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A new advanced persistent threat (APT) has been behind a string of attacks against hotels across the world, along with governments, international organizations, engineering companies, and law firms. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET codenamed the cyber espionage group  FamousSparrow , which it said has been active since at least August 2019, with victims located across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas, spanning several countries such as Burkina Faso, Taiwan, France, Lithuania, the U.K., Israel, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Canada, and Guatemala. Attacks mounted by the group involve exploiting known vulnerabilities in server applications such as SharePoint and Oracle Opera, in addition to the  ProxyLogon  remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange Server that came to light in March 2021, making it the  latest threat actor  to have had access to the exploit before details of the flaw became public. According to ESET, intrusions ex...

A new as-yet unpatched weakness in Apple's iCloud Private Relay feature could be circumvented to leak users' true IP addresses from iOS devices running the latest version of the operating system. Introduced as a beta with iOS 15, which was officially released this week,  iCloud Private Relay  aims to improve anonymity on the web by employing a dual-hop architecture that effectively shields users' IP address, location, and DNS requests from websites and network service providers. It achieves this by routing users' internet traffic on the Safari browser through two proxies in order to mask who's browsing and where that data is coming from in what could be viewed as a simplified version of Tor.  However, the feature is available only to iCloud+ subscribers running iOS 15 or macOS 12 Monterey and above. "If you read the IP address from an HTTP request received by your server, you'll get the IP address of the egress proxy," FingerprintJS researcher Se...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a novel technique adopted by a threat actor to deliberately evade detection with the help of malformed digital signatures of its malware payloads. "Attackers created malformed code signatures that are treated as valid by Windows but are not able to be decoded or checked by OpenSSL code — which is used in a number of security scanning products," Google Threat Analysis Group's Neel Mehta  said  in a write-up published on Thursday. The new mechanism was observed to be exploited by a notorious family of unwanted software known as  OpenSUpdater  that's used to download and install other suspicious programs on compromised systems. Most targets of the campaign are users located in the U.S. who are prone to downloading cracked versions of games and other grey-area software. The findings come from a set of OpenSUpdater  samples   uploaded  to VirusTotal at least since mid-August. While adversaries in the past ...

Networking equipment maker Cisco Systems has rolled out patches to address three critical security vulnerabilities in its IOS XE network operating system that remote attackers could potentially abuse to execute arbitrary code with administrative privileges and trigger a denial-of-service (DoS) condition on vulnerable devices. The list of three flaws is as follows - CVE-2021-34770  (CVSS score: 10.0) - Cisco IOS XE Software for Catalyst 9000 Family Wireless Controllers CAPWAP Remote Code Execution Vulnerability CVE-2021-34727  (CVSS score: 9.8) - Cisco IOS XE SD-WAN Software Buffer Overflow Vulnerability CVE-2021-1619  (CVSS score: 9.8) - Cisco IOS XE Software NETCONF and RESTCONF Authentication Bypass Vulnerability The most severe of the issues is CVE-2021-34770, which Cisco calls a "logic error" that occurs during the processing of  CAPWAP  (Control And Provisioning of Wireless Access Points) packets that enable a central wireless Controller to manage a...

Apple on Thursday released security updates to fix multiple security vulnerabilities in older versions of  iOS  and  macOS  that it says have been detected in exploits in the wild, in addition to expanding patches for a previously plugged security weakness abused by NSO Group's Pegasus surveillance tool to target iPhone users. Chief among them is CVE-2021-30869, a type confusion flaw that resides in the kernel component  XNU  developed by Apple that could cause a malicious application to execute arbitrary code with the highest privileges. The Cupertino-based tech giant said it addressed the bug with improved state handling. Google's Threat Analysis Group, which is credited with reporting the flaw, said it detected the vulnerability being "used in conjunction with a N-day remote code execution targeting WebKit." Two other flaws include  CVE-2021-30858 and CVE-2021-30860 , both of which were resolved by the company earlier this month following disc...

An unpatched design flaw in the implementation of Microsoft Exchange's Autodiscover protocol has resulted in the leak of approximately 100,000 login names and passwords for Windows domains worldwide. "This is a severe security issue, since if an attacker can control such domains or has the ability to 'sniff' traffic in the same network, they can capture domain credentials in plain text (HTTP basic authentication) that are being transferred over the wire," Guardicore's Amit Serper  said  in a technical report. "Moreover, if the attacker has DNS-poisoning capabilities on a large scale (such as a nation-state attacker), they could systematically syphon out leaky passwords through a large-scale DNS poisoning campaign based on these Autodiscover TLDs [top-level domains]." The Exchange  Autodiscover  service enables users to configure applications such as Microsoft Outlook with minimal user input, allowing just a combination of email addresses and pas...

Security researchers have disclosed an unpatched weakness in Microsoft Windows Platform Binary Table (WPBT) affecting all Windows-based devices since Windows 8 that could be potentially exploited to install a rootkit and compromise the integrity of devices. "These flaws make every Windows system vulnerable to easily-crafted attacks that install fraudulent vendor-specific tables," researchers from Eclypsium  said  in a report published on Monday. "These tables can be exploited by attackers with direct physical access, with remote access, or through manufacturer supply chains. More importantly, these motherboard-level flaws can obviate initiatives like  Secured-core  because of the ubiquitous usage of  ACPI  [Advanced Configuration and Power Interface] and WPBT." WPBT, introduced with Windows 8 in 2012, is a  feature  that enables "boot firmware to provide Windows with a platform binary that the operating system can execute."  In other wor...