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Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a trio of side-channel attacks that could be exploited to leak sensitive data from modern CPUs. Called  Collide+Power  ( CVE-2023-20583 ),  Downfall  ( CVE-2022-40982 ), and  Inception  ( CVE-2023-20569 ), the novel methods follow the disclosure of another newly discovered security vulnerability affecting AMD's Zen 2 architecture-based processors known as  Zenbleed  (CVE-2023-20593). "Downfall attacks target a critical weakness found in billions of modern processors used in personal and cloud computers,"  Daniel Moghimi , senior research scientist at Google,  said . "This vulnerability [...] enables a user to access and steal data from other users who share the same computer." In a hypothetical attack scenario, a malicious app installed on a device could weaponize the method to steal sensitive information like passwords and encryption keys, effectively undermining Intel's Software G...

Hackers associated with China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) have been linked to attacks in 17 different countries in Asia, Europe, and North America from 2021 to 2023. Cybersecurity firm Recorded Future attributed the intrusion set to a nation-state group it tracks under the name  RedHotel  (previously Threat Activity Group-22 or TAG-22), which overlaps with a cluster of activity broadly monitored as  Aquatic Panda ,  Bronze University , Charcoal Typhoon,  Earth Lusca , and  Red Scylla  (or Red Dev 10). Active since 2019, some of the prominent sectors targeted by the prolific actor encompass academia, aerospace, government, media, telecommunications, and research. A majority of the victims during the period were government organizations. "RedHotel has a dual mission of intelligence gathering and economic espionage," the cybersecurity company  said , calling out its persistence, operational intensity, and global reach. "It targets both gov...

Validate security continuously across your full stack with Pen Testing as a Service. In today's modern security operations center (SOC), it's a battle between the defenders and the cybercriminals. Both are using tools and expertise – however, the cybercriminals have the element of surprise on their side, and a host of tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that have evolved. These external threat actors have now been further emboldened in the era of AI with open-source tools like ChatGPT. With the potential of an attack leading to a breach within minutes, CISOs now are looking to prepare all systems and assets for cyber resilience and rapid response when needed. With tools and capabilities to validate security continuously – including penetration testing as a service – DevSecOps teams can remediate critical vulnerabilities fast due to the easy access to tactical support to the teams that need it the most. This gives the SOC and DevOps teams tools to that remove false po...

Google has introduced a new security feature in Android 14 that allows IT administrators to disable support for 2G cellular networks in their managed device fleet. The search giant said it's introducing a second user setting to turn off support, at the model level, for  null-ciphered cellular connections . "The Android Security Model assumes that all networks are hostile to keep users safe from network packet injection, tampering, or eavesdropping on user traffic," Roger Piqueras Jover, Yomna Nasser, and Sudhi Herle  said . "Android does not rely on link-layer encryption to address this threat model. Instead, Android establishes that all network traffic should be end-to-end encrypted (E2EE)." 2G networks, in particular, employ weak encryption and lack mutual authentication,  rendering  them  susceptible  to over-the-air interception and traffic decryption attacks by impersonating a real 2G tower. The  threat posed by rogue cellular base stations...

The U.K. Electoral Commission on Tuesday disclosed a "complex" cyber attack on its systems that went undetected for over a year, allowing the threat actors to access years worth of voter data belonging to 40 million people. "The incident was identified in October 2022 after suspicious activity was detected on our systems," the regulator  said . "It became clear that hostile actors had first accessed the systems in August 2021." The intrusion enabled unauthorized access to the Commission's servers hosting email, control systems, and copies of the electoral registers it maintains for research purposes. The identity of the intruders are presently unknown. The registers included the name and address of anyone in the U.K. who registered to vote between 2014 and 2022, as well as the names of those registered as overseas voters. However, they did not contain information of those who qualified to register anonymously and addresses of overseas electors regi...

Microsoft has patched a total of  74 flaws  in its software as part of the company's Patch Tuesday updates for August 2023, down from the voluminous 132 vulnerabilities the company fixed last month. This comprises six Critical, 67 Important, and one Moderate severity vulnerabilities. Released along with the security improvements are two defense-in-depth updates for Microsoft Office ( ADV230003 ) and the Memory Integrity System Readiness Scan Tool ( ADV230004 ). The updates are also in addition to 30 issues addressed by Microsoft in its Chromium-based Edge browser since last month's Patch Tuesday edition and one side-channel flaw impacting certain processor models offered by AMD ( CVE-2023-20569  or  Inception ). ADV230003 concerns an already known security flaw tracked as  CVE-2023-36884 , a remote code execution vulnerability in Office and Windows HTML that has been actively exploited by the Russia-linked RomCom threat actor in attacks targeting Ukraine as...

Exposed Kubernetes (K8s) clusters are being exploited by malicious actors to deploy cryptocurrency miners and other backdoors. Cloud security firm Aqua, in a  report  shared with The Hacker News, said a majority of the clusters belonged to small to medium-sized organizations, with a smaller subset tied to bigger companies, spanning financial, aerospace, automotive, industrial, and security sectors. In total, Kubernetes clusters belonging to more than 350 organizations, open-source projects, and individuals were discovered, 60% of which were the target of an active crypto-mining campaign. The publicly-accessible clusters, per Aqua, are said to suffer from two different kinds of misconfigurations: allowing anonymous access with high privileges and running kubectl proxy with the flags "--address=`0.0.0.0` --accept-hosts `.*`" "Housing a wide array of sensitive and valuable assets, Kubernetes clusters can store customer data, financial records, intellectual property, a...

Tactical similarities have been unearthed between the double extortion ransomware group known as Rhysida and Vice Society , including in their targeting of education and healthcare sectors. "As Vice Society was observed deploying a variety of commodity ransomware payloads, this link does not suggest that Rhysida is exclusively used by Vice Society, but shows with at least medium confidence that Vice Society operators are now using Rhysida ransomware," Check Point  said  in a new report. Vice Society , tracked by Microsoft under the name Storm-0832, has a  pattern  of employing already existing ransomware binaries that are sold on criminal forums to pull off their attacks. The financially motivated gang has also been observed resorting to pure extortion-themed attacks wherein the data is exfiltrated without encrypting them. First observed in May 2023, the  Rhysida  ransomware group is known to rely on phishing attacks and Cobalt Strike to breach target...

The operators associated with the QakBot (aka QBot) malware have set up 15 new command-and-control (C2) servers as of late June 2023. The findings are a continuation of the malware's infrastructure analysis from Team Cymru, and arrive a little over two months after Lumen Black Lotus Labs  revealed  that 25% of its C2 servers are only active for a single day. "QakBot has a history of taking an extended break each summer before returning sometime in September, with this year's spamming activities ceasing around 22 June 2023," the cybersecurity firm  said . "But are the QakBot operators actually on vacation when they aren't spamming, or is this 'break' a time for them to refine and update their infrastructure and tools?" QakBot's C2 network, like in the case of Emotet and IcedID, is  characterized  by a tiered architecture in which C2 nodes communicate with upstream Tier 2 (T2) C2 nodes hosted on VPS providers geolocated in Russia. A majo...