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Google has rolled out fixes for five security vulnerabilities in its Chrome web browser, including one which it says is being exploited in the wild, making it the  17th such weakness  to be disclosed since the start of the year. Tracked as  CVE-2021-4102 , the flaw relates to a  use-after-free bug  in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine, which could have severe consequences ranging from corruption of valid data to the execution of arbitrary code. An anonymous researcher has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. As it stands, it's not known how the weakness is being abused in real-world attacks, but the internet giant issued a terse statement that said, "it's aware of reports that an exploit for CVE-2021-4102 exists in the wild." This is done so in an attempt to ensure that a majority of users are updated with a fix and prevent further exploitation by other threat actors. CVE-2021-4102 is the second use-after-free vulnerability in V8 th...

A previously undocumented, financially motivated threat group has been connected to a string of data theft and extortion attacks on over 40 entities between September and November 2021. The hacker collective, which goes by the self-proclaimed name  Karakurt  and was first identified in June 2021, is capable of modifying its tactics and techniques to adapt to the targeted environment, Accenture's Cyber Investigations, Forensics and Response (CIFR) team said in a report published on December 10. "The threat group is financially motivated, opportunistic in nature, and so far, appears to target smaller companies or corporate subsidiaries versus the alternative big game hunting approach," the CIFR team  said . "Based on intrusion analysis to date, the threat group focuses solely on data exfiltration and subsequent extortion, rather than the more destructive ransomware deployment." 95% of the known victims are based in North America, while the remaining 5% are in...

With 2021 drawing to a close and many closing their plans and budgets for 2022, the time has come to do a brief wrap-up of the SaaS Security challenges on the horizon. Here are the top 3 SaaS security posture challenges as we see them.  1  —  The Mess of Misconfiguration Management The good news is that more businesses than ever are using SaaS apps such as GitHub, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Slack, SuccessFactors, Zoom, and many others, to enable employees to maintain productivity under the most challenging of circumstances. As for the bad news, many companies are having a hard time adequately addressing the ever-changing security risks of each app.  This challenge begins with a simple miscalculation—businesses are tasking security teams to ensure that the security configurations for each app are set correctly.  While that may seem like the logical choice, these apps are like snowflakes, no two are the same, including their specific settings and configurati...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

Infection chains associated with the multi-purpose Qakbot malware have been broken down into "distinct building blocks," an effort that Microsoft said will help to proactively detect and block the threat in an effective manner. The Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team  dubbed   Qakbot a "customizable chameleon that adapts to suit the needs of the multiple threat actor groups that utilize it." Qakbot  is believed to be the creation of a financially motivated cybercriminal threat group known as  Gold Lagoon . It is a prevalent information-stealing malware that, in recent years, has become a precursor to many critical and widespread ransomware attacks, offering a malware installation-as-a-service that enables many campaigns. First discovered in 2007, the modular malware — like  TrickBot  — has  evolved  from its early roots as a banking trojan to become a Swiss Army knife capable of data exfiltration and acting as a delivery mechanis...

Threat actors are actively weaponizing unpatched servers affected by the newly identified " Log4Shell " vulnerability in Log4j to install cryptocurrency miners, Cobalt Strike, and recruit the devices into a botnet, even as telemetry signs point to exploitation of the flaw nine days before it even came to light. Netlab, the networking security division of Chinese tech giant Qihoo 360,  disclosed  threats such as  Mirai  and  Muhstik  (aka Tsunami) are setting their sights on vulnerable systems to spread the infection and grow its computing power to orchestrate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks with the goal of overwhelming a target and rendering it unusable. Muhstik was previously spotted exploiting a critical security flaw in Atlassian Confluence ( CVE-2021-26084 , CVSS score: 9.8) earlier this September. The latest development comes as it has emerged that the vulnerability has been under attack for at least more than a week prior to its pub...

The Apache Software Foundation has released fixes to contain an  actively   exploited  zero-day vulnerability affecting the widely-used Apache Log4j Java-based logging library that could be weaponized to execute malicious code and allow a complete takeover of vulnerable systems. Tracked as  CVE-2021-44228  and by the monikers Log4Shell or LogJam, the issue concerns a case of unauthenticated, remote code execution (RCE) on any application that uses the open-source utility and affects versions Log4j 2.0-beta9 up to 2.14.1. The bug has scored a perfect 10 on 10 in the CVSS rating system, indicative of the severity of the issue. "An attacker who can control log messages or log message parameters can execute arbitrary code loaded from  LDAP  servers when message lookup substitution is enabled," the Apache Foundation  said  in an advisory. "From Log4j 2.15.0, this behavior has been disabled by default." Exploitation can be achieved by a single...

Details have emerged about what's the first Rust-language-based ransomware strain spotted in the wild that has already amassed "some victims from different countries" since its launch last month. The ransomware, dubbed  BlackCat , was  disclosed  by MalwareHunterTeam. "Victims can pay with Bitcoin or Monero," the researchers said in a series of tweets detailing the file-encrypting malware. "Also looks they are giving credentials to intermediaries" for negotiations. BlackCat, akin to many other variants that have sprung before it, operates as a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS), wherein the core developers recruit affiliates to breach corporate environments and encrypt files, but not before stealing the said documents in a double extortion scheme to pressure the targets into paying the requested amount or risk exposure of the stolen data should the companies refuse to pay up. Security researcher Michael Gillespie  called  it a "very sophisticated...