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Data Security Posture Management is an approach to securing cloud data by ensuring that sensitive data always has the correct security posture - regardless of where it's been duplicated or moved to. So, what is DSPM? Here's a quick example: Let's say you've built an excellent  security posture  for your cloud data. For the sake of this example, your data is in production, it's protected behind a firewall, it's not publicly accessible, and your IAM controls have limited access properly. Now along comes a developer and replicates that data into a lower environment. What happens to that fine security posture you've built?  Well, it's gone - and now the data is only protected by the security posture in that lower environment. So if that environment is exposed or improperly secured - so is all that sensitive data you've been trying to protect. Security postures just don't travel with their data . Data Security Posture Management ( DSPM ) was crea...

The threat actor known as  Space Pirates  has been linked to attacks against at least 16 organizations in Russia and Serbia over the past year by employing novel tactics and adding new cyber weapons to its arsenal. "The cybercriminals' main goals are still espionage and theft of confidential information, but the group has expanded its interests and the geography of its attacks," Positive Technologies  said  in a deep dive report published last week. Targets comprise government agencies, educational institutions, private security companies, aerospace manufacturers, agricultural producers, defense, energy, and healthcare firms in Russia and Serbia. Space Pirates was  first exposed  by the Russian cybersecurity company in May 2022, highlighting its attacks on the aerospace sector in the nation. The group, believed to be active since at least late 2019, has links to another adversary tracked by Symantec as  Webworm . Positive Technologies' analysis o...

A nation-state actor with links to China is suspected of being behind a series of attacks against industrial organizations in Eastern Europe that took place last year to siphon data stored on air-gapped systems. Cybersecurity company Kaspersky attributed the intrusions with medium to high confidence to a hacking crew called  APT31 , which is also tracked under the monikers Bronze Vinewood, Judgement Panda, and Violet Typhoon (formerly Zirconium), citing commonalities in the tactics observed. The attacks entailed the use of more than 15 distinct implants and their variants, broken down into three broad categories based on their ability to establish persistent remote access, gather sensitive information, and transmit the collected data to actor-controlled infrastructure. "One of the implant types appeared to be a sophisticated modular malware, aimed at profiling removable drives and contaminating them with a worm to exfiltrate data from isolated, or air-gapped, networks of indus...

Organizations in Italy are the target of a new phishing campaign that leverages a new strain of malware called  WikiLoader  with an ultimate aim to install a banking trojan, stealer, and spyware referred to as  Ursnif  (aka Gozi). "It is a sophisticated downloader with the objective of installing a second malware payload," Proofpoint  said  in a technical report. "The malware uses multiple mechanisms to evade detection and was likely developed as a malware that can be rented out to select cybercriminal threat actors." WikiLoader is so named due to the malware making a request to Wikipedia and checking that the response has the string "The Free." The enterprise security firm said it first detected the malware in the wild on December 27, 2022, in connection with an intrusion set mounted by a threat actor it tracks as  TA544 , which is also known as Bamboo Spider and Zeus Panda. The campaigns are centered around the use of emails containing either M...

The P2PInfect peer-to-peer (P2) worm has been observed employing previously undocumented initial access methods to breach susceptible Redis servers and rope them into a botnet. "The malware compromises exposed instances of the Redis data store by exploiting the replication feature," Cado Security researchers Nate Bill and Matt Muir  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "A common attack pattern against Redis in cloud environments is to exploit this feature using a malicious instance to enable replication. This is achieved via connecting to an exposed Redis instance and issuing the SLAVEOF command." The Rust-based malware was  first documented  by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, calling out the malware's ability to exploit a critical Lua sandbox escape vulnerability ( CVE-2022-0543 , CVSS score: 10.0) to obtain a foothold into Redis instances. The campaign is believed to have commenced on or after June 29, 2023. However, the latest discovery suggests th...

Threat actors associated with the hacking crew known as Patchwork have been spotted targeting universities and research organizations in China as part of a recently observed campaign. The activity, according to  KnownSec 404 Team , entailed the use of a backdoor codenamed  EyeShell . Patchwork , also known by the names Operation Hangover and Zinc Emerson, is suspected to be a threat group that operates on behalf of India. Active since at least December 2015, attack chains mounted by the outfit have a narrow focus and tend to single out Pakistan and China with custom implants such as BADNEWS via spear-phishing and watering hole attacks. The adversarial collective has been found to share tactical overlaps with other cyber-espionage groups with an Indian connection, including  SideWinder  and the  DoNot Team . Earlier this May, Meta  disclosed  that it took down 50 accounts on Facebook and Instagram operated by Patchwork, which took advantage of rog...

Demand for Virtual CISO services is soaring. According to Gartner, the use of vCISO services among small and mid-size businesses and non-regulated enterprises was expected to grow by a whopping 1900% in just one year, from only 1% in 2021 to 20% in 2022! Offering vCISO services can be especially attractive for MSPs and MSSPs. By addressing their customers' needs for proactive cyber resilience, they can generate a growing amount of recurring revenue from existing and new customers. And all while differentiating themselves from the competition. vCISO services also enable upselling of additional products and services the MSP or MSSP specializes in. However, not all MSPs and MSSPs fully understand how to provide vCISO services . Some may be unsure about which services are expected from them. Others may not realize they are already providing vCISO services and have the potential to effortlessly broaden their offerings into a complete vCISO suite or package it differently to make it more ...

More details have emerged about a botnet called  AVRecon , which has been observed making use of compromised small office/home office (SOHO) routers as part of a multi-year campaign active since at least May 2021. AVRecon was  first disclosed  by Lumen Black Lotus Labs earlier this month as malware capable of executing additional commands and stealing victim's bandwidth for what appears to be an illegal proxy service made available for other actors. It has also surpassed QakBot in terms of scale, having infiltrated over 41,000 nodes located across 20 countries worldwide. "The malware has been used to create residential proxy services to shroud malicious activity such as password spraying, web-traffic proxying, and ad fraud," the researchers said in the report. This has been corroborated by new findings from KrebsOnSecurity and Spur.us, which last week  revealed  that "AVrecon is the malware engine behind a 12-year-old service called SocksEscort, which rents ...

Threat actors are creating fake websites hosting trojanized software installers to trick unsuspecting users into downloading a downloader malware called Fruity with the goal of installing remote trojans tools like Remcos RAT. "Among the software in question are various instruments for fine-tuning CPUs, graphic cards, and BIOS; PC hardware-monitoring tools; and some other apps," cybersecurity vendor Doctor Web  said  in an analysis.  "Such installers are used as a decoy and contain not only the software potential victims are interested in, but also the trojan itself with all its components." The exact initial access vector used in the campaign is unclear but it could potentially range from phishing to drive-by downloads to malicious ads. Users who land on the fake site are prompted to download a ZIP installer package. The installer, besides activating the standard installation process, stealthily drops the Fruity trojan, a Python-based malware that unpacks an MP...