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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday announced that it will expand and rebrand its Cyber Unit to fight against cyber-related threats and protect investors in cryptocurrency markets. To that end, the SEC is renaming the Cyber Unit within the  Division of Enforcement  to Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit and plans to infuse 20 additional positions with the goal of investigating wrongdoing in the crypto markets. The goal, per the agency, is to tackle cryptocurrency fraud and crackdown on  malicious actors  attempting to profit from crypto marketplaces. The Cyber Unit was  instituted  in September 2017 with a focus on addressing cyber-based threats and protecting retail investors. But given the dramatic evolution of the digital assets markets in recent years, the new unit is expected to focus on securities law violations pertaining to - Crypto asset offerings Crypto asset exchanges Crypto asset lending and staking products Decentral...

An elusive and sophisticated cyberespionage campaign orchestrated by the China-backed Winnti group has managed to fly under the radar since at least 2019. Dubbed " Operation CuckooBees " by Israeli cybersecurity company Cybereason, the massive intellectual property theft operation enabled the threat actor to exfiltrate hundreds of gigabytes of information. Targets included technology and manufacturing companies primarily located in East Asia, Western Europe, and North America. "The attackers targeted intellectual property developed by the victims, including sensitive documents, blueprints, diagrams, formulas, and manufacturing-related proprietary data," the researchers  said . "In addition, the attackers collected information that could be used for future cyberattacks, such as details about the target company's business units, network architecture, user accounts and credentials, employee emails, and customer data." Winnti, also tracked by other ...

A pre-authenticated remote code execution vulnerability has been disclosed in dotCMS, an open-source content management system written in Java and " used by over 10,000 clients in over 70 countries around the globe, from Fortune 500 brands and mid-sized businesses." The critical flaw, tracked as CVE-2022-26352 , stems from a directory traversal attack when performing file uploads, enabling an adversary to execute arbitrary commands on the underlying system. "An attacker can upload arbitrary files to the system," Shubham Shah of Assetnote  said  in a report. "By uploading a JSP file to the tomcat's root directory, it is possible to achieve code execution, leading to command execution." In other words, the arbitrary file upload flaw can be abused to replace already existing files in the system with a web shell, which can then be used to gain persistent remote access. Although the exploit made it possible to write to arbitrary JavaScript files bei...

A  growing number of threat actors  are using the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war as a lure in various phishing and malware campaigns, even as critical infrastructure entities continue to be heavily targeted. "Government-backed actors from China, Iran, North Korea and Russia, as well as various unattributed groups, have used various Ukraine war-related themes in an effort to get targets to open malicious emails or click malicious links," Google Threat Analysis Group's (TAG) Billy Leonard  said  in a report. "Financially motivated and criminal actors are also using current events as a means for targeting users," Leonard added. One notable threat actor is Curious Gorge, which TAG has attributed to China People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force (PLA SSF) and has been observed striking government, military, logistics and manufacturing organizations in Ukraine, Russia and Central Asia. Attacks aimed at Russia have singled out several governmental entiti...

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed as many as five severe security flaws in the implementation of TLS protocol in several models of Aruba and Avaya network switches that could be abused to gain remote access to enterprise networks and steal valuable information. The findings follow the March disclosure of  TLStorm , a set of three critical flaws in APC Smart-UPS devices that could permit an attacker to take over control and, worse, physically damage the appliances. IoT security firm Armis, which uncovered the shortcomings, noted that the design flaws can be traced back to a common source: a misuse of  NanoSSL , a standards-based SSL developer suite from Mocana, a DigiCert subsidiary. The new set of flaws, dubbed  TLStorm 2.0 , renders Aruba and Avaya network switches vulnerable to remote code execution vulnerabilities, enabling an adversary to commandeer the devices, move laterally across the network, and exfiltrate sensitive data. Affected devices include Avay...

An analysis of four months of chat logs spanning more than 40 conversations between the operators of Conti and Hive ransomware and their victims has offered an insight into the groups' inner workings and their negotiation techniques. In one exchange, the Conti Team is said to have significantly reduced the ransom demand from a staggering $50 million to $1 million, a 98% drop, suggesting a willingness to settle for a far lower amount. "Both Conti and Hive are quick to lower ransom demands, routinely offering substantial reductions multiple times throughout negotiations," Cisco Talos  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This signals that despite popular belief, victims of a ransomware attack actually have significant negotiating power." Conti  and  Hive  are among the most prevalent ransomware strains in the threat landscape, cumulatively accounting for  29.1% of attacks  detected during the three-month-period between October and December...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new variant of the AvosLocker ransomware that disables antivirus solutions to evade detection after breaching target networks by taking advantage of unpatched security flaws.  "This is the first sample we observed from the U.S. with the capability to disable a defense solution using a legitimate Avast Anti-Rootkit Driver file (asWarPot.sys)," Trend Micro researchers, Christoper Ordonez and Alvin Nieto,  said  in a Monday analysis. "In addition, the ransomware is also capable of scanning multiple endpoints for the Log4j vulnerability (Log4shell) using Nmap  NSE script ." AvosLocker , one of the newer ransomware families to fill the vacuum left by  REvil , has been linked to a number of attacks that targeted critical infrastructure in the U.S., including financial services and government facilities. A ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) affiliate-based group first spotted in July 2021, AvosLocker goes beyond double extor...