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A North Korean cyberespionage group named Konni has been linked to a series of targeted attacks aimed at the Russian Federation's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) with New Year lures to compromise Windows systems with malware. "This activity cluster demonstrates the patient and persistent nature of advanced actors in waging multi-phased campaigns against perceived high-value networks," researchers from Lumen Technologies' Black Lotus Labs  said  in an analysis shared with The Hacker News. The Konni group's tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) are known to overlap with threat actors belonging to the broader  Kimsuky  umbrella, which is also tracked by the cybersecurity community under the monikers Velvet Chollima, ITG16, Black Banshee, and Thallium. The most recent attacks involved the actor gaining access to the target networks through stolen credentials, exploiting the foothold to load malware for intelligence gathering purposes, with early signs of t...

When I want to know the most recently published best practices in cyber security, I visit The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). From the latest password requirements (NIST 800-63) to IoT security for manufacturers (NISTIR 8259), NIST is always the starting point. NIST plays a key role as a US standard-setter, due to the organization's professionalism and the external experts who help to create NIST documents. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) was initially released in 2014 and last updated in 2018. The framework enables organizations to improve the security and resilience of critical infrastructure with a well-planned and easy-to-use framework. The continuing growth in SaaS, and the major changes to the work environment due to COVID-19 bring new security challenges. Although the CSF was written and updated while SaaS was on the rise, it is still geared towards the classic legacy critical infrastructure security challenges. However, organizations can bet...

Researchers have disclosed a novel technique by which malware on iOS can achieve persistence on an infected device by faking its shutdown process, making it impossible to physically determine if an iPhone is off or otherwise. The discovery — dubbed " NoReboot " — comes courtesy of mobile security firm ZecOps, which found that it's possible to block and then simulate an iOS rebooting operation, deceiving the user into believing that the phone has been powered off when, in reality, it's still running. The San Francisco-headquartered company  called  it the "ultimate persistence bug […] that cannot be patched because it's not exploiting any persistence bugs at all — only playing tricks with the human mind." NoReboot works by interfering with the routines used in iOS to shutdown and restart the device, effectively preventing them from ever happening in the first place and allowing a trojan to achieve persistence without persistence as the device is never...

VMWare has shipped updates to Workstation, Fusion, and ESXi products to address an "important" security vulnerability that could be weaponized by a threat actor to take control of affected systems. The issue relates to a heap-overflow vulnerability — tracked as  CVE-2021-22045  (CVSS score: 7.7) — that, if successfully exploited, results in the execution of arbitrary code. The company credited Jaanus Kääp, a security researcher with Clarified Security, for reporting the flaw. "A malicious actor with access to a virtual machine with CD-ROM device emulation may be able to exploit this vulnerability in conjunction with other issues to execute code on the hypervisor from a virtual machine," VMware  said  in an advisory published on January 4. "Successful exploitation requires [a] CD image to be attached to the virtual machine." The error affects ESXi versions 6.5, 6.7, and 7.0; Workstation versions 16.x; and Fusion versions 12.x, with the company yet to ...

Google has rolled out the first round of updates to its Chrome web browser for 2022 to fix 37 security issues, one of which is rated Critical in severity and could be exploited to pass arbitrary code and gain control over a victim's system. Tracked as  CVE-2022-0096 , the flaw relates to a  use-after-free bug  in the Storage component, which could have devastating effects ranging from corruption of valid data to the execution of malicious code on a compromised machine. Security researcher Yangkang ( @dnpushme ) of Qihoo 360 ATA, who has previously disclosed  zero-day vulnerabilities  in Apple's WebKit, has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on November 30, 2021. It's also worth pointing out that 24 of the 37 uncovered flaws came from external researchers, including its Google Project Zero initiative, while the others were flagged as part of its ongoing internal security work. Of the 24 bugs, 10 are rated High, another 10 are rated Medium...