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Russian-language dark web marketplace Hydra has emerged as a hotspot for illicit activities, pulling in a whopping $1.37 billion worth of cryptocurrencies in 2020, up from $9.4 million in 2016, marking a staggering 624% year-over-year jump over a three-year period from 2018 to 2020. "Further buoying Hydra's growth is its ability—or its good fortune—to remain running and unscathed against competitor attacks or  law enforcement scrutiny ; its only downtime of note occurred during a short time period at the beginning of the COVID-19 global pandemic in late March 2020," threat intelligence firm Flashpoint  said  in a report jointly published with blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis. Active since 2015, Hydra opened as a competitor to the now-defunct Russian Anonymous Marketplace (aka RAMP), primarily facilitating narcotics trade, before becoming a bazaar for all things criminal, including offering BTC cash-out services and peddling stolen credit cards, SIM cards, document...

VMware has rolled out patches to address a critical security vulnerability in vCenter Server that could be leveraged by an adversary to execute arbitrary code on the server. Tracked as CVE-2021-21985 (CVSS score 9.8), the issue stems from a lack of input validation in the Virtual SAN ( vSAN ) Health Check plug-in, which is enabled by default in the vCenter Server. "A malicious actor with network access to port 443 may exploit this issue to execute commands with unrestricted privileges on the underlying operating system that hosts vCenter Server," VMware  said  in its advisory. VMware vCenter Server is a server management utility that's used to control virtual machines, ESXi hosts, and other dependent components from a single centralized location. The flaw affects vCenter Server versions 6.5, 6.7, and 7.0 and Cloud Foundation versions 3.x and 4.x. VMware credited Ricter Z of 360 Noah Lab for reporting the vulnerability. The patch release also rectifies an authenticati...

There is a person in every organization that is the direct owner of breach protection. His or her task is to oversee and govern the process of design, build, maintain, and continuously enhance the security level of the organization. Title-wise, this person is most often either the CIO, CISO, or Directory of IT. For convenience, we'll refer to this individual as the CISO. This person is the subject-matter expert in understanding the standard set of active cyber risks, benchmarking to what degree the organization's exposure influences potential impact. They then take appropriate steps to ensure the major risks are addressed. On top of being engaged 24/7 in the organization's actual breach protection activity, the CISO has another critical task: to articulate the risks, potential impacts and appropriate steps to take to the company's management – or in other words, they must effectively translate security issues for non-security-savvy executives in a clear and busi...

Ivanti, the company behind Pulse Secure VPN appliances, has published a security advisory for a high severity vulnerability that may allow an authenticated remote attacker to execute arbitrary code with elevated privileges. "Buffer Overflow in Windows File Resource Profiles in 9.X allows a remote authenticated user with privileges to browse SMB shares to execute arbitrary code as the root user," the company  said  in an alert published on May 14. "As of version 9.1R3, this permission is not enabled by default." The flaw, identified as CVE-2021-22908, has a CVSS score of 8.5 out of a maximum of 10 and impacts Pulse Connect Secure versions 9.0Rx and 9.1Rx. In a report detailing the vulnerability, the CERT Coordination Center said the issue stems from the gateway's ability to connect to Windows file shares through a number of CGI endpoints that could be leveraged to carry out the attack. "When specifying a long server name for some SMB operations, the ...

Adversaries could exploit newly discovered security weaknesses in Bluetooth Core and Mesh Profile Specifications to masquerade as legitimate devices and carry out man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. "Devices supporting the Bluetooth  Core  and  Mesh Specifications  are vulnerable to impersonation attacks and AuthValue disclosure that could allow an attacker to impersonate a legitimate device during pairing," the Carnegie Mellon CERT Coordination Center  said  in an advisory published Monday. The two Bluetooth specifications define the standard that allows for many-to-many communication over the short-range wireless technology to facilitate data transfer between devices in an ad-hoc network. The Bluetooth Impersonation AttackS, aka BIAS , enable a malicious actor to establish a secure connection with a victim, without having to know and authenticate the long-term key shared between the victims, thus effectively bypassing Bluetooth's authentication mechani...