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Samba has released software updates to remediate multiple vulnerabilities that, if successfully exploited, could allow an attacker to take control of affected systems. The high-severity flaws, tracked as  CVE-2022-38023, CVE-2022-37966, CVE-2022-37967, and CVE-2022-45141 , have been patched in versions 4.17.4, 4.16.8 and 4.15.13  released  on December 15, 2022. Samba is an open source Windows interoperability suite for Linux, Unix, and macOS operating systems that offers file server, printing, and Active Directory services. A brief description of each of the weaknesses is below - CVE-2022-38023  (CVSS score: 8.1) - Use of weak RC4-HMAC Kerberos encryption type in the  Netlogon Secure Channel   CVE-2022-37966  (CVSS score: 8.1) - An elevation of privilege vulnerability in Windows Kerberos RC4-HMAC CVE-2022-37967  (CVSS score: 7.2) - An elevation of privilege vulnerability in Windows Kerberos CVE-2022-45141  (CVSS score: 8.1) - Use of...

Government entities in Ukraine have been breached as part of a new campaign that leveraged trojanized versions of Windows 10 installer files to conduct post-exploitation activities. Mandiant, which discovered the "socially engineered supply chain" attack around mid-July 2022, said the malicious ISO files were distributed via Ukrainian- and Russian-language Torrent websites. It's tracking the threat cluster as  UNC4166 . "Upon installation of the compromised software, the malware gathers information on the compromised system and exfiltrates it," the cybersecurity company  said  in a technical deep dive published Thursday. Although the adversarial collective's provenance is unknown, the intrusions are said to have targeted organizations that were previously victims of disruptive wiper attacks attributed to  APT28 , a  Russian state-sponsored actor . The ISO file, per the Google-owned threat intelligence firm, was designed to disable the transmission of te...

A former Twitter employee who was found guilty of spying on behalf of Saudi Arabia by sharing data pertaining to specific individuals has been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison. Ahmad Abouammo, 45, was convicted  earlier this August  on various criminal counts, including money laundering, fraud, falsifying records, and being an illegal agent of a foreign government. Abouammo was arrested on November 5, 2019, after being accused of abusing his access to Twitter's internal systems to gather information about Saudi Arabia's critics on the social media platform. He was employed at Twitter from 2013 to 2015. "Mr. Abouammo violated the trust placed on him to protect the privacy of individuals by giving their personal information to a foreign power for profit,"  said  Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department's National Security Division. "His conduct was made all the more egregious by the fact that the information was i...

Is Managing Customer Logins and Data Giving You Headaches? You're Not Alone! Today, we all expect super-fast, secure, and personalized online experiences. But let's be honest, we're also more careful about how our data is used. If something feels off, trust can vanish in an instant. Add to that the lightning-fast changes AI is bringing to everything from how we log in to spotting online fraud, and it's a whole new ball game! If you're dealing with logins, data privacy, bringing new users on board, or building digital trust, this webinar is for you . Join us for " Navigating Customer Identity in the AI Era ," where we'll dive into the Auth0 2025 Customer Identity Trends Report . We'll show you what's working, what's not, and how to tweak your strategy for the year ahead. In just one session, you'll get practical answers to real-world challenges like: How AI is changing what users expect – and where they're starting to push ba...

Reality has a way of asserting itself, irrespective of any personal or commercial choices we make, good or bad. For example, just recently, the city services of Antwerp in Belgium were the victim of a highly disruptive cyberattack.  As usual, everyone cried "foul play" and suggested that proper cybersecurity measures should have been in place. And again, as usual, it all happens a bit too late. There was nothing special or unique about the attack, and it wasn't the last of its kind either. So why are we, in IT, still happily whistling into the wind and moving along as if nothing happened? Is everyone's disaster recovery plan really that good? Are all the security measures in place – and tested? Let's Do a Quick Recap (of What You Should Be Doing) First, cover the basics. Perform proper user training that includes all of the usual: password hygiene, restrictions on account sharing, and clear instructions not to open untrusted emails or to access unscrupulous w...

GitHub on Thursday said it is making available its secret scanning service to all public repositories on the code hosting platform for free. "Secret scanning alerts notify you directly about leaked secrets in your code," the company  said , adding it's expected to complete the rollout by the end of January 2023.  Secret scanning is  designed  to examine repositories for access tokens, private keys, credentials, API keys, and other secrets in  over 200 formats  that may have been accidentally committed, and generate alerts to prevent their misuse. The security option was previously limited to repositories owned by organizations that use GitHub Enterprise Cloud and have a GitHub Advanced Security license. For customers of GitHub Advanced Security, the  protections  go a step further by performing the scans for exposed secrets, including custom patterns,  during code pushes . The Microsoft subsidiary also said it's  planning  t...

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency within the Department of Commerce,  announced  Thursday that it's formally retiring the SHA-1 cryptographic algorithm. SHA-1 , short for Secure Hash Algorithm 1, is a 27-year-old  hash function  used in cryptography and has since been  deemed   broken  owing to the risk of  collision attacks . While hashes are designed to be irreversible – meaning it should be impossible to reconstruct the original message from the fixed-length enciphered text – the lack of collision resistance in SHA-1 made it possible to generate the same hash value for two different inputs. In February 2017, a group of researchers from CWI Amsterdam and Google  disclosed  the first practical technique for producing collisions on SHA-1, effectively undermining the security of the algorithm. "For example, by crafting the two colliding PDF files as two rental agreements with different rent, i...

Microsoft on Thursday flagged a cross-platform botnet that's primarily designed to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against private Minecraft servers. Called  MCCrash , the botnet is characterized by a unique spreading mechanism that allows it to propagate to Linux-based devices despite originating from malicious software downloads on Windows hosts. "The botnet spreads by enumerating default credentials on internet-exposed Secure Shell (SSH)-enabled devices," the company  said  in a report. "Because IoT devices are commonly enabled for remote configuration with potentially insecure settings, these devices could be at risk to attacks like this botnet." This also means that the malware could persist on IoT devices even after removing it from the infected source PC. The tech giant's cybersecurity division is tracking the activity cluster under its emerging moniker DEV-1028. A majority of the infections have been reported in Russia, and ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has  added  two vulnerabilities impacting Veeam Backup & Replication software to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) Catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The now-patched critical flaws, tracked as  CVE-2022-26500 and CVE-2022-26501 , are both rated 9.8 on the CVSS scoring system, and could be leveraged to gain control of a target system. "The Veeam Distribution Service (TCP 9380 by default) allows unauthenticated users to access internal API functions," Veeam  noted  in an advisory published in March 2022. "A remote attacker may send input to the internal API which may lead to uploading and executing of malicious code." Both the issues that impact product versions 9.5, 10, and 11 have been addressed in versions 10a and 11a. Users of Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 are advised to upgrade to a supported version. Nikita Petrov, a security researcher at Russ...

A Chinese-speaking advanced persistent threat (APT) actor codenamed  MirrorFace  has been attributed to a spear-phishing campaign targeting Japanese political establishments. The activity, dubbed  Operation LiberalFace  by ESET, specifically focused on members of an unnamed political party in the nation with the goal of delivering an implant called LODEINFO and a hitherto unseen credential stealer named MirrorStealer. The Slovak cybersecurity company said the campaign was launched a little over a week prior to the  Japanese House of Councillors election  that took place on July 10, 2022. "LODEINFO was used to deliver additional malware, exfiltrate the victim's credentials, and steal the victim's documents and emails," ESET researcher Dominik Breitenbacher  said  in a technical report published Wednesday. MirrorFace is said to share overlaps with another threat actor tracked as  APT10  (aka Bronze Riverside, Cicada, Earth Tengshe, S...

Microsoft has revised the severity of a security vulnerability it originally  patched in September 2022 , upgrading it to "Critical" after it emerged that it could be exploited to achieve remote code execution. Tracked as  CVE-2022-37958  (CVSS score: 8.1), the flaw was previously described as an  information disclosure vulnerability  in SPNEGO Extended Negotiation ( NEGOEX ) Security Mechanism. SPNEGO, short for Simple and Protected GSSAPI Negotiation Mechanism (SPNEGO), is a scheme that allows a client and remote server to arrive at a consensus on the choice of the protocol to be used (e.g., Kerberos or NTLM) for authentication. But a  further analysis  of the flaw by IBM Security X-Force researcher Valentina Palmiotti found that it could allow remote execution of arbitrary code, prompting Microsoft to reclassify its severity. "This vulnerability is a pre-authentication remote code execution vulnerability impacting a wide range of protocols," I...

A previously undocumented Android malware campaign has been observed leveraging money-lending apps to blackmail victims into paying up with personal information stolen from their devices. Mobile security company Zimperium dubbed the activity  MoneyMonger , pointing out the use of the  cross-platform Flutter framework  to develop the apps. MoneyMonger "takes advantage of Flutter's framework to obfuscate malicious features and complicate the detection of malicious activity by static analysis," Zimperium researchers Fernando Sanchez, Alex Calleja , Matteo Favaro, and Gianluca Braga  said  in a report shared with The Hacker news. "Due to the nature of Flutter, the malicious code and activity now hide behind a framework outside the static analysis capabilities of legacy mobile security products." The campaign, believed to be active since May 2022, is part of a broader effort previously  disclosed  by Indian cybersecurity firm K7 Security Labs. None of...

Web applications, often in the form of Software as a Service (SaaS), are now the cornerstone for businesses all over the world. SaaS solutions have revolutionized the way they operate and deliver services, and are essential tools in nearly every industry, from finance and banking to healthcare and education.  Most startup CTOs have an excellent understanding of how to build highly functional SaaS businesses but (as they are not cyber security professionals) need to gain more knowledge of how to secure the web application that underpins it.  Why test your web applications?  If you are a CTO at a SaaS startup, you are probably already aware that just because you are small doesn't mean you're not on the firing line. The size of a startup does not exempt it from cyber-attacks – that's because hackers constantly scan the internet looking for flaws that they can exploit. Additionally, it takes only one weakness, and your customer data could end up on the internet. It takes ...

NuGet, PyPi, and npm ecosystems are the target of a new campaign that has resulted in over 144,000 packages being published by unknown threat actors. "The packages were part of a new attack vector, with attackers spamming the open source ecosystem with packages containing links to phishing campaigns," researchers from Checkmarx and Illustria  said  in a report published Wednesday. Of the  144,294 phishing-related packages  that were detected, 136,258 were published on NuGet, 7,824 on PyPi, and 212 on npm. The offending libraries have since been unlisted or taken down. Further analysis has revealed that the whole process was automated and that the packages were pushed over a short span of time, with a majority of the usernames following the convention "<a-z><1900-2022>." The fake packages themselves claimed to provide hacks, cheats, and free resources in an attempt to trick users into downloading them. The URLs to the rogue phishing pages were embed...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Wednesday announced the seizure of 48 domains that offered services to conduct distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on behalf of other threat actors, effectively lowering the barrier to entry for malicious activity. It also charged six suspects – Jeremiah Sam Evans Miller (23), Angel Manuel Colon Jr. (37), Shamar Shattock (19), Cory Anthony Palmer (22), John M. Dobbs (32), and Joshua Laing (32) – for their alleged ownership in the operation. The websites "allowed paying users to launch powerful distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks that flood targeted computers with information and prevent them from being able to access the internet," the DoJ said in a press statement. The six defendants have been charged with running various booter (or stresser) services, including RoyalStresser[.]com, SecurityTeam[.]io, Astrostress[.]com, Booter[.]sx, IPStresser[.]com, and TrueSecurityServices[.]io. They have also been accused ...

Phishing campaigns involving the  Qakbot malware  are using Scalable Vector Graphics ( SVG ) images embedded in HTML email attachments. The new distribution method was spotted by Cisco Talos, which  said  it identified fraudulent email messages featuring HTML attachments with encoded SVG images that incorporate  HTML script tags . HTML smuggling is a  technique  that relies on using legitimate features of HTML and JavaScript to run encoded malicious code contained within the lure attachment and assemble the payload on a victim's machine as opposed to making an HTTP request to fetch the malware from a remote server. In other words, the idea is to evade email gateways by storing a binary in the form of a JavaScript code that's decoded and downloaded when opened via a web browser. The attack chain spotted by the cybersecurity company concerns a JavaScript that's smuggled inside of the SVG image and executed when the unsuspecting email recipient laun...

A new Go-based botnet has been spotted scanning and brute-forcing self-hosted websites using the WordPress content management system (CMS) to seize control of targeted systems. "This new brute forcer is part of a new campaign we have named GoTrim because it was written in Go and uses ':::trim:::' to split data communicated to and from the C2 server," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researchers Eduardo Altares, Joie Salvio, and Roy Tay  said . The active campaign, observed since September 2022, utilizes a bot network to perform distributed brute-force attacks in an attempt to login to the targeted web server. A successful break-in is followed by the operator installing a downloader PHP script in the newly compromised host that, in turn, is designed to deploy the "bot client" from a hard-coded URL, effectively adding the machine to the growing network. In its present form, GoTrim does not have self-propagation capabilities of its own, nor can it distribute oth...

Microsoft on Tuesday disclosed it took steps to implement blocking protections and suspend accounts that were used to publish malicious drivers that were certified by its Windows Hardware Developer Program . The tech giant said its investigation revealed the activity was restricted to a number of developer program accounts and that no further compromise was detected. Cryptographically signing malware is concerning not least because it not only undermines a key security mechanism but also allows threat actors to subvert traditional detection methods and infiltrate target networks to perform highly privileged operations. The probe, Redmond stated, was initiated after it was notified of rogue drivers being used in post-exploitation efforts, including deploying ransomware, by cybersecurity firms Mandiant, SentinelOne, and Sophos on October 19, 2022. One notable aspect of these attacks was that the adversary had already obtained administrative privileges on compromised systems before ...

Protecting customer data is critical for any business accepting online payment information. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), created by leading credit card companies, establishes best practices for protecting consumers' information. By adhering to these standards, businesses can ensure that their customer's personal and financial information is secure.  The PCI DSS security standards apply to any business that processes, stores, or transmits credit card information. Failure to comply with the PCI DSS can result in costly fines and penalties from credit card companies. It can also lead to a loss of customer trust, which can be devastating for any business. PCI DSS 4.0 was released in March 2022 and will replace the current PCI DSS 3.2.1 standard in March 2025. That provides a three-year transition period for organizations to be compliant with 4.0. The latest version of the standard will bring a new focus to an overlooked yet critically important ar...