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A team of cybersecurity researchers today outed a little-known Indian IT firm that has secretly been operating as a global hackers-for-hire service or hacking-as-a-service platform. Based in Delhi, BellTroX InfoTech allegedly targeted thousands of high-profile individuals and hundreds of organizations across six continents in the last seven years. Hack-for-hire services do not operate as a state-sponsored group but likely as a hack-for-hire company that conducts commercial cyberespionage against given targets on behalf of private investigators and their clients. According to the latest report published by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, BellTroX—dubbed ' Dark Basin ' as a hacking group—targeted advocacy groups, senior politicians, government officials, CEOs, journalists, and human rights defenders. "Over the course of our multi-year investigation, we found that Dark Basin likely conducted commercial espionage on behalf of their clients against oppo...

Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered a new critical vulnerability affecting the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol that could allow attackers to leak kernel memory remotely, and when combined with a previously disclosed "wormable" bug, the flaw can be exploited to achieve remote code execution attacks. Dubbed " SMBleed " ( CVE-2020-1206 ) by cybersecurity firm ZecOps, the flaw resides in SMB's decompression function — the same function as with SMBGhost or EternalDarkness bug ( CVE-2020-0796 ), which came to light three months ago, potentially opening vulnerable Windows systems to malware attacks that can propagate across networks. The newly discovered vulnerability impacts Windows 10 versions 1903 and 1909, for which Microsoft today released security patches as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday updates for June . The development comes as the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an advisory last week warning Windows 10...

Microsoft today released its June 2020 batch of software security updates that patches a total of 129 newly discovered vulnerabilities affecting various versions of Windows operating systems and related products. This is the third Patch Tuesday update since the beginning of the global Covid-19 outbreak, putting some extra pressure on security teams struggling to keep up with patch management while proceeding with caution that should not break anything during this lockdown season. The 129 bugs in the June 2020 bucket for sysadmins and billions of users include 11 critical vulnerabilities—all leading to remote code execution attacks—and 118 classified as important in severity, mostly leading to privilege escalation and spoofing attacks. According to the advisories Microsoft released today, hackers, fortunately, don't appear to be exploiting any of the zero-day vulnerabilities in the wild, and details for none of the flaws addressed this month was disclosed publicly before thi...

Global spending on cybersecurity products and services is predicted to exceed $1 trillion during the period of five years, between 2017 to 2021, with different analysts predicting the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) at anywhere between 8 to 15%. It is not surprising to see this growth in spending, which is primarily driven by the evolving sophistication and volume of attacks as well as the surmounting costs of a successful data breach. And yet, data breaches continue. The sad news is that about 80% of data breaches can be prevented with basic actions; such as vulnerability assessments, patching, and proper security  configurations . The specific reasons vary; but include staffing and resource issues, lack of expertise to optimize complex, multi-vendor security systems, and a host of other reasons. Whatever the specific cause, the common theme is that security lagged either internal IT changes or changes in the external threat landscape. The phenomenon is well known...

Hacking groups are continuing to leverage misconfigured AWS S3 data storage buckets to insert malicious code into websites in an attempt to swipe credit card information and carry out malvertising campaigns. In a new report shared with The Hacker News, cybersecurity firm RiskIQ said it identified three compromised websites belonging to Endeavor Business Media last month that are still hosting JavaScript skimming code — a classic tactic embraced by Magecart , a consortium of different hacker groups who target online shopping cart systems. The unpatched affected websites host emergency services-related content and chat forums catering to firefighters, police officers, and security professionals, per RiskIQ. www[.]officer[.]com www[.]firehouse[.]com www[.]securityinfowatch[.]com The cyber firm said it hasn't heard back from Endeavor Business Media despite reaching out to the company to address the issues. As a consequence, it's working with Swiss non-profit cyber...