exchange (PBX) switching system for VoIP networks. "Buffers used in PJSIP typically have limited sizes, especially the ones allocated in the stack or supplied by the application, however in several places, we do not check if our usage can exce...

Critical security vulnerabilities have been uncovered in VoIPmonitor software that, if successfully exploited, could allow unauthenticated attackers to escalate privileges to the administrator level and execute arbitrary commands. Following responsible disclosure by researchers from  Kerbit , an Ethiopia-based penetration-testing and vulnerability research firm, on December 15, 2021, the issues were addressed in  version 24.97  of the WEB GUI shipped on January 11, 2022. "[F]ix critical vulnerabilities - new SQL injects for unauthenticated users allowing gaining admin privileges," the maintainers of VoIPmonitor noted in the change log. VoIPmonitor is an open-source network packet sniffer with commercial frontend for SIP RTP and RTCP VoIP protocols running on Linux, allowing users to monitor and troubleshoot quality of SIP VoIP calls as well as decode, play, and archive calls in a  CDR  database. The three flaws identified by Kerbit is below – CVE-2022-24...

An Android banking trojan designed to steal credentials and SMS messages has been observed once again sneaking past Google Play Store protections to target users of more than 400 banking and financial apps, including those from Russia, China, and the U.S. "TeaBot RAT capabilities are achieved via the device screen's live streaming (requested on-demand) plus the abuse of Accessibility Services for remote interaction and key-logging," Cleafy researchers  said  in a report. "This enables Threat Actors (TAs) to perform ATO (Account Takeover) directly from the compromised phone, also known as 'On-device fraud.'" Also known by the names Anatsa and Toddler, TeaBot first  emerged  in May 2021, camouflaging its malicious functions by posing as seemingly innocuous PDF document and QR code scanner apps that are distributed via the official Google Play Store instead of third-party apps stores or via fraudulent websites. Further research published by Swiss cyber...

A new data wiper malware has been observed deployed against an unnamed Ukrainian government network, a day after destructive cyber attacks struck multiple entities in the country preceding the start of Russia's military invasion. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET dubbed the new malware " IsaacWiper ," which it said was detected on February 24 in an organization that was not affected by  HermeticWiper  (aka FoxBlade), another data wiping malware that targeted several organizations on February 23 as part of a sabotage operation aimed at rendering the machines unusable. Further analysis of the HermeticWiper attacks, which infected at least five Ukrainian organizations, have revealed a worm constituent that propagates the malware across the compromised network and a ransomware module that acts as a "distraction from the wiper attacks," corroborating a  prior report  from Symantec. "These destructive attacks leveraged at least three components: HermeticWiper f...

It is predicted that 3.5 million jobs will be unfilled in the field of cybersecurity by the end of this year. Several of these jobs pay very well, and in most cases, you don't even need a college degree to get hired. The most important thing is to have the skills and certifications.  The All-In-One 2022 Super-Sized Ethical Hacking Bundle  helps you gain both, with 18 courses covering all aspects of cybersecurity. Normally, you pay $3,284 for this training, but you can get it now for only $42.99 via The Hacker New Deals. The purpose of ethical hacking is to find weaknesses in the system that a malicious hacker may exploit. A certified expert can work either full-time or freelance, earning up to $149,000 a year, according to PayScale. This bundle would be perfect for anyone interested in the field of cybersecurity, offering the opportunity to start off on the right foot. Starting with the fundamentals, the beginner-friendly instruction will take you all the way to high-leve...

Days after the Conti ransomware group broadcasted a pro-Russian message pledging its allegiance to Vladimir Putin's ongoing invasion of Ukraine, an anonymous security researcher using the Twitter handle @ContiLeaks has leaked the syndicate's internal chats. The file dump, published by malware research group  VX-Underground , is said to contain 13 months of chat logs between affiliates and administrators of the Russia-affiliated ransomware group from June 2020 to February 2022, in a move that's expected to offer  unprecedented   insight  into the criminal enterprise's inner workings. "Glory to Ukraine," the leaker said in their message. The shared conversations show that Conti used fake front companies to attempt to schedule product demos with security firms like CarbonBlack and Sophos to obtain code signing certificates, with the operators working in scrum sprints to complete the software development tasks. Additionally, the messages  confirm  the...

Even as the TrickBot infrastructure closed shop, the operators of the malware are continuing to refine and retool their arsenal to carry out attacks that culminated in the deployment of Conti ransomware. IBM Security X-Force, which discovered the revamped version of the criminal gang's  AnchorDNS  backdoor, dubbed the new, upgraded variant AnchorMail. AnchorMail "uses an email-based [command-and-control] server which it communicates with using SMTP and IMAP protocols over TLS," IBM's malware reverse engineer, Charlotte Hammond,  said . "With the exception of the overhauled C2 communication mechanism, AnchorMail's behavior aligns very closely to that of its AnchorDNS predecessor." The cybercrime actor behind TrickBot, ITG23 aka Wizard Spider, is also known for its development of the Anchor malware framework, a backdoor reserved for targeting selected high value victims since at least 2018 via TrickBot and BazarBackdoor (aka BazarLoader), an additiona...

UPDATE: It's worth noting that the malware Microsoft tracks as FoxBlade is the same as the data wiper that's been denominated HermeticWiper (aka KillDisk) . Microsoft on Monday disclosed that it detected a new round of offensive and destructive cyberattacks directed against Ukraine's digital infrastructure hours before Russia launched its first missile strikes last week. The intrusions involved the use of a never-before-seen malware package dubbed FoxBlade , according to the tech giant's Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC), noting that it added new signatures to its Defender anti-malware service to detect the exploit within three hours of the discovery. "These recent and ongoing cyberattacks have been precisely targeted, and we have not seen the use of the indiscriminate malware technology that spread across Ukraine's economy and beyond its borders in the  2017 NotPetya attack ," Microsoft's President and Vice Chair, Brad Smith,  said . Additio...

A previously undocumented espionage tool has been deployed against selected governments and other critical infrastructure targets as part of a long-running espionage campaign orchestrated by China-linked threat actors since at least 2013. Broadcom's Symantec Threat Hunter team characterized the backdoor, named  Daxin , as a technologically advanced malware, allowing the attackers to carry out a variety of communications and information-gathering operations aimed at entities in the telecom, transportation, and manufacturing sectors that are of strategic interest to China. "Daxin malware is a highly sophisticated rootkit backdoor with complex, stealthy command-and-control (C2) functionality that enables remote actors to communicate with secured devices not connected directly to the internet," the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)  said  in an independent advisory. The implant takes the form of a Windows kernel driver that implements an elabor...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)  expanded  its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog to include a recently disclosed zero-day flaw in the Zimbra email platform citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2022-24682  (CVSS score: 6.1), the issue concerns a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the Calendar feature in Zimbra Collaboration Suite that could be abused by an attacker to trick users into downloading arbitrary JavaScript code simply by clicking a link to exploit URLs in phishing messages. The Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog is a  repository  of security flaws that have been seen abused by threat actors in attacks and that are required to be patched by Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies. The vulnerability came to light on February 3, 2022, when cybersecurity firm Volexity  identified  a series of targeted spear-phishing campaigns aimed at European ...

A group of academics from Tel Aviv University have disclosed details of now-patched "severe" design flaws affecting about 100 million Android-based Samsung smartphones that could have resulted in the extraction of secret cryptographic keys. The shortcomings are the result of an analysis of the cryptographic design and implementation of Android's hardware-backed Keystore in Samsung's Galaxy S8, S9, S10, S20, and S21 flagship devices, researchers Alon Shakevsky, Eyal Ronen, and Avishai Wool  said . Trusted Execution Environments ( TEEs ) are a secure zone that provide an isolated environment for the execution of Trusted Applications (TAs) to carry out security critical tasks to ensure confidentiality and integrity. On Android, the hardware-backed  Keystore  is a system that facilitates the creation and storage of cryptographic keys within the TEE, making them more difficult to be extracted from the device in a manner that prevents the underlying operating system fr...