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According to recent research on  employee offboarding , 70% of IT professionals say they’ve experienced the negative effects of incomplete IT offboarding, whether in the form of a security incident tied to an account that wasn't deprovisioned, a surprise bill for resources that aren’t in use anymore, or a missed handoff of a critical resource or account. This is despite an average of five hours spent per departing employee on activities like finding and deprovisioning SaaS accounts. As the SaaS footprint within most organizations continues to expand, it is becoming exponentially more difficult (and time-consuming) to ensure all access is deprovisioned or transferred when an employee leaves the organization.  How Nudge Security can help Nudge Security is a  SaaS management platform  for modern IT governance and security. It discovers every cloud and SaaS account ever created by anyone in your organization, including generative AI apps, giving you a single source of...

Malicious actors are using a cloud attack tool named Xeon Sender to conduct SMS phishing and spam campaigns on a large scale by abusing legitimate services. "Attackers can use Xeon to send messages through multiple software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers using valid credentials for the service providers," SentinelOne security researcher Alex Delamotte said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Examples of the services used to facilitate the en masse distribution of SMS messages include Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Nexmo, Plivo, Proovl, Send99, Telesign, Telnyx, TextBelt, Twilio. It's important to note here that the activity does not exploit any inherent weaknesses in these providers. Rather, the tool uses legitimate APIs to conduct bulk SMS spam attacks. It joins tools like SNS Sender that have increasingly become a way to send bulk smishing messages and ultimately capture sensitive information from targets. Distributed via Telegram and hacking fo...

A newly patched security flaw in Microsoft Windows was exploited as a zero-day by Lazarus Group , a prolific state-sponsored actor affiliated with North Korea. The security vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-38193 (CVSS score: 7.8), has been described as a privilege escalation bug in the Windows Ancillary Function Driver (AFD.sys) for WinSock. "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges," Microsoft said in an advisory for the flaw last week. It was addressed by the tech giant as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday update. Credited with discovering and reporting the flaw are Gen Digital researchers Luigino Camastra and Milánek. Gen Digital owns a number of security and utility software brands like Norton, Avast, Avira, AVG, ReputationDefender, and CCleaner. "This flaw allowed them to gain unauthorized access to sensitive system areas," the company disclosed last week, adding it discovered the exploitation in early J...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered new infrastructure linked to a financially motivated threat actor known as FIN7 . The two clusters of potential FIN7 activity "indicate communications inbound to FIN7 infrastructure from IP addresses assigned to Post Ltd (Russia) and SmartApe (Estonia), respectively," Team Cymru said in a report published this week as part of a joint investigation with Silent Push and Stark Industries Solutions. The findings build on a recent report from Silent Push, which found several Stark Industries IP addresses that are solely dedicated to hosting FIN7 infrastructure. The latest analysis indicates that the hosts linked to the e-crime group were likely procured from one of Stark's resellers. "Reseller programs are common in the hosting industry; many of the largest VPS (virtual private server) providers offer such services," the cybersecurity company said. "Customers procuring infrastructure via resellers generally must ...

OpenAI on Friday said it banned a set of accounts linked to what it said was an Iranian covert influence operation that leveraged ChatGPT to generate content that, among other things, focused on the upcoming U.S. presidential election. "This week we identified and took down a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that were generating content for a covert Iranian influence operation identified as Storm-2035," OpenAI said . "The operation used ChatGPT to generate content focused on a number of topics — including commentary on candidates on both sides in the U.S. presidential election – which it then shared via social media accounts and websites." The artificial intelligence (AI) company said the content did not achieve any meaningful engagement, with a majority of the social media posts receiving negligible to no likes, shares, and comments. It further noted it had found little evidence that the long-form articles created using ChatGPT were shared on social media platforms....