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In yet another instance of software supply chain attack, unidentified hackers breached the website of  MonPass , one of Mongolia's major certificate authorities, to backdoor its installer software with Cobalt Strike binaries. The trojanized client was available for download between February 8, 2021, and March 3, 2021, said Czech cybersecurity software company Avast in a  report  published Thursday. In addition, a public webserver hosted by MonPass was infiltrated potentially as many as eight separate times, with the researchers uncovering eight different web shells and backdoors on the compromised server. Avast's investigation into the incident began after it discovered the backdoored installer and the implant on one of its customers' systems. "The malicious installer is an unsigned [Portable Executable] file," the researchers said. "It starts by downloading the legitimate version of the installer from the MonPass official website. This legitimate versi...

Google has launched an  updated version of Scorecards , its automated security tool that produces a "risk score" for open source initiatives, with improved checks and capabilities to make the data generated by the utility accessible for analysis. "With so much software today relying on open-source projects, consumers need an easy way to judge whether their dependencies are safe," Google's Open Source Security Team  said  Thursday. "Scorecards helps reduce the toil and manual effort required to continually evaluate changing packages when maintaining a project's supply chain." Scorecards  aims to automate analysis of the security posture of open source projects as well as use the security health metrics to proactively improve the security posture of other critical projects. To date, the tool has been scaled up to evaluate security criteria for over 50,000 open source projects. Some of the new additions include checks for contributions from mali...

An ongoing brute-force attack campaign targeting enterprise cloud environments has been spearheaded by the Russian military intelligence since mid-2019, according to a joint advisory published by intelligence agencies in the U.K. and U.S. The National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the U.K.'s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) formally attributed the incursions to the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) 85th Main Special Service Center (GTsSS). The  threat actor  is also tracked under various monikers, including  APT28  (FireEye Mandiant),  Fancy Bear  (CrowdStrike),  Sofacy  (Kaspersky),  STRONTIUM  (Microsoft), and  Iron Twilight  (Secureworks). APT28 has a track record of leveraging password spray and brute-force login attempts to plunder valid credentials that enable future surveillance or intrusion oper...

Microsoft on Thursday officially confirmed that the " PrintNightmare " remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability affecting Windows Print Spooler is different from the issue the company addressed as part of its Patch Tuesday update released earlier this month, while warning that it has detected exploitation attempts targeting the flaw. The company is tracking the security weakness under the identifier  CVE-2021-34527 , and has assigned it a severity rating of 8.8 on the CVSS scoring system. All versions of Windows contain the vulnerable code and are susceptible to exploitation. "A remote code execution vulnerability exists when the Windows Print Spooler service improperly performs privileged file operations," Microsoft said in its advisory. "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could run arbitrary code with SYSTEM privileges. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user righ...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning of ongoing attacks coordinated by a suspected Chinese-speaking threat actor targeting the Afghanistan government as part of an espionage campaign that may have had its provenance as far back as 2014. Israeli cybersecurity firm Check Point Research attributed the intrusions to a hacking group tracked under the moniker "IndigoZebra," with past activity aimed at other central-Asian countries, including Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. "The threat actors behind the espionage leveraged Dropbox, the popular cloud-storage service, to infiltrate the Afghan National Security Council (NSC)," the researchers said in a technical write-up shared with The Hacker News, adding they "orchestrated a ministry-to-ministry style deception, where an email is sent to a high-profile target from the mailboxes of another high-profile victim." IndigoZebra first came to light in August 2017 when Kaspersky  detailed  a covert operation that single...

Securing applications it the API-first era can be an uphill battle. As development accelerates, accountability becomes unclear, and getting controls to operate becomes a challenge in itself. It's time that we rethink our application security strategies to reflect new priorities, principles and processes in the API-first era. Securing tomorrow's applications begins with assessing the business risks today. The trends and risks shaping today's applications As the world continues to become more and more interconnected via devices — and the APIs that connect them — individuals are growing accustomed to the frictionless experience that they provide. While this frictionless reality is doubtlessly more user-friendly, i.e., faster and more convenient, it also requires a trade-off. This convenience demands openness, and openness is a risk when it comes to cybersecurity. According to  Sidney Gottesman , Mastercard's SVP for Security Innovation, the above situation leads to one...

Facebook on Tuesday revealed it filed two separate legal actions against perpetrators who abused its ad platform to run deceptive advertisements in violation of the company's  Terms  and  Advertising Policies .  "In the first case, the defendants are a California marketing company and its agents responsible for a  bait-and-switch  advertising scheme on Facebook," the social media giant's Director of Platform Enforcement and Litigation, Jessica Romero,  said . "In the second case, the defendants are a group of individuals located in Vietnam who got users to self-compromise their Facebook accounts and ran millions of dollars of unauthorized ads." As part of the fraudulent activity, the marketing company, N&J USA Incorporated, promoted the sale of merchandise such as clothing, watches, and toys through misleading ads that, when clicked, redirected users to other e-commerce websites to complete the purchase, only to either receive nothing or get d...