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Although organizations commonly go to great lengths to address security vulnerabilities that may exist within their IT infrastructure, an organization's helpdesk might pose a bigger threat due to social engineering attacks. Social engineering is "the art of manipulating people so they give up confidential information," according to  Webroot . There are many different types of social engineering schemes but one is area of vulnerability is how social engineering might be used against a helpdesk technician to steal a user's credentials. The Process of Gaining Access With Social Engineering The first step in such an attack is usually for the attacker to gather information about the organization that they are targeting. The attacker might start by using information that is freely available on the Internet to figure out who within the organization is most likely to have elevated permissions or access to sensitive information. An attacker can often get this information ...

A prominent Togolese human rights defender has been targeted with spyware by a threat actor known for striking victims in South Asia, marking the hacking group's first foray into digital surveillance in Africa. Amnesty International tied the covert attack campaign to a collective tracked as " Donot Team " (aka APT-C-35), which has been linked to cyber offensives in India and Pakistan, while also identifying apparent evidence coupling the group's infrastructure to an Indian company. The unnamed activist is believed to have targeted over a period of two months starting in December 2019 with the help of fake Android applications and spyware-loaded emails. "The persistent attacks over WhatsApp and email tried to trick the victim into installing a malicious application that masqueraded as a secure chat application," Amnesty International  said  in a report published last week. "The application was in fact a piece of custom Android spyware designed to extr...

An "aggressive" financially motivated threat actor has been identified as linked to a string of RYUK ransomware attacks since October 2018, while maintaining close partnerships with TrickBot-affiliated threat actors and using a publicly available arsenal of tools such as Cobalt Strike Beacon payloads to interact with victim networks. Cybersecurity firm Mandiant attributed the intrusions to a Russian-speaking hacker group rechristened as FIN12, and previously tracked under the name  UNC1878 , with a disproportionate focus on healthcare organizations with more than $300 million in revenue, among others, including education, financial, manufacturing, and technology sectors, located in North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific. The designation marks the first time a ransomware affiliate group has been promoted to the status of a distinct threat actor. "FIN12 relies on partners to obtain initial access to victim environments," Mandiant researchers  said . "Not...

I had the honor of hosting the first episode of the Xposure Podcast live from Xposure Summit 2025. And I couldn't have asked for a better kickoff panel: three cybersecurity leaders who don't just talk security, they live it. Let me introduce them. Alex Delay , CISO at IDB Bank, knows what it means to defend a highly regulated environment. Ben Mead , Director of Cybersecurity at Avidity Biosciences, brings a forward-thinking security perspective that reflects the innovation behind Avidity's targeted RNA therapeutics. Last but not least, Michael Francess , Director of Cybersecurity Advanced Threat at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, leads the charge in protecting the franchise. Each brought a unique vantage point to a common challenge: applying Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) to complex production environments. Gartner made waves in 2023 with a bold prediction: organizations that prioritize CTEM will be three times less likely to be breached by 2026. But here's the kicker -...

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed a new campaign that likely targets entities in Southeast Asia with a previously unrecognized Linux malware that's engineered to enable remote access to its operators, in addition to amassing credentials and function as a proxy server. The malware family, dubbed " FontOnLake " by Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET, is said to feature "well-designed modules" that are continuously being upgraded with a broad range of abilities, indicating an active development phase. Samples uploaded to VirusTotal point to the possibility that the very first intrusions utilizing this threat have been happening as early as May 2020. Avast  and  Lacework Labs  are tracking the same malware under the moniker HCRootkit. "The sneaky nature of FontOnLake's tools in combination with advanced design and low prevalence suggest that they are used in targeted attacks," ESET researcher Vladislav Hrčka  said . "To collect data or condu...

The Apache Software Foundation on Thursday released additional security updates for its HTTP Server product to remediate what it says is an "incomplete fix" for an  actively exploited  path traversal and remote code execution flaw that it patched earlier this week. CVE-2021-42013 , as the new vulnerability is identified as, builds upon  CVE-2021-41773 , a flaw that impacts Apache web servers running version 2.4.49 and involves a  path normalization  bug that could enable an adversary to access and view arbitrary files stored on a vulnerable server. Although the flaw was addressed by the maintainers in version 2.4.50, a day after the patches were released it became known that the weakness could also be abused to gain remote code execution if the "mod_cgi" module was loaded and the configuration "require all denied" was absent, prompting Apache to issue another round of emergency updates. "It was found that the fix for CVE-2021-41773 in Apache HTT...

A high-severity code injection vulnerability has been disclosed in 23andMe's Yamale, a schema and validator for YAML, that could be trivially exploited by adversaries to execute arbitrary Python code. The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2021-38305  (CVSS score: 7.8), involves manipulating the schema file provided as input to the tool to circumvent protections and achieve code execution. Particularly, the  issue  resides in the schema parsing function, which allows any input passed to be evaluated and executed, resulting in a scenario where a specially-crafted string within the schema can be abused for the injection of system commands. Yamale is a Python package that allows developers to validate YAML — a data serialization language often used for writing configuration files — from the command line. The package is used by at least  224 repositories  on GitHub.  "This gap allows attackers that can provide an input schema file to perform Python code injection ...

So, you've been thinking about getting a Penetration Test done on your Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. Great! What should that involve exactly?  There are many options available, and knowing what you need will help you make your often limited security budget go as far as possible. Broadly, the key focus areas for most penetration tests involving AWS: Your externally accessible cloud infrastructure Any application(s) you're building or hosting Your internal cloud infrastructure Your AWS configuration itself Secrets management  We'll look at each one, starting with the most important: External Infrastructure The good news here is that, by default, AWS does its best to help you stay secure. For example, the default security groups don't let your EC2 instances receive communication from the outside world unless you actively specify it by adding additional rules. That said, AWS still allows you plenty of rope to hang yourself with if you're not carefu...