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As many as 29 different router models from DrayTek have been identified as affected by a new critical, unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability that, if successfully exploited, could lead to full compromise of the devices and unauthorized access to the broader network. "The attack can be performed without user interaction if the management interface of the device has been configured to be internet facing," Trellix researcher Philippe Laulheret  said . "A one-click attack can also be performed from within the LAN in the default device configuration." Filed under CVE-2022-32548, the vulnerability has received the maximum severity rating of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system, owing to its ability to completely allow an adversary to seize control of the routers. At its core, the shortcoming is the result of a buffer overflow flaw in the web management interface ("/cgi-bin/wlogin.cgi"), which can be weaponized by a malicious actor by supplying spec...

An unknown threat actor has been targeting Russian entities with a newly discovered remote access trojan called Woody RAT for at least a year as part of a spear-phishing campaign. The advanced custom backdoor is said to be delivered via either of two methods: archive files or Microsoft Office documents leveraging the now-patched "Follina" support diagnostic tool vulnerability ( CVE-2022-30190 ) in Windows. Like other implants engineered for espionage-oriented operations, Woody RAT sports a wide range of features that enables the threat actor to remotely commandeer and steal sensitive information from the infected systems. "The earliest versions of this RAT were typically archived into a ZIP file pretending to be a document specific to a Russian group," Malwarebytes researchers Ankur Saini and Hossein Jazi  said  in a Wednesday report. "When the Follina vulnerability became known to the world, the threat actor switched to it to distribute the payload....

A threat actor is said to have "highly likely" exploited a security flaw in an outdated Atlassian Confluence server to deploy a never-before-seen backdoor against an unnamed organization in the research and technical services sector. The attack, which transpired over a seven-day-period during the end of May, has been attributed to a threat activity cluster tracked by cybersecurity firm Deepwatch as  TAC-040 . "The evidence indicates that the threat actor executed malicious commands with a parent process of tomcat9.exe in Atlassian's Confluence directory," the company  said . "After the initial compromise, the threat actor ran various commands to enumerate the local system, network, and Active Directory environment." The Atlassian vulnerability suspected to have been exploited is  CVE-2022-26134 , an Object-Graph Navigation Language (OGNL) injection flaw that paves the way for arbitrary code execution on a Confluence Server or Data Center instance....

Phishing incidents are on the rise. A report from IBM shows that phishing was the most popular attack vector in 2021, resulting in one in five employees falling victim to phishing hacking techniques. The Need for Security Awareness Training  Although technical solutions protect against phishing threats, no solution is 100% effective . Consequently, companies have no choice but to involve their employees in the fight against hackers. This is where security awareness training comes into play.  Security awareness training gives companies the confidence that their employees will execute the right response when they discover a phishing message in their inbox. As the saying goes, "knowledge is power," but the effectiveness of knowledge depends heavily on how it is delivered. When it comes to phishing attacks, simulations are among the most effective forms of training because the events in training simulations directly mimic how an employee would react in the event of an actu...

Cisco on Wednesday rolled out patches to address eight security vulnerabilities , three of which could be weaponized by an unauthenticated attacker to gain remote code execution (RCE) or cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition on affected devices. The most critical of the flaws impact Cisco Small Business RV160, RV260, RV340, and RV345 Series routers. Tracked as CVE-2022-20842 (CVSS score: 9.8), the weakness stems from an insufficient validation of user-supplied input to the web-based management interface of the appliances. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted HTTP input to an affected device," Cisco said in an advisory. "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code as the root user on the underlying operating system or cause the device to reload, resulting in a DoS condition." A second shortcoming relates to a command injection vulnerability residing in the routers' web filter database update featur...

A late-stage candidate encryption algorithm that was meant to withstand decryption by powerful quantum computers in the future has been trivially cracked by using a computer running Intel Xeon CPU in an hour's time. The algorithm in question is SIKE — short for Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation — which made it to the  fourth round  of the Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standardization process initiated by the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). "Ran on a single core, the appended  Magma   code  breaks the Microsoft  SIKE challenges  $IKEp182 and $IKEp217 in about 4 minutes and 6 minutes, respectively," KU Leuven researchers Wouter Castryck and Thomas Decru  said  in a new paper. "A run on the SIKEp434 parameters, previously believed to meet NIST's quantum security level 1, took about 62 minutes, again on a single core." The code was executed on an Intel  Xeon CPU E5-2630v2 ...

Threat actors are increasingly mimicking legitimate applications like Skype, Adobe Reader, and VLC Player as a means to abuse trust relationships and increase the likelihood of a successful social engineering attack. Other most impersonated legitimate apps by icon include 7-Zip, TeamViewer, CCleaner, Microsoft Edge, Steam, Zoom, and WhatsApp, an analysis from VirusTotal has revealed. "One of the simplest social engineering tricks we've seen involves making a malware sample seem a legitimate program," VirusTotal  said  in a Tuesday report. "The icon of these programs is a critical feature used to convince victims that these programs are legitimate." It's no surprise that threat actors resort to a variety of approaches to compromise endpoints by tricking unwitting users into downloading and running seemingly innocuous executables. This, in turn, is primarily achieved by taking advantage of genuine domains in a bid to get around IP-based firewall defenses...

The only threat more persistent to organizations than cyber criminals? The cyber security skills crisis.  Nearly  60% of enterprises  can't find the staff to protect their data (and reputations!) from new and emerging breeds of cyber-attacks, reports the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) in its 5th annual global industry study.  The result?  Heavier workloads, unfilled positions, and burnout.  And technology  isn't  easing the burden in many organizations, especially smaller ones. In fact, it's making the problem worse, suggests  Cynet's recent CISO survey . Big Tech Pushes Small Teams to the Limits Tech stacks normally supercharge cyber security teams, but in the case of crews of five or fewer — it just leads to overwhelm. For example, it took them an average of 18 months to fully implement and feel proficient in endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools — making the technology yet another barrier to cyber security for ...

A new, large-scale phishing campaign has been observed using adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) techniques to get around security protections and compromise enterprise email accounts. "It uses an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attack technique capable of bypassing multi-factor authentication," Zscaler researchers Sudeep Singh and Jagadeeswar Ramanukolanu  said  in a Tuesday report. "The campaign is specifically designed to reach end users in enterprises that use Microsoft's email services." Prominent targets include fintech, lending, insurance, energy, manufacturing, and federal credit union verticals located in the U.S., U.K., New Zealand, and Australia. This is not the first time such a phishing attack has come to light. Last month, Microsoft  disclosed  that over 10,000 organizations had been targeted since September 2021 by means of AitM techniques to breach accounts secured with multi-factor authentication (MFA). The ongoing campaign, effective June 2022,...

Virtualization services provider VMware on Tuesday shipped updates to  address 10 security flaws  affecting multiple products that could be abused by unauthenticated attackers to perform malicious actions. The issues, tracked from CVE-2022-31656 through CVE-2022-31665 (CVSS scores: 4.7 - 9.8), impact VMware Workspace ONE Access, Workspace ONE Access Connector, Identity Manager, Identity Manager Connector, vRealize Automation, Cloud Foundation, and vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager. The most severe of the flaws is CVE-2022-31656 (CVSS score: 9.8), an authentication bypass vulnerability affecting local domain users that could be leveraged by a bad actor with network access to obtain administrative rights. Also resolved by VMware are three remote code execution vulnerabilities (CVE-2022-31658, CVE-2022-31659, and CVE-2022-31665) related to JDBC and SQL injection that could be weaponized by an adversary with administrator and network access. Elsewhere, it has also remediated...

Researchers have disclosed a new offensive framework referred to as Manjusaka that they call is a "Chinese sibling of Sliver and Cobalt Strike." "A fully functional version of the command-and-control (C2), written in Golang with a User Interface in Simplified Chinese, is freely available and can generate new implants with custom configurations with ease, increasing the likelihood of wider adoption of this framework by malicious actors," Cisco Talos  said  in a new report. Sliver  and  Cobalt Strike  are legitimate adversary emulation frameworks that have been repurposed by threat actors to carry out post-exploitation activities such as network reconnaissance, lateral movement, and facilitating the deployment of follow-on payloads. Written in Rust, Manjusaka -- meaning "cow flower" -- is advertised as an equivalent to the Cobalt Strike framework with capabilities to target both Windows and Linux operating systems. Its developer is believed to be located...

Security researchers have discovered a new vulnerability called  ParseThru  affecting Golang-based applications that could be abused to gain unauthorized access to cloud-based applications. "The newly discovered vulnerability allows a threat actor to bypass validations under certain conditions, as a result of the use of unsafe URL parsing methods built in the language," Israeli cybersecurity firm Oxeye said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The issue, at its core, has to do with inconsistencies stemming from changes introduced to Golang's URL parsing logic that's implemented in the "net/url" library. While versions of the programming language prior to 1.17 treated semicolons as a valid query delimiter (e.g., example.com?a=1;b=2&c=3), this behavior has since been modified to throw an error upon finding a query string containing a semicolon. "The net/url and net/http packages used to accept ";" (semicolon) as a setting separat...

Ransomware is a kind of malware used by cybercriminals to stop users from accessing their systems or files; the cybercriminals then threaten to leak, destroy or withhold sensitive information unless a ransom is paid. Ransomware attacks can target either the data held on computer systems (known as locker ransomware) or devices (crypto-ransomware). In both instances, once a ransom is paid, threat actors typically provide victims with a decryption key or tool to unlock their data or device, though this is not guaranteed. Oliver Pinson-Roxburgh, CEO of  Defense.com , the all-in-one cybersecurity platform, shares knowledge and advice in this article on how ransomware works, how damaging it can be, and how your business can mitigate ransomware attacks from occurring. What does a ransomware attack comprise? There are three key elements to a ransomware attack: Access In order to deploy malware to encrypt files and gain control, cybercriminals need to initially gain access to an orga...

A threat actor associated with the LockBit 3.0 ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation has been observed abusing the Windows Defender command-line tool to decrypt and load Cobalt Strike payloads.  According to a report published by SentinelOne last week, the incident occurred after obtaining initial access via the  Log4Shell vulnerability  against an unpatched VMware Horizon Server. "Once initial access had been achieved, the threat actors performed a series of enumeration commands and attempted to run multiple post-exploitation tools, including Meterpreter, PowerShell Empire, and a new way to side-load Cobalt Strike," researchers Julio Dantas, James Haughom, and Julien Reisdorffer  said . LockBit 3.0 (aka LockBit Black), which comes with the tagline "Make Ransomware Great Again!," is the  next iteration  of the prolific  LockBit RaaS family  that emerged in June 2022 to iron out  critical weaknesses  discovered in its predecessor...

Researchers have uncovered a list of 3,207 mobile apps that are exposing Twitter API keys in the clear, some of which can be utilized to gain unauthorized access to Twitter accounts associated with them. The takeover is made possible, thanks to a leak of legitimate Consumer Key and Consumer Secret information, respectively, Singapore-based cybersecurity firm CloudSEK said in a report exclusively shared with The Hacker News. "Out of 3,207, 230 apps are leaking all four authentication credentials and can be used to fully take over their Twitter Accounts and can perform any critical/sensitive actions," the researchers said.  This can range from reading direct messages to carrying out arbitrary actions such as retweeting, liking and deleting tweets, following any account, removing followers, accessing account settings, and even changing the account profile picture. Access to the Twitter API  requires  generating secret keys and access tokens, which act as the usernames...

Now more than ever, organizations need to enable their development teams to build and grow their security skills. Today organizations face a threat landscape where individuals, well-financed syndicates, and state actors are actively trying to exploit errors in software. Yet, according to recent global research, 67% of developers that were interviewed said they were still shipping code they knew contained vulnerabilities.  Helping your development teams progress to achieve security maturity is possible, and ultimately beneficial. It will help ensure secure software development at every stage of the software development lifecycle. But how can you help your development teams reach security maturity? We dug deep and leveraged insights from over 400 of our customers to identify traits and behaviors that occur when a development team increases its security maturity. Here we share two of them: #1: A deep understanding of your gaps Before creating any maturity program, we first need ...

A 24-year-old Australian national has been charged for his purported role in the creation and sale of spyware for use by domestic violence perpetrators and child sex offenders. Jacob Wayne John Keen, who currently resides at Frankston, Melbourne, is said to have created the remote access trojan (RAT) when he was 15, while also administering the tool from 2013 until its shutdown in 2019 as part of a coordinated Europol-led exercise. "The Frankston man engaged with a network of individuals and sold the spyware, named Imminent Monitor (IM), to more than 14,500 individuals across 128 countries," the Australian Federal Police (AFP)  alleged  in a press release over the weekend. The defendant has been slapped with six counts of committing a computer offense by developing and supplying the malware, in addition to profiting off its illegal sale. Another woman, aged 42, who lives in the same home as the accused and is identified as his mother by  The Guardian , has also be...

The operators of the Gootkit access-as-a-service ( AaaS ) malware have resurfaced with updated techniques to compromise unsuspecting victims. "In the past, Gootkit used freeware installers to mask malicious files; now it uses legal documents to trick users into downloading these files," Trend Micro researchers Buddy Tancio and Jed Valderama  said  in a write-up last week. The findings build on a previous report from eSentire, which  disclosed  in January of widespread attacks aimed at employees of accounting and law firms to deploy malware on infected systems. Gootkit is part of the proliferating underground ecosystem of access brokers, who are known to provide other malicious actors a pathway into corporate networks for a price, paving the way for actual damaging attacks such as ransomware. The loader utilizes malicious search engine results, a technique called  SEO poisoning , to lure unsuspecting users into visiting compromised websites hosting malware...