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APT41, the state-sponsored threat actor affiliated with China, breached at least six U.S. state government networks between May 2021 and February 2022 by retooling its attack vectors to take advantage of vulnerable internet-facing web applications. The exploited vulnerabilities included "a zero-day vulnerability in the USAHERDS application ( CVE-2021-44207 ) as well as the now infamous zero-day in Log4j ( CVE-2021-44228 )," researchers from Mandiant  said  in a report published Tuesday, calling it a "deliberate campaign." Besides web compromises, the persistent attacks also involved the weaponization of exploits such as deserialization , SQL injection , and directory traversal vulnerabilities, the cybersecurity and incident response firm noted. The  prolific  advanced persistent threat, also known by the monikers Barium and Winnti, has a  track record  of targeting organizations in both the public and private sectors to orchestrate espionage activity i...

Researchers have disclosed three security vulnerabilities affecting Pascom Cloud Phone System ( CPS ) that could be combined to achieve a full pre-authenticated remote code execution of affected systems. Kerbit security researcher Daniel Eshetu  said  the shortcomings, when chained together, can lead to "an unauthenticated attacker gaining root on these devices." Pascom Cloud Phone System is an integrated collaboration and communication solution that allows businesses to host and set up private telephone networks across different platforms as well as facilitate the monitoring, maintenance, and updates associated with the virtual phone systems. The set of three flaws includes those stemming from an arbitrary path traversal in the web interface, a server-side request forgery ( SSRF ) due to an outdated third-party dependency ( CVE-2019-18394 ), and a post-authentication command injection using a daemon service ("exd.pl"). In other words, the vulnerabilities can...

Microsoft's  Patch Tuesday update  for the month of March has been made officially available with 71 fixes spanning across its software products such as Windows, Office, Exchange, and Defender, among others. Of the total 71 patches, three are rated Critical and 68 are rated Important in severity. While none of the vulnerabilities are listed as actively exploited, three of them are publicly known at the time of release. It's worth pointing out that Microsoft separately  addressed 21 flaws  in the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser earlier this month. All the three critical vulnerabilities remediated this month are remote code execution flaws impacting HEVC Video Extensions ( CVE-2022-22006 ), Microsoft Exchange Server ( CVE-2022-23277 ), and VP9 Video Extensions ( CVE-2022-24501 ). The Microsoft Exchange Server vulnerability, which was reported by researcher Markus Wulftange, is also noteworthy for the fact that it requires the attacker to be authenticated to ...

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...

Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday disclosed 16 new high-severity vulnerabilities in various implementations of Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) firmware impacting multiple HP enterprise devices. The  shortcomings , which have CVSS scores ranging from 7.5 to 8.8, have been uncovered in HP's UEFI firmware. The variety of devices affected includes HP's laptops, desktops, point-of-sale (PoS) systems, and edge computing nodes. "By exploiting the vulnerabilities disclosed, attackers can leverage them to perform privileged code execution in firmware, below the operating system, and potentially deliver persistent malicious code that survives operating system re-installations and allows the bypass of endpoint security solutions (EDR/AV), Secure Boot and Virtualization-Based Security isolation," American firmware security company Binarly said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The most severe of the flaws concern a number of memory corruption vulnera...

A broad range of threat actors, including Fancy Bear, Ghostwriter, and Mustang Panda, have launched phishing campaigns against Ukraine, Poland, and other European entities amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) said it took down two Blogspot domains that were used by the nation-state group FancyBear (aka APT28) – which is attributed to Russia's GRU military intelligence – as a landing page for its social engineering attacks. The disclosure comes close on the heels of an advisory from the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA)  warning  of phishing campaigns targeting Ukr.net users that involve sending messages from compromised accounts containing links to attacker-controlled credential harvesting pages. Another cluster of threat activity concerns webmail users of Ukr.net, Yandex.ru, wp.pl, rambler.ru, meta.ua, and i.ua, who have been at the receiving end of phishing attacks by a Belarusian threat actor tracked as Ghostwrit...

Google is officially buying threat intelligence and incident response company Mandiant in an all-cash deal approximately valued at $5.4 billion, the two technology firms announced Tuesday. Mandiant is expected to be folded into Google Cloud upon the closure of the acquisition, which is slated to happen later this year, adding to the latter's growing portfolio of security offerings such as BeyondCorp Enterprise , VirusTotal , Chronicle , and the Cybersecurity Action Team . "Today, organizations are facing cybersecurity challenges that have accelerated in frequency, severity and diversity, creating a global security imperative," Google  said  in a statement. "To address these risks, enterprises need to be able to detect and respond to adversaries quickly; analyze and automate threat intelligence to scale threat detection across organizations; orchestrate and automate remediation; validate their protection against known threats; and visualize their IT environment i...

Samsung on Monday confirmed a security breach that resulted in the exposure of internal company data, including the source code related to its Galaxy smartphones. "According to our initial analysis, the breach involves some source code relating to the operation of Galaxy devices, but does not include the personal information of our consumers or employees," the electronics giant  told  Bloomberg. The South Korean chaebol also confirmed that it doesn't anticipate any impact to its business or its customers as a result of the incident and that it has implemented new security measures to prevent such breaches in the future. The confirmation comes after the LAPSUS$ hacking group dumped 190GB of Samsung data on its Telegram channel towards the end of last week, allegedly exposing the source code for trusted applets installed within  TrustZone , algorithms for biometric authentication, bootloaders for recent devices, and even confidential data from its chip supplier Qualcom...

As many as seven security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in PTC's Axeda software that could be weaponized to gain unauthorized access to medical and IoT devices. Collectively called " Access:7 ," the weaknesses – three of which are rated Critical in severity – potentially affect more than  150 device models  spanning over 100 different manufacturers, posing a significant supply chain risk. PTC's Axeda solution includes a cloud platform that allows device manufacturers to establish connectivity to remotely monitor, manage and service a wide range of connected machines, sensors, and devices via what's called the agent, which is installed by the OEMs before the devices are sold to customers. "Access:7 could enable hackers to remotely execute malicious code, access sensitive data, or alter configuration on medical and IoT devices running PTC's Axeda remote code and management agent," researchers from Forescout and CyberMDX said in a joint report...

Unpatched software is a computer code containing known security weaknesses. Unpatched vulnerabilities refer to weaknesses that allow attackers to leverage a known security bug that has not been patched by running malicious code. Software vendors write additions to the codes, known as "patches," when they come to know about these application vulnerabilities to secure these weaknesses. Adversaries often probe into your software, looking for unpatched systems and attacking them directly or indirectly. It is risky to run unpatched software. This is because attackers get the time to become aware of the  software's unpatched vulnerabilities  before a patch emerges. A  report  found that unpatched vulnerabilities are the most consistent and primary ransomware attack vectors. It was recorded that in 2021,  65  new vulnerabilities arose that were connected to ransomware. This was observed to be a twenty-nine percent growth compared to the number of vulnerabilitie...

Linux distributions are in the process of issuing patches to address a newly disclosed security vulnerability in the kernel that could allow an attacker to overwrite arbitrary data into any read-only files and allow for a complete takeover of affected systems. Dubbed " Dirty Pipe " (CVE-2022-0847, CVSS score: 7.8) by IONOS software developer Max Kellermann, the flaw "leads to privilege escalation because unprivileged processes can inject code into root processes." Kellermann said the bug was discovered after digging into a support issue raised by one of the customers of the cloud and hosting provider that concerned a case of a "surprising kind of corruption" affecting web server access logs. The Linux kernel flaw is said to have existed since  version 5.8 , with the vulnerability sharing similarities to that of  Dirty Cow  (CVE-2016-5195), which came to light in October 2016. "A flaw was found in the way the 'flags' member of the new pip...

Details have been disclosed about a now-addressed critical vulnerability in Microsoft's  Azure Automation  service that could have permitted unauthorized access to other Azure customer accounts and take over control. "This attack could mean full control over resources and data belonging to the targeted account, depending on the permissions assigned by the customer," Orca Security researcher Yanir Tsarimi  said  in a report published Monday. The flaw potentially put several entities at risk, including an unnamed telecommunications company, two car manufacturers, a banking conglomerate, and big four accounting firms, among others, the Israeli cloud infrastructure security company added. The Azure Automation service  allows  for process automation, configuration management, and handling operating system updates within a defined maintenance window across Azure and non-Azure environments. Dubbed " AutoWarp ," the issue affects all users of the Azure Automa...

Researchers have disclosed details of critical security vulnerabilities in TerraMaster network-attached storage (TNAS) devices that could be chained to attain unauthenticated remote code execution with the highest privileges. The issues reside in TOS, an abbreviation for TerraMaster Operating System, and "can grant unauthenticated attackers access to the victim's box simply by knowing the IP address," Ethiopian cyber security research firm Octagon Networks ' Paulos Yibelo said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. TOS is the  operating system  designed for TNAS appliances, enabling users to manage storage, install applications, and backup data. Following responsible disclosure, the flaws were patched in  TOS version 4.2.30  released last week on March 1, 2022. One of the issues, tracked as CVE-2022-24990, concerns a case of information leak in a component called "webNasIPS," resulting in the exposure of TOS firmware version, the default gateway in...

Cyber-attacks keep increasing and evolving but, regardless of the degree of complexity used by hackers to gain access, get a foothold, cloak their malware, execute their payload or exfiltrate data, their attack will begin with reconnaissance. They will do their utmost to uncover exposed assets and probe their target's attack surface for gaps that can be used as entry points. So, the first line of defense is to limit the potentially useful information available to a potential attacker as much as possible. As always, the tug of war between operational necessity and security concerns needs to be taken into account, which requires a better understanding of the type of information typically leveraged. What information are hackers looking for during recon? When running recon on an organization, hackers – whether white or black hats - are "casing a joint." To plan their attack, they will try and uncover as much information as possible about: Your infrastructure The types ...

Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) warned of new phishing attacks aimed at its citizens by leveraging compromised email accounts belonging to three different Indian entities with the goal of compromising their inboxes and stealing sensitive information. The agency  cautioned  that the emails arrive with the subject line "Увага" (meaning "Attention") and claim to be from a domestic email service called Ukr.net, when in actuality, the email address of the sender is "muthuprakash.b@tvsrubber[.]com." The messages purportedly warn the recipients of an unauthorized attempt to log in to their accounts from an IP address based out of the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, further prompting them to click on a link to change their passwords with immediate effect. "After following the link and entering the password, it gets to the attackers," CERT-UA noted in a Facebook post over the weekend. "In this way, they gain access to ...

The threat actor behind a nascent Android banking trojan named  SharkBot  has managed to evade Google Play Store security barriers by masquerading as an antivirus app. SharkBot, like its malware counterparts  TeaBot ,  FluBot , and  Oscorp  (UBEL), belongs to a category of financial trojans capable of siphoning credentials to initiate money transfers from compromised devices by circumventing multi-factor authentication mechanisms. It first emerged on the scene in November 2021. Where SharkBot stands apart is in its ability to carry out the unauthorized transactions via Automatic Transfer Systems (ATS), which stands in contrast to TeaBot, which requires a live operator to interact with the infected devices to conduct the malicious activities. "The ATS features allow the malware to receive a list of events to be simulated, and they will be simulated in order to do the money transfers," Alberto Segura and Rolf Govers, malware analysts at cybersecurity fir...

Mozilla has pushed out-of-band  software updates  to its Firefox web browser to contain two high-impact security vulnerabilities, both of which it says are being actively exploited in the wild. Tracked as CVE-2022-26485 and CVE-2022-26486, the zero-day flaws have been described as  use-after-free issues  impacting the Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations ( XSLT ) parameter processing and the  WebGPU  inter-process communication ( IPC ) Framework. XSLT is an XML-based language used for the conversion of XML documents into web pages or PDF documents, whereas WebGPU is an emerging web standard that's been billed as a successor to the current WebGL JavaScript graphics library. The description of the two flaws is below – CVE-2022-26485  – Removing an XSLT parameter during processing could lead to an exploitable use-after-free CVE-2022-26486  – An unexpected message in the WebGPU IPC framework could lead to a use-after-free and exploit...

Details have emerged about a now-patched high-severity vulnerability in the Linux kernel that could potentially be abused to escape a container in order to execute arbitrary commands on the container host. The shortcoming resides in a Linux kernel feature called  control groups , also referred to as cgroups version 1 (v1), which allows processes to be organized into hierarchical groups, thereby making it possible to limit and monitor the usage of resources such as CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network. Tracked as  CVE-2022-0492  (CVSS score: 7.0), the  issue   concerns  a  case  of  privilege escalation  in the cgroups v1 release_agent functionality, a script that's executed following the termination of any process in the cgroup. "The issue stands out as one of the simplest Linux privilege escalations discovered in recent times: The Linux kernel mistakenly exposed a privileged operation to unprivileged users," Unit 42 researcher Yuval A...

Cybersecurity company Imperva on Friday said it recently mitigated a ransom distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack targeting an unnamed website that peaked at 2.5 million requests per second (RPS). "While ransom DDoS attacks are not new, they appear to be evolving and becoming more interesting with time and with each new phase," Nelli Klepfish, security analyst at Imperva,  said . "For example, we've seen instances where the ransom note is included in the attack itself embedded into a URL request." The top sources of the attacks came from Indonesia, followed by the U.S., China, Brazil, India, Colombia, Russia, Thailand, Mexico, and Argentina. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are a subcategory of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks in which an army of connected online devices, known as a botnet, is used to overwhelm a target website with fake traffic in an attempt to render it unavailable to legitimate users. The California-headquartered firm s...