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Systems hosting content pertaining to the National Games of China were successfully breached last year by an unnamed Chinese-language-speaking hacking group. Cybersecurity firm Avast, which  dissected  the intrusion, said that the attackers gained access to a web server 12 days prior to the start of the event on September 3 to drop multiple reverse web shells for remote access and achieve permanent foothold in the network. The  National Games of China , a multi-sport event held every four years, took place in the Shaanxi Province between September 15 and 27, 2021. The Czech company said it was unable to determine the nature of the information stolen by the hackers, adding it has "reason to believe [the attackers] are either native Chinese-language speakers or show high fluency in Chinese." The breach is said to have been resolved ahead of the start of the games. The initial access was facilitated by exploiting a vulnerability in the webserver. But before dropping th...

Today's enterprise networks are complex environments with different types of wired and wireless devices being connected and disconnected. The current device discovery solutions have been mainly focused on identifying and monitoring servers, workstation PCs, laptops and infrastructure devices such as network firewalls, switches and routers, because the most valuable information assets of organizations are being stored, processed and transferred over those devices, hence making them the prime target of security breaches and intrusions. However, a new trend has been emerging in the past four years,  where attackers have been targeting purpose-built connected devices  such as network printers and video conferencing systems as an entry point and data exfiltration route. These devices cannot be identified properly by the current IT asset discovery solutions for the following main reasons: Proprietary protocols are often used for managing and monitoring such devices that are not...

A Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) group has been targeting Taiwanese financial institutions as part of a "persistent campaign" that lasted for at least 18 months. The intrusions, whose primary intent was espionage, resulted in the deployment of a backdoor called xPack , granting the adversary extensive control over compromised machines, Broadcom-owned Symantec said in a  report  published last week. What's notable about this campaign is the amount of time the threat actor lurked on victim networks, affording the operators ample opportunity for detailed reconnaissance and exfiltrate potentially sensitive information pertaining to business contacts and investments without raising any red flags. In one of the unnamed financial organizations, the attackers spent close to 250 days between December 2020 and August 2021, while a manufacturing entity had its network under their watch for roughly 175 days. Although the initial access vector used to the breach the ta...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is urging federal agencies to secure their systems against an actively exploited security vulnerability in Windows that could be abused to gain elevated permissions on affected hosts. To that end, the agency has added  CVE-2022-21882  (CVSS score: 7.0) to the  Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog , necessitating that Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies patch all systems against this vulnerability by February 18, 2022. "These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors of all types and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise," CISA  said  in an advisory published last week. CVE-2022-21882 , which has been tagged with an "Exploitation More Likely" exploitability index assessment, concerns a case of elevation of privilege vulnerability affecting the Win32k component. The bug was addressed by Microsoft as part of its January 2022 ...

Users of the Argo continuous deployment (CD) tool for Kubernetes are being urged to push through updates after a zero-day vulnerability was found that could allow an attacker to extract sensitive information such as passwords and API keys. The flaw, tagged as  CVE-2022-24348  (CVSS score: 7.7), affects all versions and has been addressed in versions 2.3.0, 2.2.4, and 2.1.9. Cloud security firm Apiiro has been credited with discovering and reporting the bug on January 30, 2022s. Continuous deployment, also called continuous delivery, refers to a process that automatically deploys all code changes to the testing and/or production environment after they are tested and merged to a shared repository. Argo CD is officially used by  191 organizations , including Alibaba Group, BMW Group, Deloitte, Gojek, IBM, Intuit, LexisNexis, Red Hat, Skyscanner, Swisscom, and Ticketmaster. The path-traversal vulnerability "allows malicious actors to load a Kubernetes  Helm Chart Y...

Microsoft on Friday shared more of the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) adopted by the Russia-based Gamaredon hacking group to facilitate a barrage of cyber espionage attacks aimed at several entities in Ukraine over the past six months. The attacks are said to have singled out government, military, non-government organizations (NGO), judiciary, law enforcement, and non-profit organizations with the main goal of exfiltrating sensitive information, maintaining access, and leveraging it to move laterally into related organizations. The Windows maker's Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) is tracking the cluster under the moniker ACTINIUM (previously as DEV-0157), sticking to its tradition of identifying nation-state activities by chemical element names. The Ukrainian government, in November 2021,  publicly attributed  Gamaredon to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and connected its operations to the FSB Office of Russia in the Republic of Crimea and the city...

A now-patched security vulnerability in Apple iOS that was previously found to be exploited by Israeli company NSO Group was also separately weaponized by a different surveillance vendor named QuaDream to hack into the company's devices. The development was reported by  Reuters , citing unnamed sources, noting that "the two rival businesses gained the same ability last year to remotely break into iPhones [and] compromise Apple phones without an owner needing to open a malicious link." The zero-click exploit in question is  FORCEDENTRY , a flaw in iMessage that could be leveraged to  circumvent iOS security protections  and install spyware that allowed attackers to scoop up a wealth of information such as contacts, emails, files, messages, and photos, as well as access to the phone's camera and microphone. Google Project Zero, which studies zero-day vulnerabilities in hardware and software systems such as operating systems, web browsers, and open source libraries...