The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

In today's rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape, organizations face increasingly sophisticated attacks targeting their applications. Understanding these threats and the technologies designed to combat them is crucial. This article delves into the mechanics of a common application attack, using the infamous Log4Shell vulnerability as an example, and demonstrates how Application Detection and Response (ADR) technology effectively safeguards against such zero-day threats. View the Contrast ADR white paper The anatomy of a modern application attack: Log4Shell To illustrate the complexity and severity of modern application attacks, let's examine an attack against the infamous Log4Shell vulnerability ( CVE-2021-44228 ) that sent shockwaves through the cybersecurity world in late 2021. This attack is a prime example of attack chaining, leveraging JNDI Injection, Expression Language (EL) Injection and Command Injection. Technology note : The CVE program catalogs, which publicly...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a security flaw impacting Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Services that, if successfully exploited, could allow an attacker to escalate their privileges and access credentials for services used by the cluster. "An attacker with command execution in a pod running within an affected Azure Kubernetes Services cluster could download the configuration used to provision the cluster node, extract the transport layer security (TLS) bootstrap tokens, and perform a TLS bootstrap attack to read all secrets within the cluster," Google-owned Mandiant said . Clusters using "Azure CNI" for the "Network configuration" and "Azure" for the "Network Policy" have been found to be impacted by the privilege escalation bug. Microsoft has since addressed the issue following responsible disclosure. The attack technique devised by the threat intelligence firm hinges on accessing a little-known component called Azure WireS...

Iranian state-sponsored threat actors have been observed orchestrating spear-phishing campaigns targeting a prominent Jewish figure starting in late July 2024 with the goal of delivering a new intelligence-gathering tool called AnvilEcho. Enterprise security company Proofpoint is tracking the activity under the name TA453, which overlaps with activity tracked by the broader cybersecurity community under the monikers APT42 (Mandiant), Charming Kitten (CrowdStrike), Damselfly (Symantec), Mint Sandstorm (Microsoft), and Yellow Garuda (PwC). "The initial interaction attempted to lure the target to engage with a benign email to build conversation and trust to then subsequently click on a follow-up malicious link," security researchers Joshua Miller, Georgi Mladenov, Andrew Northern, and Greg Lesnewich said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The attack chain attempted to deliver a new malware toolkit called BlackSmith, which delivered a PowerShell trojan dubbed Anv...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a threat actor known as Blind Eagle that has persistently targeted entities and individuals in Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Panama, and other Latin American nations. Targets of these attacks span several sectors, including governmental institutions, financial companies, energy and oil and gas companies. "Blind Eagle has demonstrated adaptability in shaping the objectives of its cyberattacks and the versatility to switch between purely financially motivated attacks and espionage operations," Kaspersky said in a Monday report. Also referred to as APT-C-36, Blind Eagle is believed to be active since at least 2018. The suspected Spanish-speaking group is known for using spear-phishing lures to distribute various publicly available remote access trojans such as AsyncRAT, BitRAT, Lime RAT, NjRAT, Quasar RAT, and Remcos RAT. Earlier this March, eSentire detailed the adversary's use of a malware loader called Ande Loader to propa...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning about the discovery of thousands of externally-facing Oracle NetSuite e-commerce sites that have been found susceptible to leaking sensitive customer information. "A potential issue in NetSuite's SuiteCommerce platform could allow attackers to access sensitive data due to misconfigured access controls on custom record types (CRTs)," AppOmni's Aaron Costello said . It's worth emphasizing here that the issue is not a security weakness in the NetSuite product, but rather a customer misconfiguration that can lead to leakage of confidential data. The information exposed includes full addresses and mobile phone numbers of registered customers of the e-commerce sites. The attack scenario detailed by AppOmni exploits CRTs that employ table-level access controls with the "No Permission Required" access type, which grants unauthenticated users access to data by making use of NetSuite's record and search APIs. That sa...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added a critical security flaw impacting Jenkins to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, following its exploitation in ransomware attacks. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-23897 (CVSS score: 9.8), is a path traversal flaw that could lead to code execution. "Jenkins Command Line Interface (CLI) contains a path traversal vulnerability that allows attackers limited read access to certain files, which can lead to code execution," CISA said in a statement. It was first disclosed by Sonar security researchers in January 2024 and addressed in Jenkins versions 2.442 and LTS 2.426.3 by disabling the command parser feature. Back in March, Trend Micro said it uncovered several attack instances originating from the Netherlands, Singapore, and Germany, and that it found instances where remote code execution exploits for the flaw were actively being traded. In recent weeks, CloudSEK and ...

A new type of malware called UULoader is being used by threat actors to deliver next-stage payloads like Gh0st RAT and Mimikatz . The Cyberint Research Team, which discovered the malware, said it's distributed in the form of malicious installers for legitimate applications targeting Korean and Chinese speakers. There is evidence pointing to UULoader being the work of a Chinese speaker due to the presence of Chinese strings in program database (PDB) files embedded within the DLL file. "UULoader's 'core' files are contained in a Microsoft Cabinet archive (.cab) file which contains two primary executables (an .exe and a .dll) which have had their file header stripped," the company said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. One of the executables is a legitimate binary that's susceptible to DLL side-loading, which is used to sideload the DLL file that ultimately loads the final stage, an obfuscate file named "XamlHost.sys" that...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a surge in malware infections stemming from malvertising campaigns distributing a loader called FakeBat. "These attacks are opportunistic in nature, targeting users seeking popular business software," the Mandiant Managed Defense team said in a technical report. "The infection utilizes a trojanized MSIX installer, which executes a PowerShell script to download a secondary payload." FakeBat , also called EugenLoader and PaykLoader, is linked to a threat actor named Eugenfest. The Google-owned threat intelligence team is tracking the malware under the name NUMOZYLOD and has attributed the Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) operation to UNC4536. Attack chains propagating the loader malware make use of drive-by download techniques to push users searching for popular software toward bogus lookalike sites that host booby-trapped MSI installers. Some of the malware families delivered via FakeBat include IcedID, RedLine Stealer, Lumma...

According to recent research on  employee offboarding , 70% of IT professionals say they've experienced the negative effects of incomplete IT offboarding, whether in the form of a security incident tied to an account that wasn't deprovisioned, a surprise bill for resources that aren't in use anymore, or a missed handoff of a critical resource or account. This is despite an average of five hours spent per departing employee on activities like finding and deprovisioning SaaS accounts. As the SaaS footprint within most organizations continues to expand, it is becoming exponentially more difficult (and time-consuming) to ensure all access is deprovisioned or transferred when an employee leaves the organization.  How Nudge Security can help Nudge Security is a  SaaS management platform  for modern IT governance and security. It discovers every cloud and SaaS account ever created by anyone in your organization, including generative AI apps, giving you a single source of...

Malicious actors are using a cloud attack tool named Xeon Sender to conduct SMS phishing and spam campaigns on a large scale by abusing legitimate services. "Attackers can use Xeon to send messages through multiple software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers using valid credentials for the service providers," SentinelOne security researcher Alex Delamotte said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Examples of the services used to facilitate the en masse distribution of SMS messages include Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Nexmo, Plivo, Proovl, Send99, Telesign, Telnyx, TextBelt, Twilio. It's important to note here that the activity does not exploit any inherent weaknesses in these providers. Rather, the tool uses legitimate APIs to conduct bulk SMS spam attacks. It joins tools like SNS Sender that have increasingly become a way to send bulk smishing messages and ultimately capture sensitive information from targets. Distributed via Telegram and hacking fo...

A newly patched security flaw in Microsoft Windows was exploited as a zero-day by Lazarus Group , a prolific state-sponsored actor affiliated with North Korea. The security vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-38193 (CVSS score: 7.8), has been described as a privilege escalation bug in the Windows Ancillary Function Driver (AFD.sys) for WinSock. "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges," Microsoft said in an advisory for the flaw last week. It was addressed by the tech giant as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday update. Credited with discovering and reporting the flaw are Gen Digital researchers Luigino Camastra and Milánek. Gen Digital owns a number of security and utility software brands like Norton, Avast, Avira, AVG, ReputationDefender, and CCleaner. "This flaw allowed them to gain unauthorized access to sensitive system areas," the company disclosed last week, adding it discovered the exploitation in early J...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered new infrastructure linked to a financially motivated threat actor known as FIN7 . The two clusters of potential FIN7 activity "indicate communications inbound to FIN7 infrastructure from IP addresses assigned to Post Ltd (Russia) and SmartApe (Estonia), respectively," Team Cymru said in a report published this week as part of a joint investigation with Silent Push and Stark Industries Solutions. The findings build on a recent report from Silent Push, which found several Stark Industries IP addresses that are solely dedicated to hosting FIN7 infrastructure. The latest analysis indicates that the hosts linked to the e-crime group were likely procured from one of Stark's resellers. "Reseller programs are common in the hosting industry; many of the largest VPS (virtual private server) providers offer such services," the cybersecurity company said. "Customers procuring infrastructure via resellers generally must ...

OpenAI on Friday said it banned a set of accounts linked to what it said was an Iranian covert influence operation that leveraged ChatGPT to generate content that, among other things, focused on the upcoming U.S. presidential election. "This week we identified and took down a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that were generating content for a covert Iranian influence operation identified as Storm-2035," OpenAI said . "The operation used ChatGPT to generate content focused on a number of topics — including commentary on candidates on both sides in the U.S. presidential election – which it then shared via social media accounts and websites." The artificial intelligence (AI) company said the content did not achieve any meaningful engagement, with a majority of the social media posts receiving negligible to no likes, shares, and comments. It further noted it had found little evidence that the long-form articles created using ChatGPT were shared on social media platforms....

A large-scale extortion campaign has compromised various organizations by taking advantage of publicly accessible environment variable files (.env) that contain credentials associated with cloud and social media applications. "Multiple security missteps were present in the course of this campaign, including the following: Exposing environment variables, using long-lived credentials, and absence of least privilege architecture," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said in a Thursday report. The campaign is notable for setting up its attack infrastructure within the infected organizations' Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments and using them as a launchpad for scanning more than 230 million unique targets for sensitive data. With 110,000 domains targeted, the malicious activity is said to have netted over 90,000 unique variables in the .env files, out of which 7,000 belonged to organizations' cloud services and 1,500 variables are linked to social media accounts. "T...

A 27-year-old Russian national has been sentenced to over three years in prison in the U.S. for peddling financial information, login credentials, and other personally identifying information (PII) on a now-defunct dark web marketplace called Slilpp . Georgy Kavzharadze, 27, of Moscow, Russia, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and wire fraud earlier this February. In addition to a 40-month jail term, Kavzharadze has been ordered to pay $1,233,521.47 in restitution. The defendant, who went by the online monikers TeRorPP, Torqovec, and PlutuSS, is believed to have listed over 626,100 stolen login credentials for sale on Slilpp and sold more than 297,300 of them on the illicit marketplace between July 2016 and May 2021. "Those credentials were subsequently linked to $1.2 million in fraudulent transactions," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said . "On May 27, 2021, Kavzharadze's account on Slilpp listed 240,495 login credentials fo...