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For the last few years, the cybersecurity threat landscape has gotten progressively more complex and dangerous. The online world is now rife with data thieves, extortionists, and even state actors looking to exploit vulnerabilities in businesses' digital defenses.  And unfortunately — the bad guys have the upper hand at the moment. Part of the reason for that is the fallout from the rapid digitization made necessary by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to research on the subject,  more than half of businesses  have yet to mitigate the risks created by that digitization. And when you add a persistent shortage of cybersecurity workers to that fact, you have the makings of a scary situation. But businesses aren't helpless. There are plenty of things they can do to augment their defenses as they look to mitigate cyber risks. And best of all, some of those options won't cost them a thing. A great example of that is the open-source security platform  Wazuh . It offers ...

An analysis of SMS phone-verified account (PVA) services has led to the discovery of a rogue platform built atop a botnet involving thousands of infected Android phones, once again underscoring the flaws with relying on SMS for account validation. SMS PVA services, since gaining prevalence in 2018, provide users with alternative mobile numbers that can be used to register for other online services and platforms, and help bypass SMS-based authentication and single sign-on (SSO) mechanisms put in place to verify new accounts. "This type of service can be used by malicious actors to register disposable accounts in bulk or create phone-verified accounts for conducting fraud and other criminal activities," Trend Micro researchers  said  in a report published last week. Telemetry data gathered by the company shows that most of the infections are located in Indonesia (47,357), followed by Russia (16,157), Thailand (11,196), India (8,109), and France (5,548), Peru (4,915), Moroc...

Researchers have detailed what they call the "first successful attempt" at decrypting data infected with Hive ransomware without relying on the private key used to lock access to the content. "We were able to recover the master key for generating the file encryption key without the attacker's private key, by using a cryptographic vulnerability identified through analysis," a group of academics from South Korea's Kookmin University  said  in a new paper dissecting its encryption process. Hive, like other cybercriminal groups, operates a ransomware-as-a-service that uses different mechanisms to compromise business networks, exfiltrate data, and encrypt data on the networks, and attempts to collect a ransom in exchange for access to the decryption software. It was  first observed  in June 2021, when it struck a company called Altus Group. Hive leverages a variety of initial compromise methods, including vulnerable RDP servers, compromised VPN credentials,...

If you invite guest users into your Entra ID tenant, you may be opening yourself up to a surprising risk.  A gap in access control in Microsoft Entra's subscription handling is allowing guest users to create and transfer subscriptions into the tenant they are invited into, while maintaining full ownership of them.  All the guest user needs are the permissions to create subscriptions in their home tenant, and an invitation as a guest user into an external tenant. Once inside, the guest user can create subscriptions in their home tenant, transfer them into the external tenant, and retain full ownership rights. This stealthy privilege escalation tactic allows a guest user to gain a privileged foothold in an environment where they should only have limited access. Many organizations treat guest accounts as low-risk based on their temporary, limited access, but this behavior, which works as designed, opens the door to known attack paths and lateral movement within the resource t...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) earlier this week appointed Eun Young Choi to serve as the first Director of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET) it established last year. The NCET was  created  to tackle the criminal misuse of cryptocurrencies and digital assets," with a focus on illegal activities in virtual currency exchanges, mixing and tumbling services, and money laundering infrastructure actors to fuel cyberattacks and ransomware and extortion schemes. "The NCET will serve as the focal point for the department's efforts to tackle the growth of crime involving [digital assets and distributed ledger] technologies,"  said  Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite Jr. of the Justice Department's Criminal Division. Separately, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said it's  launching  a new effort of its own called the Virtual Asset Exploitation Unit (VAXU) dedicated to tracking and seizing illicit cryptocurrencies as part...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday  published  a repository of free tools and services to enable organizations to mitigate, detect, and respond effectively to malicious attacks and further improve their security posture. The " Free Cybersecurity Services and Tools " resource hub comprises a mix of 101 services provided by CISA, open-source utilities, and other implements offered by private and public sector organizations across the cybersecurity community. "Many organizations, both public and private, are target rich and resource poor," CISA Director, Jen Easterly, said in a statement. "The resources on this list will help such organizations improve their security posture, which is particularly critical in the current heightened threat environment." The tools catalog is the latest in a string of initiatives launched by CISA to combat cyber threats and help organizations adopt foundational measures to maximize re...

Patches have been issued to contain a "severe" security vulnerability in UpdraftPlus, a WordPress plugin with over three million installations, that can be weaponized to download the site's private data using an account on the vulnerable sites. "All versions of UpdraftPlus from March 2019 onwards have contained a vulnerability caused by a missing permissions-level check, allowing untrusted users access to backups," the maintainers of the plugin said in an advisory published this week. Security researcher Marc-Alexandre Montpas of Automattic has been credited with discovering and reporting the vulnerability on February 14 that's been assigned the identifier  CVE-2022-0633  (CVSS score: 8.5). The issue impacts UpdraftPlus versions from 1.16.7 to 1.22.2. UpdraftPlus is a  backup and restoration solution  that's capable of performing full, manual, or scheduled backups of WordPress files, databases, plugins and themes, which can then be reinstated via th...

Microsoft has warned of emerging threats in the  Web3  landscape, including "ice phishing" campaigns, as a surge in adoption of blockchain and DeFi technologies emphasizes the need to build security into the decentralized web while it's still in its early stages. The company's Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team called out various new avenues through which malicious actors may attempt to trick cryptocurrency users into giving up their private cryptographic keys and carry out unauthorized fund transfers. "One aspect that the immutable and public blockchain enables is complete transparency, so an attack can be observed and studied after it occurred," Christian Seifert, principal research manager at Microsoft's Security and Compliance group,  said . "It also allows assessment of the financial impact of attacks, which is challenging in traditional Web2 phishing attacks." The theft of the keys could be carried out in several ways, including im...