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WordPress security company Wordfence on Thursday said it started detecting exploitation attempts targeting the newly disclosed flaw in Apache Commons Text on October 18, 2022. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2022-42889  aka Text4Shell , has been assigned a severity ranking of 9.8 out of a possible 10.0 on the CVSS scale and affects versions 1.5 through 1.9 of the library. It's also similar to the now infamous  Log4Shell  vulnerability in that the  issue  is rooted in the manner  string substitutions  carried out during  DNS, script, and URL lookups  could lead to the execution of arbitrary code on susceptible systems when passing untrusted input. "The attacker can send a crafted payload remotely using 'script,' 'dns,' and 'url' lookups to achieve arbitrary remote code execution," the Zscaler ThreatLabZ team explained . A  successful exploitation of the flaw  can enable a threat actor to open a reverse shell conn...

Acknowledging that you have a problem is the first step to addressing the problem in a serious way. This seems to be the reasoning for the White House recently announcing its "Strengthening America's Cybersecurity" initiative. The text of the announcement contains several statements that anyone who's ever read about cybersecurity will have heard many times over: increasing resilience, greater awareness, countering ransomware attacks – the list goes on.  There are some novel aspects to the text as well, including a realization that cybersecurity is not, has never been, and will never be something that can be solved at the nation-state level.  The White House also pointed to IoT warning labels as a solution – and reminded us all (and we do need reminding) about the importance of cybersecurity education. Let's take a look. International cooperation is critical A key point that the White House statement makes very clear is that cyberattacks are asymmetric in the...

Microsoft this week confirmed that it inadvertently exposed information related to thousands of customers following a security lapse that left an endpoint publicly accessible over the internet sans any authentication. "This misconfiguration resulted in the potential for unauthenticated access to some business transaction data corresponding to interactions between Microsoft and prospective customers, such as the planning or potential implementation and provisioning of Microsoft services," Microsoft  said  in an alert. Microsoft also emphasized that the B2B leak was "caused by an unintentional misconfiguration on an endpoint that is not in use across the Microsoft ecosystem and was not the result of a security vulnerability." The misconfiguration of the Azure Blob Storage was spotted on September 24, 2022, by cybersecurity company SOCRadar, which termed the leak  BlueBleed . Microsoft said it's in the process of directly notifying impacted customers. The Win...

Google on Thursday announced that it's seeking contributors to a new open source initiative called Graph for Understanding Artifact Composition , also known as GUAC, as part of its ongoing efforts to beef up the  software supply chain . "GUAC addresses a need created by the burgeoning efforts across the ecosystem to generate software build, security, and dependency metadata," Brandon Lum, Mihai Maruseac, and Isaac Hepworth of Google said in a post shared with The Hacker News. "GUAC is meant to democratize the availability of this security information by making it freely accessible and useful for every organization, not just those with enterprise-scale security and IT funding." Software supply chain has  emerged  a  lucrative   attack vector  for threat actors, wherein exploiting just one weakness -- as seen in the case of  SolarWinds  and  Log4Shell  -- opens a pathway long enough to traverse down the supply chain and steal sensiti...

A Russian-speaking ransomware group dubbed OldGremlin has been attributed to 16 malicious campaigns aimed at entities operating in the transcontinental Eurasian nation over the course of two and a half years. "The group's victims include companies in sectors such as logistics, industry, insurance, retail, real estate, software development, and banking," Group-IB  said  in an exhaustive report shared with The Hacker News. "In 2020, the group even targeted an arms manufacturer." In what's a rarity in the ransomware landscape, OldGremlin (aka TinyScouts) is one of the very few financially motivated cybercrime gangs that primarily focuses on Russian companies. Other notable groups consist of Dharma, Crylock, and Thanos, contributing to an uptick in ransomware attacks targeting businesses in the country by over 200% in 2021. OldGremlin first came to light in September 2020 when the Singapore-headquartered cybersecurity company  disclosed  nine campaigns orch...

The Iranian threat actor known as Domestic Kitten has been attributed to a new mobile campaign that masquerades as a translation app to distribute an updated variant of an Android malware known as FurBall. "Since June 2021, it has been distributed as a translation app via a copycat of an Iranian website that provides translated articles, journals, and books," ESET researcher Lukas Stefanko  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The updates, while retaining the same surveillance functionality as earlier versions, are designed to evade detection by security solutions, the Slovak cybersecurity firm added. Domestic Kitten, also called APT-C-50, is an Iranian threat activity cluster that has been previously identified as targeting individuals of interest with the goal of harvesting sensitive information from compromised mobile devices. It's been known to be active since at least 2016. A tactical analysis conducted by Trend Micro in 2019 revealed Domestic Kitten...

When creating a Sandbox, the mindset tends to be that the Sandbox is considered a place to play around, test things, and there will be no effect on the production or operational system. Therefore, people don't actively think they need to worry about its security. This mindset is not only wrong, but extremely dangerous.  When it comes to software developers, their version of sandbox is similar to a child's playground — a place to build and test without breaking any flows in production. Meanwhile, in the world of cybersecurity, the term 'sandbox' is used to describe a virtual environment or machine used to run suspicious code and other elements.  Many organizations use a Sandbox for their SaaS apps — to test changes without disrupting the production SaaS app or even to connect new apps (much like a software developer's Sandbox). This common practice often leads to a false sense of security and in turn a lack of thought for its security implications. This article wi...