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Cyber threats used to be less threatening. While nobody wants their customers' credit card numbers stolen in a data breach, or to see a deranged manifesto plastered over their company website, such incidents can almost seem quaint compared to ransomware attacks that bring all of your critical information systems to a dead halt. The frequency of these attacks  increased more than 150% in the U.S. last year, and in 2021 their global cost is expected to reach $20 billion. Effective, comprehensive security training is essential to mitigating these threats, many of which originate with low-profile phishing or malware attacks to get a foot in the door—attacks that can target anyone who works in your organization. A company's employees are the front line of defense against cyberattacks, and canned training videos and short quizzes are rarely sufficient to prepare them for this responsibility. The trouble with good training is that it takes not just expertise but time and other reso...

A new JavaScript-based remote access Trojan (RAT) propagated via a social engineering campaign has been observed employing sneaky "fileless" techniques as part of its detection-evasion methods to elude discovery and analysis. Dubbed DarkWatchman by researchers from Prevailion's Adversarial Counterintelligence Team (PACT), the malware uses a resilient domain generation algorithm ( DGA ) to identify its command-and-control (C2) infrastructure and utilizes the Windows Registry for all of its storage operations, thereby enabling it to bypass antimalware engines. The RAT "utilizes novel methods for fileless persistence, on-system activity, and dynamic run-time capabilities like self-updating and recompilation," researchers Matt Stafford and Sherman Smith  said , adding it "represents an evolution in fileless malware techniques, as it uses the registry for nearly all temporary and permanent storage and therefore never writes anything to disk, allowing it to o...

Web infrastructure company Cloudflare on Wednesday revealed that threat actors are actively attempting to exploit a  second bug  disclosed in the widely used Log4j logging utility, making it imperative that customers move quickly to install the latest version as a barrage of attacks continues to pummel unpatched systems with a variety of malware. The new vulnerability, assigned the identifier  CVE-2021-45046 , makes it possible for adversaries to carry out denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and follows disclosure from the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) that the original fix for the remote code execution bug — CVE-2021-44228 aka Log4Shell — was "incomplete in certain non-default configurations." The issue has since been addressed in Log4j version 2.16.0. "This vulnerability is actively being exploited and anyone using Log4j should update to version 2.16.0 as soon as possible, even if you have previously updated to 2.15.0," Cloudflare's Andre Bluehs and Gabriel ...

Meta Platforms, the company formerly known as Facebook, has announced that it's expanding its  bug bounty program  to start rewarding valid reports of scraping vulnerabilities across its platforms as well as include reports of scraping data sets that are available online. "We know that automated activity designed to scrape people's public and private data targets every website or service," said Dan Gurfinkel, security engineering manager at Meta. "We also know that it is a highly adversarial space where scrapers — be it malicious apps, websites or scripts — constantly adapt their tactics to evade detection in response to the defenses we build and improve." To that end, the social media giant aims to  monetarily compensate  for valid reports of scraping bugs in its service and identify unprotected or openly public databases containing no less than 100,000 unique Facebook user records with personally identifiable information (PII) such as email, phone numb...

Today's cyber attackers are constantly looking for ways to exploit vulnerabilities and infiltrate organizations. To keep up with this evolving threat landscape, security teams must be on the lookout for potential risks around the clock. Since most organizations simply cannot afford to have 24x7 security teams, managed detection and response (MDR) services have become a critical aspect of any modern security stack.  Most organizations must find outsourced MDR providers on top of their existing solutions, but that's not always a feasible solution. XDR provider Cynet offers its MDR service ( learn more here ), which the company calls CyOps, as part of its offering. The service is much more than simply a help desk, though. CyOps offers a thorough MDR service that offers both monitoring and threat hunting, as well as incident response in cases where an attack is successful.  How CyOps operates The key selling point for CyOps MDR is that it enhances organizations' security a...

Malicious actors are deploying a previously undiscovered binary, an Internet Information Services ( IIS ) webserver module dubbed " Owowa ," on Microsoft Exchange Outlook Web Access servers with the goal of stealing credentials and enabling remote command execution. "Owowa is a C#-developed .NET v4.0 assembly that is intended to be loaded as a module within an IIS web server that also exposes Exchange's Outlook Web Access (OWA)," Kaspersky researchers Paul Rascagneres and Pierre Delcher  said . "When loaded this way, Owowa will steal credentials that are entered by any user in the OWA login page, and will allow a remote operator to run commands on the underlying server." The idea that a rogue IIS module can be fashioned as a backdoor is not new. In August 2021, an exhaustive study of the IIS threat landscape by Slovak cybersecurity company ESET revealed  as many as 14 malware families that were developed as native IIS modules in an attempt to interc...

Microsoft has rolled out  Patch Tuesday updates  to address multiple security vulnerabilities in Windows and other software, including one actively exploited flaw that's being abused to deliver Emotet, TrickBot, or Bazaloader malware payloads. The latest monthly release for December fixes a total of 67 flaws, bringing the total number of bugs patched by the company this year to 887, according to the  Zero Day Initiative . Seven of the 67 flaws are rated Critical and 60 are rated as Important in severity, with five of the issues publicly known at the time of release. It's worth noting that this is in addition to the  21 flaws  resolved in the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser. The most critical of the lot is  CVE-2021-43890  (CVSS score: 7.1), a Windows AppX installer spoofing vulnerability that Microsoft said could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution. The lower severity rating is indicative of the fact that code execution hinges on ...