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The breach of LA Unified School District (LAUSD) highlights the prevalence of password vulnerabilities, as criminal hackers continue to use breached credentials in increasingly frequent ransomware attacks on education. The Labor Day weekend breach of LAUSD brought significant  districtwide disruptions to access to email , computers, and applications. It's unclear what student or employee data the attackers exfiltrated. There is a significant trend in ransomware breaches in education, a highly vulnerable sector. The transitory nature of students leaves accounts and passwords vulnerable. The open environments schools create to foster student exploration and the relative naivete in the sector regarding cybersecurity invite attacks.  The breach at LAUSD and what happened afterward Four days post-breach, reports came that criminals had offered credentials for accounts inside the school district's network  for sale on the dark web  months before the attack. The stolen...

Researchers have disclosed details about a now-patched critical flaw in the Move virtual machine that powers the Aptos blockchain network. The vulnerability "can cause Aptos nodes to crash and cause denial of service," Singapore-based Numen Cyber Labs  said  in a technical write-up published earlier this month. Aptos is a  new entrant  to the blockchain space, which  launched  its  mainnet  on October 17, 2022. It has its roots in the Diem stablecoin payment system proposed by Meta (née Facebook), which also introduced a short-lived digital wallet called  Novi . The network is built using a platform-agnostic programming language known as  Move , a Rust-based system that's  designed  to implement and execute  smart contracts  in a secure  runtime environment , also known as the Move Virtual Machine (aka  MoveVM ). The  vulnerability  identified by Numen Cyber Labs is rooted in the Move langua...

The notorious  Emotet botnet  has been linked to a new wave of malspam campaigns that take advantage of password-protected archive files to drop CoinMiner and Quasar RAT on compromised systems. In an  attack chain  detected by Trustwave SpiderLabs researchers, an invoice-themed ZIP file lure was found to contain a nested self-extracting (SFX) archive, the first archive acting as a conduit to launch the second. While phishing attacks like these traditionally require persuading the target into opening the attachment, the cybersecurity company said the campaign sidesteps this hurdle by making use of a batch file to automatically supply the password to unlock the payload. The first SFX archive file further makes use of either a PDF or Excel icon to make it appear legitimate, when, in reality, it contains three components: the password-protected second SFX RAR file, the aforementioned batch script which launches the archive, and a decoy PDF or image. "The execution ...

A now-patched vulnerability in VMware Workspace ONE Access has been observed being exploited to deliver both cryptocurrency miners and ransomware on affected machines. "The attacker intends to utilize a victim's resources as much as possible, not only to install RAR1Ransom for extortion, but also to spread GuardMiner to collect cryptocurrency," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin  said  in a Thursday report. The issue, tracked as CVE-2022-22954 (CVSS score: 9.8), concerns a remote code execution vulnerability that stems from a case of server-side template injection. Although the shortcoming was addressed by the virtualization services provider in April 2022, it has since come under active exploitation in the wild. Fortinet said it observed in August 2022 attacks that sought to weaponize the flaw to deploy the  Mirai botnet  on Linux devices as well as the RAR1Ransom and  GuardMiner , a variant of the XMRig Monero miner. The Mirai sample is re...

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...