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As many as 350,000 open source projects are believed to be potentially vulnerable to exploitation as a result of a security flaw in a Python module that has remained unpatched for 15 years. The open source repositories span a number of industry verticals, such as software development, artificial intelligence/machine learning, web development, media, security, and IT management. The shortcoming, tracked as  CVE-2007-4559  (CVSS score: 6.8), is rooted in the tarfile module, successful exploitation of which could lead to code execution from an arbitrary file write. "The vulnerability is a path traversal attack in the extract and extractall functions in the tarfile module that allow an attacker to overwrite arbitrary files by adding the '..' sequence to filenames in a TAR archive," Trellix security researcher Kasimir Schulz  said  in a writeup. Originally disclosed in August 2007, the bug has to do with how a specially crafted tar archive can be leveraged to overwr...

A now-patched critical security flaw affecting Atlassian Confluence Server that came to light a few months ago is being actively exploited for illicit cryptocurrency mining on unpatched installations. "If left unremedied and successfully exploited, this vulnerability could be used for multiple and more malicious attacks, such as a complete domain takeover of the infrastructure and the deployment information stealers, remote access trojans (RATs), and ransomware," Trend Micro threat researcher Sunil Bharti  said  in a report. The issue, tracked as  CVE-2022-26134  (CVSS score: 9.8), was addressed by the Australian software company in June 2022. In one of the infection chains observed by the cybersecurity company, the flaw was leveraged to download and run a shell script ("ro.sh") on the victim's machine, which, in turn, fetched a second shell script ("ap.sh"). The malicious code is designed to update the  PATH variable  to include additional paths...

An unknown attacker targeted tens of thousands of unauthenticated Redis servers exposed on the internet in an attempt to  install a cryptocurrency miner . It's not immediately known if all of these hosts were successfully compromised. Nonetheless, it was made possible by means of a "lesser-known technique" designed to trick the servers into writing data to arbitrary files – a case of  unauthorized access  that was first documented in September 2018. "The general idea behind this exploitation technique is to configure Redis to write its file-based database to a directory containing some method to authorize a user (like adding a key to '.ssh/authorized_keys'), or start a process (like adding a script to '/etc/cron.d')," Censys  said  in a new write-up. The attack surface management platform said it uncovered evidence (i.e., Redis commands) indicating efforts on part of the attacker to store malicious  crontab entries  into the file "/var/...

In what's the latest crypto heist to target the decentralized finance (DeFi) space, hackers have stolen digital assets worth around $160 million from crypto trading firm Wintermute . The hack involved a series of unauthorized transactions that transferred USD Coin, Binance USD, Tether USD, Wrapped ETH, and 66 other cryptocurrencies to the  attacker's wallet . The company said that its centralized finance (CeFi) and over-the-counter (OTC) operations have not been impacted by the security incident. It did not disclose when the hack took place. The digital asset market maker, which provides liquidity to more several exchanges and crypto platforms, warned of disruption to its services in the coming days, but stressed that it's "solvent with twice over that amount in equity left." "We are (still) open to treat[ing] this as a white hat, so if you are the attacker – get in touch," the company's founder and CEO, Evgeny Gaevoy,  said  in a tweet. Detai...

For cybersecurity professionals, it is a huge challenge to separate the "good guys" from the "villains". In the past, most cyberattacks could simply be traced to external cybercriminals, cyberterrorists, or rogue nation-states.  But not anymore . Threats from within organizations – also known as "insider threats" – are increasing and cybersecurity practitioners are feeling the pain.  Traditional perimeter defenses are not designed to prevent these attacks. They also struggle to keep  external  attackers out. Clever hackers continuously find ways in and "weaponize" their trusted status inside the network to compromise sensitive assets and orchestrate larger attacks. And an increasing number of enterprise resources – applications, devices, data, and even people – now live outside the perimeter. It's difficult to protect these assets with legacy approaches, much less fortify the perimeter to keep attackers out completely. How can you protect your organization in th...

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has added Pacific Network Corp, along with its subsidiary ComNet (USA) LLC, and China Unicom (Americas) Operations Limited, to the list of communications equipment and services that have been deemed a threat to national security. The agency  said  the companies are subject to the Chinese government's exploitation, influence, and control, and could be forced to comply with requests for intercepting and misrouting communications, without the ability to challenge such requests. The Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau further noted that equipment and services from ComNet and China Unicom could present an opportunity for the Chinese government to carry out espionage operations and gather intelligence against the U.S. Alternatively, they could also provide the Chinese government with a strategic capability to "target, collect, alter, block, and reroute network traffic." China Unicom also earned a place on the list fo...

Cybersecurity company Imperva has disclosed that it mitigated a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack with a total of over 25.3 billion requests on June 27, 2022. The "strong attack," which targeted an unnamed Chinese telecommunications company, is said to have lasted for four hours and peaked at 3.9 million requests per second (RPS). "Attackers used HTTP/2 multiplexing, or combining multiple packets into one, to send multiple requests at once over individual connections," Imperva  said  in a report published on September 19. The attack was launched from a botnet that comprised nearly 170,000 different IP addresses spanning routers, security cameras, and compromised servers located in more than 180 countries, primarily the U.S., Indonesia, and Brazil. The disclosure also comes as web infrastructure provider Akamai said it fielded a new DDoS assault aimed at a customer based in Eastern Europe on September 12, with attack traffic spiking at 704.8 million p...