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A malicious web shell deployed on Windows systems by leveraging a previously undisclosed zero-day in SolarWinds' Orion network monitoring software may have been the work of a possible Chinese threat group. In a  report  published by Secureworks on Monday, the cybersecurity firm attributed the intrusions to a threat actor it calls Spiral. Back on December 22, 2020, Microsoft  disclosed  that a second espionage group may have been abusing the IT infrastructure provider's Orion software to drop a persistent backdoor called Supernova on target systems. The findings were also corroborated by cybersecurity firms Palo Alto Networks'  Unit 42  threat intelligence team and  GuidePoint Security , both of whom described Supernova as a .NET web shell implemented by modifying an "app_web_logoimagehandler.ashx.b6031896.dll" module of the SolarWinds Orion application. The alterations were made possible not by breaching the SolarWinds app update infrastructure b...

The European Banking Authority (EBA) on Sunday said it had been a victim of a cyberattack targeting its Microsoft Exchange Servers, forcing it to temporarily take its email systems offline as a precautionary measure. "As the vulnerability is related to the EBA's email servers, access to personal data through emails held on that servers may have been obtained by the attacker," the Paris-based regulatory agency  said . EBA said it's launched a full investigation into the incident in partnership with its information and communication technology (ICT) provider, a team of forensic experts, and other relevant entities. In a second update issued on Monday, the agency said it had secured its email infrastructure and that it found no evidence of data extraction, adding it has "no indication to think that the breach has gone beyond our email servers." Besides deploying extra security measures, EBA also noted it's closely monitoring the situation after restor...

Apple has released out-of-band patches for iOS, macOS, watchOS, and Safari web browser to address a security flaw that could allow attackers to run arbitrary code on devices via malicious web content. Tracked as CVE-2021-1844 , the vulnerability was discovered and reported to the company by Clément Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group and Alison Huffman of Microsoft Browser Vulnerability Research. According to the update notes posted by Apple, the flaw stems from a memory corruption issue that could lead to arbitrary code execution when processing specially crafted web content. The company said the problem was addressed with "improved validation." The update is available for devices running  iOS 14.4, iPadOS 14.4 ,  macOS Big Sur , and  watchOS 7.3.1  (Apple Watch Series 3 and later), and as an  update to Safari  for MacBooks running macOS Catalina and macOS Mojave. The latest development comes on the heels of a patch for  three zero-day vu...

Hackers with suspected ties to Iran are actively targeting academia, government agencies, and tourism entities in the Middle East and neighboring regions as part of an espionage campaign aimed at data theft. Dubbed "Earth Vetala" by Trend Micro, the latest finding expands on previous research  published by Anomali  last month, which found evidence of malicious activity aimed at UAE and Kuwait government agencies by exploiting ScreenConnect remote management tool.  The cybersecurity firm linked the ongoing attacks with moderate confidence to a threat actor widely tracked as  MuddyWater , an Iranian hacker group known for its offensives primarily against Middle Eastern nations. Earth Vetala is said to have leveraged spear-phishing emails containing embedded links to a popular file-sharing service called Onehub to distribute malware that ranged from password dumping utilities to custom backdoors, before initiating communications with a command-and-control (C2) serv...

A new research has yielded yet another means to pilfer sensitive data by exploiting what's the first "on-chip, cross-core" side-channel attack targeting the ring interconnect used in Intel Coffee Lake and Skylake processors. Published by a group of academics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the  findings  are expected to be presented at the USENIX Security Symposium coming this August. While information leakage attacks targeting the CPU microarchitecture have been previously demonstrated to break the isolation between user applications and the operating system, allowing a malicious program to access memory used by other programs (e.g., Meltdown and Spectre), the new attack leverages a contention on the ring interconnect. SoC  Ring interconnect  is an on-die bus arranged in a ring topology which enables intra-process communication between different components (aka agents) such as the cores, the last level cache (LLC), the graphics unit, and the...

Microsoft on Friday warned of active attacks exploiting unpatched Exchange Servers carried out by multiple threat actors, as the hacking campaign is believed to have infected tens of thousands of businesses, government entities in the U.S., Asia, and Europe. The company  said  "it continues to see increased use of these vulnerabilities in attacks targeting unpatched systems by multiple malicious actors beyond HAFNIUM," signaling an escalation that the breaches are no longer "limited and targeted" as was previously deemed. According to independent cybersecurity journalist  Brian Krebs , at least 30,000 entities across the U.S. — mainly small businesses, towns, cities, and local governments — have been compromised by an "unusually aggressive" Chinese group that has set its sights on stealing emails from victim organizations by exploiting previously undisclosed flaws in Exchange Server. Victims are also being reported from outside the U.S., with email s...

Cybersecurity researchers on Thursday disclosed two distinct design and implementation flaws in Apple's crowdsourced Bluetooth location tracking system that can lead to a location correlation attack and unauthorized access to the location history of the past seven days, thereby deanonymizing users. The  findings  are a consequence of an exhaustive review undertaken by the Open Wireless Link (OWL) project, a team of researchers from the Secure Mobile Networking Lab at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, who have historically taken apart Apple's wireless ecosystem with the goal of identifying security and privacy issues. In response to the disclosures on July 2, 2020, Apple is said to have partially addressed the issues, stated the researchers, who used their own data for the study citing privacy implications of the analysis. How Find My Works? Apple devices come with a feature called  Find My  that makes it easy for users to locate other Apple devices...

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In what's a case of hackers getting hacked, a prominent underground online criminal forum by the name of Maza has been compromised by unknown attackers, making it the fourth forum to have been breached since the start of the year. The intrusion is said to have occurred on March 3, with information about the forum members — including usernames, email addresses, and hashed passwords — publicly disclosed on a breach notification page put up by the attackers, stating "Your data has been leaked" and "This forum has been hacked." "The announcement was accompanied by a PDF file allegedly containing a portion of forum user data. The file comprised more than 3,000 rows, containing usernames, partially obfuscated password hashes, email addresses and other contact details," cybersecurity firm Intel 471  said . Originally called Mazafaka, Maza is an elite, invite-only Russian-language cybercrime forum known to be operational as early as 2003, acting as an exc...