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With each passing year, the cybersecurity threat landscape continues to worsen. That reality makes cybersecurity analysts some of the most sought-after technology professionals in the world. And there are nowhere near enough of them to meet the demand. At last count, there were over  3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs  worldwide — and that number is still growing. The situation means that it's a great time to become a cybersecurity analyst. What's more, the skyrocketing demand means it's possible to start a lucrative freelance career in the field and take complete control over your professional future. Here's a start-to-finish guide on how to do exactly that. Start With the Right Training The first step on the path to becoming a freelance cybersecurity analyst is to acquire the necessary skills. For those without an existing technology background, the best place to start is with a cybersecurity bootcamp. They're designed to get newcomers up to speed with ba...

Web infrastructure and security company Cloudflare disclosed this week that it halted a 2.5 Tbps distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack launched by a Mirai botnet. Characterizing it as a "multi-vector attack consisting of UDP and TCP floods," researcher Omer Yoachimik said the DDoS attack targeted the Minecraft server Wynncraft in Q3 2022. "The entire 2.5 Tbps attack lasted about 2 minutes, and the peak of the 26 million rps attack [was] only 15 seconds," Yoachimik  noted . "This is the largest attack we've ever seen from the bitrate perspective." Cloudflare also pointed to a surge in multi-terabit DDoS attacks as well as longer-lasting volumetric attacks during the time period, not to mention an uptick in attacks targeting Taiwan and Japan. The disclosure comes almost 10 months after Microsoft said it thwarted a  record-breaking 3.47 Tbps DDoS attack  in November 2021 directed against an unnamed Azure customer in Asia. Other  DDoS attacks ...

A proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code has been made available for the recently disclosed critical security flaw affecting Fortinet FortiOS, FortiProxy, and FortiSwitchManager, making it imperative that users move quickly to apply the patches. "FortiOS exposes a management web portal that allows a user to configure the system," Horizon3.ai researcher James Horseman  said . "Additionally, a user can SSH into the system which exposes a locked down CLI interface." The issue, tracked as  CVE-2022-40684  (CVSS score: 9.6), concerns an  authentication bypass  vulnerability that could allow a remote attacker to perform malicious operations on the administrative interface via specially crafted HTTP(S) requests. A successful exploitation of the shortcoming is tantamount to granting complete access "to do just about anything" on the affected system, including altering network configurations, adding malicious users, and intercepting network traffic. That said, ...

A previously undocumented command-and-control (C2) framework dubbed Alchimist is likely being used in the wild to target Windows, macOS, and Linux systems. "Alchimist C2 has a web interface written in Simplified Chinese and can generate a configured payload, establish remote sessions, deploy payload to the remote machines, capture screenshots, perform remote shellcode execution, and run arbitrary commands," Cisco Talos  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Written in GoLang, Alchimist is complemented by a beacon implant called Insekt, which comes with remote access features that can be instrumented by the C2 server. The discovery of Alchimist and its assorted family of malware implants comes three months after Talos also detailed another self-contained framework known as  Manjusaka , which has been  touted  as the "Chinese sibling of Sliver and Cobalt Strike." Even more interestingly, both Manjusaka and Alchimist pack in similar functionalities, ...

A novel timing attack discovered against the npm's registry API can be exploited to potentially disclose private packages used by organizations, putting developers at risk of supply chain threats. "By creating a list of possible package names, threat actors can detect organizations'  scoped private packages  and then masquerade public packages, tricking employees and users into downloading them," Aqua Security researcher Yakir Kadkoda  said . The Scoped Confusion attack banks on analyzing the time it takes for the  npm API  (registry.npmjs[.]org) to return an HTTP 404 error message when querying for a private package, and measuring it against the response time for a non-existing module. "It takes on average less time to get a reply for a private package that does not exist compared to a private package that does," Kadkoda explained. The idea, ultimately, is to identify packages internally used by companies, which could then be used by threat actors to...

What is the OWASP Top 10, and – just as important – what is it not? In this review, we look at how you can make this critical risk report work for you and your organisation. What is OWASP? OWASP  is the Open Web Application Security Project, an international non-profit organization dedicated to improving web application security.  It operates on the core principle that all of its materials are freely available and easily accessible online, so that anyone anywhere can improve their own web app security. It offers a number of tools, videos, and forums to help you do this – but their best-known project is the OWASP Top 10. The top 10 risks The  OWASP Top 10  outlines the most critical risks to web application security. Put together by a team of security experts from all over the world, the list is designed to raise awareness of the current security landscape and offer developers and security professionals invaluable insights into the latest and most widespread sec...

An advanced persistent threat (APT) actor known as  Budworm  targeted a U.S.-based entity for the first time in more than six years, according to latest research. The attack was aimed at an unnamed U.S. state legislature, the Symantec Threat Hunter team, part of Broadcom Software,  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Other "strategically significant" intrusions mounted over the past six months were directed against a government of a Middle Eastern country, a multinational electronics manufacturer, and a hospital in South East Asia. Budworm , also called APT27, Bronze Union, Emissary Panda, Lucky Mouse, and Red Phoenix, is a threat actor that's believed to operate on behalf of China through attacks that leverage a mix of custom and openly available tools to exfiltrate information of interest. "Bronze Union maintains a high degree of operational flexibility in order to adapt to the environments it operates in," Secureworks  notes  in a profil...