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Attack surface management (ASM) and vulnerability management (VM) are often confused, and while they overlap, they're not the same. The main difference between attack surface management and vulnerability management is in their scope: vulnerability management checks a list of known assets, while attack surface management assumes you have unknown assets and so begins with discovery. Let's look at both in more detail. What is vulnerability management? Vulnerability management is, at the simplest level, the use of automated tools to identify, prioritize and report on security issues and vulnerabilities in your digital infrastructure. Vulnerability management uses automated scanners to run regular, scheduled scans on assets within a known IP range to detect established and new vulnerabilities, so you can apply patches, remove vulnerabilities or mitigate any potential risks. These vulnerabilities tend to use a risk score or scale – such as CVSS – and risk calculations. Vulnerability sca...

The banking trojan known as  Mispadu  has expanded its focus beyond Latin America (LATAM) and Spanish-speaking individuals to target users in Italy, Poland, and Sweden. Targets of the ongoing campaign include entities spanning finance, services, motor vehicle manufacturing, law firms, and commercial facilities, according to Morphisec. "Despite the geographic expansion, Mexico remains the primary target," security researcher Arnold Osipov  said  in a report published last week. "The campaign has resulted in thousands of stolen credentials, with records dating back to April 2023. The threat actor leverages these credentials to orchestrate malicious phishing emails, posing a significant threat to recipients." Mispadu, also called URSA,  came to light  in 2019, when it was observed carrying out credential theft activities aimed at financial institutions in Brazil and Mexico by displaying fake pop-up windows. The Delphi-based malware is also capable of taki...

A critical security flaw impacting the LayerSlider plugin for WordPress could be abused to extract sensitive information from databases, such as password hashes. The flaw, designated as  CVE-2024-2879 , carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10.0. It has been described as a case of SQL injection impacting versions from 7.9.11 through 7.10.0. The issue has been addressed in version 7.10.1 released on March 27, 2024, following responsible disclosure on March 25. "This update includes important security fixes," the maintainers of LayerSlider  said  in their release notes. LayerSlider is a visual web content editor, a graphic design software, and a digital visual effects that allows users to create animations and rich content for their websites. According to its own site, the plugin is  used  by "millions of users worldwide." The flaw discovered in the tool stems from a case of insufficient escaping of user supplied parameters and the absence of ...

The malicious code inserted into the open-source library XZ Utils, a widely used package present in major Linux distributions, is also capable of facilitating remote code execution, a new analysis has revealed. The audacious supply chain compromise, tracked as  CVE-2024-3094  (CVSS score: 10.0), came to light last week when Microsoft engineer and PostgreSQL developer Andres Freund alerted to the  presence  of a  backdoor  in the data compression utility that gives remote attackers a way to sidestep secure shell authentication and gain complete access to an affected system. "I was doing some micro-benchmarking at the time, needed to quiesce the system to reduce noise," Freund said in a post shared on Mastodon. "Saw sshd processes were using a surprising amount of CPU, despite immediately failing because of wrong usernames etc." "Profiled sshd, showing lots of cpu time in liblzma, with perf unable to attribute it to a symbol. Got suspicious. Recalled tha...

Cloud solutions are more mainstream – and therefore more exposed – than ever before. In 2023 alone, a staggering 82% of data breaches were against public, private, or hybrid cloud environments. What's more, nearly 40% of breaches spanned multiple cloud environments. The average cost of a cloud breach was above the overall average, at $4.75 million. In a time where cloud has become the de facto standard – with 65% of IT decision-makers confirming that cloud-based services are their first choice when upgrading or purchasing new solutions – despite its overwhelming prominence, cloud security still faces multiple challenges.  Security Challenges in the Cloud  One major hurdle is the lack of visibility. Unlike physical servers you can see and touch, cloud resources are often spread across vast networks, making it difficult to monitor for suspicious activity and leaving vulnerabilities undetected. Another challenge is the inconsistency across cloud vendor permission management s...

A threat activity cluster tracked as  Earth Freybug  has been observed using a new malware called UNAPIMON to fly under the radar. "Earth Freybug is a cyberthreat group that has been active since at least 2012 that focuses on espionage and financially motivated activities," Trend Micro security researcher Christopher So  said  in a report published today. "It has been observed to target organizations from various sectors across different countries." The cybersecurity firm has described Earth Freybug as a subset within  APT41 , a China-linked cyber espionage group that's also tracked as Axiom, Brass Typhoon (formerly Barium), Bronze Atlas, HOODOO, Wicked Panda, and Winnti. The adversarial collective is known to rely on a combination of living-off-the-land binaries (LOLBins) and custom malware to realize its goals. Also adopted are techniques like dynamic-link library (DLL) hijacking and application programming interface (API) unhooking. Trend Micro said th...

Google has agreed to purge billions of data records reflecting users' browsing activities to settle a class action lawsuit that claimed the search giant tracked them without their knowledge or consent in its Chrome browser. The  class action , filed in 2020, alleged the company misled users by tracking their internet browsing activity who thought that it remained private when using the "incognito" or "private" mode on web browsers like Chrome. In late December 2023, it  emerged  that the company had consented to settle the lawsuit. The deal is currently pending approval by the U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. "The settlement provides broad relief regardless of any challenges presented by Google's limited record keeping," a court filing on April 1, 2024, said. "Much of the private browsing data in these logs will be deleted in their entirety, including billions of event level data records that reflect class members' private ...