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A stealthy Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) bootkit called BlackLotus has become the first publicly known malware capable of bypassing Secure Boot defenses, making it a potent threat in the cyber landscape. "This bootkit can run even on fully up-to-date Windows 11 systems with UEFI Secure Boot enabled," Slovak cybersecurity company ESET  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. UEFI bootkits  are deployed in the FAT32 system partition and allow full control over the operating system (OS) boot process, thereby making it possible to disable OS-level security mechanisms and deploy arbitrary payloads during startup with high privileges. Offered for sale at $5,000 (and $200 per new subsequent version), the powerful and persistent toolkit is programmed in Assembly and C and is 80 kilobytes in size. It also features geofencing capabilities to avoid infecting computers in Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine. Details about B...

Employee well-being has become a primary focus for many businesses. Even before the pandemic, the C-suite was acutely aware of how employee mental health impacts business outcomes.  But for cybersecurity professionals, stress has always been a part of the job. A  new survey  revealed that one of the most concerning aspects of employee mental health is how it impacts cybersecurity programs and, more broadly, a business' ability to protect itself from cyberattacks. CISOs and their teams appear to be taking the brunt of unmitigated work-related stress levels and it's affecting the entire organization.  CISOs at small to midsize businesses with teams of five employees or fewer were surveyed to better understand how work-related stress is impacting CISOs – from their ability to do their job and lead their team to how it's affecting their own professional outlook and personal life. Here's what the survey results revealed.  The Impact of CISO Work-Stress Levels o...

Google has announced the general availability of client-side encryption (CSE) for Gmail and Calendar, months after  piloting the feature  in late 2022. The data privacy controls enable "even more organizations to become arbiters of their own data and the sole party deciding who has access to it," Google's Ganesh Chilakapati and Andy Wen  said . To that end, users can send and receive emails or create meeting events within their organizations or to other external parties in a manner that's encrypted "before it reaches Google servers." The company is also making available a decrypter utility in beta for Windows to decrypt client-side encrypted files and emails exported via its Data Export tool or Google Vault. macOS and Linux versions of the decrypter are expected to be released in the future. The development follows the  rollout of CSE  to other products such as Google Drive, Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Meet. The solution, the tech behemoth said, is ai...

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...

Cryptocurrency companies are being targeted as part of a new campaign that delivers a remote access trojan called Parallax RAT. The malware "uses injection techniques to hide within legitimate processes, making it difficult to detect," Uptycs  said  in a new report. "Once it has been successfully injected, attackers can interact with their victim via Windows Notepad that likely serves as a communication channel." Parallax RAT  grants attackers remote access to victim machines. It comes with features to upload and download files as well as record keystrokes and screen captures. It has been put to use since early 2020 and was  previously delivered  via COVID-19-themed lures. In February 2022, Proofpoint  detailed  an activity cluster dubbed TA2541 targeting aviation, aerospace, transportation, manufacturing, and defense industries using different RATs, including Parallax. The first payload is a Visual C++ malware that employs the  process holl...

Romanian cybersecurity company Bitdefender has  released  a free universal decryptor for a nascent file-encrypting malware known as MortalKombat . MortalKombat is a new ransomware strain that emerged in January 2023. It's based on a commodity ransomware dubbed Xorist and has been observed in attacks targeting entities in the U.S., the Philippines, the U.K., and Turkey. Xorist , detected since 2010, is distributed as a ransomware builder, allowing cyber threat actors to create and customize their own version of the malware. This includes the ransom note, the file name of the ransom note, the list of file extensions targeted, the wallpaper to be used, and the extension to be used on encrypted files. A decryptor for Xorist was made available by Emsisoft in May 2016. MortalKombat notably was deployed in recent attacks mounted by an unnamed financially motivated threat actor as a part of a phishing campaign aimed at a wide range of organizations. "MortalKombat encrypts vari...

A new post-exploitation framework called EXFILTRATOR-22 (aka EX-22) has emerged in the wild with the goal of deploying ransomware within enterprise networks while flying under the radar. "It comes with a wide range of capabilities, making post-exploitation a cakewalk for anyone purchasing the tool," CYFIRMA  said  in a new report. Some of the notable features include establishing a reverse shell with elevated privileges, uploading and downloading files, logging keystrokes, launching ransomware to encrypt files, and starting a live VNC (Virtual Network Computing) session for real-time access. It's also equipped to persist after system reboots, perform lateral movement via a worm, view running processes, generate cryptographic hashes of files, and extract authentication tokens. The cybersecurity firm assessed with moderate confidence that threat actors responsible for creating the malware are operating from North, East, or Southeast Asia and are likely former affiliat...

As digital transformation takes hold and businesses become increasingly reliant on digital services, it has become more important than ever to secure applications and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). With that said, application security and API security are two critical components of a comprehensive security strategy. By utilizing these practices, organizations can protect themselves from malicious attacks and security threats, and most importantly, ensure their data remains secure. Interestingly enough, despite the clear advantages these disciplines provide, businesses are struggling to understand which security approach is best for their needs. So in this article, we'll discuss the differences between application and API security, best practices that you should consider, and ultimately make the case for why you need both.  What is Application Security Application security, better known as AppSec, is a critical aspect of any organization's cybersecurity strategy....

The threat actor known as Blind Eagle has been linked to a new campaign targeting various key industries in Colombia. The activity, which was detected by the BlackBerry Research and Intelligence Team on February 20, 2023, is also said to encompass Ecuador, Chile, and Spain, suggesting a slow expansion of the hacking group's victimology footprint. Targeted entities include health, financial, law enforcement, immigration, and an agency in charge of peace negotiation in Colombia, the Canadian cybersecurity company said. Blind Eagle, also known as  APT-C-36 , was  recently covered  by Check Point Research, detailing the adversary's advanced toolset comprising Meterpreter payloads that are delivered via spear-phishing emails. The latest set of attacks involves the group impersonating the Colombian government tax agency, the National Directorate of Taxes and Customs (DIAN), to phish its targets using lures that urge recipients to settle "outstanding obligations." Th...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has  added  a high-severity flaw affecting the ZK Framework to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog based on evidence of active exploitation. Tracked as  CVE-2022-36537  (CVSS score: 7.5), the issue impacts ZK Framework versions 9.6.1, 9.6.0.1, 9.5.1.3, 9.0.1.2, and 8.6.4.1, and allows threat actors to retrieve sensitive information via specially crafted requests. "The ZK Framework is an open source Java framework," CISA  said . "This vulnerability can impact multiple products, including but not limited to ConnectWise R1Soft Server Backup Manager." The  vulnerability  was patched in May 2022 in versions 9.6.2, 9.6.0.2, 9.5.1.4, 9.0.1.3, and 8.6.4.2. As  demonstrated  by Huntress in a proof-of-concept (PoC) in October 2022, the vulnerability can be weaponized to bypass authentication, upload a backdoored JDBC database driver to gain code execution, and deploy r...