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As many as  121 new security flaws  were patched by Microsoft as part of its Patch Tuesday updates for the month of August, which also includes a fix for a Support Diagnostic Tool vulnerability that the company said is being actively exploited in the wild. Of the 121 bugs, 17 are rated Critical, 102 are rated Important, one is rated Moderate, and one is rated Low in severity. Two of the issues have been listed as publicly known at the time of the release. It's worth noting that the 121 security flaws are in addition to  25 shortcomings  the tech giant addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser late last month and the previous week. Topping the list of patches is  CVE-2022-34713  (CVSS score: 7.8), a case of remote code execution affecting the Microsoft Windows Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT), making it the second flaw in the same component after  Follina  (CVE-2022-30190) to be weaponized in  real-world attacks  within three months....

Customer engagement platform Twilio on Monday disclosed that a "sophisticated" threat actor gained "unauthorized access" using an SMS-based phishing campaign aimed at its staff to gain information on a "limited number" of accounts. The social-engineering attack was bent on stealing employee credentials, the company said, calling the as-yet-unidentified adversary "well-organized" and "methodical in their actions." The incident came to light on August 4. "This broad based attack against our employee base succeeded in fooling some employees into providing their credentials," it  said  in a notice. "The attackers then used the stolen credentials to gain access to some of our internal systems, where they were able to access certain customer data." The communications giant has  268,000 active customer accounts , and counts companies like Airbnb, Box, Dell, DoorDash, eBay, Glassdoor, Lyft, Salesforce, Stripe, Twitter, ...

The U.S. Treasury Department on Monday placed sanctions against crypto mixing service Tornado Cash, citing its use by the North Korea-backed Lazarus Group in the high-profile hacks of Ethereum bridges to launder and cash out the ill-gotten money. Tornado Cash, which allows users to move cryptocurrency assets between accounts by obfuscating their origin and destination, is estimated to have been used to launder more than $7.6 billion worth of virtual assets since its creation in 2019, the department said. Thefts, hacks, and fraud account for $1.54 billion of the total assets sent through the mixer, according to blockchain analytics firm  Elliptic . Crypto mixing is akin to shuffling digital currencies through a black box, blending a certain quantity of cryptocurrency in private pools before transferring it to its designated receivers for a fee. The aim is to make transactions anonymous and difficult to trace. "Despite public assurances otherwise, Tornado Cash has repeatedly f...

AI agents promise to automate everything from financial reconciliations to incident response. Yet every time an AI agent spins up a workflow, it has to authenticate somewhere; often with a high-privilege API key, OAuth token, or service account that defenders can't easily see. These "invisible" non-human identities (NHIs) now outnumber human accounts in most cloud environments, and they have become one of the ripest targets for attackers. Astrix's Field CTO Jonathan Sander put it bluntly in a recent Hacker News webinar : "One dangerous habit we've had for a long time is trusting application logic to act as the guardrails. That doesn't work when your AI agent is powered by LLMs that don't stop and think when they're about to do something wrong. They just do it." Why AI Agents Redefine Identity Risk Autonomy changes everything: An AI agent can chain multiple API calls and modify data without a human in the loop. If the underlying credential is exposed or overprivileged, each addit...

TL;DR: As weird as it might sound, seeing a few false positives reported by a security scanner is probably a good sign and certainly better than seeing none. Let's explain why. Introduction False positives have made a somewhat unexpected appearance in our lives in recent years. I am, of course, referring to the COVID-19 pandemic, which required massive testing campaigns in order to control the spread of the virus. For the record, a false positive is a result that appears positive (for COVID-19 in our case), where it is actually negative (the person is not infected). More commonly, we speak of false alarms. In computer security, we are also often confronted with false positives. Ask the security team behind any SIEM what their biggest operational challenge is, and chances are that false positives will be mentioned. A recent  report  estimates that as much as 20% of all the alerts received by security professionals are false positives, making it a big source of fatigue. Yet...

In what's yet another instance of malicious packages creeping into public code repositories, 10 modules have been removed from the Python Package Index (PyPI) for their ability to harvest critical data points such as passwords and API tokens. The packages "install info-stealers that enable attackers to steal developer's private data and personal credentials," Israeli cybersecurity firm Check Point  said  in a Monday report. A short summary of the offending packages is below - Ascii2text , which downloads a nefarious script that gathers passwords stored in web browsers such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, and Yandex Browser Pyg-utils, Pymocks, and PyProto2 , which are designed to  steal users' AWS credentials Test-async and Zlibsrc , which download and execute malicious code during installation Free-net-vpn, Free-net-vpn2, and WINRPCexploit , which steal user credentials and environment variables, and Browserdiv , which are capable of coll...

Over a dozen military-industrial complex enterprises and public institutions in Afghanistan and Europe have come under a wave of targeted attacks since January 2022 to steal confidential data by simultaneously making use of six different backdoors. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky  attributed  the attacks "with a high degree of confidence" to a China-linked threat actor tracked by  Proofpoint  as  TA428 , citing overlaps in tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).  TA428, also known by the names Bronze Dudley, Temp.Hex, and Vicious Panda, has a  history  of striking entities in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and Mongolia. It's believed to share connections with another hacking group called Mustang Panda (aka Bronze President). Targets of the latest cyber espionage campaign included industrial plants, design bureaus and research institutes, government agencies, ministries and departments in several East European countries and Afghanistan. A...

A new botnet named Orchard has been observed using Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto's account transaction information to generate domain names to conceal its command-and-control (C2) infrastructure. "Because of the uncertainty of Bitcoin transactions, this technique is more unpredictable than using the common time-generated [ domain generation algorithms ], and thus more difficult to defend against," researchers from Qihoo 360's Netlab security team said in a Friday write-up. Orchard is said to have undergone three revisions since February 2021, with the botnet primarily used to deploy additional payloads onto a victim's machine and execute commands received from the C2 server. It's also designed to upload device and user information as well as infect USB storage devices to propagate the malware. Netlab's analysis shows that over 3,000 hosts have been enslaved by the malware to date, most of them located in China. Orchard has also been subjected to ...