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An advanced persistent threat (APT) actor codenamed ToddyCat has been linked to a string of attacks aimed at government and military entities in Europe and Asia since at least December 2020. The relatively new adversarial collective is said to have commenced its operations by targeting Microsoft Exchange servers in Taiwan and Vietnam using an unknown exploit to deploy the China Chopper web shell and activate a multi-stage infection chain. Other prominent countries singled out include Afghanistan, India, Indonesia, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Russia, Slovakia, Thailand, the U.K., and Uzbekistan, the swift escalation in targeting marked by improvements to its toolset over the course of successive campaigns. "The first wave of attacks exclusively targeted Microsoft Exchange Servers, which were compromised with Samurai, a sophisticated passive backdoor that usually works on ports 80 and 443," Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky  said  in a report published toda...

Nearly five dozen security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in devices from 10 operational technology (OT) vendors due to what researchers call are "insecure-by-design practices." Collectively dubbed  OT:ICEFALL  by Forescout, the 56 issues span as many as 26 device models from Bently Nevada, Emerson, Honeywell, JTEKT, Motorola, Omron, Phoenix Contact, Siemens, and Yokogawa. "Exploiting these vulnerabilities, attackers with network access to a target device could remotely execute code, change the logic, files or firmware of OT devices, bypass authentication, compromise credentials, cause denials of service or have a variety of operational impacts," the company said in a technical report. These vulnerabilities could have disastrous consequences considering the impacted products are widely employed in critical infrastructure industries such as oil and gas, chemical, nuclear, power generation and distribution, manufacturing, water treatment and distribution, min...

Ransomware has been a thorn in the side of cybersecurity teams for years. With the move to remote and hybrid work, this insidious threat has become even more of a challenge for  organizations everywhere. 2021 was a case study in ransomware due to the wide variety of attacks, significant financial and economic impact, and diverse ways that organizations responded.  These attacks  should be seen as a lesson that can inform future security strategies to mitigate ransomware risk. As an organization continues to evolve, so should its security strategy. The Remote Environment Is Primed for Ransomware With organizations continuing to support remote and hybrid work, they no longer have the visibility and control they once had inside their perimeter. Attackers are  exploiting this weakness  and profiting. Here are three reasons they’re able to do so: Visibility and control have changed.  Most organizations now have employees working from anywhere. These employe...

A 36-year-old former Amazon employee was convicted of wire fraud and computer intrusions in the U.S. for her role in the theft of personal data of no fewer than 100 million people in the  2019 Capital One breach . Paige Thompson , who operated under the online alias "erratic" and worked for the tech giant till 2016, was found guilty of wire fraud, five counts of unauthorized access to a protected computer, and damaging a protected computer. The seven-day trial saw the jury acquitted her of other charges, including access device fraud and aggravated identity theft. She is scheduled for sentencing on September 15, 2022. Cumulatively, the offenses are punishable by up to 25 years in prison. "Ms. Thompson used her hacking skills to steal the personal information of more than 100 million people, and hijacked computer servers to mine cryptocurrency,"  said  U.S. Attorney Nick Brown. "Far from being an ethical hacker trying to help companies with their computer s...

A new kind of Windows NTLM relay attack dubbed  DFSCoerce  has been uncovered that leverages the Distributed File System (DFS): Namespace Management Protocol (MS-DFSNM) to seize control of a domain. "Spooler service disabled, RPC filters installed to prevent PetitPotam and File Server VSS Agent Service not installed but you still want to relay [Domain Controller authentication] to [Active Directory Certificate Services]? Don't worry MS-DFSNM have (sic) your back," security researcher Filip Dragovic  said  in a tweet. MS-DFSNM  provides a remote procedure call (RPC) interface for administering distributed file system configurations. The NTLM (NT Lan Manager) relay attack is a well-known method that exploits the challenge-response mechanism. It allows malicious parties to sit between clients and servers and intercept and relay validated authentication requests in order to gain unauthorized access to network resources, effectively gaining an initial foothold i...