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Details have emerged about a China-nexus threat group's exploitation of a recently disclosed, now-patched security flaw in Cisco switches as a zero-day to seize control of the appliances and evade detection. The activity, attributed to Velvet Ant, was observed early this year and involved the weaponization of CVE-2024-20399 (CVSS score: 6.0) to deliver bespoke malware and gain extensive control over the compromised system, facilitating both data exfiltration and persistent access. "The zero-day exploit allows an attacker with valid administrator credentials to the Switch management console to escape the NX-OS command line interface (CLI) and execute arbitrary commands on the Linux underlying operating system," cybersecurity company Sygnia said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Velvet Ant first caught the attention of researchers at the Israeli cybersecurity company in connection with a multi-year campaign that targeted an unnamed organization located in Eas...

As many as 15,000 applications using Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Application Load Balancer (ALB) for authentication are potentially susceptible to a configuration-based issue that could expose them to sidestep access controls and compromise applications. That's according to findings from Israeli cybersecurity company Miggo, which dubbed the problem ALBeast . "This vulnerability allows attackers to directly access affected applications, particularly if they are exposed to the internet," security researcher Liad Eliyahu said . ALB is an Amazon service designed to route HTTP and HTTPS traffic to target applications based on the nature of the requests. It also allows users to "offload the authentication functionality" from their apps into the ALB. "Application Load Balancer will securely authenticate users as they access cloud applications," Amazon notes on its website. "Application Load Balancer is seamlessly integrated with Amazon Cognit...

What is Continuous Attack Surface Penetration Testing or CASPT? Continuous Penetration Testing or Continuous Attack Surface Penetration Testing (CASPT) is an advanced security practice that involves the continuous, automated, and ongoing penetration testing services of an organization's digital assets to identify and mitigate security vulnerabilities. CASPT is designed for enterprises with an evolving attack surface where periodic pentesting is no longer sufficient. Unlike traditional penetration testing, which is often performed annually or semi-annually, CASPT is an ongoing process that integrates directly into the software development lifecycle (SDLC), ensuring that vulnerabilities are discovered and addressed in real-time or near-real-time. CASPT is a proactive security measure designed to stay ahead of potential attackers by continuously evaluating the security posture of an organization. It enables security teams to identify critical entry points that could be exploited b...

Google has rolled out security fixes to address a high-severity security flaw in its Chrome browser that it said has come under active exploitation in the wild. Tracked as CVE-2024-7971 , the vulnerability has been described as a type confusion bug in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine. "Type confusion in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 128.0.6613.84 allowed a remote attacker to exploit heap corruption via a crafted HTML page," according to a description of the bug in the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) and Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) have been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on August 19, 2024. No additional details about the nature of the attacks exploiting the flaw or the identity of the threat actors that may be weaponizing it have been released, primarily to ensure that a majority of the users are updated with a fix. The tech giant, however, acknowledged in a terse sta...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical security flaw in the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress that could permit unauthenticated users to gain administrator privileges. "The plugin suffers from an unauthenticated privilege escalation vulnerability which allows any unauthenticated visitor to gain Administrator level access after which malicious plugins could be uploaded and installed," Patchstack's Rafie Muhammad said in a Wednesday report. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-28000 (CVSS score: 9.8), has been patched in version 6.4 of the plugin released on August 13, 2024. It impacts all versions of the plugin, including and prior to 6.3.0.1. LiteSpeed Cache is one of the most widely used caching plugins in WordPress with over five million active installations. In a nutshell, CVE-2024-28000 makes it possible for an unauthenticated attacker to spoof their user ID and register as an administrative-level user, effectively granting them privileges to...

GitHub has released fixes to address a set of three security flaws impacting its Enterprise Server product, including one critical bug that could be abused to gain site administrator privileges. The most severe of the shortcomings has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2024-6800, and carries a CVSS score of 9.5. "On GitHub Enterprise Server instances that use SAML single sign-on (SSO) authentication with specific IdPs utilizing publicly exposed signed federation metadata XML, an attacker could forge a SAML response to provision and/or gain access to a user account with site administrator privileges," GitHub said in an advisory. The Microsoft-owned subsidiary has also addressed a pair of medium-severity flaws - CVE-2024-7711 (CVSS score: 5.3) - An incorrect authorization vulnerability that could allow an attacker to update the title, assignees, and labels of any issue inside a public repository. CVE-2024-6337 (CVSS score: 5.9) - An incorrect authorization vulnerab...

Cybersecurity researchers have unpacked a new malware strain dubbed PG_MEM that's designed to mine cryptocurrency after brute-forcing their way into PostgreSQL database instances. "Brute-force attacks on Postgres involve repeatedly attempting to guess the database credentials until access is gained, exploiting weak passwords," Aqua security researcher Assaf Morag said in a technical report. "Once accessed, attackers can leverage the COPY ... FROM PROGRAM SQL command to execute arbitrary shell commands on the host, allowing them to perform malicious activities such as data theft or deploying malware." The attack chain observed by the cloud security firm entails targeting misconfigured PostgreSQL databases to create an administrator role in Postgres and exploiting a feature called PROGRAM to run shell commands. In addition, a successful brute-force attack is followed by the threat actor conducting initial reconnaissance and executing commands to strip the ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical security flaw impacting Microsoft's Copilot Studio that could be exploited to access sensitive information. Tracked as CVE-2024-38206 (CVSS score: 8.5), the vulnerability has been described as an information disclosure bug stemming from a server-side request forgery ( SSRF ) attack. "An authenticated attacker can bypass Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) protection in Microsoft Copilot Studio to leak sensitive information over a network," Microsoft said in an advisory released on August 6, 2024. The tech giant further said the vulnerability has been addressed and that it requires no customer action. Tenable security researcher Evan Grant, who is credited with discovering and reporting the shortcoming, said it takes advantage of Copilot's ability to make external web requests. "Combined with a useful SSRF protection bypass, we used this flaw to get access to Microsoft's internal infrastructure for Cop...

A new remote access trojan called MoonPeak has been discovered as being used by a state-sponsored North Korean threat activity cluster as part of a new campaign. Cisco Talos attributed the malicious cyber campaign to a hacking group it tracks as UAT-5394, which it said exhibits some level of tactical overlaps with a known nation-state actor codenamed Kimsuky . MoonPeak, under active development by the threat actor, is a variant of the open-source Xeno RAT malware, which was previously deployed as part of phishing attacks that were designed to retrieve the payload from actor-controlled cloud services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. Some of the key features of Xeno RAT include the ability to load additional plugins, launch and terminate processes, and communicate with a command-and-control (C2) server. Talos said the commonalities between the two intrusion sets either indicate UAT-5394 is actually Kimsuky (or its sub-group) or it's another hacking crew wi...

It's no great revelation to say that SaaS applications have changed the way we operate, both in our personal and professional lives. We routinely rely on cloud-based and remote applications to conduct our basic functions, with the result that the only true perimeter of our networks has become the identities with which we log into these services. Unfortunately – as is so often the case – our appetite for better workflows, collaboration, and communications outpaced our willingness to make sure these tools and processes were secure as we hooked them into our environments, handing off our control of the security of our data. Each of these applications asks for various amounts of permissions into our data, which often rely on other vendors' services, creating not a network, but a tangle of interdependent intricacies that has become so complex most security and IT teams don't even know how many SaaS applications are connected in, let alone what they are or their access permissi...

In what's a case of an operational security (OPSEC) lapse, the operator behind a new information stealer called Styx Stealer leaked data from their own computer, including details related to the clients, profit information, nicknames, phone numbers, and email addresses. Styx Stealer, a derivative of the Phemedrone Stealer , is capable of stealing browser data, instant messenger sessions from Telegram and Discord, and cryptocurrency wallet information, cybersecurity company Check Point said in an analysis. It first emerged in April 2024. "Styx Stealer is most likely based on the source code of an old version of Phemedrone Stealer, which lacks some features found in newer versions such as sending reports to Telegram, report encryption, and more," the company noted . "However, the creator of Styx Stealer added some new features: auto-start, clipboard monitor and crypto-clipper, additional sandbox evasion, and anti-analysis techniques, and re-implemented sending dat...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new macOS malware strain dubbed TodoSwift that they say exhibits commonalities with known malicious software used by North Korean hacking groups. "This application shares several behaviors with malware we've seen that originated in North Korea (DPRK) — specifically the threat actor known as BlueNoroff — such as KANDYKORN and RustBucket ," Kandji security researcher Christopher Lopez said in an analysis. RustBucket, which first came to light in July 2023, refers to an AppleScript-based backdoor that's capable of fetching next-stage payloads from a command-and-control (C2) server. Late last year, Elastic Security Labs also uncovered another macOS malware tracked as KANDYKORN that was deployed in connection with a cyber attack targeting blockchain engineers of an unnamed cryptocurrency exchange platform. Delivered by means of a sophisticated multi-stage infection chain, KANDYKORN possesses capabilities to access and exfi...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of new phishing attacks that aim to infect devices with malware. The activity has been attributed to a threat cluster it tracks as UAC-0020, which is also known as Vermin . The exact scale and scope of the attacks are presently unknown. The attack chains commence with phishing messages with photos of alleged prisoners of war (PoWs) from the Kursk region, urging recipients to click on a link pointing to a ZIP archive. The ZIP file contains a Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) file that embeds JavaScript code responsible for launching an obfuscated PowerShell script. "Opening the file installs components of known spyware SPECTR, as well as the new malware called FIRMACHAGENT," CERT-UA said. "The purpose of FIRMACHAGENT is to retrive the data stolen by SPECTR and send it to a remote management server." SPECTR is a known malware linked to Vermin as far back as 2019. The group is assessed to be ...

A maximum-severity security flaw has been disclosed in the WordPress GiveWP donation and fundraising plugin that exposes more than 100,000 websites to remote code execution attacks. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-5932 (CVSS score: 10.0), impacts all versions of the plugin prior to version 3.14.2, which was released on August 7, 2024. A security researcher, who goes by the online alias villu164, has been credited with discovering and reporting the issue. The plugin is "vulnerable to PHP Object Injection in all versions up to, and including, 3.14.1 via deserialization of untrusted input from the 'give_title' parameter," Wordfence said in a report this week. "This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to inject a PHP Object. The additional presence of a POP chain allows attackers to execute code remotely, and to delete arbitrary files." The vulnerability is rooted in a function named "give_process_donation_form()," which is used to vali...

As cloud infrastructure becomes the backbone of modern enterprises, ensuring the security of these environments is paramount. With AWS (Amazon Web Services) still being the dominant cloud it is important for any security professional to know where to look for signs of compromise. AWS CloudTrail stands out as an essential tool for tracking and logging API activity, providing a comprehensive record of actions taken within an AWS account. Think of AWS CloudTrail like an audit or event log for all of the API calls made in your AWS account. For security professionals, monitoring these logs is critical, particularly when it comes to detecting potential unauthorized access, such as through stolen API keys. These techniques and many others I've learned through the incidents I've worked in AWS and that we built into SANS FOR509 , Enterprise Cloud Forensics.  1. Unusual API Calls and Access Patterns A. Sudden Spike in API Requests One of the first signs of a potential security breach is ...