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

In yet another instance of software supply chain attack, dozens of WordPress themes and plugins hosted on a developer's website were backdoored with malicious code in the first half of September 2021 with the goal of infecting further sites. The backdoor gave the attackers full administrative control over websites that used 40 themes and 53 plugins belonging to AccessPress Themes, a Nepal-based company that boasts of no fewer than 360,000 active website installations. "The infected extensions contained a dropper for a web shell that gives the attackers full access to the infected sites," security researchers from JetPack, a WordPress plugin suite developer, said in a  report  published this week. "The same extensions were fine if downloaded or installed directly from the WordPress[.]org directory." The vulnerability has been assigned the identifier  CVE-2021-24867 . Website security platform Sucuri, in a separate analysis,  said  some of the infected websit...

Researchers have disclosed details of two critical security vulnerabilities in Control Web Panel that could be abused as part of an exploit chain to achieve pre-authenticated remote code execution on affected servers. Tracked as CVE-2021-45467 , the issue concerns a case of a  file inclusion vulnerability , which occurs when a web application is tricked into exposing or running arbitrary files on the web server. Control Web Panel, previously CentOS Web Panel, is an open-source Linux control panel software used for deploying web hosting environments. Specifically, the issue arises when two of the unauthenticated PHP pages used in the application — "/user/login.php" and "/user/index.php" — fail to adequately validate a path to a script file, according to Octagon Networks'  Paulos Yibelo , who discovered and reported the flaws. This means that in order to exploit the vulnerability, all an attacker has to do is to alter the  include statement , which is used...

A previously undocumented firmware implant deployed to maintain stealthy persistence as part of a targeted espionage campaign has been linked to the Chinese-speaking Winnti advanced persistent threat group ( APT41 ). Kaspersky, which codenamed the rootkit  MoonBounce ,  characterized  the malware as the "most advanced  UEFI  firmware implant discovered in the wild to date," adding "the purpose of the implant is to facilitate the deployment of user-mode malware that stages execution of further payloads downloaded from the internet." Firmware-based rootkits, once a rarity in the threat landscape, are fast becoming lucrative tools among sophisticated actors to help achieve long standing foothold in a manner that's not only hard to detect, but also difficult to remove. The first firmware-level rootkit — dubbed  LoJax  — was discovered in the wild in 2018. Since then, three different instances of UEFI malware have been unearthed so far, including ...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

The U.S. Treasury Department on Thursday announced sanctions against four current and former Ukrainian government officials for engaging in "Russian government-directed influence activities" in the country, including gathering sensitive information about its critical infrastructure. The agency said the four individuals were involved in different roles as part of a concerted influence campaign to destabilize the nation, while also accusing Russia's national security authority, the Federal Security Service (FSB), of recruiting Ukrainians in key positions to create instability. Two of the officials, Taras Kozak and Oleh Voloshyn, are alleged to have worked to amplify false narratives and undermine confidence in the Ukrainian government, while Vladimir Sivkovich, former Deputy Secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, attempted to build support for Ukraine to officially cede Crimea to Russia. "Russia has directed its intelligence services to ...

Cisco Systems has rolled out fixes for a critical security flaw affecting Redundancy Configuration Manager (RCM) for Cisco StarOS Software that could be weaponized by an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code and take over vulnerable machines. Tracked as  CVE-2022-20649  (CVSS score: 9.0), the vulnerability stems from the fact that the debug mode has been incorrectly enabled for specific services. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by connecting to the device and navigating to the service with debug mode enabled," Cisco said in an advisory. "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary commands as the root user." The network equipment maker, however, noted that the adversary would need to perform detailed reconnaissance to allow for unauthenticated access to vulnerable devices. Stating that the vulnerability was discovered during internal security testing, Cisco added it found no evidence of active exploitat...

An exploration of zero-click attack surface for the popular video conferencing solution Zoom has yielded two previously undisclosed security vulnerabilities that could have been exploited to crash the service, execute malicious code, and even leak arbitrary areas of its memory. Natalie Silvanovich of Google Project Zero, who  discovered  and reported the  two   flaws  last year, said the issues impacted both Zoom clients and Multimedia Router (MMR) servers, which transmit audio and video content between clients in  on-premise deployments . The weaknesses have since been addressed by Zoom as part of  updates  shipped on November 24, 2021. The goal of a zero-click attack is to stealthily gain control over the victim's device without requiring any kind of interaction from the user, such as clicking on a link. While the specifics of the exploit will vary depending on the nature of vulnerability being exploited, a key trait of zero-click hacks is...

A coordinated law enforcement operation has resulted in the arrest of 11 members allegedly belonging to a Nigerian cybercrime gang notorious for perpetrating business email compromise (BEC) attacks targeting more than 50,000 victims in recent years. The disruption of the BEC network is the result of a ten-day investigation dubbed  Operation Falcon II  undertaken by the Interpol along with participation from the Nigeria Police Force's Cybercrime Police Unit in December 2021. Cybersecurity firms  Group-IB  and Palo Alto Networks'  Unit 42 , both of which shared information on the threat actors and their infrastructure, said six of the 11 suspects are believed to be a part of a prolific group of Nigerian cyber actors known as SilverTerrier (aka TMT). BEC attacks, which began to gain dominance in 2013, are  sophisticated scams  that target legitimate business email accounts through social engineering schemes to infiltrate corporate networks and subseq...

A threat actor with potential links to an Indian cybersecurity company has been nothing if remarkably persistent in its attacks against military organizations based in South Asia, including Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, since at least September 2020 by deploying different variants of its bespoke malware framework. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET attributed the highly targeted attack to a hacking group known as  Donot Team . "Donot Team has been consistently targeting the same entities with waves of spear-phishing emails with malicious attachments every two to four months," researchers Facundo Muñoz and Matías Porolli  said . Operating since at least 2016, Donot Team (also known as APT-C-35 and SectorE02) has been linked to a string of intrusions primarily targeting embassies, governments, and military entities in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Nepal with Windows and Android malware. In October 2021, Amnesty International  unearthed evidence  tying the g...