The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

Virtual Chief Information Security Officer (vCISO) services (also known as 'Fractional CISO' or 'CISO-as-a-Service') are growing in popularity, especially as growing cyber threats, tightening regulatory demands and strict cyber insurance requirements are driving small to medium-sized enterprises demand for strategic cybersecurity and compliance guidance and management. But vCISO services are labor intensive, require highly skilled experts, and are difficult to scale. So, how exactly do successful vCISO providers overcome these obstacles? When you want advice on how to overcome challenges, scale and expand, who better to go to than the people who have been there, seen it, and done it with success? In a new eBook, titled ' Top virtual CISOs share: 7 tips on how vCISO service providers can maximize services, increase revenues, and improve margins " ( Download here ), vCISO platform provider Cynomi interviewed some of America's top vCISO service providers (MS...

SideWinder, a prolific nation-state actor mainly known for targeting Pakistan military entities, compromised the official website of the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) to deliver a tailored malware called  WarHawk . "The newly discovered WarHawk backdoor contains various malicious modules that deliver Cobalt Strike, incorporating new TTPs such as  KernelCallBackTable injection  and Pakistan Standard Time zone check in order to ensure a victorious campaign," Zscaler ThreatLabz  said . The threat group, also called APT-C-17, Rattlesnake, and Razor Tiger, is  suspected  to be an Indian state-sponsored actor, although a report from Kaspersky earlier this May acknowledged previous indicators that led to the attribution have since disappeared, making it challenging it to link the threat cluster to a specific nation. More than 1,000 attacks are said to have been  launched by the group  since April 2020, an indication of SideWin...

U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies have published a joint advisory warning of attacks perpetrated by a cybercrime gang known as the  Daixin Team  primarily targeting the healthcare sector in the country. "The Daixin Team is a ransomware and data extortion group that has targeted the HPH Sector with ransomware and data extortion operations since at least June 2022," the agencies  said . The alert was published Friday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Over the past four months, the group has been linked to multiple ransomware incidents in the Healthcare and Public Health (HPH) sector, encrypting servers related to electronic health records, diagnostics, imaging, and intranet services. It's also said to have exfiltrated personal identifiable information (PII) and patient health information (PHI) as part of a double extortion scheme to se...

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...