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The maintainers of the official third-party software repository for Python have begun imposing a new two-factor authentication (2FA) condition for projects deemed "critical." "We've begun rolling out a 2FA requirement: soon, maintainers of critical projects must have 2FA enabled to publish, update, or modify them," Python Package Index (PyPI)  said  in a tweet last week. "Any maintainer of a critical project (both 'Maintainers' and 'Owners') are included in the 2FA requirement," it  added . Additionally, the developers of critical projects who have not previously turned on 2FA on PyPi are being offered free hardware security keys from the Google Open Source Security Team. PyPI, which is run by the Python Software Foundation, houses more than 350,000 projects, of which over  3,500 projects  are said to be tagged with a "critical" designation. According to the repository maintainers, any project accounting for the top 1% ...

A newly observed phishing campaign is leveraging the recently disclosed Follina security vulnerability to distribute a previously undocumented backdoor on Windows systems. "Rozena is a backdoor malware that is capable of injecting a remote shell connection back to the attacker's machine," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin  said  in a report this week. Tracked as  CVE-2022-30190 , the now-patched Microsoft Windows Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT) remote code execution vulnerability has come under heavy exploitation in recent weeks ever since it came to light in late May 2022. The starting point for the latest attack chain observed by Fortinet is a weaponized  Office document  that, when opened, connects to a  Discord CDN URL  to retrieve an HTML file (" index.htm ") that, in turn, invokes the diagnostic utility using a PowerShell command to download next-stage payloads from the same CDN attachment space. This includes the Rozena implant (...

Cybersecurity researchers are drawing attention to an ongoing wave of attacks linked to a threat cluster tracked as Raspberry Robin that's behind a Windows malware with worm-like capabilities.  Describing it as a "persistent" and "spreading" threat, Cybereason  said  it observed a number of victims in Europe. The infections involve a worm that propagates over removable USB devices containing malicious a .LNK file and leverages compromised QNAP network-attached storage (NAS) devices for command-and-control. It was  first documented  by researchers from Red Canary in May 2022. Also codenamed  QNAP worm  by Sekoia, the malware leverages a legitimate Windows installer binary called "msiexec.exe" to download and execute a malicious shared library (DLL) from a compromised QNAP NAS appliance. "To make it harder to detect, Raspberry Robin leverages process injections in three legitimate Windows system processes," Cybereason researcher Loïc Cast...

LockBit ransomware attacks are constantly evolving by making use of a wide range of techniques to infect targets while also taking steps to disable endpoint security solutions. "The affiliates that use LockBit's services conduct their attacks according to their preference and use different tools and techniques to achieve their goal," Cybereason security analysts Loïc Castel and Gal Romano  said . "As the attack progresses further along the kill chain, the activities from different cases tend to converge to similar activities." LockBit, which operates on a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) model like most groups, was first observed in September 2019 and has since emerged as the most dominant ransomware strain this year, surpassing other well-known groups like  Conti ,  Hive , and  BlackCat . This involves the malware authors licensing access to affiliates, who execute the attacks in exchange for using their tools and infrastructure and earn as much as 80% of ea...

Five months after announcing plans to disable Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros by default in the Office productivity suite, Microsoft appears to have rolled back its plans. "Based on feedback received, a rollback has started," Microsoft employee Angela Robertson  said  in a July 6 comment. "An update about the rollback is in progress. I apologize for any inconvenience of the rollback starting before the update about the change was made available." When reached by The Hacker News, Redmond said its decision to reverse course was temporary and that it's working to incorporate further usability improvements. "Following user feedback, we have rolled back this change temporarily while we make some additional changes to enhance usability," a Microsoft spokesperson said. "This is a temporary change, and we are fully committed to making the default change for all users. Regardless of the default setting, customers can block internet macros th...

Progress powers technology forward. But progress also has a cost: by adding new capabilities and features, the developer community is constantly adjusting the building blocks. That includes the fundamental languages used to code technology solutions. When the building blocks change, the code behind the technology solution must change too. It's a challenging and time-consuming exercise that drains resources. But what if there's an alternative? The problem: reading code someone else wrote Let's take a step back and take a look at one of the fundamental challenges in development: editing someone else's code. Editing code you just wrote, or wrote a couple of weeks ago, is just fine. But editing your own code written years ago – never mind someone else's code - that's a different story. In-house code style rules can help but there are always odd naming conventions for variables and functions, or unusual choices for algorithms. Arguably, a programmer's abilit...

A malicious browser extension with 350 variants is masquerading as a Google Translate add-on as part of an adware campaign targeting Russian users of Google Chrome, Opera, and Mozilla Firefox browsers. Mobile security firm Zimperium dubbed the malware family  ABCsoup , stating the "extensions are installed onto a victim's machine via a Windows-based executable, bypassing most endpoint security solutions, along with the security controls found in the official extension stores." The rogue browser add-ons come with the same extension ID as that of Google Translate — " aapbdbdomjkkjkaonfhkkikfgjllcleb " — in an attempt to trick users into believing that they have installed a legitimate extension. The extensions are not available on the official browser web stores themselves. Rather they are delivered through different Windows executables that install the add-on on the victim's web browser. In the event the targeted user already has the Google Translate ext...