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Nation-state hacking groups aligned with China, Iran, North Korea, and Turkey have been targeting journalists to conduct espionage and spread malware as part of a series of campaigns since early 2021. "Most commonly, phishing attacks targeting journalists are used for espionage or to gain key insights into the inner workings of another government, company, or other area of state-designated import," Proofpoint  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The ultimate goal of the "sustained" intrusions, the enterprise security firm said, is to gain a competitive intelligence edge or spread disinformation and propaganda. Proofpoint said it identified two Chinese hacking groups, TA412 (aka  Zirconium  or Judgment Panda) and  TA459 , targeting media personnel with malicious emails containing web beacons and weaponized documents respectively that were used to amass information about the recipients' network environments and drop  Chinoxy  malware. I...

Although there is a greater awareness of cybersecurity threats than ever before, it is becoming increasingly difficult for IT departments to get their security budgets approved. Security budgets seem to shrink each year and IT pros are constantly being asked to do more with less. Even so, the situation may not be hopeless. There are some things that IT pros can do to improve the chances of getting their security budgets approved.  Presenting the Problem in a Compelling Way If you want to get your proposed security budget approved, you will need to present security problems in a compelling way. While those who are in charge of the organization's finances are likely aware of the need for good security, they have probably also seen enough examples of "a security solution in search of a problem" to make them skeptical of security spending requests. If you want to persuade those who control the money, then you will need to convince them of three things: You are trying to ...

Microsoft on Wednesday shed light on a now patched security vulnerability affecting Apple's operating systems that, if successfully exploited, could allow attackers to escalate device privileges and deploy malware. "An attacker could take advantage of this sandbox escape vulnerability to gain elevated privileges on the affected device or execute malicious commands like installing additional payloads," Jonathan Bar Or of the Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team  said  in a write-up. Tracked as  CVE-2022-26706  (CVSS score: 5.5), the security vulnerability impacts iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS and was fixed by Apple in May 2022. Calling it an access issue affecting the LaunchServices (launchd) component, the iPhone maker noted that "A sandboxed process may be able to circumvent sandbox restrictions," adding it mitigated the issue with additional restrictions. While Apple's  App Sandbox  is designed to tightly regulate a third-party app's acce...

The advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as Transparent Tribe has been attributed to a new ongoing phishing campaign targeting students at various educational institutions in India at least since December 2021. "This new campaign also suggests that the APT is actively expanding its network of victims to include civilian users," Cisco Talos  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Also tracked under the monikers APT36, Operation C-Major, PROJECTM, Mythic Leopard, the Transparent Tribe actor is  suspected  to be of Pakistani origin and is known to strike government entities and think tanks in India and Afghanistan with custom malware such as CrimsonRAT, ObliqueRAT, and CapraRAT. But the targeting of educational institutions and students, first  observed  by India-based K7 Labs in May 2022, indicates a deviation from the adversary's typical focus. "The latest targeting of the educational sector may align with the strategic goals of espion...

Security researchers have uncovered yet another vulnerability affecting numerous older AMD and Intel microprocessors that could bypass current defenses and result in Spectre-based speculative-execution attacks. Dubbed  Retbleed  by ETH Zurich researchers Johannes Wikner and Kaveh Razavi, the issue is tracked as CVE-2022-29900 (AMD) and CVE-2022-29901 (Intel), with the chipmakers  releasing   software   mitigations  as part of a coordinated disclosure process. Retbleed is also the latest addition to a class of  Spectre attacks  known as Spectre-BTI (CVE-2017-5715 or Spectre-V2), which exploit the side effects of an optimization technique called  speculative execution  by means of a timing side channel to trick a program into accessing arbitrary locations in its memory space and leak private information. Speculative execution attempts to fill the instruction pipeline of a program by predicting which instruction will be executed next i...

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) warned this week that it will crack down on tech companies' illegal use and sharing of highly sensitive data and false claims about data anonymization. "While many consumers may happily offer their location data in exchange for real-time crowd-sourced advice on the fastest route home, they likely think differently about having their thinly-disguised online identity associated with the frequency of their visits to a therapist or cancer doctor," FTC's Kristin Cohen  said . The sensitive nature of information about users' health and their precise whereabouts has prompted the agency to caution against opaque practices in the "shadowy ad tech and  data broker ecosystem ," with consumers having little to no knowledge of how their personal data is harvested, used, and processed. This lack of awareness is compounded by the fact that mobile apps embed privacy-invasive software development kits (SDKs) that surreptitious...

Consumer electronics maker Lenovo on Tuesday  rolled out fixes  to contain three security flaws in its UEFI firmware affecting over 70 product models. "The vulnerabilities can be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution in the early phases of the platform boot, possibly allowing the attackers to hijack the OS execution flow and disable some important security features," Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET  said  in a series of tweets. Tracked as CVE-2022-1890, CVE-2022-1891, and CVE-2022-1892, all three bugs relate to  buffer overflow vulnerabilities  that have been described by Lenovo as leading to privilege escalation on affected systems. Martin Smolár from ESET has been credited with reporting the flaws. The bugs stem from an insufficient validation of an NVRAM variable called "DataSize" in three different drivers ReadyBootDxe, SystemLoadDefaultDxe, and SystemBootManagerDxe, resulting in a buffer overflow that could be weaponized to achieve code ex...

Microsoft on Tuesday disclosed that a large-scale phishing campaign targeted over 10,000 organizations since September 2021 by hijacking Office 365's authentication process even on accounts secured with multi-factor authentication (MFA). "The attackers then used the stolen credentials and session cookies to access affected users' mailboxes and perform follow-on business email compromise (BEC) campaigns against other targets," the company's cybersecurity teams  reported . The intrusions entailed setting up adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) phishing sites, wherein the attacker deploys a proxy server between a potential victim and the targeted website so that recipients of a phishing email are redirected to lookalike landing pages designed to capture credentials and MFA information. "The phishing page has two different Transport Layer Security (TLS) sessions — one with the target and another with the actual website the target wants to access," the company ...

Often, organizations think of firewall security as a one-and-done type of solution. They install firewalls, then assume that they are "good to go" without investigating whether or not these solutions are actually protecting their systems in the best way possible. "Set it and forget it!" Instead of just relying on firewalls and assuming that they will always protect their businesses from cyber risk, executives need to start asking deeper questions about them. As with most areas of business, it's important to take a critical look at each solution that your organization relies on for security. So, let's break down a few questions that you and your team should be asking about firewall security to get a more accurate view into your network defense posture. 1 — What does your team's firewall knowledge look like? In order to properly service and upkeep firewalls, your team needs to have at least a baseline knowledge of how firewalls operate. It's espe...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered new variants of the  ChromeLoader  information-stealing malware, highlighting its evolving feature set in a short span of time. Primarily used for hijacking victims' browser searches and presenting advertisements, ChromeLoader came to light in January 2022 and has been distributed in the form of ISO or DMG file downloads advertised via QR codes on Twitter and free gaming sites. ChromeLoader has also been codenamed Choziosi Loader and ChromeBack by the broader cybersecurity community. What makes the adware notable is that it's fashioned as a browser extension as opposed to a Windows executable (.exe) or Dynamic Link Library (.dll). The infections typically work by enticing unsuspecting users into downloading movie torrents or cracked video games through malvertising campaigns on pay-per-install sites and social media. Besides requesting invasive permissions to access browser data and manipulate web requests, it's also designed t...

The operators behind the Qakbot malware are transforming their delivery vectors in an attempt to sidestep detection. "Most recently, threat actors have transformed their techniques to evade detection by using ZIP file extensions, enticing file names with common formats, and Excel (XLM) 4.0 to trick victims into downloading malicious attachments that install Qakbot," Zscaler Threatlabz researchers Tarun Dewan and Aditya Sharma  said . Other methods adopted by the group include code obfuscation, introducing new layers in the attack chain from initial compromise to execution, and using multiple URLs as well as unknown file extensions (e.g., .OCX, .ooccxx, .dat, or .gyp) to deliver the payload. Also called QBot, QuackBot, or Pinkslipbot, Qakbot has been a  recurring threat  since late 2007, evolving from its initial days as a banking trojan to a modular information stealer capable of deploying next-stage payloads such as  ransomware . "Qakbot is a flexible post-ex...

Microsoft released its monthly round of Patch Tuesday updates to address  84 new security flaws  spanning multiple product categories, counting a zero-day vulnerability that's under active attack in the wild. Of the 84 shortcomings, four are rated Critical, and 80 are rated Important in severity. Also separately resolved by the tech giant are  two other bugs  in the Chromium-based Edge browser, one of which plugs another  zero-day flaw  that Google disclosed as being actively exploited in real-world attacks. Top of the list of this month's updates is  CVE-2022-22047  (CVSS score: 7.8), a case of privilege escalation in the Windows Client Server Runtime Subsystem ( CSRSS ) that could be abused by an attacker to gain SYSTEM permissions. "With this level of access, the attackers are able to disable local services such as Endpoint Detection and Security tools," Kev Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs, told The Hacker News. "...

Popular video-sharing platform TikTok on Tuesday agreed to pause a controversial privacy policy update that could have allowed it to serve targeted ads based on users' activity on the social video platform without their permission to do so. The reversal, reported by  TechCrunch , comes a day after the Italian data protection authority — the Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali — warned the company against the change, citing violations of data protection laws. "The personal data stored in users' devices may not be used to profile those users and send personalized ads without their explicit consent," the Garante  said . The formal warning was in response to a privacy policy revision that noted the service had historically asked users' "consent" to their on-TikTok activity and off-TikTok activity to serve personalized ads and that, therefore, it intends to stop asking users for their permission to profile their behavior and process personal dat...

Businesses know they need to secure their client-side scripts. Content security policies (CSPs) are a great way to do that. But CSPs are cumbersome. One mistake and you have a potentially significant client-side security gap. Finding those gaps means long and tedious hours (or days) in manual code reviews through thousands of lines of script on your web applications. Automated content security policies can help streamline the code review process by first identifying all first- and third-party scripts and the assets they access, and then generating an appropriate content security policy to help better secure the client-side attack surface. There are few developers or AppSec professionals who claim to enjoy deploying CSPs. First, the CSP has to work for the specific web application. Then the team needs to make sure it provides the appropriate level of protection. The CSP also can't conflict with any existing widgets or plugins (or the decision must be made to not deploy the CSP or dea...

Microsoft on Monday announced the general availability of a feature called Autopatch that automatically keeps Windows and Office software up-to-date on enrolled endpoints. The launch, which comes a day before Microsoft is expected to release its monthly round of security patches, is available for customers with Windows Enterprise E3 and E5 licenses. It, however, doesn't support Windows Education (A3) or Windows Front Line Worker (F3) licenses. "Microsoft will continue to release updates on the second Tuesday of every month and now Autopatch helps streamline updating operations and create new opportunities for IT pros," Lior Bela  said . Autopatch works by  applying security updates  first to devices in what's called the Test ring, which contains a minimum number of representative devices. After a validation period, the updates are pushed to the First (1% devices), Fast (9%), and Broad (90%) rings. The service was first  teased  by the tech giant in April...

GitHub Actions and Azure virtual machines (VMs) are being leveraged for cloud-based cryptocurrency mining, indicating sustained attempts on the part of malicious actors to target cloud resources for illicit purposes. "Attackers can abuse the  runners  or servers provided by GitHub to run an organization's pipelines and automation by maliciously downloading and installing their own cryptocurrency miners to gain profit easily," Trend Micro researcher Magno Logan  said  in a report last week. GitHub Actions ( GHAs ) is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that allows users to automate the software build, test, and deployment pipeline. Developers can leverage the feature to create workflows that build and test every pull request to a code repository, or deploy merged pull requests to production. Both Linux and Windows runners are hosted on  Standard_DS2_v2  virtual machines on Azure and come with two vCPUs and 7GB of memory. T...