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A cyber mercenary that "ostensibly sells general security and information analysis services to commercial customers" used several Windows and Adobe zero-day exploits in limited and highly-targeted attacks against European and Central American entities. The company, which Microsoft describes as a private-sector offensive actor (PSOA), is an Austria-based outfit called  DSIRF  that's linked to the development and attempted sale of a piece of cyberweapon referred to as Subzero , which can be used to hack targets' phones, computers, and internet-connected devices. "Observed victims to date include law firms, banks, and strategic consultancies in countries such as Austria, the United Kingdom, and Panama," the tech giant's cybersecurity teams  said  in a Wednesday report. Microsoft is  tracking  the actor under the moniker KNOTWEED, continuing its trend of terming PSOAs using names given to trees and shrubs. The company previously designated the name  SO...

MSSPs must find ways to balance the need to please existing customers, add new ones, and deliver high-margin services against their internal budget constraints and the need to maintain high employee morale. In an environment where there are thousands of potential alerts each day and cyberattacks are growing rapidly in frequency and sophistication, this isn't an easy balance to maintain. Customers want airtight security, but adding dozens of security tools to scan for and respond to any potential attack often means that specific analysts become experts in specific tools. It's left to the whole team to manually correlate their findings to discover and respond to multi-layered attacks, and hackers are always finding ways to exploit the gaps in coverage. This is a no-win situation where the analysts are frustrated, customers are dissatisfied, and costs can easily run out of control. To win in the marketplace, MSSPs must find ways to make their teams highly efficient while driving higher...

The team behind LibreOffice has released security updates to fix three security flaws in the productivity software, one of which could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution on affected systems. Tracked as  CVE-2022-26305 , the issue has been described as a case of improper certificate validation when checking whether a macro is signed by a trusted author, leading to the execution of rogue code packaged within the macros. "An adversary could therefore create an arbitrary certificate with a serial number and an issuer string identical to a trusted certificate which LibreOffice would present as belonging to the trusted author, potentially leading to the user to execute arbitrary code contained in macros improperly trusted," LibreOffice said in an advisory. Also resolved is the use of a static initialization vector ( IV ) during encryption ( CVE-2022-26306 ) that could have weakened the security should a bad actor have access to the user's configuration inform...

The U.S. State Department has announced rewards of up to $10 million for any information that could help disrupt North Korea's cryptocurrency theft, cyber-espionage, and other illicit state-backed activities. "If you have information on any individuals associated with the North Korean government-linked malicious cyber groups (such as Andariel, APT38, Bluenoroff, Guardians of Peace, Kimsuky, or Lazarus Group) and who are involved in targeting U.S. critical infrastructure in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, you may be eligible for a reward," the department  said  in a tweet. The amount is double the bounty the agency  publicized  in March 2022 for specifics regarding the financial mechanisms employed by state-sponsored actors working on behalf of the North Korean government. The development comes a week after the Justice Department  disclosed  the seizure of $500,000 worth of Bitcoin from North Korean hackers who extorted digital payments b...

As many as 30 malicious Android apps with cumulative downloads of nearly 10 million have been found on the Google Play Store distributing adware. "All of them were built into various programs, including image-editing software, virtual keyboards, system tools and utilities, calling apps, wallpaper collection apps, and others," Dr.Web  said  in a Tuesday write-up. While masquerading as innocuous apps, their primary goal is to request permissions to show windows over other apps and run in the background in order to serve intrusive ads. To make it difficult for the victims to detect and uninstall the apps, the adware trojans hide their icons from the list of installed apps in the home screen or replace the icons with others that are likely to be less noticed (e.g., SIM Toolkit). Some of these apps also offer the advertised features, as observed in the case of two apps: "Water Reminder- Tracker & Reminder" and "Yoga- For Beginner to Advanced." However...

Facebook business and advertising accounts are at the receiving end of an ongoing campaign dubbed  Ducktail  designed to seize control as part of a financially driven cybercriminal operation.  "The threat actor targets individuals and employees that may have access to a Facebook Business account with an information-stealer malware," Finnish cybersecurity company WithSecure (formerly F-Secure Business)  said  in a new report. "The malware is designed to steal browser cookies and take advantage of authenticated Facebook sessions to steal information from the victim's Facebook account and ultimately hijack any Facebook Business account that the victim has sufficient access to." The attacks, attributed to a Vietnamese threat actor, are said to have begun in the latter half of 2021, with primary targets being individuals with managerial, digital marketing, digital media, and human resources roles in companies. The idea is to target employees with high-level acc...

Software vulnerabilities are a major threat to organizations today. The cost of these threats is significant, both financially and in terms of reputation. Vulnerability management and patching can easily get out of hand when the number of vulnerabilities in your organization is in the hundreds of thousands of vulnerabilities and tracked in inefficient ways, such as using Excel spreadsheets or multiple reports, especially when many teams are involved in the organization. Even when a process for patching is in place, organizations still struggle to effectively patch vulnerabilities in their assets. This is generally because teams look at the severity of vulnerabilities and tend to apply patches to vulnerabilities in the following severity order: critical > high > medium > low > info. The following sections explain why this approach is flawed and how it can be improved. Why is Patching Difficult? While it is well known that vulnerability patching is extremely important, it ...

Threat actors are increasingly abusing Internet Information Services ( IIS ) extensions to backdoor servers as a means of establishing a "durable persistence mechanism." That's according to a  new warning  from the Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team, which said that "IIS backdoors are also harder to detect since they mostly reside in the same directories as legitimate modules used by target applications, and they follow the same code structure as clean modules." Attack chains taking this approach commence with weaponizing a critical vulnerability in the hosted application for initial access, using this foothold to drop a script web shell as the first stage payload. This web shell then becomes the conduit for installing a rogue IIS module to provide highly covert and persistent access to the server, in addition to monitoring incoming and outgoing requests as well as running remote commands. Indeed, earlier this month, Kaspersky researchers disclosed a cam...

Cybersecurity researchers have reiterated similarities between the latest iteration of the LockBit ransomware and  BlackMatter , a rebranded variant of the DarkSide ransomware strain that closed shop in November 2021. The new version of  LockBit , called LockBit 3.0 aka LockBit Black, was released in June 2022, launching a brand new leak site and what's the very first ransomware bug bounty program, alongside Zcash as a cryptocurrency payment option. Its encryption process involves appending the extension "HLJkNskOq" or "19MqZqZ0s" to each and every file and changing the icons of the locked files to that of the .ico file that's dropped by the LockBit sample to kick-start the infection. "The ransomware then drops its ransom note, which references 'Ilon Musk' and the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)," Trend Micro researchers  said  in a Monday report. "Lastly, it changes the wallpaper of the victim's ...

The financial services industry has always been at the forefront of technology adoption, but the 2020 pandemic accelerated the widespread use of mobile banking apps, chat-based customer service, and other digital tools.  Adobe's 2022 FIS Trends Report ,  for instance, found that more than half of the financial services and insurance firms surveyed experienced a notable increase in digital/mobile visitors in the first half of 2020. The same report found that four out of ten financial executives say that digital and mobile channels account for more than half of their sales – a trend that's only expected to continue in the next few years. As financial institutions expand their digital footprint, they have more opportunities to better serve their customers – but are also more exposed to security threats. Every new tool increases the attack surface. A higher number of potential security gaps, may potentially lead to a higher number of security breaches. According to the  Ci...

As many as 207 websites have been infected with malicious code designed to launch a cryptocurrency miner by leveraging WebAssembly (Wasm) on the browser. Web security company Sucuri, which published details of the campaign, said it launched an investigation after one of its clients had their computer slowed down significantly every time upon navigating to their own WordPress portal. This uncovered a compromise of a theme file to inject malicious JavaScript code from a remote server -- hxxps://wm.bmwebm[.]org/auto.js -- that's loaded whenever the website's page is accessed. "Once decoded, the contents of auto.js immediately reveal the functionality of a cryptominer which starts mining when a visitor lands on the compromised site," Sucuri malware researcher Cesar Anjos  said . What's more, the deobfuscated auto.js code makes use of WebAssembly to run low-level binary code directly on the browser. WebAssembly , which is supported by all major browsers, is a  b...

FileWave's mobile device management (MDM) system has been found vulnerable to two critical security flaws that could be leveraged to carry out remote attacks and seize control of a fleet of devices connected to it. "The vulnerabilities are remotely exploitable and enable an attacker to bypass authentication mechanisms and gain full control over the MDM platform and its managed devices," Claroty security researcher Noam Moshe  said  in a Monday report. FileWave MDM is a cross-platform mobile device management solution that allows IT administrators to manage and monitor all of an organization's devices, including mobile phones, tablets, laptops, workstations, and smart TVs. The platform functions as a channel to push mandatory software and updates, change device settings, and even remotely wipe devices, all of which is delivered from a central server. The two issues identified by the operational technology firm relate to an authentication bypass (CVE-2022-34907) a...

An information-stealing malware called Amadey is being distributed by means of another backdoor called SmokeLoader. The attacks hinge on tricking users into downloading SmokeLoader that masquerades as software cracks, paving the way for the deployment of Amadey, researchers from the AhnLab Security Emergency Response Center (ASEC)  said  in a report published last week. Amadey , a botnet that  first appeared  around October 2018 on Russian underground forums for $600, is equipped to siphon credentials, capture screenshots, system metadata, and even information about antivirus engines and additional malware installed on an infected machine. While a feature improvement spotted last July by Walmart Global Tech  incorporated  functionality for harvesting data from Mikrotik routers and Microsoft Outlook, the toolset has since been upgraded to capture information from FileZilla, Pidgin, Total Commander FTP Client, RealVNC, TightVNC, TigerVNC, and WinSCP. ...

Malicious actors are exploiting a previously unknown security flaw in the open source PrestaShop e-commerce platform to inject malicious skimmer code designed to swipe sensitive information. "Attackers have found a way to use a security vulnerability to carry out arbitrary code execution in servers running PrestaShop websites," the company  noted  in an advisory published on July 22. PrestaShop is  marketed  as the leading open-source e-commerce solution in Europe and Latin America, used by nearly 300,000 online merchants worldwide. The goal of the infections is to introduce malicious code capable of stealing payment information entered by customers on checkout pages. Shops using outdated versions of the software or other vulnerable third-party modules appear to be the prime targets.  The PrestaShop maintainers also said they found a zero-day flaw in its service that they said has been addressed in  version 1.7.8.7 , although they cautioned that "we c...

Microsoft is now taking steps to prevent Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) brute-force attacks as part of the latest builds for the Windows 11 operating system in an attempt to raise the  security baseline  to meet the evolving threat landscape. To that end, the default policy for Windows 11 builds – particularly, Insider Preview builds 22528.1000 and newer – will automatically lock accounts for 10 minutes after 10 invalid sign-in attempts. "Win11 builds now have a DEFAULT account lockout policy to mitigate RDP and other brute-force password vectors," David Weston, Microsoft's vice president for OS security and enterprise,  said  in a series of tweets last week. "This technique is very commonly used in Human Operated Ransomware and other attacks -- this control will make brute forcing much harder which is awesome!" It's worth pointing out that while this  account lockout setting  is already incorporated in Windows 10, it's not enabled by default. The f...

An unknown Chinese-speaking threat actor has been attributed to a new kind of sophisticated Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ( UEFI ) firmware rootkit called  CosmicStrand . "The rootkit is located in the firmware images of Gigabyte or ASUS motherboards, and we noticed that all these images are related to designs using the H81 chipset," Kaspersky researchers  said  in a new report published today. "This suggests that a common vulnerability may exist that allowed the attackers to inject their rootkit into the firmware's image." Victims identified are said to be private individuals located in China, Vietnam, Iran, and Russia, with no discernible ties to any organization or industry vertical. Rootkits, which are malware implants that are capable of embedding themselves in the deepest layers of the operating system, have morphed from a rarity to an increasingly common occurrence in the threat landscape, equipping threat actors with stealth and persistence f...

Three restaurant ordering platforms MenuDrive, Harbortouch, and InTouchPOS were the target of two Magecart skimming campaigns that resulted in the compromise of at least 311 restaurants. The trio of breaches has led to the theft of more than 50,000 payment card records from these infected restaurants and posted for sale on the dark web. "The online ordering platforms MenuDrive and Harbortouch were targeted by the same Magecart campaign, resulting in e-skimmer infections on 80 restaurants using MenuDrive and 74 using Harbortouch," cybersecurity firm Recorded Future  revealed  in a report. "InTouchPOS was targeted by a separate, unrelated Magecart campaign, resulting in e-skimmer infections on 157 restaurants using the platform." Magecart actors have a history of  infecting e-commerce websites  with JavaScript skimmers to steal online shoppers' payment card data, billing information, and other personally identifiable information (PII). The first set of act...