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Spanish language victims are the target of an email phishing campaign that delivers a new remote access trojan (RAT) called Poco RAT since at least February 2024. The attacks primarily single out mining, manufacturing, hospitality, and utilities sectors, according to cybersecurity company Cofense. "The majority of the custom code in the malware appears to be focused on anti-analysis, communicating with its command-and-control center (C2), and downloading and running files with a limited focus on monitoring or harvesting credentials," it said . Infection chains begin with phishing messages bearing finance-themed lures that trick recipients into clicking on an embedded URL pointing to a 7-Zip archive file hosted on Google Drive. Other methods observed include the use of HTML or PDF files directly attached to the emails or downloaded via another embedded Google Drive link. The abuse of legitimate services by threat actors is not a new phenomenon as it allows them to bypass...

Multiple threat actors have been observed exploiting a recently disclosed security flaw in PHP to deliver remote access trojans, cryptocurrency miners, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnets. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2024-4577 (CVSS score: 9.8), which allows an attacker to remotely execute malicious commands on Windows systems using Chinese and Japanese language locales. It was publicly disclosed in early June 2024. "CVE-2024-4577 is a flaw that allows an attacker to escape the command line and pass arguments to be interpreted directly by PHP," Akamai researchers Kyle Lefton, Allen West, and Sam Tinklenberg said in a Wednesday analysis. "The vulnerability itself lies in how Unicode characters are converted into ASCII." The web infrastructure company said it began observing exploit attempts against its honeypot servers targeting the PHP flaw within 24 hours of it being public knowledge. This included exploits designed to deliver a remote...

GitLab has shipped another round of updates to close out security flaws in its software development platform, including a critical bug that allows an attacker to run pipeline jobs as an arbitrary user. Tracked as CVE-2024-6385, the vulnerability carries a CVSS score of 9.6 out of a maximum of 10.0. "An issue was discovered in GitLab CE/EE affecting versions 15.8 prior to 16.11.6, 17.0 prior to 17.0.4, and 17.1 prior to 17.1.2, which allows an attacker to trigger a pipeline as another user under certain circumstances," the company said in a Wednesday advisory. It's worth noting that the company patched a similar bug late last month ( CVE-2024-5655 , CVSS score: 9.6) that could also be weaponized to run pipelines as other users. Also addressed by GitLab is a medium-severity issue (CVE-2024-5257, CVSS score: 4.9) that allows a Developer user with admin_compliance_framework permissions to modify the URL for a group namespace. All the security shortcomings have been fi...

A now-patched security flaw in Veeam Backup & Replication software is being exploited by a nascent ransomware operation known as EstateRansomware. Singapore-headquartered Group-IB, which discovered the threat actor in early April 2024, said the modus operandi involved the exploitation of CVE-2023-27532 (CVSS score: 7.5) to carry out the malicious activities. Initial access to the target environment is said to have been facilitated by means of a Fortinet FortiGate firewall SSL VPN appliance using a dormant account. "The threat actor pivoted laterally from the FortiGate Firewall through the SSL VPN service to access the failover server," security researcher Yeo Zi Wei said in an analysis published today. "Before the ransomware attack, there were VPN brute-force attempts noted in April 2024 using a dormant account identified as 'Acc1.' Several days later, a successful VPN login using 'Acc1' was traced back to the remote IP address 149.28.106[.]25...

The Problem The “2024 Attack Intelligence Report” from the staff at Rapid7 [1] is a well-researched, well-written report that is worthy of careful study. Some key takeaways are:  53% of the over 30 new vulnerabilities that were widely exploited in 2023 and at the start of 2024 were zero-days . More mass compromise events arose from zero-day vulnerabilities than from n-day vulnerabilities. Nearly a quarter of widespread attacks were zero-day attacks where a single adversary compromised dozens to hundreds of organizations simultaneously. Attackers are moving from initial access to exploitation in minutes or hours rather than days or weeks. So the conventional patch and put strategy is as effective as a firetruck showing up after a building has burned to the ground! Of course, patch and put could prevent future attacks, but taking into account that patch development takes from days to weeks [2] and that the average time to apply critical patches is 16 days [3], devices are vu...

Microsoft has released patches to address a total of 143 security flaws as part of its monthly security updates, two of which have come under active exploitation in the wild. Five out of the 143 flaws are rated Critical, 136 are rated Important, and four are rated Moderate in severity. The fixes are in addition to 33 vulnerabilities that have been addressed in the Chromium-based Edge browser over the past month. The two security shortcomings that have come under exploitation are below - CVE-2024-38080 (CVSS score: 7.8) - Windows Hyper-V Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2024-38112 (CVSS score: 7.5) - Windows MSHTML Platform Spoofing Vulnerability "Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an attacker to take additional actions prior to exploitation to prepare the target environment," Microsoft said of CVE-2024-38112. "An attacker would have to send the victim a malicious file that the victim would have to execute." Check Point securi...