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A Chinese state-sponsored espionage group known as Override Panda has resurfaced in recent weeks with a new phishing attack with the goal of stealing sensitive information. "The Chinese APT used a spear-phishing email to deliver a beacon of a Red Team framework known as 'Viper,'" Cluster25  said  in a report published last week. "The target of this attack is currently unknown but with high probability, given the previous history of the attack perpetrated by the group, it might be a government institution from a South Asian country." Override Panda, also called  Naikon , Hellsing, and Bronze Geneva, is known to operate on behalf of Chinese interests since at least 2005 to conduct intelligence-gathering operations targeting  ASEAN countries . Attack chains unleashed by the threat actor have involved the use of decoy documents attached to spear-phishing emails that are designed to entice the intended victims to open and compromise themselves with malware...

According to folklore, witches were able to sail in a sieve, a strainer with holes in the bottom. Unfortunately, witches don't work in cybersecurity – where networks generally have so many vulnerabilities that they resemble sieves.  For most of us, keeping the sieve of our networks afloat requires nightmarishly hard work and frequent compromises on which holes to plug first. The reason? In 2010, just under 5000 CVEs were recorded in the MITRE vulnerabilities database. By 2021, the yearly total had skyrocketed to  over 20,000 . Today, software and network integrity are synonymous with business continuity. And this makes the issue of which vulnerabilities to address first mission-critical. Yet owing to the countless documented vulnerabilities lurking in a typical enterprise ecosystem – across thousands of laptops, servers, and internet-connected devices – less than  one in ten  actually needs to be patched. The question is: how can we know which patches will ensure ...

A Russian state-sponsored threat actor has been observed targeting diplomatic and government entities as part of a series of phishing campaigns commencing on January 17, 2022. Threat intelligence and incident response firm Mandiant attributed the attacks to a hacking group tracked as APT29 (aka Cozy Bear), with some set of the activities associated with the crew assigned the moniker  Nobelium  (aka UNC2452/2652). "This latest wave of spear phishing showcases APT29's enduring interests in obtaining diplomatic and foreign policy information from governments around the world," Mandiant  said  in a report published last week. The initial access is said to have been aided through spear-phishing emails masquerading as administrative notices, using legitimate but compromised email addresses from other diplomatic entities. These emails contain an HTML dropper attachment called ROOTSAW (aka  EnvyScout ) that, when opened, triggers an infection sequence that deliver...

Google has officially  released  the first developer preview for the Privacy Sandbox on Android 13, offering an "early look" at the SDK Runtime and Topics API to boost users' privacy online. "The Privacy Sandbox on Android Developer Preview program will run over the course of 2022, with a beta release planned by the end of the year," the search giant  said  in an overview. A "multi-year effort,"  Privacy Sandbox  on Android aims to create technologies that's both privacy-preserving as well as keep online content and services free without having to resort to opaque methods of digital advertising. The idea is to limit sharing of user data with third-parties and operate without cross-app identifiers, including advertising ID, a unique, user-resettable string of letters and digits that can be used to track users as they move between apps. Google originally  announced  its plans to bring Privacy Sandbox to Android earlier this February, followin...

The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) has announced the initial prototype release of a new tool that's capable of carrying out dynamic analysis of all packages uploaded to popular open source repositories. Called the  Package Analysis  project, the initiative aims to secure open-source packages by detecting and alerting users to any malicious behavior with the goal of bolstering the security of the software supply chain and increasing trust in open-source software. "The Package Analysis project seeks to understand the behavior and capabilities of packages available on open source repositories: what files do they access, what addresses do they connect to, and what commands do they run?," the OpenSSF  said . "The project also tracks changes in how packages behave over time, to identify when previously safe software begins acting suspiciously," the foundation's Caleb Brown and David A. Wheeler added. In a test run that lasted a month, the tool ide...

At least six different Russia-aligned actors launched no less than 237 cyberattacks against Ukraine from February 23 to April 8, including 38 discrete destructive attacks that irrevocably destroyed files in hundreds of systems across dozens of organizations in the country. "Collectively, the cyber and kinetic actions work to disrupt or degrade Ukrainian government and military functions and undermine the public's trust in those same institutions," the company's Digital Security Unit (DSU)  said  in a special report. The major malware families that have been leveraged for destructive activity as part of Russia's relentless digital assaults include:  WhisperGate ,  HermeticWiper  ( FoxBlade  aka KillDisk),  HermeticRansom  (SonicVote),  IssacWiper  (Lasainraw),  CaddyWiper ,  DesertBlade ,  DoubleZero  (FiberLake), and  Industroyer2 . WhisperGate, HermeticWiper, IssacWiper, and CaddyWiper are all data wipers d...

Microsoft on Thursday disclosed that it addressed a pair of issues with the Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server that could result in unauthorized cross-account database access in a region. "By exploiting an elevated permissions bug in the Flexible Server authentication process for a replication user, a malicious user could leverage an improperly anchored regular expression to bypass authentication to gain access to other customers' databases," Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC)  said . New York City-based cloud security company Wiz, which uncovered the flaws, dubbed the exploit chain " ExtraReplica ." Microsoft said it mitigated the bug within 48 hours of disclosure on January 13, 2022. Specifically, it relates to a case of privilege escalation in the Azure PostgreSQL engine to gain code execution and a cross-account authentication bypass by means of a forged certificate, allowing an attacker to create a database in the target's Azure r...

India's computer and emergency response team, CERT-In, on Thursday published new guidelines that require service providers, intermediaries, data centers, and government entities to compulsorily report cybersecurity incidents, including data breaches, within six hours. "Any service provider, intermediary, data center, body corporate and Government organization shall mandatorily report cyber incidents [...] to CERT-In within six hours of noticing such incidents or being brought to notice about such incidents," the government  said  in a release. The types of incidents that come under the ambit include, inter alia, compromise of critical systems, targeting scanning, unauthorized access to computers and social media accounts, website defacements, malware deployments, identity theft, DDoS attacks, data breaches and leaks, rogue mobile apps, and attacks against servers and network appliances like routers and IoT devices. The government said it was taking these steps to ens...