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

A cyberespionage threat actor known for targeting a variety of critical infrastructure sectors in Africa, the Middle East, and the U.S. has been observed using an upgraded version of a remote access trojan with information stealing capabilities. Calling  TA410  an umbrella group comprised of three teams dubbed FlowingFrog, LookingFrog, and JollyFrog, Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET  assessed  that "these subgroups operate somewhat independently, but that they may share intelligence requirements, an access team that runs their spear-phishing campaigns, and also the team that deploys network infrastructure." TA410 — said to share behavioral and tooling overlaps with  APT10  (aka Stone Panda or TA429) — has a history of targeting U.S.-based organizations in the utilities sector as well as diplomatic entities in the Middle East and Africa. Other identified victims of the hacker collective include a manufacturing company in Japan, a mining business in India, ...

You've been asked for a Vulnerability Assessment Report for your organisation and for some of you reading this article, your first thought is likely to be "What is that?" Worry not. This article will answer that very question as well as why you need a Vulnerability Assessment Report and where you can get one from.  As it's likely the request for such a report came from an important source such as the Board, a partner, a client or an auditor, there isn't a moment to waste. So let's drive straight in. What is a Vulnerability Assessment Report and why do you need one? A Vulnerability Assessment Report is simply a document that illustrates how you are managing your organisation's vulnerabilities. It's important because, with tens of thousands of new technology flaws being discovered every year, you need to be able to prove that your organisation does its best to avoid attack if you want to be trusted by partners and customers.  A best security practi...

Cybercriminal actors previously observed delivering BazaLoader and IcedID as part of their malware campaigns are said to have transitioned to a new loader called Bumblebee that's under active development. "Based on the timing of its appearance in the threat landscape and use by multiple cybercriminal groups, it is likely Bumblebee is, if not a direct replacement for BazaLoader, then a new, multifunctional tool used by actors that historically favored other malware," enterprise security firm Proofpoint  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Campaigns distributing the new highly sophisticated loader are said to have commenced in March 2022, while sharing overlaps with malicious activity leading to the deployment of Conti and Diavol ransomware, raising the possibility that the loader could act as a precursor for ransomware attacks. "Threat actors using Bumblebee are associated with malware payloads that have been linked to follow-on ransomware campaigns,...

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and Twitter's new owner, on Thursday called on adding support for end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to the platform's direct messages ( DM ) feature. "Twitter DMs should have end to end encryption like Signal, so no one can spy on or hack your messages," Musk  said  in a tweet. The statement comes days after the microblogging service  announced  it officially entered into an agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, with the transaction valued at approximately US$ 44 billion, or US$ 54.20 per share in cash.  The deal, which is expected to be closed over the next six months, will see it becoming a privately held company. "Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," Musk said in a statement. "I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making t...

A new campaign leveraging an exploit kit has been observed abusing an Internet Explorer flaw patched by Microsoft last year to deliver the RedLine Stealer trojan. "When executed, RedLine Stealer performs recon against the target system (including username, hardware, browsers installed, anti-virus software) and then exfiltrates data (including passwords, saved credit cards, crypto wallets, VPN logins) to a remote command and control server," Bitdefender  said  in a new report shared with The Hacker News. Most of the infections are located in Brazil and Germany, followed by the U.S., Egypt, Canada, China, and Poland, among others. Exploit kits or exploit packs are comprehensive tools that contain a collection of exploits designed to take advantage of vulnerabilities in commonly-used software by scanning infected systems for different kinds of flaws and deploying additional malware. The primary infection method used by attackers to distribute exploit kits, in this case the...

Log4Shell ,  ProxyShell ,  ProxyLogon ,  ZeroLogon , and flaws in  Zoho ManageEngine AD SelfService Plus ,  Atlassian Confluence , and  VMware vSphere Client  emerged as some of the top exploited security vulnerabilities in 2021. That's according to a " Top Routinely Exploited Vulnerabilities " report released by cybersecurity authorities from the Five Eyes nations Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S. Other frequently weaponized flaws included a remote code execution bug in Microsoft Exchange Server ( CVE-2020-0688 ), an arbitrary file read vulnerability in Pulse Secure Pulse Connect Secure ( CVE-2019-11510 ), and a path traversal defect in Fortinet FortiOS and FortiProxy ( CVE-2018-13379 ). Nine of the top 15 routinely exploited flaws were remote code execution vulnerabilities, followed by two privilege escalation weaknesses, and one each of security feature bypass, arbitrary code execution, arbitrary file read, and path traver...

Cloudflare on Wednesday disclosed that it acted to mitigate a 15.3 million request-per-second (RPS) distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The web infrastructure and website security company called it one of the "largest HTTPS DDoS attacks on record."  "HTTPS DDoS attacks are more expensive in terms of required computational resources because of the higher cost of establishing a secure TLS encrypted connection," Cloudflare's Omer Yoachimik and Julien Desgats  said . "Therefore it costs the attacker more to launch the attack, and for the victim to mitigate it." The volumetric DDoS attack is said to have lasted less than 15 seconds and targeted an unnamed Cloudflare customer operating a crypto launchpad.  Volumetric DDoS attacks are designed to overwhelm a target network/service with significantly high volumes of malicious traffic, which typically originate from a botnet under a threat actor's control. Cloudflare said the latest attack w...

Network-attached storage (NAS) appliance maker QNAP on Wednesday  said  it's working on updating its QTS and QuTS operating systems after Netatalk last month released patches to contain seven security flaws in its software. Netatalk  is an open-source implementation of the Apple Filing Protocol ( AFP ), allowing Unix-like operating systems to serve as file servers for Apple macOS computers. On March 22, 2022, its maintainers released  version 3.1.13  of the software to resolve major security issues — CVE-2021-31439 ,  CVE-2022-23121 ,  CVE-2022-23122 ,  CVE-2022-23123 ,  CVE-2022-23124 ,  CVE-2022-23125 , and  CVE-2022-0194  — that could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution. "This vulnerability [CVE-2022-23121] can be exploited remotely and does not need authentication," NCC Group researchers  noted  last month. "It allows an attacker to get remote code execution as the 'nobody' user on the NAS. This...