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The maintainers of Python Package Index (PyPI) last week issued fixes for three vulnerabilities, one among which could be abused to achieve arbitrary code execution and take full control of the official third-party software repository. The security weaknesses were  discovered  and reported by Japanese security researcher RyotaK, who in the past has disclosed critical vulnerabilities in the  Homebrew Cask repository  and Cloudflare's  CDNJS library . He was awarded a total of $3,000 as part of the bug bounty program. The list of three vulnerabilities is as follows - Vulnerability in Legacy Document Deletion on PyPI  - An exploitable vulnerability in the mechanisms for deleting legacy documentation hosting deployment tooling on PyPI, which would allow an attacker to remove documentation for projects not under their control. Vulnerability in Role Deletion on PyPI  - An exploitable vulnerability in the mechanisms for deleting roles on PyPI was disco...

Healthcare and education sectors are the frequent targets of a new surge in credential harvesting activity from what's a "highly modular" .NET-based information stealer and keylogger, charting the course for the threat actor's continued evolution while simultaneously remaining under the radar. Dubbed " Solarmarker ," the malware campaign is believed to be active since September 2020, with telemetry data pointing to malicious actions as early as April 2020, according to Cisco Talos. "At its core, the Solarmarker campaign appears to be conducted by a fairly sophisticated actor largely focused on credential and residual information theft," Talos researchers Andrew Windsor and Chris Neal  said  in a technical write-up published last week. Infections consist of multiple moving parts, chief among them being a .NET assembly module that serves as a system profiler and staging ground on the victim host for command-and-control (C2) communications and fur...

Cybersecurity researchers on Friday unmasked new command-and-control (C2) infrastructure belonging to the Russian threat actor tracked as APT29, aka Cozy Bear, that has been spotted actively serving WellMess malware as part of an ongoing attack campaign. More than 30 C2 servers operated by the Russian foreign intelligence have been uncovered, Microsoft-owned cybersecurity subsidiary RiskIQ  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. APT29, the moniker assigned to government operatives working for Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), is believed to have been the  mastermind behind the massive SolarWinds supply chain attack  that came to light late last year, with the U.K. and U.S. governments formally pinning the intrusions on Russia earlier this April. The activity is being tracked by the cybersecurity community under various codenames, including UNC2452 (FireEye), Nobelium (Microsoft), SolarStorm (Unit 42), StellarParticle (Crowdstrike), Dark Halo (...

As many as eight Python packages that were downloaded more than 30,000 times have been removed from the PyPI portal for containing malicious code, once again highlighting how software package repositories are evolving into a popular target for supply chain attacks. "Lack of moderation and automated security controls in public software repositories allow even inexperienced attackers to use them as a platform to spread malware, whether through typosquatting, dependency confusion, or simple social engineering attacks," JFrog researchers Andrey Polkovnichenko, Omer Kaspi, and Shachar Menashe  said  Thursday. PyPI, short for Python Package Index, is the official third-party software repository for Python, with package manager utilities like  pip  relying on it as the default source for packages and their dependencies. The Python packages in question, which were found to be obfuscated using Base64 encoding, are listed below - pytagora (uploaded by leonora123) pytag...

A cyber attack that derailed websites of Iran's transport ministry and its national railway system earlier this month, causing widespread disruptions in train services, was the result of a never-before-seen reusable wiper malware called "Meteor." The campaign — dubbed " MeteorExpress " — has not been linked to any previously identified threat group or to additional attacks, making it the first incident involving the deployment of this malware, according to researchers from Iranian antivirus firm  Amn Pardaz  and SentinelOne. Meteor is believed to have been in the works over the past three years. "Despite a lack of specific indicators of compromise, we were able to recover most of the attack components," SentinelOne's Principal Threat Researcher, Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, noted. "Behind this outlandish tale of stopped trains and glib trolls, we found the fingerprints of an unfamiliar attacker," adding the offensive is "designed t...