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A high-severity security flaw has been disclosed in the Python URL parsing function that could be exploited to bypass domain or protocol filtering methods implemented with a blocklist, ultimately resulting in arbitrary file reads and command execution. "urlparse has a parsing problem when the entire URL starts with blank characters," the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) said in a Friday advisory. "This problem affects both the parsing of hostname and scheme, and eventually causes any blocklisting methods to fail." The flaw has been assigned the identifier  CVE-2023-24329  and carries a CVSS score of 7.5. Security researcher Yebo Cao has been credited with discovering and reporting the issue in August 2022. It has been addressed in the following versions - >= 3.12 3.11.x >= 3.11.4 3.10.x >= 3.10.12 3.9.x >= 3.9.17 3.8.x >= 3.8.17, and  3.7.x >= 3.7.17 urllib.parse  is a widely used parsing function that makes it possible to break dow...

A hitherto undocumented threat actor operating for nearly a decade and codenamed  MoustachedBouncer has been attributed to cyber espionage attacks aimed at foreign embassies in Belarus. "Since 2020, MoustachedBouncer has most likely been able to perform adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attacks at the ISP level, within Belarus, in order to compromise its targets," ESET security researcher Matthieu Faou  said , describing the group as skilled and advanced. The adversary, active since at least 2014, is assessed to be aligned with Belarusian interests, likely employing a lawful interception system such as  SORM  to conduct its AitM attacks as well as deploy disparate tools called NightClub and Disco. Both the Windows malware frameworks support additional spying plugins including a screenshotter, an audio recorder, and a file stealer. The oldest sample of NightClub dates back to November 19, 2014, when it was uploaded to VirusTotal from Ukraine. Embassy staff from fo...

Google has announced plans to add support for quantum-resistant encryption algorithms in its Chrome browser, starting with version 116. "Chrome will begin supporting  X25519Kyber768  for establishing symmetric secrets in  TLS , starting in Chrome 116, and available behind a flag in Chrome 115," Devon O'Brien  said  in a post published Thursday. Kyber was  chosen  by the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as the candidate for general encryption in a bid to tackle future cyber attacks posed by the advent of quantum computing.  Kyber-768  is roughly the security equivalent of  AES-192 . The encryption algorithm has already been adopted by  Cloudflare ,  Amazon Web Services , and IBM. X25519Kyber768 is a hybrid algorithm that combines the output of  X25519 , an elliptic curve algorithm widely used for key agreement in TLS, and Kyber-768 to create a strong session key to en...

The Chinese threat actor known as APT31 (aka Bronze Vinewood, Judgement Panda, or Violet Typhoon) has been linked to a set of advanced backdoors that are capable of exfiltrating harvested sensitive information to Dropbox. The malware is part of a broader collection of  more than 15 implants  that have been put to use by the adversary in attacks targeting industrial organizations in Eastern Europe in 2022. "The attackers aimed to establish a permanent channel for data exfiltration, including data stored on air-gapped systems," Kaspersky  said  in an analysis spotlighting APT31's previously undocumented tradecraft. The intrusions employ a three-stage malware stack, each focused on disparate aspects of the attack chain: setting up persistence, gathering sensitive data, and transmitting the information to a remote server under the threat actor's control. Some variants of the second-stage backdoors also come with features designed to look up file names in the Micros...

An unknown threat actor has been linked to a cyber attack on a power generation company in southern Africa with a new variant of the SystemBC malware called DroxiDat as a precursor to a suspected ransomware attack. "The proxy-capable backdoor was deployed alongside Cobalt Strike Beacons in a south African nation's critical infrastructure," Kurt Baumgartner, principal security researcher at Kaspersky's Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT),  said . The Russian cybersecurity company said the attack, which took place in late March 2023, was in its early stages and involved the use of DroxiDat to profile the system and proxy network traffic using the  SOCKS5 protocol  to and from command-and-control (C2) infrastructure. SystemBC  is a C/C++-based commodity malware and remote administrative tool that was  first seen in 2019 . Its main feature is to set up  SOCKS5 proxies  on victim computers that can then be used by threat actors to tunnel maliciou...

A set of 16 high-severity security flaws have been disclosed in the  CODESYS V3  software development kit (SDK) that could result in remote code execution and denial-of-service under specific conditions, posing risks to operational technology (OT) environments. The flaws, tracked from CVE-2022-47378 through CVE-2022-47393 and dubbed  CoDe16 , carry a CVSS score of 8.8 with the exception of CVE-2022-47391, which has a severity rating of 7.5. Twelve of the flaws are buffer overflow vulnerabilities. "Exploitation of the discovered vulnerabilities, which affect all versions of CODESYS V3 prior to version 3.5.19.0, could put operational technology (OT) infrastructure at risk of attacks, such as remote code execution (RCE) and denial-of-service (DoS)," Vladimir Tokarev of the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Community  said  in a report. While a successful weaponization of the flaws requires user authentication as well as an in-depth knowledge of the proprietary prot...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has  added  a recently patched security flaw in Microsoft's .NET and Visual Studio products to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. Tracked as  CVE-2023-38180  (CVSS score: 7.5), the high-severity flaw relates to a case denial-of-service (DoS) impacting .NET and Visual Studio. It was  addressed  by Microsoft as part of its August 2023 Patch Tuesday updates shipped earlier this week, tagging it with an "Exploitation More Likely" assessment. While exact details surrounding the nature of exploitation are unclear, the Windows maker has acknowledged the existence of a proof-of-concept (PoC) in its advisory. It also said that attacks leveraging the flaw can be pulled off without any additional privileges or user interaction. "Proof-of-concept exploit code is available, or an attack demonstration is not practical for most systems," the com...