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Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 has detailed the inner workings of a malware called  OriginLogger , which has been touted as a successor to the widely used information stealer and remote access trojan (RAT) known as  Agent Tesla . A .NET based keylogger and remote access, Agent Tesla has had a long-standing presence in the threat landscape, allowing malicious actors to gain remote access to targeted systems and beacon sensitive information to an actor-controlled domain. Known to be used in the wild since 2014, it's advertised for sale on dark web forums and is generally distributed through malicious spam emails as an attachment. In February 2021, cybersecurity firm Sophos  disclosed two new variants  of the commodity malware (version 2 and 3) that featured capabilities to steal credentials from web browsers, email apps, and VPN clients, as well as use Telegram API for command-and-control. Now according to Unit 42 researcher Jeff White, what has been tagged as Agent ...

Tech giant Microsoft on Tuesday shipped fixes to quash  64 new security flaws  across its software lineup, including one zero-day flaw that has been actively exploited in real-world attacks. Of the 64 bugs, five are rated Critical, 57 are rated Important, one is rated Moderate, and one is rated Low in severity. The patches are in addition to  16 vulnerabilities  that Microsoft addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser earlier this month. "In terms of CVEs released, this Patch Tuesday may appear on the lighter side in comparison to other months," Bharat Jogi, director of vulnerability and threat research at Qualys, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "However, this month hit a sizable milestone for the calendar year, with MSFT having fixed the 1000th CVE of 2022 – likely on track to surpass 2021, which patched 1,200 CVEs in total." The actively exploited vulnerability in question is  CVE-2022-37969  (CVSS score: 7.8), a privilege e...

A zero-day flaw in the latest version of a WordPress premium plugin known as  WPGateway  is being actively exploited in the wild, potentially allowing malicious actors to completely take over affected sites. Tracked as  CVE-2022-3180  (CVSS score: 9.8), the issue is being weaponized to add a malicious administrator user to sites running the WPGateway plugin, WordPress security company Wordfence noted. "Part of the plugin functionality exposes a vulnerability that allows unauthenticated attackers to insert a malicious administrator," Wordfence researcher Ram Gall  said  in an advisory. WPGateway is billed as a means for site administrators to install, backup, and clone WordPress plugins and themes from a unified dashboard. The most common indicator that a website running the plugin has been compromised is the presence of an administrator with the username "rangex." Additionally, the appearance of requests to "//wp-content/plugins/wpgateway/wpgateway-w...

Security operations centers (SOCs) are under pressure from both sides: threats are growing more complex and frequent, while security budgets are no longer keeping pace. Today's security leaders are expected to reduce risk and deliver results without relying on larger teams or increased spending. At the same time, SOC inefficiencies are draining resources. Studies show that up to half of all alerts are false positives, with some reports citing false positive rates as high as 99 percent . This means highly trained analysts spend a disproportionate amount of time chasing down harmless activity, wasting effort, increasing fatigue, and raising the chance of missing real threats. In this environment, the business imperative is clear: maximize the impact of every analyst and every dollar by making security operations faster, smarter, and more focused. Enter the Agentic AI SOC Analyst The agentic AI SOC Analyst is a force multiplier that enables organizations to do more with the team an...

Contemporary organizations understand the importance of data and its impact on improving interactions with customers, offering quality products or services, and building loyalty. Data is fundamental to business success. It allows companies to make the right decisions at the right time and deliver the high-quality, personalized products and services that customers expect. There is a challenge, though. Businesses are collecting more data than ever before, and new technologies have accelerated this process dramatically. As a result, organizations have significant volumes of data, making it hard to manage, protect, and get value from it. Here is where Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) comes in. GRC enables companies to define and implement the best practices, procedures, and governance to ensure the data is clean, safe, and reliable across the board.  More importantly,  organizations can use GRC platforms like StandardFusion  to create an organizational culture aro...

Government and state-owned organizations in a number of Asian countries have been targeted by a distinct group of espionage hackers as part of an intelligence gathering mission that has been underway since early 2021. "A notable feature of these attacks is that the attackers leveraged a wide range of legitimate software packages in order to load their malware payloads using a technique known as  DLL side-loading ," the Symantec Threat Hunter team, part of Broadcom Software,  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The campaign is said to be exclusively geared towards government institutions related to finance, aerospace, and defense, as well as state-owned media, IT, and telecom firms.  Dynamic-link library (DLL) side-loading is a popular cyberattack method that leverages how Microsoft Windows applications handle DLL files. In these intrusions, a spoofed malicious DLL is planted in the Windows Side-by-Side ( WinSxS ) directory so that the operating system ...

Hackers tied to the Iranian government have been targeting individuals specializing in Middle Eastern affairs, nuclear security, and genome research as part of a new social engineering campaign designed to hunt for sensitive information. Enterprise security firm Proofpoint attributed the targeted attacks to a threat actor named  TA453 , which broadly overlaps with cyber activities monitored under the monikers APT42, Charming Kitten, and Phosphorus. It all starts with a phishing email impersonating legitimate individuals at Western foreign policy research organizations that's ultimately designed to gather intelligence on behalf of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The sock puppet accounts include people from Pew Research Center, the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FRPI), the U.K.'s Chatham House, and the scientific journal Nature. The technique is said to have been deployed in mid-June 2022. However, what differentiates this from other phishing attacks...

Apple has released another round of security updates to address multiple vulnerabilities in iOS and macOS, including a new zero-day flaw that has been used in attacks in the wild. The issue, assigned the identifier  CVE-2022-32917 , is rooted in the Kernel component and could enable a malicious app to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges. "Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited," the iPhone maker acknowledged in a brief statement, adding it resolved the bug with improved bound checks. An anonymous researcher has been credited with reporting the shortcoming. It's worth noting that CVE-2022-32917 is also the  second Kernel related zero-day flaw  that Apple has remediated in less than a month. Patches are available in versions  iOS 15.7, iPadOS 15.7 ,  iOS 16 ,  macOS Big Sur 11.7 , and  macOS Monterey 12.6 . The iOS and iPadOS updates cover iPhone 6s and later, iPad Pro (all models), iPad Air 2 and late...

China has accused the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) of conducting a string of cyberattacks aimed at aeronautical and military research-oriented Northwestern Polytechnical University in the city of Xi'an in June 2022. The National Computer Virus Emergency Response Centre (NCVERC) disclosed its findings last week, and accused the Office of Tailored Access Operations ( TAO ), a cyber-warfare intelligence-gathering unit of the National Security Agency (NSA), of orchestrating thousands of attacks against the entities located within the country. "The U.S. NSA's TAO has carried out tens of thousands of malicious cyber attacks on China's domestic network targets, controlled tens of thousands of network devices (network servers, Internet terminals, network switches, telephone exchanges, routers, firewalls, etc.), and stole more than 140GB of high-value data," the NCVERC  said . According to the U.S. Department of Justice ( DoJ ), Northwestern Polytechnical Unive...

A hacktivist collective called  GhostSec  has claimed credit for compromising as many as 55 Berghof programmable logic controllers ( PLCs ) used by Israeli organizations as part of a "Free Palestine" campaign. Industrial cybersecurity firm OTORIO, which  dug deeper  into the incident, said the breach was made possible owing to the fact that the PLCs were accessible through the Internet and were secured by trivially guessable credentials. Details of the compromise first came to light on September 4 after GhostSec shared a video on its Telegram channel demonstrating a successful login to the PLC's admin panel, in addition to dumping data from the hacked controllers. The Israeli company said the system dumps and screenshots were exported directly from the admin panel following unauthorized access to the controllers through their public IP addresses. GhostSec (aka Ghost Security), first identified in 2015, is a self-proclaimed  vigilante group  that was i...