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Spanish law enforcement officials have announced the arrest of two individuals in connection with a cyberattack on the country's radioactivity alert network (RAR), which took place between March and June 2021. The act of sabotage is said to have disabled more than one-third of the sensors that are maintained by the Directorate-General for Civil Protection and Emergencies ( DGPCE ) and used to monitor excessive radiation levels across the country. The reason for the attacks is unknown as yet. "The two detainees, former workers, attacked the computer system and caused the connection of the sensors to fail, reducing their detection capacity even in the environment of nuclear power plants," the Policía Nacional  said . The law enforcement probe, dubbed Operation GAMMA, commenced in June 2021 in the immediate aftermath of the attack perpetrated against the RAR network, which is a mesh of 800 gamma radiation detection sensors deployed in various parts of the country to de...

A week after Atlassian rolled out patches to contain a critical flaw in its Questions For Confluence app for Confluence Server and Confluence Data Center, the shortcoming has now come under active exploitation in the wild. The bug in question is  CVE-2022-26138 , which concerns the use of a hard-coded password in the app that could be exploited by a remote, unauthenticated attacker to gain unrestricted access to all pages in Confluence. The real-world exploitation follows the release of the hard-coded credentials on Twitter, prompting the Australian software company to prioritize patches to mitigate potential threats targeting the flaw. "Unsurprisingly, it didn't take long [...] to observe exploitation once the hard-coded credentials were released, given the high value of Confluence for attackers who often jump on Confluence vulnerabilities to execute ransomware attacks," Rapid7 security researcher Glenn Thorpe  said . It's worth noting that the bug only exists...

Google on Wednesday said it's once again delaying its plans to turn off third-party cookies in the Chrome web browser from late 2023 to the second half of 2024. "The most consistent feedback we've received is the need for more time to evaluate and test the new Privacy Sandbox technologies before deprecating third-party cookies in Chrome," Anthony Chavez, vice president of Privacy Sandbox,  said . In keeping this in mind, the internet and ad tech giant said it's taking a "deliberate approach" and  extending the testing window  for its ongoing Privacy Sandbox initiatives prior to phasing out third-party cookies. Cookies are pieces of data planted on a user's computer or other device by the web browser as a website is accessed, with third-party cookies fueling much of the digital advertising ecosystem and its ability to track users across different sites to show targeted ads. Privacy Sandbox is Google's umbrella term for a set of technologies ...

With Microsoft taking steps to block Excel 4.0 (XLM or XL4) and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros by default across Office apps, malicious actors are responding by refining their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). "The use of VBA and XL4 Macros decreased approximately 66% from October 2021 through June 2022," Proofpoint  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News, calling it "one of the largest email threat landscape shifts in recent history." In its place, adversaries are increasingly pivoting away from macro-enabled documents to other alternatives, including container files such as ISO and RAR as well as Windows Shortcut (LNK) files in campaigns to distribute malware. "Threat actors pivoting away from directly distributing macro-based attachments in email represents a significant shift in the threat landscape," Sherrod DeGrippo, vice president of threat research and detection at Proofpoint, said in a statement. "Threat act...

A cyber mercenary that "ostensibly sells general security and information analysis services to commercial customers" used several Windows and Adobe zero-day exploits in limited and highly-targeted attacks against European and Central American entities. The company, which Microsoft describes as a private-sector offensive actor (PSOA), is an Austria-based outfit called  DSIRF  that's linked to the development and attempted sale of a piece of cyberweapon referred to as Subzero , which can be used to hack targets' phones, computers, and internet-connected devices. "Observed victims to date include law firms, banks, and strategic consultancies in countries such as Austria, the United Kingdom, and Panama," the tech giant's cybersecurity teams  said  in a Wednesday report. Microsoft is  tracking  the actor under the moniker KNOTWEED, continuing its trend of terming PSOAs using names given to trees and shrubs. The company previously designated the name  SO...

MSSPs must find ways to balance the need to please existing customers, add new ones, and deliver high-margin services against their internal budget constraints and the need to maintain high employee morale. In an environment where there are thousands of potential alerts each day and cyberattacks are growing rapidly in frequency and sophistication, this isn't an easy balance to maintain. Customers want airtight security, but adding dozens of security tools to scan for and respond to any potential attack often means that specific analysts become experts in specific tools. It's left to the whole team to manually correlate their findings to discover and respond to multi-layered attacks, and hackers are always finding ways to exploit the gaps in coverage. This is a no-win situation where the analysts are frustrated, customers are dissatisfied, and costs can easily run out of control. To win in the marketplace, MSSPs must find ways to make their teams highly efficient while driving higher...

The team behind LibreOffice has released security updates to fix three security flaws in the productivity software, one of which could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution on affected systems. Tracked as  CVE-2022-26305 , the issue has been described as a case of improper certificate validation when checking whether a macro is signed by a trusted author, leading to the execution of rogue code packaged within the macros. "An adversary could therefore create an arbitrary certificate with a serial number and an issuer string identical to a trusted certificate which LibreOffice would present as belonging to the trusted author, potentially leading to the user to execute arbitrary code contained in macros improperly trusted," LibreOffice said in an advisory. Also resolved is the use of a static initialization vector ( IV ) during encryption ( CVE-2022-26306 ) that could have weakened the security should a bad actor have access to the user's configuration inform...