The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

The U.S. government on Wednesday warned of nation-state actors deploying specialized malware to maintain access to industrial control systems (ICS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) devices. "The APT actors have developed custom-made tools for targeting ICS/SCADA devices," multiple U.S. agencies  said  in an alert. "The tools enable them to scan for, compromise, and control affected devices once they have established initial access to the operational technology (OT) network." The joint federal advisory comes courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The custom-made tools are specifically designed to single out Schneider Electric programmable logic controllers (PLCs), OMRON Sysmac NEX PLCs, and Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA) servers. On top of that, the unnamed actors...

A week after VMware released patches to remediate eight security vulnerabilities in VMware Workspace ONE Access, threat actors have begun to actively exploit one of the critical flaws in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2022-22954 , the security shortcoming relates to a remote code execution vulnerability that stems from server-side template injection in VMware Workspace ONE Access and Identity Manager. The bug is rated 9.8 in severity. "A malicious actor with network access can trigger a server-side  template injection  that may result in remote code execution," the company  noted  in its advisory. The virtualization services provider has since revised its bulletin to warn customers of confirmed exploitation of CVE-2022-22954 occurring in the wild. Cybersecurity firm Bad Packets also  corroborated  that it detected attempts to weaponize the vulnerability. Source:  Bad Packets It's worth noting that the patches shipped last week address seven...

Extended detection and response (XDR) is expected to be the future of cybersecurity, merging security technologies with the evolving approach to the way we do cybersecurity. And while many organizations are scrambling to integrate XDR into their cybersecurity strategies – even more are still trying to figure out what XDR really is and if it's even the right solution for their organization.  But there are some organizations that are getting lost in the debate and are wondering if there is a place for them in this new frontier of cybersecurity: organizations with lean security teams and limited resources.  Fortunately, Cynet, a cybersecurity company, is hosting an upcoming webinar in partnership with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) that will explore how choosing the right XDR can be impactful for companies lean security teams [ register here ]. During the webinar, Jon Oltsik, Senior Principal Analyst with ESG, and George Tubin, Director of Product Strategy at Cynet, will cove...

The Chinese-backed Hafnium hacking group has been linked to a piece of a new malware that's used to maintain persistence on compromised Windows environments. The threat actor is said to have targeted entities in the telecommunication, internet service provider and data services sectors from August 2021 to February 2022, expanding from the initial victimology patterns observed during its attacks exploiting the then zero-day flaws in  Microsoft Exchange Servers  in March 2021. Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC), which dubbed the defense evasion malware " Tarrask ," characterized it as a tool that creates "hidden" scheduled tasks on the system. "Scheduled task abuse is a very common method of persistence and defense evasion — and an enticing one, at that," the researchers  said . Hafnium, while most notable for Exchange Server attacks, has since leveraged unpatched zero-day vulnerabilities as initial vectors to drop web shells and other mal...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) on Tuesday  disclosed  that it thwarted a cyberattack by Sandworm , a hacking group affiliated with Russia's military intelligence, to sabotage the operations of an unnamed energy provider in the country. "The attackers attempted to take down several infrastructure components of their target, namely: Electrical substations, Windows-operated computing systems, Linux-operated server equipment, [and] active network equipment," the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine (SSSCIP)  said  in a statement. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET, which collaborated with CERT-UA to analyze the attack, said the attempted intrusion involved the use of ICS-capable malware and regular disk wipers, with the adversary unleashing an updated variant of the  Industroyer  malware, which was first deployed in a 2016 assault on Ukraine's power grid. "The Sandworm attackers made an attemp...

An international law enforcement operation raided and took down RaidForums, one of the world's largest hacking forums notorious for selling access to hacked personal information belonging to users. Dubbed Tourniquet, the seizure of the cybercrime website involved authorities from the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Portugal, and Romania, with the criminal investigation resulting in the  arrest  of the forum's administrator at his home last month in Croydon, England. The three confiscated domains associated with the illicit marketplace include "raidforums[.]com," "Rf[.]ws," and "Raid[.]lol." Diogo Santos Coelho (aka "Omnipotent"), the said founder and chief administrator, was apprehended in the U.K. on January 31 and is pending extradition to the U.S. Santos Coelho has been charged with conspiracy, access device fraud, and aggravated identity theft. In addition to detailing Santos Coelho's central role in designing and administering the soft...

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday updates for the month of April have addressed a  total of 128 security vulnerabilities  spanning across its software product portfolio, including Windows, Defender, Office, Exchange Server, Visual Studio, and Print Spooler, among others. 10 of the 128 bugs fixed are rated Critical, 115 are rated Important, and three are rated Moderate in severity, with one of the flaws listed as publicly known and another under active attack at the time of the release. The updates are in addition to  26 other flaws  resolved by Microsoft in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the start of the month. The actively exploited flaw ( CVE-2022-24521 , CVSS score: 7.8) relates to an elevation of privilege vulnerability in the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS). Credited with reporting the flaw are the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and CrowdStrike researchers Adam Podlosky and Amir Bazine. The second publicly-known zero-day flaw ( CVE-2022-26904 , C...

Unsurprisingly, here at  Rewind , we've got a lot of data to protect (over 2 petabytes worth). One of the databases we use is called Elasticsearch (ES or Opensearch, as it is currently known in AWS). To put it simply, ES is a document database that facilitates lightning-fast search results. Speed is essential when customers are looking for a particular file or item that they need to restore using  Rewind . Every second of downtime counts, so our search results need to be fast, accurate, and reliable. Another consideration was disaster  recovery . As part of our  System and Organization Controls Level 2 (SOC2)  certification process, we needed to ensure we had a working disaster recovery plan to restore service in the unlikely event that the entire AWS region was down. "An entire AWS region?? That will never happen!" (Except for  when it did )  Anything is possible, things go wrong, and in order to meet our SOC2 requirements we needed to have a work...

Researchers have disclosed a previously undocumented local file inclusion ( LFI ) vulnerability in  Hashnode , a developer-oriented blogging platform, that could be abused to access sensitive data such as SSH keys, server's IP address, and other network information. "The LFI originates in a  Bulk Markdown Import feature  that can be manipulated to provide attackers with unimpeded ability to download local files from Hashnode's server," Akamai researchers said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Local file inclusion flaws occur when a web application is tricked into exposing or running unapproved files on a server, leading to directory traversal, information disclosure, remote code execution, and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. The flaw, caused due to the web application failing to adequately sanitize the path to a file that's passed as input, could have serious repercussions in that an assailant could navigate to any path on the server and access s...

Senior officials in the European Union were allegedly targeted with NSO Group's infamous Pegasus surveillance tool, according to a  new report  from Reuters. At least five individuals, including European Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders, are said to have been singled out in total, the news agency said, citing documents and two unnamed E.U. officials. However, it's not clear who used the commercial spyware against them or what information was obtained following the attacks. NSO Group said in a statement shared with Reuters that it was not responsible for the hacking attempts, adding that the targeting "could not have happened with NSO's tools." The intrusions are said to have come to light after Apple notified the victims of state-sponsored attacks last November as part of its efforts to stop the Israeli surveillance firm from targeting its customers. That same month, the iPhone maker  filed a lawsuit  against NSO Group, seeking a court-issued injunction ...

The maintainers of the NGINX web server project have issued mitigations to address security weaknesses in its Lightweight Directory Access Protocol ( LDAP ) Reference Implementation. "NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus are not themselves affected, and no corrective action is necessary if you do not use the reference implementation," Liam Crilly and Timo Stark of F5 Networks  said  in an advisory published Monday. NGINX said that the  reference implementation , which  uses LDAP to authenticate users , is impacted only under three conditions if the deployments involve - Command-line parameters to configure the Python-based reference implementation daemon Unused, optional configuration parameters, and Specific group membership to carry out LDAP authentication Should any of the aforementioned conditions be met, an attacker could potentially override the configuration parameters by sending specially crafted HTTP request headers and even bypass group membership re...

The mass adoption of cloud infrastructure is fully justified by innumerable advantages. As a result, today, organizations' most sensitive business applications, workloads, and data are in the cloud. Hackers, good and bad, have noticed that trend and effectively evolved their attack techniques to match this new tantalizing target landscape. With threat actors' high reactivity and adaptability, it is recommended to assume that organizations are under attack and that some user accounts or applications might already have been compromised. Finding out exactly which assets are put at risk through compromised accounts or breached assets requires mapping potential attack paths across a comprehensive map of all the relationships between assets.  Today, mapping potential attack paths is performed with scanning tools such as AzureHound or AWSPX. Those are graph-based tools enabling the visualization of assets and resources relationships within the related cloud service provider. By r...

Google on Monday disclosed that it's taking legal action against a nefarious actor who has been spotted operating fraudulent websites to defraud unsuspecting people into buying non-existent puppies. "The actor used a network of fraudulent websites that claimed to sell basset hound puppies — with alluring photos and fake customer testimonials — in order to take advantage of people during the pandemic," Google's CyberCrime Investigation Group manager Albert Shin and senior counsel Mike Trinh  said . The fraudulent scheme involved Nche Noel Ntse of Cameroon using a network of rogue websites, Google Voice phone numbers, and Gmail accounts to trick people into paying thousands of dollars online for "adorable puppies" that never arrived. The purported culprit is also alleged to have run a Google Ads campaign to push the fraudulent websites on top of search results pages as part of what Google characterized as "multiple international non-delivery scams....

A new traffic direction system (TDS) called Parrot has been spotted leveraging tens of thousands of compromised websites to launch further malicious campaigns. "The TDS has infected various web servers hosting more than 16,500 websites, ranging from adult content sites, personal websites, university sites, and local government sites," Avast researchers Pavel Novák and Jan Rubín  said  in a report published last week. Traffic direction systems are used by threat actors to determine whether or not a target is of interest and should be redirected to a malicious domain under their control and act as a gateway to compromise their systems with malware. Earlier this January, the BlackBerry Research and Intelligence Team detailed another TDS called  Prometheus  that has been put to use in different campaigns mounted by cybercriminal groups to distribute Campo Loader, Hancitor, IcedID, QBot, Buer Loader, and SocGholish malware. What makes Parrot TDS stand out is its hug...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning of two different information-stealing malware, named  FFDroider  and  Lightning Stealer , that are capable of siphoning data and launching further attacks. "Designed to send stolen credentials and cookies to a Command & Control server, FFDroider disguises itself on victim's machines to look like the instant messaging application 'Telegram,'" Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers Avinash Kumar and Niraj Shivtarkar  said  in a report published last week. Information stealers, as the name implies, are equipped to harvest sensitive information from compromised machines, such as keystrokes, screenshots, files, saved passwords and cookies from web browsers, that are then transmitted to a remote attacker-controlled domain.  FFDroider is distributed through cracked versions of installers and freeware with the primary objective of stealing cookies and credentials associated with popular social media and e-commerce platforms an...

Microsoft last week announced that it intends to make generally available a feature called Autopatch as part of Windows Enterprise E3 in July 2022. "This service will keep Windows and Office software on enrolled endpoints up-to-date automatically, at no additional cost,"  said  Lior Bela, senior product marketing manager at Microsoft, in a post last week. "The second Tuesday of every month will be 'just another Tuesday.'" Windows Autopatch is intended to work with all supported versions of Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows 365 for Enterprise. Windows Server OS and Windows 365 for Business, however, are not supported. The tech giant said the feature is aimed at tackling the complexity associated with software updates in enterprise IT environments as well as closing security gaps introduced as a result of not applying patches in a timely fashion, thereby opening the door to potential new threats.  The managed service works by applying the updates acro...

The recently disclosed critical Spring4Shell vulnerability is being actively exploited by threat actors to execute the Mirai botnet malware , particularly in the Singapore region since the start of April 2022. "The exploitation allows threat actors to download the Mirai sample to the '/tmp' folder and execute them after permission change using 'chmod ,'" Trend Micro researchers Deep Patel, Nitesh Surana, Ashish Verma said in a report published Friday. Tracked as CVE-2022-22965 (CVSS score: 9.8), the vulnerability could allow malicious actors to achieve remote code execution in Spring Core applications under non-default circumstances, granting the attackers full control over the compromised devices. The development comes as the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) earlier this week added the Spring4Shell vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog based on "evidence of active exploitation." This is ...