The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

A never-before-seen China-based targeted intrusion adversary dubbed Aquatic Panda has been observed leveraging  critical flaws  in the Apache Log4j logging library as an access vector to perform various post-exploitation operations, including reconnaissance and credential harvesting on targeted systems. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said the infiltration, which was ultimately foiled, was aimed at an unnamed "large academic institution." The state-sponsored group is believed to have been operating since mid-2020 in pursuit of intelligence collection and industrial espionage, with its attacks primarily directed against companies in the telecommunications, technology, and government sectors. The attempted intrusion exploited the newly discovered  Log4Shell  flaw (CVE-2021-44228, CVSS score: 10.0) to gain access to a vulnerable instance of the  VMware Horizon  desktop and app virtualization product, followed by running a series of malicious commands orches...

An ongoing crypto mining campaign has upgraded its arsenal while evolving its defense evasion tactics that enable the threat actors to conceal the intrusions and fly under the radar, new research published today has revealed. Since first detected in 2019, a total of 84 attacks against its honeypot servers have been recorded to date, four of which transpired in 2021, according to researchers from DevSecOps and cloud security firm Aqua Security, who have been tracking the malware operation for the past three years. That said, 125 attacks have been spotted in the wild in the third quarter of 2021 alone, signaling that the attacks have not slowed down. Initial attacks involved executing a malicious command upon running a vanilla image named "alpine:latest" that resulted in the download of a shell script named "autom.sh." "Adversaries commonly use vanilla images along with malicious commands to perform their attacks, because most organizations trust the official...

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) on Tuesday rolled out fresh patches to contain an arbitrary code execution flaw in Log4j that could be abused by threat actors to run malicious code on affected systems, making it the fifth security shortcoming to be discovered in the tool in the span of a month. Tracked as  CVE-2021-44832 , the vulnerability is rated 6.6 in severity on a scale of 10 and impacts all versions of the logging library from 2.0-alpha7 to 2.17.0 with the exception of 2.3.2 and 2.12.4. While Log4j versions 1.x are not affected, users are recommended to upgrade to Log4j 2.3.2 (for Java 6), 2.12.4 (for Java 7), or 2.17.1 (for Java 8 and later). "Apache Log4j2 versions 2.0-beta7 through 2.17.0 (excluding security fix releases 2.3.2 and 2.12.4) are vulnerable to a remote code execution (RCE) attack where an attacker with permission to modify the logging configuration file can construct a malicious configuration using a JDBC Appender with a data source referencing a JND...

Cybersecurity researchers have offered a detailed glimpse into a system called DoubleFeature that's dedicated to logging the different stages of post-exploitation stemming from the deployment of DanderSpritz, a full-featured malware framework used by the  Equation Group . DanderSpritz came to light on April 14, 2017, when a hacking group known as the Shadow Brokers leaked the exploit tool, among others, under a dispatch titled " Lost in Translation ." Also included in the leaks was  EternalBlue , a cyberattack exploit developed by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) that enabled threat actors to carry out the  NotPetya ransomware attack  on unpatched Windows computers. The tool is a modular, stealthy, and fully functional framework that relies on dozens of plugins for post-exploitation activities on Windows and Linux hosts. DoubleFeature is one among them, which functions as a "diagnostic tool for victim machines carrying DanderSpritz," researchers from ...

A number of security flaws have been uncovered in a networking component in Garrett Metal Detectors that could allow remote attackers to bypass authentication requirements, tamper with metal detector configurations, and even execute arbitrary code on the devices. "An attacker could manipulate this module to remotely monitor statistics on the metal detector, such as whether the alarm has been triggered or how many visitors have walked through," Cisco Talos  noted  in a disclosure publicized last week. "They could also make configuration changes, such as altering the sensitivity level of a device, which potentially poses a security risk to users who rely on these metal detectors." Talos security researcher Matt Wiseman has been credited with discovering and reporting these vulnerabilities on August 17, 2021. Patches have been released by the vendor on December 13, 2021. The flaws reside in Garrett  iC Module , which enables users to communicate to walk-through me...