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Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

A previously undocumented threat activity cluster dubbed Earth Minotaur is leveraging the MOONSHINE exploit kit and an unreported Android-cum-Windows backdoor called DarkNimbus to facilitate long-term surveillance operations targeting Tibetans and Uyghurs. "Earth Minotaur uses MOONSHINE to deliver the DarkNimbus backdoor to Android and Windows devices, targeting WeChat, and possibly making it a cross-platform threat," Trend Micro researchers Joseph C Chen and Daniel Lunghi said in an analysis published today. "MOONSHINE exploits multiple known vulnerabilities in Chromium-based browsers and applications, requiring users to update software regularly to prevent attacks." Countries affected by Earth Minotaur's attacks span Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Nepal, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, and the U.S. MOONSHINE first came to light in September 2019 as part of cyber attacks targeting t...

A suspected Chinese threat actor targeted a large U.S. organization earlier this year as part of a four-month-long intrusion. According to Broadcom-owned Symantec, the first evidence of the malicious activity was detected on April 11, 2024 and continued until August. However, the company doesn't rule out the possibility that the intrusion may have occurred earlier. "The attackers moved laterally across the organization's network, compromising multiple computers," the Symantec Threat Hunter Team said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Some of the machines targeted were Exchange Servers, suggesting the attackers were gathering intelligence by harvesting emails. Exfiltration tools were also deployed, suggesting that targeted data was taken from the organizations." The name of the organization that was impacted by the persistent attack campaign was not disclosed, but noted that the victim has a significant presence in China. The links to China as ...

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The China-linked threat actor known as MirrorFace has been attributed to a new spear-phishing campaign mainly targeting individuals and organizations in Japan since June 2024. The aim of the campaign is to deliver backdoors known as NOOPDOOR (aka HiddenFace) and ANEL (aka UPPERCUT), Trend Micro said in a technical analysis. "An interesting aspect of this campaign is the comeback of a backdoor dubbed ANEL, which was used in campaigns targeting Japan by APT10 until around 2018 and had not been observed since then," security researcher Hara Hiroaki said . It's worth noting that MirrorFace's use of ANEL was also documented by ESET last month as part of a cyber attack targeting a diplomatic organization in the European Union using lures related to the World Expo. MirrorFace, also known as Earth Kasha, is the name given to a Chinese threat actor that's known for its persistent targeting of Japanese entities. It's assessed to be a sub-cluster within APT10. ...

The U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA) on Wednesday announced that it led an international investigation to disrupt Russian money laundering networks that were found to facilitate serious and organized crime across the U.K., the Middle East, Russia, and South America. The effort, codenamed Operation Destabilise , has resulted in the arrest of 84 suspects linked to two Russian-speaking networks Smart and TGR. In addition, £20 million ($25.4 million) in cash and cryptocurrency has been seized. Both the businesses are based in Moscow's Federation Tower, per The Telegraph , which is known to act as a hub for money laundering firms . Concurrent with the takedown and arrests, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has sanctioned five individuals and four entities associated with the TGR Group. "Through the TGR Group, Russian elites sought to exploit digital assets – in particular U.S. dollar-backed stablecoins – to evade U.S. and in...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added multiple security flaws affecting products from Zyxel, North Grid Proself, ProjectSend , and CyberPanel to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2024-51378 (CVSS score: 10.0) - An incorrect default permissions vulnerability that allows for authentication bypass and the execution of arbitrary commands using shell metacharacters in the statusfile property CVE-2023-45727 (CVSS score: 7.5) - An improper restriction of XML External Entity (XXE) reference vulnerability that could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to conduct an XXE attack CVE-2024-11680 (CVSS score: 9.8) - An improper authentication vulnerability that allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to create accounts, upload web shells, and embed malicious JavaScript CVE-2024-11667 (CVSS score: 7.5) - A path traversal vulnerabilit...

The Russia-linked advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as Turla has been linked to a previously undocumented campaign that involved infiltrating the command-and-control (C2) servers of a Pakistan-based hacking group named Storm-0156 to conduct its own operations since 2022. The activity, first observed in December 2022, is the latest instance of the nation-state adversary "embedding themselves" in another group's malicious operations to further their own objectives and cloud attribution efforts, Lumen Technologies Black Lotus Labs said. "In December 2022, Secret Blizzard initially gained access to a Storm-0156 C2 server and by mid-2023 had expanded their control to a number of C2s associated with the Storm-0156 actor," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. By leveraging their access to these servers, Turla has been found to take advantage of the intrusions already orchestrated by Storm-0156 to deploy custom malware families refe...

Europol on Tuesday announced the takedown of an invite-only encrypted messaging service called MATRIX that's created by criminals for criminal purposes. The joint operation, conducted by French and Dutch authorities under the moniker Passionflower , comes in the aftermath of an investigation that was launched in 2021 after the messaging service was discovered on the phone of a criminal convicted for the murder of a Dutch journalist Peter R. de Vries . This allowed authorities to intercept messages being sent via the service for a period of three months, amassing a total of more than 2.3 million messages in 33 languages. The messages, Europol said, are associated with serious crimes such as international drug trafficking, arms trafficking, and money laundering.  It's worth noting at this stage that MATRIX is different from the open-source, decentralized messaging app of the same name ("matrix[.]org"). Also known by other names such as Mactrix, Totalsec, X-quantum...

Are you using the cloud or thinking about transitioning? Undoubtedly, multi-cloud and hybrid environments offer numerous benefits for organizations. However, the cloud's flexibility, scalability, and efficiency come with significant risk — an expanded attack surface. The decentralization that comes with utilizing multi-cloud environments can also lead to limited visibility into user activity and poor access management.  Privileged accounts with access to your critical systems and sensitive data are among the most vulnerable elements in cloud setups. When mismanaged, these accounts open the doors to unauthorized access, potential malicious activity, and data breaches. That's why strong privileged access management (PAM) is indispensable. PAM plays an essential role in addressing the security challenges of complex infrastructures by enforcing strict access controls and managing the life cycle of privileged accounts. By employing PAM in hybrid and cloud environments, you're not...

Many organizations struggle with password policies that look strong on paper but fail in practice because they're too rigid to follow, too vague to enforce, or disconnected from real security needs. Some are so tedious and complex that employees post passwords on sticky notes under keyboards, monitors, or desk drawers. Others set rules so loose they may as well not exist. And many simply copy generic standards that don't address their specific security challenges. Creating a password policy that works to protect your organization in the real world requires a careful balance: it must be strict enough to protect your systems, flexible enough for daily work, and precise enough to be enforced consistently. Let's explore five strategies for building a password policy that works in the real world. 1. Build compliant password practices Is your organization in a regulated industry like healthcare, government, agriculture, or financial services? If so, one of your top priorities...

Cybersecurity researchers are alerting to a software supply chain attack targeting the popular @solana/web3.js npm library that involved pushing two malicious versions capable of harvesting users' private keys with an aim to drain their cryptocurrency wallets. The attack has been detected in versions 1.95.6 and 1.95.7. Both these versions are no longer available for download from the npm registry. The package is widely used, attracting over 400,000 weekly downloads. "These compromised versions contain injected malicious code that is designed to steal private keys from unsuspecting developers and users, potentially enabling attackers to drain cryptocurrency wallets," Socket said in a report. @solana/web3.js is an npm package that can be used to interact with the Solana JavaScript software development kit (SDK) for building Node.js and web apps. According to Datadog security researcher Christophe Tafani-Dereeper , "the backdoor inserted in v1.95.7 adds an ...

A joint advisory issued by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the U.S. has warned of a broad cyber espionage campaign undertaken by People's Republic of China (PRC)-affiliated threat actors targeting telecommunications providers. "Identified exploitations or compromises associated with these threat actors' activity align with existing weaknesses associated with victim infrastructure; no novel activity has been observed," government agencies said . U.S. officials told Tuesday that the threat actors are still lurking inside U.S. telecommunications networks about six months after an investigation into the intrusions commenced. The attacks have been attributed to a nation-state group from China referred to as Salt Typhoon, which overlaps with activities tracked as Earth Estries, FamousSparrow, GhostEmperor, and UNC2286. The group is known to be active since at least 2020, with some of the artifacts developed as early as 2019. Last week, T-Mobile acknowledged that...

Veeam has released security updates to address a critical flaw impacting Service Provider Console (VSPC) that could pave the way for remote code execution on susceptible instances. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-42448, carries a CVSS score of 9.9 out of a maximum of 10.0. The company noted that the bug was identified during internal testing. "From the VSPC management agent machine, under the condition that the management agent is authorized on the server, it is possible to perform Remote Code Execution (RCE) on the VSPC server machine," Veeam said in an advisory. Another defect patched by Veeam relates to a vulnerability (CVE-2024-42449, CVSS score: 7.1) that could be abused to leak an NTLM hash of the VSPC server service account and delete files on the VSPC server machine. Both the identified vulnerabilities affect Veeam Service Provider Console 8.1.0.21377 and all earlier versions of 7 and 8 builds. They have been addressed in version 8.1.0.21999. Veeam furt...

A critical security vulnerability has been disclosed in SailPoint's IdentityIQ identity and access management (IAM) software that allows unauthorized access to content stored within the application directory. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-10905 , has a CVSS score of 10.0, indicating maximum severity. It affects IdentityIQ versions 8.2. 8.3, 8.4, and other previous versions. IdentityIQ "allows HTTP access to static content in the IdentityIQ application directory that should be protected," according to a description of the flaw on NIST's National Vulnerability Database (NVD). The vulnerability has been characterized as a case of improper handling of file names that identify virtual resources ( CWE-66 ), which could be abused to read otherwise inaccessible files. In an alert of its own, SailPoint said it has "released e-fixes for each impacted and supported version of IdentityIQ." The exact list of versions impacted by CVE-2024-10905 is mentioned below...

Cybersecurity researchers have called attention to a novel phishing campaign that leverages corrupted Microsoft Office documents and ZIP archives as a way to bypass email defenses. "The ongoing attack evades #antivirus software, prevents uploads to sandboxes, and bypasses Outlook's spam filters, allowing the malicious emails to reach your inbox," ANY.RUN said in a series of posts on X. The malicious activity entails sending emails containing ZIP archives or Office attachments that are intentionally corrupted in such a way that they cannot be scanned by security tools. These messages aim to trick users into opening the attachments with false promises of employee benefits and bonuses. In other words, the corrupted state of the files means that they are not flagged as suspicious or malicious by email filters and antivirus software. However, the attack still works because it takes advantage of the built-in recovery mechanisms of programs like Word, Outlook, and WinRAR ...

Cisco on Monday updated an advisory to warn customers of active exploitation of a decade-old security flaw impacting its Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA). The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2014-2120 (CVSS score: 4.3), concerns a case of insufficient input validation in ASA's WebVPN login page that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to conduct a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack against a targeted user of the appliance. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by convincing a user to access a malicious link," Cisco noted in an alert released in March 2014. As of December 2, 2024, the networking equipment major has revised its bulletin to note that it has become aware of "additional attempted exploitation" of the vulnerability in the wild. The development comes shortly after cybersecurity firm CloudSEK revealed that the threat actors behind AndroxGh0st are leveraging an extensive list of security vulnerabilities in various internet-faci...