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Mozilla on Tuesday released security updates to resolve a critical zero-day vulnerability in Firefox and Thunderbird that has been actively exploited in the wild, a day after Google released a fix for the issue in its Chrome browser. The shortcoming, assigned the identifier  CVE-2023-4863 , is a heap buffer overflow flaw in the WebP image format that could result in arbitrary code execution when processing a specially crafted image. "Opening a malicious WebP image could lead to a heap buffer overflow in the content process," Mozilla  said  in an advisory. "We are aware of this issue being exploited in other products in the wild." According to the description on the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), the flaw could allow a remote attacker to perform an out-of-bounds memory write via a crafted HTML page. Apple Security Engineering and Architecture (SEAR) and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School have been credited with reporting the s...

A new vulnerability disclosed in GitHub could have exposed thousands of repositories at risk of repojacking attacks, new findings show. The flaw "could allow an attacker to exploit a race condition within GitHub's repository creation and username renaming operations," Checkmarx security researcher Elad Rapoport  said  in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "Successful exploitation of this vulnerability impacts the open-source community by enabling the hijacking of over 4,000 code packages in languages such as Go, PHP, and Swift, as well as GitHub actions." Following responsible disclosure on March 1, 2023, the Microsoft-owned code hosting platform has addressed the issue as of September 1, 2023. Repojacking , short for  repository hijacking , is a technique where a threat actor is able to bypass a security mechanism called popular repository namespace retirement and ultimately control of a repository. What the protection measure does is preven...

SaaS applications are the backbone of modern businesses, constituting a staggering 70% of total software usage. Applications like Box, Google Workplace, and Microsoft 365 are integral to daily operations. This widespread adoption has transformed them into potential breeding grounds for cyber threats. Each SaaS application presents unique security challenges, and the landscape constantly evolves as vendors enhance their security features. Moreover, the dynamic nature of user governance, including onboarding, deprovisioning, and role adjustments, further complicates the security equation. With great convenience comes great responsibility, as securing these SaaS applications has become a top priority for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and IT teams worldwide. Effectively securing SaaS applications requires a delicate balance between robust security measures and enabling users to perform their tasks efficiently. To navigate this complex terrain, this article excerpts a  ...

A threat actor called  Redfly  has been linked to a compromise of a national grid located in an unnamed Asian country for as long as six months earlier this year using a known malware referred to as  ShadowPad . "The attackers managed to steal credentials and compromise multiple computers on the organization's network," the Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom,  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The attack is the latest in a series of espionage intrusions against [critical national infrastructure] targets." ShadowPad, also known as PoisonPlug, is a follow-up to the PlugX remote access trojan and is a modular implant capable of loading additional plugins dynamically from a remote server as required to harvest sensitive data from breached networks. It has been  widely used  by a growing list of  China-nexus   nation-state groups  since at least 2019 in attacks aimed at organizations in various industry verticals....

A sophisticated phishing campaign is using a Microsoft Word document lure to distribute a trifecta of threats, namely Agent Tesla, OriginBotnet, and RedLine Clipper, to gather a wide range of information from compromised Windows machines. "A phishing email delivers the Word document as an attachment, presenting a deliberately blurred image and a counterfeit reCAPTCHA to lure the recipient into clicking on it," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin  said . Clicking on the image leads to the delivery of a loader from a remote server that, in turn, is designed to distribute OriginBotnet for keylogging and password recovery, RedLine Clipper for cryptocurrency theft, and Agent Tesla for harvesting sensitive information. The loader, written in .NET, employs a technique called binary padding by adding null bytes to increase the file's size to 400 MB in an attempt to evade detection by security software. The activation of the loader triggers a multi-stage process to ...

A new information stealer malware called MetaStealer has set its sights on Apple macOS, making the latest in a growing list of stealer families focused on the operating system after MacStealer , Pureland , Atomic Stealer , and  Realst . "Threat actors are proactively targeting macOS businesses by posing as fake clients in order to socially engineer victims into launching malicious payloads," SentinelOne security researcher Phil Stokes  said  in a Monday analysis. In these attacks, MetaStealer is distributed in the form of rogue application bundles in the disk image format (DMG), with targets approached through threat actors posing as prospective design clients in order to share a password-protected ZIP archive containing the DMG file. Other instances have involved the malware masquerading as Adobe files or installers for Adobe Photoshop. Evidence gathered so far shows that MetaStealer artifacts began appearing in the wild in March 2023. The most recent sample was upl...

Google on Monday rolled out out-of-band security patches to address a critical security flaw in its Chrome web browser that it said has been exploited in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2023-4863 , the issue has been described as a case of  heap buffer overflow  that resides in the  WebP image format  that could result in arbitrary code execution or a crash. Apple Security Engineering and Architecture (SEAR) and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School have been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on September 6, 2023. The tech giant has yet to disclose additional details about the nature of the attacks, but noted that it's "aware that an exploit for CVE-2023-4863 exists in the wild." With the latest fix, Google has addressed a total of four zero-day vulnerabilities in Chrome since the start of the year - CVE-2023-2033  (CVSS score: 8.8) - Type Confusion in V8 CVE-2023-2136  (CVSS score: 9.6) - Integer overflow in Skia...

A new phishing attack is leveraging Facebook Messenger to propagate messages with malicious attachments from a "swarm of fake and hijacked personal accounts" with the ultimate goal of taking over the targets' Business accounts. "Originating yet again from a Vietnamese-based group, this campaign uses a tiny compressed file attachment that packs a powerful Python-based stealer dropped in a multi-stage process full of simple yet effective obfuscation methods," Guardio Labs researcher Oleg Zaytsev  said  in an analysis published over the weekend. In these attacks, dubbed MrTonyScam, potential victims are sent messages that entice them into clicking on the RAR and ZIP archive attachments, leading to the deployment of a dropper that fetches the next-stage from a GitHub or GitLab repository. This payload is another archive file that contains a CMD file, which, in turn, harbors an obfuscated Python-based stealer to exfiltrate all cookies and login credentials from d...

The Iranian threat actor known as  Charming Kitten  has been linked to a new wave of attacks targeting different entities in Brazil, Israel, and the U.A.E. using a previously undocumented backdoor named Sponsor. Slovak cybersecurity firm is tracking the cluster under the name  Ballistic Bobcat . Victimology patterns suggest that the group primarily singles out education, government, and healthcare organizations, as well as human rights activists and journalists. At least 34 victims of Sponsor have been detected to date, with the earliest instances of deployment dating back to September 2021. "The Sponsor backdoor uses configuration files stored on disk," ESET researcher Adam Burgher  said  in a new report published today. "These files are discreetly deployed by batch files and deliberately designed to appear innocuous, thereby attempting to evade detection by scanning engines." The campaign, dubbed Sponsoring Access, involves obtaining initial access by op...