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A suspected Chinese-nexus hacking group exploited a  recently disclosed zero-day flaw  in Barracuda Networks Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliances to breach government, military, defense and aerospace, high-tech industry, and telecom sectors as part of a global espionage campaign. Mandiant, which is tracking the activity under the name  UNC4841 , described the threat actor as "highly responsive to defensive efforts" and capable of actively tweaking their modus operandi to maintain persistent access to targets. "UNC4841 deployed new and novel malware designed to maintain presence at a small subset of high priority targets that it compromised either before the patch was released, or shortly following Barracuda's remediation guidance," the Google-owned threat intelligence firm  said  in a new technical report published today. Almost a third of the identified affected organizations are government agencies. Interestingly enough, some of the earliest compromises...

A new malspam campaign has been observed deploying an off-the-shelf malware called DarkGate . "The current spike in DarkGate malware activity is plausible given the fact that the developer of the malware has recently started to rent out the malware to a limited number of affiliates," Telekom Security  said  in a report published last week. The latest report builds on  recent findings  from security researcher Igal Lytzki, who detailed a "high volume campaign" that leverages hijacked email threads to trick recipients into downloading the malware. The attack commences with a phishing URL that, when clicked, passes through a traffic direction system ( TDS ) to take the victim to an MSI payload subject to certain conditions. This includes the presence of a refresh header in the HTTP response. Opening the MSI file triggers a multi-stage process that incorporates an AutoIt script to execute shellcode that acts as a conduit to decrypt and launch DarkGate via a crypte...

Ask any security professional and they'll tell you that remediating risks from various siloed security scanning tools requires a tedious and labor-intensive series of steps focused on deduplication, prioritization, and routing of issues to an appropriate "fixer" somewhere in the organization. This burden on already resource-strapped security teams is an efficiency killer.  A new study , commissioned by Seemplicity and conducted by Dark Reading, provides fresh insight into how security pros handle the challenging remediation life cycle from discovery to resolution. The research reveals the obstacles security professionals face when coordinating remediation activities. The data exposes the outcomes — in increased workload and diminished risk posture — that arise from lengthy remediation times, inefficient and uncontrolled manual processes, the lack of managerial visibility and oversight across the risk life cycle.  Remediation Process Broken Down to Steps and Time Spent on Ea...

Is Managing Customer Logins and Data Giving You Headaches? You're Not Alone! Today, we all expect super-fast, secure, and personalized online experiences. But let's be honest, we're also more careful about how our data is used. If something feels off, trust can vanish in an instant. Add to that the lightning-fast changes AI is bringing to everything from how we log in to spotting online fraud, and it's a whole new ball game! If you're dealing with logins, data privacy, bringing new users on board, or building digital trust, this webinar is for you . Join us for " Navigating Customer Identity in the AI Era ," where we'll dive into the Auth0 2025 Customer Identity Trends Report . We'll show you what's working, what's not, and how to tweak your strategy for the year ahead. In just one session, you'll get practical answers to real-world challenges like: How AI is changing what users expect – and where they're starting to push ba...

Unpatched Citrix NetScaler systems exposed to the internet are being targeted by unknown threat actors in what's suspected to be a ransomware attack. Cybersecurity company Sophos is  tracking  the activity cluster under the moniker  STAC4663 . Attack chains involve the exploitation of  CVE-2023-3519 , a critical code injection vulnerability impacting NetScaler ADC and Gateway servers that could facilitate unauthenticated remote code execution. In one intrusion detected in mid-August 2023, the security flaw is said to have been used to conduct a domain-wide attack, including injecting payloads into legitimate executables such as the Windows Update Agent (wuauclt.exe) and the Windows Management Instrumentation Provider Service (wmiprvse.exe). An analysis of the payload is underway. Other notable aspects include the distribution of obfuscated PowerShell scripts, PHP web shells, and the use of an Estonian service called BlueVPS for malware staging. Sophos said the...

Microsoft is warning of an increase in adversary-in-the-middle ( AiTM ) phishing techniques, which are being propagated as part of the phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) cybercrime model. In addition to an uptick in AiTM-capable PhaaS platforms, the tech giant noted that existing phishing services like PerSwaysion are incorporating AiTM capabilities. "This development in the PhaaS ecosystem enables attackers to conduct high-volume phishing campaigns that attempt to circumvent MFA protections at scale," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team  said  in a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter). Phishing kits with AiTM capabilities work in two ways, one of which concerns the use of reverse proxy servers (i.e., the phishing page) to relay traffic to and from the client and legitimate website and stealthily capture user credentials, two-factor authentication codes, and session cookies. A second method involves synchronous relay servers. "In AiTM through synchronous relay s...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a case of privilege escalation associated with a Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) application by taking advantage of an abandoned reply URL. "An attacker could leverage this abandoned URL to redirect authorization codes to themselves, exchanging the ill-gotten authorization codes for access tokens," Secureworks Counter Threat Unit (CTU)  said  in a technical report published last week. "The threat actor could then call Power Platform API via a middle-tier service and obtain elevated privileges." Following responsible disclosure on April 5, 2023, the issue was addressed by Microsoft via an update released a day later. Secureworks has also made available an  open-source tool  that other organizations can use to scan for abandoned reply URLs. Reply URL , also called redirect URI, refers to the location where the authorization server sends the user once the app has been successfully authorized and grant...

In yet another sign that developers continue to be targets of software supply chain attacks, a number of malicious packages have been discovered on the Rust programming language's crate registry. The libraries, uploaded between August 14 and 16, 2023, were published by a user named "amaperf," Phylum  said  in a report published last week. The names of the packages, now taken down, are as follows: postgress, if-cfg, xrvrv, serd, oncecell, lazystatic, and envlogger. It's not clear what the end goal of the campaign was, but the suspicious modules were found to harbor functionalities to capture the operating system information (i.e., Windows, Linux, macOS, or Unknown) and transmit the data to a hard-coded Telegram channel via the messaging platform's API. This suggests that the campaign may have been in its early stages and that the threat actor may have been casting a wide net to compromise as many developer machines as possible to deliver rogue updates with imp...

Cyber attacks on e-commerce applications are a common trend in 2023 as e-commerce businesses become more omnichannel, they build and deploy increasingly more API interfaces, with threat actors constantly exploring more ways to exploit vulnerabilities. This is why regular testing and ongoing monitoring are necessary to fully protect web applications, identifying weaknesses so they can be mitigated quickly. In this article, we will discuss the recent Honda e-commerce platform attack, how it happened, and its impact on the business and its clients. In addition, to the importance of application security testing, we will also discuss the different areas of vulnerability testing and its various phases. Finally, we will provide details on how a long-term preventative solution such as  PTaaS  can protect e-commerce businesses and the differences between continuous testing (PTaaS) and standard pen testing. The 2023 Honda E-commerce Platform Attack Honda's power equipment, lawn, ga...

An updated version of a botnet malware called  KmsdBot  is now targeting Internet of Things (IoT) devices, simultaneously branching out its capabilities and the attack surface. "The binary now includes support for  Telnet scanning  and support for more CPU architectures," Akamai security researcher Larry W. Cashdollar  said  in an analysis published this month. The latest iteration, observed since July 16, 2023, comes months after it emerged that the botnet is being offered as a  DDoS-for-hire service  to other threat actors. The fact that it's being actively maintained indicates its effectiveness in real-world attacks. KmsdBot was  first documented  by the web infrastructure and security company in November 2022. It's mainly employed to target private gaming servers and cloud hosting providers, although it has since set its eyes on some Romanian government and Spanish educational sites. The malware is designed to scan random IP ad...