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The politically motivated Moses Staff hacker group has been observed using a custom multi-component toolset with the goal of carrying out espionage against its targets as part of a new campaign that exclusively singles out Israeli organizations. First  publicly documented  in late 2021, Moses Staff is believed to be sponsored by the Iranian government, with attacks reported against entities in Israel, Italy, India, Germany, Chile, Turkey, the U.A.E., and the U.S. Earlier this month, the hacker collective was observed incorporating a previously undocumented remote access trojan (RAT) called " StrifeWater " that masquerades as the Windows Calculator app to evade detection. "Close examination reveals that the group has been active for over a year, much earlier than the group's first official public exposure, managing to stay under the radar with an extremely low detection rate," findings from FortiGuard Labs show . The latest threat activity involves an atta...

State-sponsored actors backed by the Russian government regularly targeted the networks of several U.S. cleared defense contractors (CDCs) to acquire proprietary documents and other confidential information pertaining to the country's defense and intelligence programs and capabilities. The sustained espionage campaign is said to have commenced at least two years ago from January 2020, according to a  joint advisory  published by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Security Agency (NSA), and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). "These continued intrusions have enabled the actors to acquire sensitive, unclassified information, as well as CDC-proprietary and export-controlled technology," the agencies  said . "The acquired information provides significant insight into U.S. weapons platforms development and deployment timelines, vehicle specifications, and plans for communications infrastructure and information technology....

The increasing volume and sophistication of cyberattacks have naturally led many companies to invest in additional cybersecurity technologies. We know that expanded threat detection capabilities are necessary for protection, but they have also led to several unintended consequences. The "more is not always better" adage fits this situation perfectly. An upcoming webinar by cybersecurity company Cynet ( register here ) sheds light on alert overload, the result of too many alerts. Beyond discussing the stress and strain placed on cybersecurity teams trying to sift through an ongoing barrage of threat alerts, Cynet shows how this situation actually degrades cybersecurity effectiveness. Then Cynet will talk about the way out – something important to almost every company suffering from alert overload. The Real Impact of Alert Overload It's interesting that threat alerts, which are so vital to protection have also become an obstacle. Cynet lays out two key reasons why this has come about...

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 notorious TrickBot malware is targeting customers of 60 financial and technology companies, including cryptocurrency firms, primarily located in the U.S., even as its operators have updated the botnet with new anti-analysis features. "TrickBot is a sophisticated and versatile malware with more than 20 modules that can be downloaded and executed on demand," Check Point researchers Aliaksandr Trafimchuk and Raman Ladutska  said  in a report published today. In addition to being both prevalent and persistent, TrickBot has  continually   evolved  its tactics to go past security and detection layers. To that end, the malware's "injectDll" web-injects module, which is responsible for stealing banking and credential data, leverages anti-deobfuscation techniques to crash the web page and thwart attempts to scrutinize the source code. Also put in place are anti-analysis guardrails to prevent security researchers from sending automated requests to command-and-con...

VMware on Tuesday patched several  high-severity   vulnerabilities  impacting ESXi, Workstation, Fusion, Cloud Foundation, and NSX Data Center for vSphere that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code and cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. As of writing, there's no evidence that any of the weaknesses are exploited in the wild. The list of six flaws is as follows – CVE-2021-22040  (CVSS score: 8.4) - Use-after-free vulnerability in XHCI USB controller CVE-2021-22041  (CVSS score: 8.4) - Double-fetch vulnerability in UHCI USB controller CVE-2021-22042  (CVSS score: 8.2) - ESXi settingsd unauthorized access vulnerability CVE-2021-22043  (CVSS score: 8.2) - ESXi settingsd TOCTOU vulnerability CVE-2021-22050  (CVSS score: 5.3) - ESXi slow HTTP POST denial-of-service vulnerability CVE-2022-22945  (CVSS score: 8.8) - CLI shell injection vulnerability in the NSX Edge appliance component Successful exploitation of the flaws cou...

The European Union's data protection authority on Tuesday called for a ban on the development and the use of Pegasus-like commercial spyware in the region, stating that the technology's "unprecedented level of intrusiveness" could endanger users' right to privacy. "Pegasus constitutes a paradigm shift in terms of access to private communications and devices, which is able to affect the very essence of our fundamental rights, in particular the right to privacy," the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS)  said  in its preliminary remarks. "This fact makes its use incompatible with our democratic values." Pegasus  is a piece of highly advanced military-grade intrusion software developed by Israeli company NSO Group that's capable of breaking into smartphones running Android and iOS, turning the devices into a remote monitoring tool capable of extracting sensitive information, recording conversations, and tracking users' movements....

Researchers have revealed details of a now-patched high-severity security vulnerability in Apache Cassandra that, if left unaddressed, could be abused to gain remote code execution (RCE) on affected installations. "This Apache security vulnerability is easy to exploit and has the potential to wreak havoc on systems, but luckily only manifests in non-default configurations of Cassandra," Omer Kaspi, security researcher at DevOps firm JFrog,  said  in a technical write-up published Tuesday. Apache Cassandra is an open-source, distributed, NoSQL database management system for managing very large amounts of structured data across commodity servers. Tracked as  CVE-2021-44521  (CVSS score: 8.4), the vulnerability concerns a specific scenario where the configuration for user-defined functions ( UDFs ) are enabled, effectively allowing an attacker to leverage the  Nashorn  JavaScript engine, escape the sandbox, and achieve execution of untrusted code. Speci...

Meta Platforms has agreed to pay $90 million to settle a lawsuit over the company's use of cookies to allegedly track Facebook users' internet activity even after they had logged off from the platform. In addition, the social media company will be required to delete all of the data it illegally collected from those users. The development was first reported by  Variety . The decade-old case, filed in 2012, centered around Facebook's use of the proprietary "Like" button to track users as they visited third-party websites – regardless of whether they actually used the button – in violation of the federal wiretapping laws, and then allegedly compiling those browsing histories into profiles for selling the information to advertisers. Based on the terms of the proposed settlement, users who browsed non-Facebook websites that included the "Like" button between April 22, 2010, and September 26, 2011, will be covered. "Reaching a settlement in this cas...