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A prolific North Korean state-sponsored hacking group has been tied to a new ongoing espionage campaign aimed at exfiltrating sensitive information from organizations in the defense industry. Attributing the attacks with high confidence to the  Lazarus Group , the new findings from Kaspersky signal an expansion of the APT actor's tactics by going beyond the usual gamut of financially-motivated crimes to fund the cash-strapped regime.  This broadening of its strategic interests happened in early 2020 by leveraging a tool called ThreatNeedle , researchers Vyacheslav Kopeytsev and Seongsu Park said in a Thursday write-up. At a high level, the campaign takes advantage of a multi-step approach that begins with a carefully crafted spear-phishing attack leading eventually to the attackers gaining remote control over the devices. ThreatNeedle is delivered to targets via COVID-themed emails with malicious Microsoft Word attachments as initial infection vectors that, when opened, ...

Researchers have uncovered gaps in Amazon's skill vetting process for the Alexa voice assistant ecosystem that could allow a malicious actor to publish a deceptive skill under any arbitrary developer name and even make backend code changes after approval to trick users into giving up sensitive information. The findings were presented on Wednesday at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) conference by a group of academics from Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the North Carolina State University, who analyzed 90,194 skills available in seven countries, including the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, and France. Amazon Alexa allows third-party developers to create additional functionality for devices such as Echo smart speakers by configuring "skills" that run on top of the voice assistant, thereby making it easy for users to initiate a conversation with the skill and complete a specific task.  Chief among the findings is the concern that ...

Cisco has addressed a maximum severity vulnerability in its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Multi-Site Orchestrator (MSO) that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication on vulnerable devices. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted request to the affected API," the company  said  in an advisory published yesterday. "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to receive a token with administrator-level privileges that could be used to authenticate to the API on affected MSO and managed Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) devices." The bug, tracked as CVE-2021-1388, ranks 10 (out of 10) on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system and stems from an improper token validation in an API endpoint of Cisco ACI MSO installed the Application Services Engine. It affects ACI MSO versions running a 3.0 release of the software. The ACI Multi-Site Orchestrator lets customers monitor and m...

Cybersecurity researchers today unwrapped a new campaign aimed at spying on vulnerable Tibetan communities globally by deploying a malicious Firefox extension on target systems. "Threat actors aligned with the Chinese Communist Party's state interests delivered a customized malicious Mozilla Firefox browser extension that facilitated access and control of users' Gmail accounts," Proofpoint said in an analysis. The Sunnyvale-based enterprise security company pinned the phishing operation on a Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) it tracks as  TA413 , which has been previously attributed to attacks against the Tibetan diaspora by leveraging  COVID-themed lures  to deliver the Sepulcher malware with the strategic goal of espionage and civil dissident surveillance. The researchers said the attacks were detected in January and February 2021, a pattern that has continued since March 2020. The infection chain begins with a phishing email impersonating the "Tib...

It's no secret that sysadmins have plenty on their plates. Managing, troubleshooting, and updating software or hardware is a tedious task. Additionally, admins must grapple with complex webs of permissions and security. This can quickly become overwhelming without the right tools. If you're a sysadmin seeking to simplify your workflows, you're in luck. We've gathered some excellent software picks to help tackle different duties more efficiently.  Thankfully, these free tools are also respectful of tight budgets—without sacrificing core functionality. Best for Permissions Management: SolarWinds Permissions Analyzer for Active Directory Whether you are part of an organization with many members or numerous resources, keeping track of permissions can be challenging. Changes in responsibilities, titles, or even employment statuses can influence one's access to proprietary data. Each user has unique privileges. We not only need to visualize these but manage them on ...