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The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday issued an  advisory  warning of multiple vulnerabilities in the OpENer  EtherNet/IP  stack that could expose industrial systems to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, data leaks, and remote code execution. All OpENer commits and versions prior to February 10, 2021, are affected, although there are no known public exploits that specifically target these vulnerabilities. The four security flaws were discovered and reported to CISA by researchers Tal Keren and Sharon Brizinov from operational technology security company Claroty. Additionally, a fifth security issue identified by Claroty was previously disclosed by Cisco Talos ( CVE-2020-13556 ) on December 2, 2020. "An attacker would only need to send crafted ENIP/CIP packets to the device in order to exploit these vulnerabilities," the researchers  said . CVE-2020-13556 concerns an out-of-bounds write vulnerability in the Ethernet/IP s...

The U.S. and U.K. on Thursday formally attributed the supply chain attack of IT infrastructure management company SolarWinds with "high confidence" to government operatives working for Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). "Russia's pattern of malign behaviour around the world – whether in cyberspace, in election interference or in the aggressive operations of their intelligence services – demonstrates that Russia remains the most acute threat to the U.K.'s national and collective security," the U.K. government  said  in a statement. To that effect, the U.S. Department of the Treasury has imposed sweeping sanctions against Russia for "undermining the conduct of free and fair elections and democratic institutions" in the U.S. and for its role in facilitating the sprawling SolarWinds hack, while also barring six technology companies in the country that provide support to the cyber program run by Russian Intelligence Services. The com...

Multiple one-click vulnerabilities have been discovered across a variety of popular software applications, allowing an attacker to potentially execute arbitrary code on target systems. The issues were discovered by Positive Security researchers Fabian Bräunlein and Lukas Euler and affect apps like Telegram, Nextcloud, VLC, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Bitcoin/Dogecoin Wallets, Wireshark, and Mumble. "Desktop applications which pass user supplied URLs to be opened by the operating system are frequently vulnerable to code execution with user interaction," the researchers  said . "Code execution can be achieved either when a URL pointing to a malicious executable (.desktop, .jar, .exe, …) hosted on an internet accessible file share (nfs, webdav, smb, …) is opened, or an additional vulnerability in the opened application's URI handler is exploited." Put differently; the flaws stem from an insufficient validation of URL input that, when opened with the help of the u...

AI agents promise to automate everything from financial reconciliations to incident response. Yet every time an AI agent spins up a workflow, it has to authenticate somewhere; often with a high-privilege API key, OAuth token, or service account that defenders can't easily see. These "invisible" non-human identities (NHIs) now outnumber human accounts in most cloud environments, and they have become one of the ripest targets for attackers. Astrix's Field CTO Jonathan Sander put it bluntly in a recent Hacker News webinar : "One dangerous habit we've had for a long time is trusting application logic to act as the guardrails. That doesn't work when your AI agent is powered by LLMs that don't stop and think when they're about to do something wrong. They just do it." Why AI Agents Redefine Identity Risk Autonomy changes everything: An AI agent can chain multiple API calls and modify data without a human in the loop. If the underlying credential is exposed or overprivileged, each addit...

A malicious program intended to cause havoc with IT systems—malware—is becoming more and more sophisticated every year. The year 2021 is no exception, as recent trends indicate that several  new variants of malware  are making their way into the world of cybersecurity. While smarter security solutions are popping up, modern malware still eludes and challenges cybersecurity experts.  The evolution of malware has infected everything from personal computers to industrial units since the 70s. Cybersecurity firm  FireEye's network was attacked  in 2020 by hackers with the most sophisticated form of hacking i.e., supply chain. This hacking team demonstrated world-class capabilities to disregard security tools and forensic examination, proving that anybody can be hacked. Also, the year 2021 is already witnessing a bump in  COVID-19 vaccine-related phishing attacks .  Let's take a look at the trends that forecast an increase in malware attacks: COVID-19 ...

Cybercriminals are resorting to search engine poisoning techniques to lure business professionals into visiting seemingly legitimate Google sites that install a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) capable of carrying out a wide range of attacks. The attack works by leveraging searches for business forms such as invoices, templates, questionnaires, and receipts as a stepping stone toward infiltrating the systems. Users attempting to download the alleged document templates are  redirected , without their knowledge, to a malicious website that hosts the malware. "Once the RAT is on the victim's computer and activated, the threat actors can send commands and upload additional malware to the infected system, such as ransomware, a credential stealer, a banking trojan, or simply use the RAT as a foothold into the victim's network," researchers from eSentire  said  in a write-up published on Tuesday. The cybersecurity firm said it discovered over 100,000 unique web pages that co...

Facebook-owned WhatsApp recently addressed two security vulnerabilities in its messaging app for Android that could have been exploited to execute malicious code remotely on the device and even exfiltrate sensitive information. The flaws take aim at devices running Android versions up to and including Android 9 by carrying out what's known as a "man-in-the-disk" attack that makes it possible for adversaries to compromise an app by manipulating certain data being exchanged between it and the external storage. "The two aforementioned WhatsApp vulnerabilities would have made it possible for attackers to remotely collect TLS cryptographic material for TLS 1.3 and TLS 1.2 sessions," researchers from Census Labs  said  today.  "With the TLS secrets at hand, we will demonstrate how a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack can lead to the compromise of WhatsApp communications, to remote code execution on the victim device and to the extraction of Noise protocol keys u...

Academics from Vrije University in Amsterdam and ETH Zurich have published a new research paper describing yet another variation of the Rowhammer attack. Dubbed  SMASH  (Synchronized MAny-Sided Hammering), the technique can be used to successfully trigger the attack from JavaScript on modern DDR4 RAM cards, notwithstanding extensive mitigations that have been put in place by manufacturers over the last seven years. "Despite their in-DRAM Target Row Refresh (TRR) mitigations, some of the most recent DDR4 modules are still vulnerable to many-sided Rowhammer bit flips," the researchers said.  "SMASH exploits high-level knowledge of cache replacement policies to generate optimal access patterns for eviction-based many-sided Rowhammer. To bypass the in-DRAM TRR mitigations, SMASH carefully schedules cache hits and misses to successfully trigger synchronized many-sided Rowhammer bit flips." By synchronizing memory requests with DRAM refresh commands, the researchers...

One of the biggest consequences of the rapidly evolving cybersecurity threat landscape is that defenses must constantly build bigger systems to defend themselves.  This leads to both more complex systems and often less communication between them. More importantly, it can lead companies to invest in disparate "best in class" components instead of finding the best fit for their needs. The constant arms race means that companies often get bigger, more powerful tools that can't handle the nuanced threats they face. For instance, in a car race, it's not often the fastest, most powerful car that wins, but the one that is more balanced, lighter, and more able to turn and react when needed. In a new live webinar, Cynet Chief Strategist Chris Roberts breaks down why the philosophy of "simpler is better" is just what cybersecurity needs ( register here ). The webinar will focus on how quickly cybersecurity stacks are growing and how this is not always a good thing. Companies are too foc...