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The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) this week added 95 more security flaws to its  Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog , taking the total number of actively exploited vulnerabilities to 478. "These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise," the agency  said  in an advisory published on March 3, 2022. Of the 95 newly added bugs, 38 relate to Cisco vulnerabilities, 27 for Microsoft, 16 for Adobe, seven impact Oracle, and one each corresponding to Apache Tomcat, ChakraCore, Exim, Mozilla Firefox, Linux Kernel, Siemens SIMATIC CP, and Treck TCP/IP stack. Included in the list are five issues discovered in Cisco RV routers, which CISA notes are being exploited in real-world attacks. The flaws, which  came to light  early last month, allow for the execution of arbitrary code with root privileges. Three of the vulnerabilities – CVE-2022...

Cyber criminals and hacktivist groups are increasingly using the Telegram messaging app to coordinate their activities, leak data, and spread disinformation, as the Russia-Ukraine conflict enters its eighth day. A new analysis by Israeli cybersecurity company Check Point Research has  found  that "user volume grew a hundred folds daily on Telegram related groups, peaking at 200,000 per group." Prominent among the groups are anti-Russian cyber attack groups, including the Ukraine government-backed IT Army, which has urged its more 270,000 members to conduct distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Russian entities. Other hacktivist-oriented Telegram groups used to coordinate the attacks on Russian targets via DDoS, SMS or call-based attacks are Anna_ and Mark_, Check Point researchers noted. That said, there may be more to these attacks than meets the eye. "It seems that many of the hacktivist groups are more focused on building self-reputation and recei...

Researchers have disclosed details of a new security vulnerability in GitLab, an open-source DevOps software, that could potentially allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to recover user-related information. Tracked as CVE-2021-4191 (CVSS score: 5.3), the medium-severity flaw affects all versions of GitLab Community Edition and Enterprise Edition starting from 13.0 and all versions starting from 14.4 and prior to 14.8. Credited with discovering and reporting the flaw is Jake Baines, a senior security researcher at Rapid7. Following responsible disclosure on November 18, 2021, patches were  released  for self-managed servers as part of GitLab critical security releases 14.8.2, 14.7.4, and 14.6.5 shipped on February 25, 2022. "The vulnerability is the result of a missing authentication check when executing certain GitLab GraphQL API queries," Baines  said  in a report published Thursday. "A remote, unauthenticated attacker can use this vulnerability to collect ...

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...

As the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict continues to escalate, the Russian government on Thursday  released  a massive list containing 17,576 IP addresses and 166 domains that it said are behind a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks aimed at its domestic infrastructure. Some of the noticeable domains in the listing released by Russia's National Coordination Center for Computer Incidents (NCCCI) included the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and websites of several media publications such as the USA Today, 24News.ge, megatv.ge, and Ukraine's Korrespondent magazine. As part of its recommendations to counter the DDoS attacks, the agency is urging organizations to ringfence network devices, enable logging, change passwords associated with key infrastructure elements, turn off automatic software updates, disable third-party plugins on websites, enforce data backups, and watch out for phishing attacks. "Use Russ...

A group of academics from the North Carolina State University and Dokuz Eylul University have demonstrated what they say is the "first side-channel attack" on homomorphic encryption that could be exploited to leak data as the encryption process is underway. "Basically, by monitoring power consumption in a device that is encoding data for homomorphic encryption, we are able to read the data as it is being encrypted," Aydin Aysu, one of the authors of the study,  said . "This demonstrates that even next generation encryption technologies need protection against side-channel attacks." Homomorphic Encryption is a  form of encryption  that allows certain types of computation to be performed directly on encrypted data without having to decrypt it in the first place. It's also meant to be privacy-preserving in that it allows sharing of sensitive data with other third-party services, such as data analytics firms, for further processing while the underlyin...

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...