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The prolific threat actor known as  Scattered Spider  has been observed impersonating newly hired employees in targeted firms as a ploy to blend into normal on-hire processes and takeover accounts and breach organizations across the world. Microsoft, which disclosed the activities of the financially motivated hacking crew, described the adversary as "one of the most dangerous financial criminal groups," calling out its operational fluidity and its ability to incorporate SMS phishing, SIM swapping, and help desk fraud into its attack model. "Octo Tempest is a financially motivated collective of native English-speaking threat actors known for launching wide-ranging campaigns that prominently feature adversary-in-the-middle ( AiTM ) techniques, social engineering, and SIM swapping capabilities," the company  said . It's worth noting that the activity represented by  Octo Tempest  is tracked by other cybersecurity companies under various monikers, including 0kta...

Cloudflare on Thursday said it mitigated thousands of hyper-volumetric HTTP distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that exploited a recently disclosed flaw called  HTTP/2 Rapid Reset , 89 of which exceeded 100 million requests per second (RPS). "The campaign contributed to an overall increase of 65% in HTTP DDoS attack traffic in Q3 compared to the previous quarter ," the web infrastructure and security company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Similarly,  L3/4 DDoS attacks  also increased by 14%." The total number of HTTP DDoS attack requests in the quarter surged to 8.9 trillion, up from 5.4 trillion in Q2 2023 and 4.7 trillion in Q1 2023. The number of attack requests in Q4 2022 stood at 6.5 trillion. HTTP/2 Rapid Reset (CVE-2023-44487) came to light earlier this month following an industry-wide coordinated disclosure that delved into DDoS attacks orchestrated by an unknown actor by leveraging the flaw to target various providers such as ...

While cyberattacks on websites receive much attention, there are often unaddressed risks that can lead to businesses facing lawsuits and privacy violations even in the absence of hacking incidents. A new case study highlights one of these more common cases.  Download the full case study here . It's a scenario that could have affected any type of company, from healthcare to finance, e-commerce to insurance, or any other industry. Recently, Reflectiz, an advanced website security solution provider, released a  case study  focusing on a forgotten and misconfigured pixel that had been associated with a leading global healthcare provider. This overlooked piece of code surreptitiously gathered private data without user consent, potentially exposing the company to substantial fines and damage to its reputation. Nowadays, it has become common practice for companies to embed such pixels into their websites. For instance, the TikTok Pixel is a typical example, added to web...

The Iranian threat actor known as  Tortoiseshell  has been attributed to a new wave of watering hole attacks that are designed to deploy a malware dubbed IMAPLoader. "IMAPLoader is a .NET malware that has the ability to fingerprint victim systems using native Windows utilities and acts as a downloader for further payloads," the PwC Threat Intelligence team  said  in a Wednesday analysis. "It uses email as a [command-and-control] channel and is able to execute payloads extracted from email attachments and is executed via new service deployments." Active since at least 2018, Tortoiseshell has a history of using strategic website compromises as a ploy to facilitate the distribution of malware. Earlier this May, ClearSky  linked the group  to the breach of eight websites associated with shipping, logistics, and financial services companies in Israel. The threat actor is  aligned  with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps ( IRGC ) and is also tr...

Users of  Mirth Connect , an open-source data integration platform from NextGen HealthCare, are being urged to update to the latest version following the discovery of an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability. Tracked as  CVE-2023-43208 , the vulnerability has been addressed in  version 4.4.1  released on October 6, 2023. "This is an easily exploitable, unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability," Horizon3.ai's Naveen Sunkavally  said  in a Wednesday report. "Attackers would most likely exploit this vulnerability for initial access or to compromise sensitive healthcare data." Called the "Swiss Army knife of healthcare integration," Mirth Connect is a cross-platform interface engine used in the healthcare industry to communicate and exchange data between disparate systems in a  standardized manner . Additional technical details about the flaw have been withheld in light of the fact that Mirth Connect versions going as far bac...

A relatively new threat actor known as  YoroTrooper  is likely made up of operators originating from Kazakhstan. The assessment, which comes from Cisco Talos, is based on their fluency in Kazakh and Russian, use of Tenge to pay for operating infrastructure, and very limited targeting of Kazakhstani entities, barring the government's Anti-Corruption Agency. "YoroTrooper attempts to obfuscate the origin of their operations, employing various tactics to make its malicious activity appear to emanate from Azerbaijan, such as using VPN exit nodes local to that region," security researchers Asheer Malhotra and Vitor Ventura  said . First documented by the cybersecurity company in March 2023, the adversary is  known to be active  since at least June 2022, singling out various state-owned entities in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET is tracking the activity under the name  SturgeonPhisher . YoroTrooper's at...