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

Nicknamed ProxyNotShell, a new exploit used in the wild takes advantage of the recently published Microsoft Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability CVE-2022-41040 and a second vulnerability, CVE-2022-41082 that allows Remote Code Execution (RCE) when PowerShell is available to unidentified attackers. Based on ProxyShell, this new zero-day abuse risk leverage a chained attack similar to the one used in the 2021 ProxyShell attack that exploited the combination of multiple vulnerabilities - CVE-2021-34523, CVE-2021-34473, and CVE-2021-31207 – to permit a remote actor to execute arbitrary code. Despite the potential severity of attacks using them, ProxyShell vulnerabilities are still on CISA's list of top 2021 routinely exploited vulnerabilities. Meet ProxyNotShell  Recorded on September 19, 2022, CVE-2022-41082 is an attack vector targeting Microsoft's Exchange Servers, enabling attacks of low complexity with low privileges required. Impacted services, if vulnerable, ena...

Australian telecom giant Optus on Monday confirmed that nearly 2.1 million of its current and former customers suffered a leak of their personal information and at least one form of identification number as a result of a  data breach  late last month. The company also  said  it has engaged the services of Deloitte to conduct an external forensic assessment of the attack to "understand how it occurred and how we can prevent it from occurring again." Optus is fully owned by Singaporean telecommunications conglomerate Singtel, which also has a significant stake in Bharti Airtel, the second largest carrier in India. "Approximately 1.2 million customers have had at least one number from a current and valid form of identification, and personal information, compromised," Singtel  said  in an announcement made on its website. It also said the breach affected expired IDs and personal information of about 900,000 additional customers. It further emphasized that...

A threat actor likely with associations to China has been attributed to a new supply chain attack that involves the use of a trojanized installer for the Comm100 Live Chat application to distribute a JavaScript backdoor. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said the attack made use of a signed Comm100 desktop agent app for Windows that was downloadable from the company's website. The scale of the attack is currently unknown, but the trojanized file is said to have been identified at organizations in the industrial, healthcare, technology, manufacturing, insurance, and telecom sectors in North America and Europe. Comm100 is a Canadian provider of live audio/video chat and customer engagement software for enterprises. It  claims  to have more than 15,000 customers across 51 countries. "The installer was signed on September 26, 2022 at 14:54:00 UTC using a valid Comm100 Network Corporation certificate," the company  noted , adding it remained available until September 29. E...

The recently discovered Linux-Based ransomware strain known as Cheerscrypt has been outed as a handiwork of a Chinese cyber espionage group known for operating short-lived ransomware schemes . Cybersecurity firm Sygnia attributed the attacks to a threat actor it tracks under the name Emperor Dragonfly, which is also known as Bronze Starlight (Secureworks) and DEV-0401 (Microsoft). "Emperor Dragonfly deployed open source tools that were written by Chinese developers for Chinese users," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This reinforces claims that the 'Emperor Dragonfly' ransomware operators are based in China." The use of Cheerscrypt is the latest addition to a long list of ransomware families previously deployed by the group in little over a year, including LockFile, Atom Silo, Rook, Night Sky, Pandora, and LockBit 2.0. Secureworks, in its profile of the group, noted "it is plausible that Bronze Starlight deploys ransomw...

The North Korea-backed Lazarus Group has been observed deploying a Windows rootkit by taking advantage of an exploit in a Dell firmware driver, highlighting new tactics adopted by the state-sponsored adversary. The Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver ( BYOVD ) attack, which took place in the autumn of 2021, is another variant of the threat actor's espionage-oriented activity called Operation In(ter)ception  that's directed against aerospace and defense industries. "The campaign started with spear-phishing emails containing malicious Amazon-themed documents and targeted an employee of an aerospace company in the Netherlands, and a political journalist in Belgium," ESET researcher Peter Kálnai  said . Attack chains unfolded upon the opening of the lure documents, leading to the distribution of malicious droppers that were trojanized versions of open source projects, corroborating recent reports from Google's  Mandiant  and  Microsoft . ESET said it uncovered ev...

A former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) employee has been arrested on charges of attempting to sell classified information to a foreign spy, who was actually an undercover agent working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Jareh Sebastian Dalke, 30, was employed at the NSA for less than a month from June 6, 2022, to July 1, 2022, serving as an Information Systems Security Designer as part of a temporary assignment in Washington D.C. According to an  affidavit  filed by the FBI, Dalke was also a member of the U.S. Army from about 2015 to 2018 and held a Secret security clearance, which he received in 2016. The defendant further held a Top Secret security clearance during his tenure at the NSA. "Between August and September 2022, Dalke used an encrypted email account to transmit excerpts of three classified documents he had obtained during his employment to an individual Dalke believed to be working for a foreign government," the Justice Department (DoJ) ...

Whether you relish a mental challenge or fancy a six-figure paycheck, there are many good reasons to get into  white hat hacking . That said, picking up the necessary knowledge to build a  new career  can seem like a daunting task. There is a lot to learn, after all. To help you get started, The Hacker News Deals is currently running an eye-catching offer:  pay what you want  for one video course, and get another eight courses if you beat the average price paid.  Special Offer  — For a limited time, name your price for one cybersecurity course and beat the average price paid to  get lifetime access to nine courses . The full bundle is worth $1,668! With thousands of unfilled positions, white hat hacking is a lucrative and exciting career path. This bundle provides a solid introduction to the world of penetration testing and general cybersecurity, with over 65 hours of intensive training. Through concise video tutorials, you learn how to secur...

Microsoft on Friday disclosed that a single activity group in August 2022 achieved initial access and breached Exchange servers by chaining the  two newly disclosed zero-day flaws  in a limited set of attacks aimed at less than 10 organizations globally. "These attacks installed the Chopper web shell to facilitate hands-on-keyboard access, which the attackers used to perform Active Directory reconnaissance and data exfiltration," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC)  said  in a new analysis. The weaponization of the vulnerabilities is expected to ramp up in the coming days, Microsoft further warned, as malicious actors co-opt the exploits into their toolkits, including deploying ransomware, due to the "highly privileged access Exchange systems confer onto an attacker." The tech giant attributed the ongoing attacks with medium confidence to a state-sponsored organization, adding it was already investigating these attacks when the Zero Day Initiative d...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday  added  a recently disclosed critical flaw impacting Atlassian's Bitbucket Server and Data Center to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. Tracked as  CVE-2022-36804 , the issue relates to a command injection vulnerability that could allow malicious actors to gain arbitrary code execution on susceptible installations by sending a specially crafted HTTP request. Successful exploitation, however, banks on the prerequisite that the attacker already has access to a public repository or possesses read permissions to a private Bitbucket repository. "All versions of Bitbucket Server and Datacenter released after 6.10.17 including 7.0.0 and newer are affected, this means that all instances that are running any versions between 7.0.0 and 8.3.0 inclusive are affected by this vulnerability," Atlassian  noted  in a late August 2022 advisory....