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

The threat actor known as  ToddyCat  has been observed using a wide range of tools to retain access to compromised environments and steal valuable data. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky characterized the adversary as relying on various programs to harvest data on an "industrial scale" from primarily governmental organizations, some of them defense related, located in the Asia-Pacific region. "To collect large volumes of data from many hosts, attackers need to automate the data harvesting process as much as possible, and provide several alternative means to continuously access and monitor systems they attack," security researchers Andrey Gunkin, Alexander Fedotov, and Natalya Shornikova  said . ToddyCat was  first documented  by the company in June 2022 in connection with a series of cyber attacks aimed at government and military entities in Europe and Asia since at least December 2020. These intrusions leveraged a passive backdoor dubbed S...

Over the past two years, a shocking  51% of organizations surveyed in a leading industry report have been compromised by a cyberattack.  Yes, over half.  And this, in a world where enterprises deploy  an average of 53 different security solutions  to safeguard their digital domain.  Alarming? Absolutely. A recent survey of CISOs and CIOs, commissioned by Pentera and conducted by Global Surveyz Research, offers a quantifiable glimpse into this evolving battlefield, revealing a stark contrast between the growing risks and the tightening budget constraints under which cybersecurity professionals operate. With this report, Pentera has once again taken a magnifying glass to the state of pentesting to release its annual report about today's pentesting practices. Engaging with 450 security executives from North America, LATAM, APAC, and EMEA—all in VP or C-level positions at organizations with over 1,000 employees—the report paints a current picture of modern...

The MITRE Corporation revealed that it was the target of a nation-state cyber attack that exploited two zero-day flaws in Ivanti Connect Secure appliances starting in January 2024. The intrusion led to the compromise of its Networked Experimentation, Research, and Virtualization Environment (NERVE), an unclassified research and prototyping network. The unknown adversary "performed reconnaissance of our networks, exploited one of our Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) through two Ivanti Connect Secure zero-day vulnerabilities, and skirted past our multi-factor authentication using session hijacking," Lex Crumpton, a defensive cyber operations researcher at the non-profit,  said  last week. The attack entailed the  exploitation  of CVE-2023-46805 (CVSS score: 8.2) and CVE-2024-21887 (CVSS score: 9.1), which could be weaponized by threat actors to bypass authentication and run arbitrary commands on the infected system. Upon gaining initial access, the threat actors m...

Between crossovers - Do threat actors play dirty or desperate? In our dataset of over 11,000 victim organizations that have experienced a Cyber Extortion / Ransomware attack, we noticed that some victims re-occur. Consequently, the question arises why we observe a re-victimization and whether or not this is an actual second attack, an affiliate crossover (meaning an affiliate has gone to another Cyber Extortion operation with the same victim) or stolen data that has been travelling and re-(mis-)used. Either way, for the victims neither is good news.  But first thing’s first, let’s explore the current threat landscape, dive into one of our most recent research focuses on the dynamics of this ecosystem; and then explore our dataset on Law Enforcement activities in this space. Might the re-occurrence that we observe be foul play by threat actors and thus show how desperately they are trying to regain the trust of their co-offenders after disruption efforts by Law Enforcement? Or ar...

New research has found that the DOS-to-NT path conversion process could be exploited by threat actors to achieve rootkit-like capabilities to conceal and impersonate files, directories, and processes. "When a user executes a function that has a path argument in Windows, the DOS path at which the file or folder exists is converted to an NT path," SafeBreach security researcher Or Yair  said  in an analysis, which was  presented  at the Black Hat Asia conference last week. "During this conversion process, a known issue exists in which the function removes trailing dots from any path element and any trailing spaces from the last path element. This action is completed by most user-space APIs in Windows." These so-called MagicDot paths allow for rootkit-like functionality that's accessible to any unprivileged user, who could then weaponize them to carry out a series of malicious actions without having admin permissions and remain undetected. They include the ab...