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Hey 👋 there, cyber friends! Welcome to  this week's cybersecurity newsletter , where we aim to keep you informed and empowered in the ever-changing world of cyber threats. In today's edition, we will cover some interesting developments in the cybersecurity landscape and share some insightful analysis of each to help you protect yourself against potential attacks. 1. Apple 📱 Devices Hacked with New Zero-Day Bug - Update ASAP! Have you updated your Apple devices lately? If not, it's time to do so, as the tech giant just released security updates for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and Safari. The update is to fix a zero-day vulnerability that hackers have been exploiting. This vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-23529, is related to a type confusion bug in the WebKit browser engine. What does this mean? Well, it means that if you visit a website with malicious code, the bug can be activated, leading to arbitrary code execution. In other words, hackers can take control of your devi...

Entities in Armenia have come under a cyber attack using an updated version of a backdoor called  OxtaRAT  that allows remote access and desktop surveillance. "The tool capabilities include searching for and exfiltrating files from the infected machine, recording the video from the web camera and desktop, remotely controlling the compromised machine with TightVNC, installing a web shell, performing port scanning, and more," Check Point Research  said  in a report. The latest campaign is said to have commenced in November 2022 and marks the first time the threat actors behind the activity have expanded their focus beyond Azerbaijan. "The threat actors behind these attacks have been targeting human rights organizations, dissidents, and independent media in Azerbaijan for several years," the cybersecurity firm noted, calling the campaign Operation Silent Watch. The late 2022 intrusions are significant, not least because of the changes in the infection chain, the s...

A new variant of the notorious Mirai botnet has been found leveraging several security vulnerabilities to propagate itself to Linux and IoT devices. Observed during the second half of 2022, the new version has been dubbed  V3G4  by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, which identified three different campaigns likely conducted by the same threat actor. "Once the vulnerable devices are compromised, they will be fully controlled by attackers and become a part of the botnet," Unit 42 researchers  said . "The threat actor has the capability to utilize those devices to conduct further attacks, such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks." The attacks primarily single out exposed servers and networking devices running Linux, with the adversary weaponizing as many as 13 flaws that could lead to remote code execution (RCE). Some of the notable flaws relate to critical flaws in Atlassian Confluence Server and Data Center, DrayTek Vigor routers, Airspan AirSpot, and Geu...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

Cisco has rolled out security updates to address a critical flaw reported in the ClamAV open source antivirus engine that could lead to remote code execution on susceptible devices. Tracked as  CVE-2023-20032  (CVSS score: 9.8), the issue relates to a case of remote code execution residing in the HFS+ file parser component. The flaw affects versions 1.0.0 and earlier, 0.105.1 and earlier, and 0.103.7 and earlier. Google security engineer Simon Scannell has been credited with discovering and reporting the bug. "This vulnerability is due to a missing buffer size check that may result in a heap buffer overflow write," Cisco Talos  said  in an advisory. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by submitting a crafted HFS+ partition file to be scanned by ClamAV on an affected device." Successful exploitation of the weakness could enable an adversary to run arbitrary code with the same privileges as that of the ClamAV scanning process, or crash the process, resu...

A popular npm package with more than 3.5 million weekly downloads has been found vulnerable to an account takeover attack. "The package can be taken over by recovering an expired domain name for one of its maintainers and resetting the password," software supply chain security company Illustria  said  in a report. While npm's security protections limit users to have only one active email address per account, the Israeli firm said it was able to reset the GitHub password using the recovered domain. The attack, in a nutshell, grants a threat actor access to the package's associated GitHub account, effectively making it possible to publish trojanized versions to the npm registry that can be weaponized to conduct supply chain attacks at scale. This is achieved by taking advantage of a GitHub Action that's configured in the repository to automatically publish the packages when new code changes are pushed. "Even though the maintainer's npm user account i...

The prolific  SideWinder  group has been attributed as the nation-state actor behind attempted attacks against 61 entities in Afghanistan, Bhutan, Myanmar, Nepal, and Sri Lanka between June and November 2021. Targets included government, military, law enforcement, banks, and other organizations, according to an  exhaustive report  published by Group-IB, which also found links between the adversary and two other intrusion sets tracked as Baby Elephant and  DoNot Team . SideWinder  is also referred to as APT-C-17, Hardcore Nationalist (HN2), Rattlesnake, Razor Tiger, and T-APT4. It's suspected to be of Indian origin, although Kaspersky in 2022 noted that the attribution is no longer deterministic. The  group  has been linked to  no less than 1,000 attacks  against government organizations in the Asia-Pacific region since April 2020, according to a report from the Russian cybersecurity firm early last year. Of the 61 potential targets...

Chinese-speaking individuals in Southeast and East Asia are the targets of a new rogue Google Ads campaign that delivers remote access trojans such as FatalRAT to compromised machines. The attacks involve purchasing ad slots to appear in Google search results and direct users looking for popular applications to rogue websites hosting trojanized installers, ESET said in a report published today. The ads have since been taken down. Some of the spoofed applications include Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Telegram, WhatsApp, LINE, Signal, Skype, Electrum, Sogou Pinyin Method, Youdao, and WPS Office. "The websites and installers downloaded from them are mostly in Chinese and in some cases falsely offer Chinese language versions of software that is not available in China," the Slovak cybersecurity firm  said , adding it observed the attacks between August 2022 and January 2023. A majority of the victims are located in Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong, followed by Malaysia, Japan, ...

Security researchers have disclosed two new vulnerabilities affecting Schneider Electric Modicon programmable logic controllers (PLCs) that could allow for authentication bypass and remote code execution. The flaws, tracked as  CVE-2022-45788  (CVSS score: 7.5) and  CVE-2022-45789  (CVSS score: 8.1), are part of a  broader collection  of  security defects  tracked by Forescout as OT:ICEFALL. Successful exploitation of the bugs could enable an adversary to execute unauthorized code, denial-of-service, or disclosure of sensitive information. The cybersecurity company said the shortcomings can be chained by a threat actor with known flaws from other vendors (e.g.,  CVE-2021-31886 ) to achieve deep lateral movement in operational technology (OT) networks. "Deep lateral movement lets attackers gain deep access to industrial control systems and cross often overlooked security perimeters, allowing them to perform highly granular and stealthy ...

Security teams typically have great visibility over most areas, for example, the corporate network, endpoints, servers, and cloud infrastructure. They use this visibility to enforce the necessary security and compliance requirements. However, this is not the case when it comes to sensitive data sitting in production or analytic databases, data warehouses or data lakes. Security teams have to rely on data teams to locate sensitive data and enforce access controls and security policies. This is a huge headache for both the security and data teams. It weakens the business's security and compliance putting it at risk of exposing sensitive data, large fines, reputational damages, and more. Also, in many cases, it slows down the business's ability to scale up data operations.  This article examines how Satori, a data security platform, gives control of the sensitive data in databases, data warehouses and data lakes to the security teams. Satori's  automated data security plat...