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Between a series of recent high-profile cybersecurity incidents and the heightened geopolitical tensions, there's rarely been a more dangerous cybersecurity environment. It's a danger that affects every organization – automated attack campaigns don't discriminate between targets. The situation is driven in large part due to a relentless rise in vulnerabilities, with tens of thousands of brand-new vulnerabilities discovered every year. For tech teams that are probably already under-resourced, guarding against this rising tide of threats is an impossible task. Yet, in the battle against cybercrime, some of the most effective and most sensible mitigations are sometimes neglected. In this article, we'll outline why cybersecurity risks have escalated so dramatically – and which easy wins your organization can make for a significant difference in your cybersecurity posture, right now. Recent major cyberattacks point to the danger Cyber security has arguably never been mo...

Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), on Tuesday announced the official takedown of Hydra, the world's largest illegal dark web marketplace that has cumulatively facilitated over $5 billion in Bitcoin transactions to date. "Bitcoins amounting to currently the equivalent of approximately €23 million were seized, which are attributed to the marketplace," the BKA said in a press release. Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic confirmed that the seizure occurred on April 5, 2022 in a series of 88 transactions totaling 543.3 BTC. The agency attributed the shutdown of Hydra to an extensive investigation operation conducted by its Central Office for Combating Cybercrime (ZIT) in partnership with U.S. law enforcement authorities that it said had been underway since August 2021. Launched in 2015, Hydra was a Russian-language darknet marketplace that opened as a competitor to the now-defunct Russian Anonymous Marketplace (aka RAMP), primarily...

A Chinese state-backed advanced persistent threat (APT) group known for singling out Japanese entities has been attributed to a new long-running espionage campaign targeting new geographies, suggesting a "widening" of the threat actor's targeting. The widespread intrusions, which are believed to have commenced at the earliest in mid-2021 and continued as recently as February 2022, have been tied to a group tracked as Cicada , which is also known as APT10, Stone Panda, Potassium, Bronze Riverside, or MenuPass Team. "Victims in this Cicada (aka APT10) campaign include government, legal, religious, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in multiple countries around the world, including in Europe, Asia, and North America," researchers from the Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom Software,  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "There is a strong focus on victims in the government and NGO sectors, with some of these organizations worki...

With the growth in digital transformation, the API management market is set to grow  by more than 30%   by the year 2025 as more businesses build web APIs and consumers grow to rely on them for everything from mobile apps to customized digital services. As part of strategic business planning, an API helps generate revenue by allowing customers access to the functionality of a website or computer program through custom applications. As more and more businesses are implementing APIs, the risk of API attacks increases. By 2022, Gartner predicted that API (Application Programming Interface) attacks would become the most common attack vector for enterprise web applications. Cybercriminals are targeting APIs more aggressively than ever before, and businesses must take a proactive approach to  API security  to combat this new aggression. API and The Business World With integrating APIs into modern IT environments, businesses are becoming increasingly data-driven...

Email marketing service Mailchimp on Monday revealed a data breach that resulted in the compromise of an internal tool to gain unauthorized access to customer accounts and stage phishing attacks.  The development was first  reported  by Bleeping Computer. The company, which was acquired by financial software firm Intuit in September 2021, told the publication that it became aware of the incident on March 26 when it became aware of a malicious party accessing the customer support tool. "The incident was propagated by an external actor who conducted a successful social engineering attack on Mailchimp employees, resulting in employee credentials being compromised," Siobhan Smyth, Mailchimp's chief information security officer, was quoted as saying. Although Mailchimp stated it acted quickly to terminate access to the breached employee account, the siphoned credentials were used to access 319 MailChimp accounts and further export the mailing lists pertaining to 102 acc...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added the recently disclosed remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability affecting the Spring Framework, to its  Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog  based on "evidence of active exploitation." The critical severity flaw, assigned the identifier  CVE-2022-22965  (CVSS score: 9.8) and dubbed "Spring4Shell", impacts Spring model–view–controller (MVC) and Spring WebFlux applications running on Java Development Kit 9 and later. "Exploitation requires an endpoint with DataBinder enabled (e.g., a POST request that decodes data from the request body automatically) and depends heavily on the servlet container for the application," Praetorian researchers Anthony Weems and Dallas Kaman noted last week. Although exact details of in-the-wild abuse remain unclear, information security company SecurityScorecard  said  "active scanning for this vulnerability has been observed coming fro...

An Android spyware application has been spotted masquerading as a "Process Manager" service to stealthily siphon sensitive information stored in the infected devices. Interestingly, the app — that has the package name " com.remote.app " — establishes contact with a remote command-and-control server, 82.146.35[.]240, which has been previously identified as infrastructure belonging to the Russia-based hacking group known as  Turla . "When the application is run, a warning appears about the permissions granted to the application," Lab52 researchers  said . "These include screen unlock attempts, lock the screen, set the device global proxy, set screen lock password expiration, set storage encryption and disable cameras." Once the app is "activated," the malware removes its gear-shaped icon from the home screen and runs in the background, abusing its wide permissions to access the device's contacts and call logs, track its location,...

At least three different advanced persistent threat (APT) groups from across the world have launched spear-phishing campaigns in mid-March 2022 using the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war as a lure to distribute malware and steal sensitive information. The campaigns, undertaken by El Machete, Lyceum, and SideWinder, have targeted a variety of sectors, including energy, financial, and governmental sectors in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. "The attackers use decoys ranging from official-looking documents to news articles or even job postings, depending on the targets and region," Check Point Research  said  in a report. "Many of these lure documents utilize malicious macros or template injection to gain an initial foothold into the targeted organizations, and then launch malware attacks." The infection chains of  El Machete , a Spanish-speaking threat actor first documented in August 2014 by Kaspersky, involve the use of macro-laced decoy doc...

A group of academics from the University of Oxford and Armasuisse S+T has disclosed details of a new attack technique against the popular Combined Charging System ( CCS ) that could potentially disrupt the ability to charge electric vehicles at scale. Dubbed " Brokenwire ," the method interferes with the control communications that transpire between the vehicle and charger to wirelessly abort the charging sessions from a distance of as far as 47m (151ft). "While it may only be an inconvenience for individuals, interrupting the charging process of critical vehicles, such as electric ambulances, can have life-threatening consequences," the researchers  explained . "Brokenwire has immediate implications for many of the 12 million battery EVs estimated to be on the roads worldwide — and profound effects on the new wave of electrification for vehicle fleets, both for private enterprise and for crucial public services." Additional details of the attack...

A previously undocumented "sophisticated" information-stealing malware named BlackGuard is being advertised for sale on Russian underground forums for a monthly subscription of $200. "BlackGuard has the capability to steal all types of information related to Crypto wallets, VPN, Messengers, FTP credentials, saved browser credentials, and email clients," Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers Mitesh Wani and Kaivalya Khursale  said  in a report published last week. Also sold for a lifetime price of $700, BlackGuard is designed as a .NET-based malware that's actively under development, boasting of a number of anti-analysis, anti-debugging, and anti-evasion features that allows it to kill processes related to antivirus engines and bypass string-based detection. What's more, it checks the IP address of the infected devices by sending a request to the domain "https://ipwhois[.]app/xml/," and exit itself if the country is one among the Commonwealth of Indep...

A variant of the Mirai botnet called Beastmode has been observed adopting newly disclosed vulnerabilities in TOTOLINK routers between February and March 2022 to infect unpatched devices and expand its reach potentially. "The Beastmode (aka B3astmode) Mirai-based DDoS campaign has aggressively updated its arsenal of exploits," Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs Research team  said . "Five new exploits were added within a month, with three targeting various models of TOTOLINK routers." The list of exploited vulnerabilities in TOTOLINK routers is as follows - CVE-2022-26210  (CVSS score: 9.8) - A command injection vulnerability that could be exploited to gain arbitrary code execution CVE-2022-26186  (CVSS score: 9.8) - A command injection vulnerability affecting TOTOLINK N600R and A7100RU routers, and CVE-2022-25075 to CVE-2022-25084  (CVSS scores: 9.8) - A command injection vulnerability impacting multiple TOTOLINK routers, leading to code execution The other e...

A 15-year-old security vulnerability has been disclosed in the PEAR PHP repository that could permit an attacker to carry out a supply chain attack, including obtaining unauthorized access to publish rogue packages and execute arbitrary code. "An attacker exploiting the first one could take over any developer account and publish malicious releases, while the second bug would allow the attacker to gain persistent access to the central PEAR server," SonarSource vulnerability researcher Thomas Chauchefoin  said  in a write-up published this week. PEAR, short for PHP Extension and Application Repository, is a framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components. One of the issues, introduced in a  code commit  made in March 2007 when the feature was originally implemented, relates to the use of the cryptographically insecure  mt_rand()  PHP function in the password reset functionality that could allow an attacker to "discover a valid password rese...

The City of London Police on Friday disclosed that it has charged two of the seven teenagers, a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old, who were arrested last week for their alleged connections to the LAPSUS$ data extortion gang. "Both teenagers have been charged with: three counts of unauthorized access to a computer with intent to impair the reliability of data; one count of fraud by false representation and one count of unauthorized access to a computer with intent to hinder access to data," Detective Inspector Michael O'Sullivan, from the City of London Police,  said  in a statement. In addition, the unnamed 16-year-old minor has been charged with one count of causing a computer to perform a function to secure unauthorized access to a program. The charges come as the City of London Police moved to arrest seven suspected LAPSUS$ gang members aged between 16 and 21 on March 25, with the agency  telling  The Hacker News that all the individuals had been subsequently "re...

DevOps platform GitLab has released software updates to address a critical security vulnerability that, if potentially exploited, could permit an adversary to seize control of accounts. Tracked as  CVE-2022-1162 , the issue has a CVSS score of 9.1 and is said to have been discovered internally by the GitLab team. "A hardcoded password was set for accounts registered using an  OmniAuth provider  (e.g., OAuth, LDAP, SAML) in GitLab CE/EE versions 14.7 prior to 14.7.7, 14.8 prior to 14.8.5, and 14.9 prior to 14.9.2 allowing attackers to potentially take over accounts," the company  said  in an advisory published on March 31. GitLab, which has addressed the bug with the latest release of versions 14.9.2, 14.8.5, and 14.7.7 for GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE), also said it took the step of resetting the password of an unspecified number of users out of an abundance of caution. "Our investigation shows no indication that users or accou...

The cyberattack aimed at Viasat that temporarily knocked KA-SAT modems offline on February 24, 2022, the same day Russian military forces invaded Ukraine, is believed to have been the consequence of wiper malware, according to the  latest research  from SentinelOne. The findings come a day after the U.S. telecom company  disclosed  that it was the target of a multifaceted and deliberate" cyberattack against its KA-SAT network, linking it to a "ground-based network intrusion by an attacker exploiting a misconfiguration in a VPN appliance to gain remote access to the trusted management segment of the KA-SAT network." Upon gaining access, the adversary issued "destructive commands" on tens of thousands of modems belonging to the satellite broadband service that "overwrote key data in flash memory on the modems, rendering the modems unable to access the network, but not permanently unusable." But SentinelOne said it uncovered a new piece of malware (...

Two new security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Rockwell Automation's programmable logic controllers ( PLCs ) and engineering workstation software that could be exploited by an attacker to inject malicious code on affected systems and stealthily modify automation processes. The flaws have the potential to disrupt industrial operations and cause physical damage to factories in a manner similar to that of Stuxnet and the  Rogue7 attacks , operational technology security company Claroty said. "Programmable logic and predefined variables drive these [automation] processes, and changes to either will alter normal operation of the PLC and the process it manages," Claroty's Sharon Brizinov  noted  in a write-up published Thursday. The list of two flaws is below – CVE-2022-1161  (CVSS score: 10.0) – A remotely exploitable flaw that allows a malicious actor to write user-readable "textual" program code to a separate memory location from the executed c...

A Chinese advanced persistent threat tracked as Deep Panda has been observed exploiting the  Log4Shell vulnerability  in VMware Horizon servers to deploy a backdoor and a novel rootkit on infected machines with the goal of stealing sensitive data. "The nature of targeting was opportunistic insofar that multiple infections in several countries and various sectors occurred on the same dates,"  said  Rotem Sde-Or and Eliran Voronovitch, researchers with Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs, in a report released this week. "The victims belong to the financial, academic, cosmetics, and travel industries." Deep Panda , also known by the monikers Shell Crew, KungFu Kittens, and Bronze Firestone, is said to have been active since at least 2010, with recent attacks "targeting legal firms for data exfiltration and technology providers for command-and-control infrastructure building,"  according  to Secureworks. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which assigned the panda...

Threat actor groups like Wizard Spider and Sandworm have been wreaking havoc over the past few years – developing and deploying cybercrime tools like Conti, Trickbot, and Ryuk ransomware. Most recently, Sandworm (suspected to be a Russian cyber-military unit) unleashed cyberattacks against Ukranian infrastructure targets. To ensure cybersecurity providers are battle ready, MITRE Engenuity uses real-world attack scenarios and tactics implemented by threat groups to test security vendors' capabilities to protect against threats – the MITRE ATT&CK Evaluation. Each vendor's detections and capabilities are assessed within the context of the  MITRE ATT&CK Framework. This year, they used the tactics seen in Wizard Spider and Sandworm's during their evaluation simulations. And MITRE Engenuity didn't go easy on these participating vendors. As mentioned before – the stakes are too high, and risk is growing. The 2022 results overview To think about it simply, this MITRE ATT&C...

The North Korean state-backed hacking crew, otherwise known as the  Lazarus Group , has been attributed to yet another financially motivated campaign that leverages a trojanized decentralized finance (DeFi) wallet app to distribute a fully-featured backdoor onto compromised Windows systems. The app, which is equipped with functionalities to save and manage a cryptocurrency wallet, is also designed to trigger the launch of the implant that can take control of the infected host. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky  said  it first encountered the rogue application in mid-December 2021. The infection scheme initiated by the app also results in the deployment of the installer for a legitimate application, which gets overwritten with a trojanized version in an effort to cover its tracks. That said, the initial access avenue is unclear, although it's suspected to be a case of social engineering. The spawned malware, which masquerades as Google's Chrome web browser, subsequ...