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Web infrastructure company Cloudflare on Wednesday revealed that threat actors are actively attempting to exploit a  second bug  disclosed in the widely used Log4j logging utility, making it imperative that customers move quickly to install the latest version as a barrage of attacks continues to pummel unpatched systems with a variety of malware. The new vulnerability, assigned the identifier  CVE-2021-45046 , makes it possible for adversaries to carry out denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and follows disclosure from the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) that the original fix for the remote code execution bug — CVE-2021-44228 aka Log4Shell — was "incomplete in certain non-default configurations." The issue has since been addressed in Log4j version 2.16.0. "This vulnerability is actively being exploited and anyone using Log4j should update to version 2.16.0 as soon as possible, even if you have previously updated to 2.15.0," Cloudflare's Andre Bluehs and Gabriel ...

Meta Platforms, the company formerly known as Facebook, has announced that it's expanding its  bug bounty program  to start rewarding valid reports of scraping vulnerabilities across its platforms as well as include reports of scraping data sets that are available online. "We know that automated activity designed to scrape people's public and private data targets every website or service," said Dan Gurfinkel, security engineering manager at Meta. "We also know that it is a highly adversarial space where scrapers — be it malicious apps, websites or scripts — constantly adapt their tactics to evade detection in response to the defenses we build and improve." To that end, the social media giant aims to  monetarily compensate  for valid reports of scraping bugs in its service and identify unprotected or openly public databases containing no less than 100,000 unique Facebook user records with personally identifiable information (PII) such as email, phone numb...

Today's cyber attackers are constantly looking for ways to exploit vulnerabilities and infiltrate organizations. To keep up with this evolving threat landscape, security teams must be on the lookout for potential risks around the clock. Since most organizations simply cannot afford to have 24x7 security teams, managed detection and response (MDR) services have become a critical aspect of any modern security stack.  Most organizations must find outsourced MDR providers on top of their existing solutions, but that's not always a feasible solution. XDR provider Cynet offers its MDR service ( learn more here ), which the company calls CyOps, as part of its offering. The service is much more than simply a help desk, though. CyOps offers a thorough MDR service that offers both monitoring and threat hunting, as well as incident response in cases where an attack is successful.  How CyOps operates The key selling point for CyOps MDR is that it enhances organizations' security a...

Malicious actors are deploying a previously undiscovered binary, an Internet Information Services ( IIS ) webserver module dubbed " Owowa ," on Microsoft Exchange Outlook Web Access servers with the goal of stealing credentials and enabling remote command execution. "Owowa is a C#-developed .NET v4.0 assembly that is intended to be loaded as a module within an IIS web server that also exposes Exchange's Outlook Web Access (OWA)," Kaspersky researchers Paul Rascagneres and Pierre Delcher  said . "When loaded this way, Owowa will steal credentials that are entered by any user in the OWA login page, and will allow a remote operator to run commands on the underlying server." The idea that a rogue IIS module can be fashioned as a backdoor is not new. In August 2021, an exhaustive study of the IIS threat landscape by Slovak cybersecurity company ESET revealed  as many as 14 malware families that were developed as native IIS modules in an attempt to interc...

Microsoft has rolled out  Patch Tuesday updates  to address multiple security vulnerabilities in Windows and other software, including one actively exploited flaw that's being abused to deliver Emotet, TrickBot, or Bazaloader malware payloads. The latest monthly release for December fixes a total of 67 flaws, bringing the total number of bugs patched by the company this year to 887, according to the  Zero Day Initiative . Seven of the 67 flaws are rated Critical and 60 are rated as Important in severity, with five of the issues publicly known at the time of release. It's worth noting that this is in addition to the  21 flaws  resolved in the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser. The most critical of the lot is  CVE-2021-43890  (CVSS score: 7.1), a Windows AppX installer spoofing vulnerability that Microsoft said could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution. The lower severity rating is indicative of the fact that code execution hinges on ...

UPDATE — The severity score of CVE-2021-45046, originally classified as a DoS bug, has since been revised from 3.7 to 9.0, to reflect the fact that an attacker could abuse the vulnerability to send a specially crafted string that leads to "information leak and remote code execution in some environments and local code execution in all environments." The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has pushed out a new fix for the Log4j logging utility after the previous patch for the recently disclosed  Log4Shell  exploit was deemed as "incomplete in certain non-default configurations." The second vulnerability — tracked as  CVE-2021-45046  — is rated 3.7 out of a maximum of 10 on the CVSS rating system and affects all versions of Log4j from 2.0-beta9 through 2.12.1 and 2.13.0 through 2.15.0, which the project maintainers shipped last week to address a critical remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) that could be abused to infiltrate and take over systems. ...

Romanian cybersecurity technology company Bitdefender on Monday revealed that attempts are being made to target Windows machines with a novel ransomware family called  Khonsari  as well as a remote access Trojan named  Orcus  by exploiting the recently disclosed critical Log4j vulnerability . The attack leverages the remote code execution (RCE) flaw to download an additional payload, a .NET binary, from a remote server that encrypts all the files with the extension ".khonsari" and displays a ransom note that urges the victims to make a Bitcoin payment in exchange for recovering access to the files. Tracked as CVE-2021-44228 , the RCE vulnerability is also known by the monikers "Log4Shell" or "Logjam" and impacts versions 2.0-beta9 to 2.14.1 of the software library. In simple terms, the bug could force an affected system to download malicious software, giving the attackers a digital beachhead on servers located within corporate networks. Log4j is an op...

As a CISO, one of the most challenging questions to answer is "How well are we protected right now?" Between the acceleration of hackers' offensive capabilities and the dynamic nature of information networks, a drift in the security posture is unavoidable and needs to be continuously compensated. Therefore, answering that question implies continuously validating the security posture and being in a position to check it including, against the latest emerging threats. Yet, the bulk of cybersecurity is focused on defensive tools. The combination of the rapid evolution of technology and the multiplication of technology layers, combined with the professionalization of the threat landscape, has led to a profusion of cybersecurity tools tackling different security aspects. Checking the cybersecurity solution stack efficiency is typically done through pen-testing or, more recently, through red teaming – an exercise aimed to map possible loopholes that would lead to a data breac...

Europol, the European Union's premier law enforcement agency, has  announced  the arrest of a third Romanian national for his role as a ransomware affiliate suspected of hacking high-profile organizations and companies and stealing large volumes of sensitive data. The 41-year-old unnamed individual was apprehended Monday morning at his home in Craiova, Romania, by the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism ( DIICOT ) following a joint investigation in collaboration with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It's not currently known which ransomware gang the suspect was working with, but the development comes a little over a month after Romanian authorities  arrested two affiliates  of the REvil ransomware family, who are believed to have orchestrated no fewer than 5,000 ransomware attacks and extorted close to $600,000 from victims. Affiliates play a key role in the subscription-based ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) busines...