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Cloudflare on Tuesday disclosed that it had acted to prevent a record-setting 26 million request per second (RPS) distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack last week, making it the largest HTTPS DDoS attack detected to date. The web performance and security company said the attack was directed against an unnamed customer website using its Free plan and emanated from a "powerful" botnet of 5,067 devices, with each node generating approximately 5,200 RPS at peak. The botnet is said to have created a flood of more than 212 million HTTPS requests within less than 30 seconds from over 1,500 networks in 121 countries, including Indonesia, the U.S., Brazil, Russia, and India. Roughly 3% of the attack came through Tor nodes. The attack "originated mostly from Cloud Service Providers as opposed to Residential Internet Service Providers, indicating the use of hijacked virtual machines and powerful servers to generate the attack — as opposed to much weaker Internet of Things...

Microsoft finally released fixes to address an actively exploited Windows zero-day vulnerability known as Follina as part of its Patch Tuesday updates. Also addressed by the tech giant are  55 other flaws , three of which are rated Critical, 51 are rated Important, and one is rated Moderate in severity. Separately, five more shortcomings were resolved in the Microsoft Edge browser. Tracked as  CVE-2022-30190  (CVSS score: 7.8), the  zero-day bug  relates to a remote code execution vulnerability affecting the Windows Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT) when it's invoked using the "ms-msdt:" URI protocol scheme from an application such as Word. The vulnerability can be trivially exploited by means of a specially crafted Word document that downloads and loads a malicious HTML file through Word's remote template feature. The HTML file ultimately permits the attacker to load and execute PowerShell code within Windows. "An attacker who successfully exploits thi...

A new high-severity vulnerability has been disclosed in the Zimbra email suite that, if successfully exploited, enables an unauthenticated attacker to steal cleartext passwords of users sans any user interaction. "With the consequent access to the victims' mailboxes, attackers can potentially escalate their access to targeted organizations and gain access to various internal services and steal highly sensitive information," SonarSource  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Tracked as  CVE-2022-27924  (CVSS score: 7.5), the issue has been characterized as a case of "Memcached poisoning with unauthenticated request," leading to a scenario where an adversary can inject malicious commands and siphon sensitive information. This is made possible by poisoning the IMAP route cache entries in the Memcached server that's used to look up Zimbra users and forward their HTTP requests to appropriate backend services. Memcached is an in-memory key-value sto...

In 2017, The Australian Cyber Security Center (ACSC) published a set of mitigation strategies that were designed to help organizations to protect themselves against cyber security incidents. These strategies, which became known as  the Essential Eight , are designed specifically for use on Windows networks, although variations of these strategies are commonly applied to other platforms. What is the Essential Eight?  The Essential Eight is essentially a cyber security framework that is made up of objectives and controls (with each objective including multiple controls). Initially, the Australian government only mandated that companies adhere to four of the security controls that were included in the first objective. Starting in June of 2022 however, all 98 non-corporate Commonwealth entities (NCCEs) are going to be  required to comply with the entire framework . Non-Australians take note  Although the Essential Eight is specific to Australia, organizations outsid...

Microsoft has incorporated additional improvements to address the recently disclosed  SynLapse  security vulnerability in order to meet comprehensive  tenant isolation   requirements  in Azure Data Factory and Azure Synapse Pipelines. The latest safeguards include moving the shared integration runtimes to sandboxed ephemeral instances and using scoped tokens to prevent adversaries from using a client certificate to access other tenants' information. "This means that if an attacker could execute code on the  integration runtime , it is never shared between two different tenants, so no sensitive data is in danger," Orca Security said in a technical report detailing the flaw. In a statement shared with The Hacker News regarding the protections deployed, Microsoft said it fully mitigated different attack paths to the vulnerability across all integration runtime types. The tech giant stated that it "contained and closely monitored the backend certificate...

An unpatched security issue in the Travis CI API has left tens of thousands of developers' user tokens exposed to potential attacks, effectively allowing threat actors to breach cloud infrastructures, make unauthorized code changes, and initiate supply chain attacks. "More than 770 million logs of free tier users are available, from which you can easily extract tokens, secrets, and other credentials associated with popular cloud service providers such as GitHub, AWS, and Docker Hub," researchers from cloud security firm Aqua  said  in a Monday report. Travis CI is a  continuous integration  service used to build and test software projects hosted on cloud repository platforms such as GitHub and Bitbucket. The issue, previously reported in 2015 and  2019 , is rooted in the fact that the  API  permits access to historical logs in cleartext format, enabling a malicious party to even "fetch the logs that were previously unavailable via the API." The l...

A new covert Linux kernel rootkit named  Syslogk  has been spotted under development in the wild and cloaking a malicious payload that can be remotely commandeered by an adversary using a  magic network traffic packet . "The Syslogk rootkit is heavily based on Adore-Ng but incorporates new functionalities making the user-mode application and the kernel rootkit hard to detect," Avast security researchers David Álvarez and Jan Neduchal  said  in a report published Monday. Adore-Ng, an  open-source rootkit  available since 2004, equips the attacker with full control over a compromised system. It also facilitates hiding processes as well as custom malicious artifacts, files, and even the kernel module, making it harder to detect. "The module starts by hooking itself into various file systems. It digs up the inode for the root filesystem, and replaces that inode's  readdir()  function pointer with one of its own," LWN.net  noted  at...

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed the workings of a fully-featured malware loader dubbed  PureCrypter  that's being purchased by cyber criminals to deliver remote access trojans (RATs) and information stealers. "The loader is a .NET executable obfuscated with SmartAssembly and makes use of compression, encryption, and obfuscation to evade antivirus software products," Zscaler's Romain Dumont  said  in a new report. Some of the malware families distributed using PureCrypter include  Agent Tesla ,  Arkei ,  AsyncRAT ,  AZORult ,  DarkCrystal RAT  (DCRat),  LokiBot ,  NanoCore ,  RedLine Stealer ,  Remcos ,  Snake Keylogger , and  Warzone RAT . Sold for a price of $59 by its developer named "PureCoder" for a one-month plan (and $249 for a one-off lifetime purchase) since at least March 2021, PureCrypter is advertised as the "only crypter in the market that uses offline and online delivery technique....

A technically sophisticated threat actor known as  SeaFlower  has been targeting Android and iOS users as part of an extensive campaign that mimics official cryptocurrency wallet websites intending to distribute backdoored apps that drain victims' funds. Said to be first discovered in March 2022, the cluster of activity "hint[s] to a strong relationship with a Chinese-speaking entity yet to be uncovered," based on the macOS usernames, source code comments in the backdoor code, and its abuse of Alibaba's Content Delivery Network (CDN). "As of today, the main current objective of SeaFlower is to modify Web3 wallets with backdoor code that ultimately exfiltrates the seed phrase," Confiant's Taha Karim  said  in a technical deep-dive of the campaign. Targeted apps include Android and iOS versions of Coinbase Wallet, MetaMask, TokenPocket, and imToken. SeaFlower's modus operandi involves setting up cloned websites that act as a conduit to download ...

A Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) known as Gallium has been observed using a previously undocumented remote access trojan in its espionage attacks targeting companies operating in Southeast Asia, Europe, and Africa. Called  PingPull , the "difficult-to-detect" backdoor is notable for its use of the Internet Control Message Protocol ( ICMP ) for command-and-control (C2) communications, according to new research published by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 today. Gallium is notorious for its attacks primarily aimed at telecom companies dating as far back as 2012. Also tracked under the name  Soft Cell  by Cybereason, the state-sponsored actor has been  connected  to a broader set of attacks targeting five major telecom companies located in Southeast Asian countries since 2017. Over the past year, however, the group is said to have expanded its victimology footprint to include financial institutions and government entities located in Afghanistan, Australia...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of two medium-security flaws in Mitel 6800/6900 desk phones that, if successfully exploited, could allow an attacker to gain root privileges on the devices. Tracked as  CVE-2022-29854  and  CVE-2022-29855  (CVSS score: 6.8), the access control issues were discovered by German penetration testing firm SySS, following which patches were shipped in May 2022. "Due to this undocumented backdoor, an attacker with physical access to a vulnerable desk phone can gain root access by pressing specific keys on system boot, and then connect to a provided Telnet service as root user," SySS researcher Matthias Deeg said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. Specifically, the issue relates to a previously unknown functionality present in a shell script ("check_mft.sh") in the phones' firmware that's designed to be executed at system boot. "The shell script 'check_mft.sh,' which is located in the direc...

BPFDoor isn't new to the  cyberattack  game — in fact, it's gone undetected for years — but PwC researchers discovered the piece of malware in 2021. Subsequently, the cybersecurity community is learning more about the  stealthy nature of malware , how it works, and how it can be prevented. What's BPFDoor? BPFDoor  is a piece of malware associated with China-based threat actor Red Menshen that has hit mostly Linux operating systems. It's undetected by firewalls and goes unnoticed by most detection systems — so unnoticed that it's been a work in progress over the last five years, going through various phases of development and complexity. How Does It Work? BPF stands for Berkley Packet Filters, which is appropriate given that the virus exploits packet filters. BPFDoor uses BPF " sniffers " to see all network traffic and find vulnerabilities. Packet filters are programs that analyze "packets" (files, metadata, network traffic) and permit or dec...

Windows and Linux systems are being targeted by a ransomware variant called HelloXD, with the infections also involving the deployment of a backdoor to facilitate persistent remote access to infected hosts. "Unlike other ransomware groups, this ransomware family doesn't have an active leak site; instead it prefers to direct the impacted victim to negotiations through  Tox chat  and onion-based messenger instances," Daniel Bunce and Doel Santos, security researchers from Palo Alto Networks Unit 42,  said  in a new write-up. HelloXD  surfaced in the wild on November 30, 2021, and is based off leaked code from Babuk, which was  published  on a Russian-language cybercrime forum in September 2021. The ransomware family is no exception to the norm in that the operators follow the tried-and-tested approach of  double extortion  to demand cryptocurrency payments by exfiltrating a victim's sensitive data in addition to encrypting it and threateni...

The Iranian state-sponsored threat actor tracked under the moniker Lyceum has turned to using a new custom .NET-based backdoor in recent campaigns directed against the Middle East. "The new malware is a .NET based DNS Backdoor which is a customized version of the open source tool 'DIG.net,'" Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers Niraj Shivtarkar and Avinash Kumar  said  in a report published last week. "The malware leverages a DNS attack technique called 'DNS Hijacking' in which an attacker-controlled DNS server manipulates the response of DNS queries and resolves them as per their malicious requirements." DNS hijacking is a  redirection attack  in which DNS queries to genuine websites are intercepted to take an unsuspecting user to fraudulent pages under an adversary's control. Unlike  cache poisoning , DNS hijacking targets the DNS record of the website on the nameserver, rather than a resolver's cache. Lyceum , also known as Hexane, Spirli...

A novel hardware attack dubbed  PACMAN  has been demonstrated against Apple's M1 processor chipsets, potentially arming a malicious actor with the capability to gain arbitrary code execution on macOS systems. It leverages "speculative execution attacks to bypass an important memory protection mechanism, ARM Pointer Authentication, a security feature that is used to enforce pointer integrity," MIT researchers Joseph Ravichandran, Weon Taek Na, Jay Lang, and Mengjia Yan  said  in a new paper. What's more concerning is that "while the hardware mechanisms used by PACMAN cannot be patched with software features, memory corruption bugs can be," the researchers added. The vulnerability is rooted in pointer authentication codes ( PACs ), a line of defense introduced in arm64e architecture that aims to detect and secure against unexpected changes to  pointers  — objects that reference an address location in memory. PACs aim to solve a common problem in software...

A new research undertaken by a group of academics from the University of California San Diego has revealed for the first time that Bluetooth signals can be fingerprinted to track smartphones (and therefore, individuals). The identification, at its core, hinges on imperfections in the Bluetooth chipset hardware introduced during the manufacturing process, resulting in a "unique physical-layer fingerprint." "To perform a physical-layer fingerprinting attack, the attacker must be equipped with a Software Defined Radio sniffer: a radio receiver capable of recording raw IQ radio signals," the researchers  said  in a  new paper   titled  "Evaluating Physical-Layer BLE Location Tracking Attacks on Mobile Devices." The  attack  is made possible due to the ubiquitous nature of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons that are continuously transmitted by modern devices to enable crucial functions such as  contact tracing  during public health emergencie...

Cybercriminals are impersonating popular crypto platforms such as Binance, Celo, and Trust Wallet with spoofed emails and fake login pages in an attempt to steal login details and deceptively transfer virtual funds. "As cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) become more mainstream, and capture headlines for their volatility, there is a greater likelihood of more individuals falling victim to fraud attempting to exploit people for digital currencies," Proofpoint  said  in a new report. "The rise and proliferation of cryptocurrency has also provided attackers with a new method of financial extraction." The targeting of sensitive cryptocurrency data by threat actors was recently echoed by the Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team, which warned about the emerging threat of  cryware  wherein private keys, seed phrases, and wallet addresses are plundered with the goal of siphoning virtual currencies by means of fraudulent transfers. The  swift popularity o...