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A never-before-seen Linux malware has been dubbed a "Swiss Army Knife" for its modular architecture and its capability to install rootkits. This previously undetected Linux threat, called  Lightning Framework  by Intezer, is equipped with a plethora of features, making it one of the most intricate frameworks developed for targeting Linux systems. "The framework has both passive and active capabilities for communication with the threat actor, including opening up SSH on an infected machine, and a polymorphic malleable command and control configuration," Intezer researcher Ryan Robinson  said  in a new report published today. Central to the malware is a downloader ("kbioset") and a core ("kkdmflush") module, the former of which is engineered to retrieve at least seven different plugins from a remote server that are subsequently invoked by the core component. In addition, the downloader is also responsible for establishing the persistence of t...

A large software development company whose software is used by different state entities in Ukraine was at the receiving end of an "uncommon" piece of malware, new research has found. The malware, first observed on the morning of May 19, 2022, is a custom variant of the open source backdoor known as  GoMet  and is designed for maintaining persistent access to the network. "This access could be leveraged in a variety of ways including deeper access or to launch additional attacks, including the potential for software supply chain compromise," Cisco Talos  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Although there are no concrete indicators linking the attack to a single actor or group, the cybersecurity firm's assessment points to Russian nation-state activity. Public reporting into the use of GoMet in real-world attacks has so far uncovered only two documented cases to date: one in 2020, coinciding with the disclosure of  CVE-2020-5902 , a critical remot...

The advanced persistent threat (APT) actor tracked as Evilnum is once again exhibiting signs of renewed activity aimed at European financial and investment entities. "Evilnum is a backdoor that can be used for data theft or to load additional payloads," enterprise security firm Proofpoint  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The malware includes multiple interesting components to evade detection and modify infection paths based on identified antivirus software." Targets include organizations with operations supporting foreign exchanges, cryptocurrency, and decentralized finance (DeFi). The latest spate of attacks are said to have commenced in late 2021. The findings also dovetail with a report from Zscaler last month that  detailed  low-volume targeted attack campaigns launched against companies in Europe and the U.K. Active since 2018,  Evilnum  is tracked by the wider cybersecurity community using the names TA4563 and DeathStalker, with ...

Typically, when threat actors look to infiltrate an organization's SaaS apps, they look to SaaS app misconfigurations as a means of entry. However, employees now use their personal devices, whether their phones or laptops, etc., to get their jobs done. If the device's hygiene is not up to par, it increases the risk for the organization and widens the attack surface for bad actors. And so, Endpoint (Device) Protection — through EDR, XDR, and vulnerability management solutions – has arisen as a critical factor in SaaS Security. The challenge in remediating the threats posed by endpoints and devices lies in the ability to correlate between the SaaS app users, their roles, and permissions with their associated devices' compliance and integrity levels. This end-to-end approach is what's needed for the organization to implement a holistic, zero-trust approach for their SaaS Security.  Not a simple feat, however, automated SaaS Security Posture Management solutions, like Ad...

Atlassian has rolled out fixes to remediate a critical security vulnerability pertaining to the use of hard-coded credentials affecting  the Questions For Confluence  app for Confluence Server and Confluence Data Center. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2022-26138 , arises when the app in question is enabled on either of two services, causing it to create a Confluence user account with the username "disabledsystemuser." While this account, Atlassian says, is to help administrators migrate data from the app to Confluence Cloud, it's also created with a hard-coded password, effectively allowing viewing and editing all non-restricted pages within Confluence by default. "A remote, unauthenticated attacker with knowledge of the hard-coded password could exploit this to log into Confluence and access any pages the  confluence-users group  has access to," the company  said  in an advisory, adding that "the hard-coded password is trivial to obtain after downloading an...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) has announced the seizure of $500,000 worth of Bitcoin from North Korean hackers who extorted digital payments from several organizations by using a new ransomware strain known as Maui. "The seized funds include ransoms paid by healthcare providers in Kansas and Colorado," the DoJ  said  in a press release issued Tuesday. The recovery of the bitcoin ransoms comes after the agency said it took control of two cryptocurrency accounts that were used to receive payments to the tune of $100,000 and $120,000 from the medical centers. The DoJ did not disclose where the rest of the payments originated from. "Reporting cyber incidents to law enforcement and cooperating with investigations not only protects the United States, it is also good business," said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the DoJ's National Security Division. "The reimbursement to these victims of the ransom shows why it pays to work with law en...

Growing cyber threats, tightening regulatory demands and strict cyber insurance requirements are driving small to medium-sized enterprises demand for strategic cybersecurity and compliance guidance and management. Since most companies this size don't have in-house CISO expertise – the demand for virtual CISO (vCISO) services is also growing. Yet current vCISO services models still rely on manual, humanCISO expertise. This makes these services costly and tough to scale – leaving MSPs, MSSPs and consulting firms unable to add vCISO service to their portfolio or scale their existing vCISO services to meet the growing demand. This is the challenge  Cynomi's Automated vCISO platform  is trying to solve. The company's AI-powered vCISO platform automatically generates everything vCISO service providers need to provide their clients, fully customized for each and every client: risk and compliance assessments, gap analysis, tailored security policies, strategic remediation plans w...

Apple on Wednesday rolled out  software fixes  for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS to address a number of security flaws affecting its platforms. This includes at least 37 flaws spanning different components in iOS and macOS that range from privilege escalation to arbitrary code execution and from information disclosure to denial-of-service (DoS). Chief among them is CVE-2022-2294, a memory corruption flaw in the WebRTC component that Google  disclosed  earlier this month as having been exploited in real-world attacks aimed at users of the Chrome browser. There is, however, no evidence of in-the-wild zero-day exploitation of the flaw targeting iOS, macOS, and Safari. Besides CVE-2022-2294, the updates also address several arbitrary code execution flaws impacting Apple Neural Engine (CVE-2022-32810, CVE-2022-32829, and CVE-2022-32840), Audio (CVE-2022-32820), GPU Drivers (CVE-2022-32821), ImageIO (CVE-2022-32802), IOMobileFrameBuffer (CVE-2022-26768), Kern...

Cisco on Wednesday released security patches for 45 vulnerabilities affecting a variety of products, some of which could be exploited to execute arbitrary actions with elevated permissions on affected systems. Of the 45 bugs, one security vulnerability is rated Critical, three are rated High, and 41 are rated Medium in severity.  The  most severe of the issues  are CVE-2022-20857, CVE-2022-20858, and CVE-2022-20861, which impact Cisco Nexus Dashboard for data centers and cloud network infrastructures and could enable an "unauthenticated remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands, read or upload container image files, or perform a cross-site request forgery attack." CVE-2022-20857  (CVSS score: 9.8) - Cisco Nexus Dashboard arbitrary command execution vulnerability CVE-2022-20858  (CVSS score: 8.2) - Cisco Nexus Dashboard container image read and write vulnerability CVE-2022-20861  (CVSS score: 8.8) - Cisco Nexus Dashboard cross-site request forgery...

Google on Tuesday officially announced support for DNS-over-HTTP/3 (DoH3) for Android devices as part of a Google Play system update designed to keep DNS queries private. To that end, Android smartphones running Android 11 and higher are expected to use DoH3 instead of DNS-over-TLS ( DoT ), which was incorporated into the mobile operating system with Android 9.0. DoH3 is also an alternative to DNS-over-HTTPS ( DoH ), a mechanism for carrying out remote Domain Name System (DNS) resolution through an encrypted connection, effectively preventing third parties from snooping on users' browsing activities. HTTP/3 , the first major upgrade to the hypertext transfer protocol since HTTP/2 was introduced in May 2015, is designed to use a new transport layer protocol called  QUIC  that's already supported by major browsers such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari. The low-latency protocol, developed by Google in 2012, relies on the User Datagram Pro...

Kaspersky security researchers have disclosed details of a brand-new ransomware family written in Rust, making it the third strain after  BlackCat  and  Hive  to use the programming language. Luna, as it's called, is "fairly simple" and can run on Windows, Linux, and ESXi systems, with the malware banking on a combination of  Curve25519  and  AES  for encryption. "Both the Linux and ESXi samples are compiled using the same source code with some minor changes from the Windows version," the Russian firm  noted  in a report published today. Advertisements for Luna on darknet forums suggest that the ransomware is intended for use only by Russian-speaking affiliates. Its core developers are also believed to be of Russian origin owing to spelling mistakes in the ransom note hard-coded within the binary. "Luna confirms the trend for cross-platform ransomware," the researchers stated, adding how the platform agnostic nature of languages li...

The 8220 cryptomining group has expanded in size to encompass as many as 30,000 infected hosts, up from 2,000 hosts globally in mid-2021. "8220 Gang is one of the many low-skill crimeware gangs we continually observe infecting cloud hosts and operating a botnet and cryptocurrency miners through known vulnerabilities and remote access brute forcing infection vectors," Tom Hegel of SentinelOne  said  in a Monday report. The growth is said to have been fueled through the use of Linux and common cloud application vulnerabilities and poorly secured configurations for services such as Docker, Apache WebLogic, and Redis. Active since early 2017, the Chinese-speaking, Monero-mining threat actor was most recently  seen  targeting i686 and x86_64 Linux systems by means of weaponizing a newly disclosed remote code execution exploit for Atlassian Confluence Server (CVE-2022-26134) to drop the PwnRig miner payload. "Victims are not targeted geographically, but simply ident...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is warning of a handful of unpatched security vulnerabilities in  MiCODUS MV720  Global Positioning System (GPS) trackers outfitted in over 1.5 million vehicles that could lead to remote disruption of critical operations. "Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities may allow a remote actor to exploit access and gain control of the global positioning system tracker," CISA  said . "These vulnerabilities could impact access to a vehicle fuel supply, vehicle control, or allow locational surveillance of vehicles in which the device is installed." Available on sale for $20 and manufactured by the China-based MiCODUS, the company's tracking devices are employed by major organizations in 169 countries spanning aerospace, energy, engineering, government, manufacturing, nuclear power plant, and shipping sectors. The top countries with the most users include Chile, Australia, Mexico, Ukraine, Russi...

The Great Resignation – or the Great Reshuffle as some are calling it – and the growing skills gap have been dominating headlines lately. But these issues aren't new to the cybersecurity industry. While many are just now hearing about employee burnout, security teams have faced reality and serious consequences of burnout for years.  One of the biggest culprits? Alert overload.  The average security team gets tens of thousands of alerts  each day . Many analysts feel like they can't get their heads above water…and are starting to give up. This looks like physical burnout and even apathy. Surveys found that some security analysts feel so overwhelmed they ignore alerts and even walk away from their computers.  In fact, these surveys found that  70% of security teams  feel emotionally overwhelmed by alerts, and more than  55% of security professionals  don't feel fully confident that they can prioritize and respond to every alert that really does ...

Russian threat actors capitalized on the  ongoing conflict  against Ukraine to distribute Android malware camouflaged as an app for pro-Ukrainian hacktivists to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Russian sites. Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) attributed the malware to Turla, an advanced persistent threat also known as Krypton, Venomous Bear, Waterbug, and Uroburos, and linked to Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB). "This is the first known instance of Turla distributing Android-related malware," TAG researcher Billy Leonard  said . "The apps were not distributed through the Google Play Store, but hosted on a domain controlled by the actor and disseminated via links on third party messaging services." It's worth noting that the  onslaught  of  cyberattacks  in the immediate aftermath of Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine prompted the latter to  form an IT Army  to stage counter-DDoS attacks against Rus...

The Russian state-sponsored hacking collective known as APT29 has been attributed to a new phishing campaign that takes advantage of legitimate cloud services like Google Drive and Dropbox to deliver malicious payloads on compromised systems. "These campaigns are believed to have targeted several Western diplomatic missions between May and June 2022," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42  said  in a Tuesday report. "The lures included in these campaigns suggest targeting of a foreign embassy in Portugal as well as a foreign embassy in Brazil." APT29, also tracked under the monikers Cozy Bear, Cloaked Ursa, or The Dukes, has been characterized as an organized cyberespionage group working to collect intelligence that aligns with Russia's strategic objectives. Some aspects of the advanced persistent threat's activities, including the infamous  SolarWinds supply chain attack  of 2020, are separately tracked by Microsoft under the name Nobelium, with Mandiant calling i...

Cybersecurity researchers have taken the wraps off a previously undocumented spyware targeting the Apple macOS operating system. The malware, codenamed  CloudMensis  by Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET, is said to exclusively use public cloud storage services such as pCloud, Yandex Disk, and Dropbox for receiving attacker commands and exfiltrating files. "Its capabilities clearly show that the intent of its operators is to gather information from the victims' Macs by exfiltrating documents, keystrokes, and screen captures," ESET researcher Marc-Etienne M.Léveillé  said  in a report published today. CloudMensis, written in Objective-C, was first discovered in April 2022 and is designed to strike both Intel and Apple silicon architectures. The initial infection vector for the attacks and the targets remain unknown as yet. But its very limited distribution is an indication that the malware is being used as part of a highly targeted operation directed against entities...