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With 2022 coming to a close, there is no better time to buckle down and prepare to face the security challenges in the year to come. This past year has seen its  fair share of breaches , attacks, and leaks, forcing organizations to scramble to protect their SaaS stacks. March alone saw three different breaches from Microsoft, Hubspot, and Okta.  With SaaS sprawl ever growing and becoming more complex, organizations can look to four areas within their SaaS environment to harden and secure.  Learn how you can automate your SaaS stack security Misconfigurations Abound Enterprises can have  over 40 million  knobs, check boxes, and toggles in their employees' SaaS apps. The security team is responsible to secure each of these settings, user roles and permissions to ensure they comply with industry and company policy.  Not only because of their obvious risk or misalignment with security policies, misconfigurations are overwhelmingly challenging to secure ma...

Google has officially begun rolling out support for  passkeys , the next-generation passwordless login standard, to its stable version of Chrome web browser. "Passkeys are a significantly safer replacement for passwords and other phishable authentication factors," the tech giant's Ali Sarraf  said . "They cannot be reused, don't leak in server breaches, and protect users from phishing attacks." The improved security feature, which is available in version 108, comes nearly two months after Google  began testing the option  across Android, macOS, and Windows 11. Passkeys  obviate the need for passwords by requiring users to authenticate themselves during sign in by unlocking their nearby Android or iOS device using biometrics. This, however, calls for websites to build passkey support on their sites using the  WebAuthn API . Essentially, the technology works by creating a unique cryptographic key pair to associate with an account for the app or website ...

A cryptocurrency mining attack targeting the Linux operating system also involved the use of an open source remote access trojan (RAT) dubbed  CHAOS . The threat, which was spotted by Trend Micro in November 2022, remains virtually unchanged in all other aspects, including when it comes to terminating competing malware, security software, and deploying the Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency miner. "The malware achieves its persistence by altering  /etc/crontab file , a UNIX task scheduler that, in this case, downloads itself every 10 minutes from Pastebin," researchers David Fiser and Alfredo Oliveira  said . This step is succeeded by downloading next-stage payloads that consist of the XMRig miner and the Go-based CHAOS RAT. The cybersecurity firm said that the main downloader script and further payloads are hosted in multiple locations to make sure that the campaign remains active and new infections continue to happen. The CHAOS RAT, once downloaded and launched, transmi...

As the holiday season approaches, online shopping and gift-giving are at the top of many people's to-do lists. But before you hit the "buy" button, it's important to remember that this time of year is also the peak season for cybercriminals. In fact, cybercriminals often ramp up their efforts during the holidays, taking advantage of the influx of online shoppers and the general hustle and bustle of the season Don't let cybercriminals steal your holiday cheer – follow our simple steps to protect yourself and your personal information while shopping online, completing work tasks, or simply browsing the web. Check everything twice It's common for scammers to lure people in with fake deals and offers during the holiday season. They may promise deep discounts on popular items or claim to have limited-time offers that are too good to pass up. They may also create fake websites or emails that look like they are from legitimate companies to trick people into giv...

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has cautioned of ongoing Royal ransomware attacks targeting healthcare entities in the country. "While most of the known ransomware operators have performed Ransomware-as-a-Service, Royal appears to be a private group without any affiliates while maintaining financial motivation as their goal," the agency's Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center (HC3)  said  [PDF]. "The group does claim to steal data for double-extortion attacks, where they will also exfiltrate sensitive data." Royal ransomware, per  Fortinet FortiGuard Labs , is said to be active since at least the start of 2022. The malware is a 64-bit Windows executable written in C++ and is launched via the command line, indicating that it involves a human operator to trigger the infection after obtaining access to a targeted environment. Besides deleting volume shadow copies on the system, Royal utilizes the OpenSSL cryptographic library ...

Travel agencies have emerged as the target of a hack-for-hire group dubbed  Evilnum  as part of a broader campaign aimed at legal and financial investment institutions in the Middle East and Europe. The attacks, which took place during 2020 and 2021 and likely went as far back as 2015, involved a revamped variant of a malware called Janicab that leverages a number of public services like WordPress and YouTube as  dead drop resolvers , Kaspersky  said  in a technical report published this week. Janicab infections comprise a diverse set of victims located in Egypt, Georgia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the U.K. The development marks the first time legal organizations in Saudi Arabia have been targeted by this group. Also tracked as DeathStalker, the threat actor is known to deploy  backdoors  like Janicab, Evilnum, Powersing, and PowerPepper to exfiltrate confidential corporate information. "Their interest in gathering sensitive business information ...