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An ongoing campaign is targeting Facebook Business accounts with bogus messages to harvest victims' credentials using a variant of the Python-based  NodeStealer  and potentially take over their accounts for follow-on malicious activities.  "The attacks are reaching victims mainly in Southern Europe and North America across different segments, led by the manufacturing services and technology sectors," Netskope Threat Labs researcher Jan Michael Alcantara  said  in an analysis published Thursday. First documented by Meta in May 2023, NodeStealer  originated  as a JavaScript malware capable of pilfering cookies and passwords from web browsers to compromise Facebook, Gmail, and Outlook accounts. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, last month,  revealed  a separate attack wave that took place in December 2022 using a Python version of the malware, with select iterations also designed to conduct cryptocurrency theft. The latest findings from Netskope...

The threat actors behind RedLine and Vidar information stealers have been observed pivoting to ransomware through phishing campaigns that spread initial payloads signed with Extended Validation ( EV ) code signing certificates. "This suggests that the threat actors are streamlining operations by making their techniques multipurpose," Trend Micro researchers  said  in a new analysis published this week. In the incident investigated by the cybersecurity company, an unnamed victim is said to have first received a piece of info stealer malware with EV code signing certificates, followed by ransomware using the same delivery technique. In the past,  QakBot infections  have leveraged  samples signed with valid code signing certificates  to bypass security protections. The attacks start with phishing emails that employ well-worn lures to trick victims into running malicious attachments that masquerade as PDF or JPG images but are actually executables that jum...

Iranian nation-state actors have been conducting password spray attacks against thousands of organizations globally between February and July 2023, new findings from Microsoft reveal. The tech giant, which is tracking the activity under the name  Peach Sandstorm  (formerly Holmium), said the adversary pursued organizations in the satellite, defense, and pharmaceutical sectors to likely facilitate intelligence collection in support of Iranian state interests. Should the authentication to an account be successful, the threat actor has been observed using a combination of publicly available and custom tools for discovery, persistence, and lateral movement, followed by data exfiltration in limited cases. Peach Sandstorm , also known by the names APT33, Elfin, and Refined Kitten, has been linked to spear-phishing attacks against aerospace and energy sectors in the past, some of which have entailed the use of the  SHAPESHIFT  wiper malware. It's said to be active since...

AI agents promise to automate everything from financial reconciliations to incident response. Yet every time an AI agent spins up a workflow, it has to authenticate somewhere; often with a high-privilege API key, OAuth token, or service account that defenders can't easily see. These "invisible" non-human identities (NHIs) now outnumber human accounts in most cloud environments, and they have become one of the ripest targets for attackers. Astrix's Field CTO Jonathan Sander put it bluntly in a recent Hacker News webinar : "One dangerous habit we've had for a long time is trusting application logic to act as the guardrails. That doesn't work when your AI agent is powered by LLMs that don't stop and think when they're about to do something wrong. They just do it." Why AI Agents Redefine Identity Risk Autonomy changes everything: An AI agent can chain multiple API calls and modify data without a human in the loop. If the underlying credential is exposed or overprivileged, each addit...

A set of memory corruption flaws have been discovered in the  ncurses  (short for  new curses ) programming library that could be exploited by threat actors to run malicious code on vulnerable Linux and macOS systems. "Using environment variable poisoning, attackers could chain these vulnerabilities to elevate privileges and run code in the targeted program's context or perform other malicious actions," Microsoft Threat Intelligence researchers Jonathan Bar Or, Emanuele Cozzi, and Michael Pearse  said  in a technical report published today. The vulnerabilities, collectively tracked as  CVE-2023-29491  (CVSS score of 7.8), have been  addressed  as of April 2023. Microsoft said it also worked with Apple on remediating the macOS-specific issues related to these flaws. Environment variables are user-defined values that can be used by multiple programs on a system and can affect the manner in which they behave on the system. Manipulating t...

A download manager site served Linux users malware that stealthily stole passwords and other sensitive information for more than three years as part of a supply chain attack. The modus operandi entailed establishing a reverse shell to an actor-controlled server and installing a Bash stealer on the compromised system. The campaign, which took place between 2020 and 2022, is no longer active. "This stealer collects data such as system information, browsing history, saved passwords, cryptocurrency wallet files, as well as credentials for cloud services (AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Azure)," Kaspersky researchers Georgy Kucherin and Leonid Bezvershenko  said . The website in question is freedownloadmanager[.]org, which, according to the Russian cybersecurity firm, offers a legitimate Linux software called "Free Download Manager," but starting in January 2020, began redirecting some users who attempted to download it to another domain deb.fdmpkg[.]...

Employee offboarding is no one's favorite task, yet it is a critical IT process that needs to be executed diligently and efficiently. That's easier said than done, especially considering that IT organizations have less visibility and control over employees' IT use than ever. Today, employees can easily adopt new cloud and SaaS applications whenever and wherever they want, and the old IT offboarding playbook of "disable AD account, forward email, recover and wipe device, and call it a day" is no longer enough.  Here, we'll cover five of the most common pitfalls of  IT offboarding  in a SaaS-first world, along with advice on how to navigate around them. ‍ Pitfall #1: Suspending or deleting the email account before completing other critical steps It may seem logical to suspend or delete the employees' Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account as the first step in the offboarding process. However, this will make the account inaccessible to everyone, even admins, which cou...

A high-severity security flaw has been disclosed in N-Able's Take Control Agent that could be exploited by a local unprivileged attacker to gain SYSTEM privileges. Tracked as  CVE-2023-27470  (CVSS score: 8.8), the  issue  relates to a Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use ( TOCTOU ) race condition vulnerability, which, when successfully exploited, could be leveraged to delete arbitrary files on a Windows system. The security shortcoming, which impacts versions 7.0.41.1141 and prior, has been addressed in version 7.0.43 released on March 15, 2023, following responsible disclosure by Mandiant on February 27, 2023. Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use falls under a category of software flaws wherein a program checks the state of a resource for a specific value, but that value changes before it's actually used, effectively invalidating the results of the check. An exploitation of such a flaw can result in a loss of integrity and trick the program into performing actions that it sh...

The iPhone belonging to Galina Timchenko, a prominent Russian journalist and critic of the government, was compromised with NSO Group's Pegasus spyware, a new collaborative investigation from  Access Now  and the  Citizen Lab  has revealed. The infiltration is said to have happened on or around February 10, 2023. Timchenko is the executive editor and owner of  Meduza , an independent news publication based in Latvia. It's currently not clear who deployed the malware on the device. The Washington Post  reported  that the Russian government is not a client of NSO Group, citing an unnamed person familiar with the company's operations. "During the infection her device was localized to the GMT+1 timezone, and she reports being in Berlin, Germany," the Citizen Lab said. "The day following the infection she was scheduled to attend a private meeting with other heads of Russian independent media exiled in Europe to discuss how to manage threats and censorsh...

Three interrelated high-severity security flaws discovered in Kubernetes could be exploited to achieve remote code execution with elevated privileges on Windows endpoints within a cluster. The  issues , tracked as CVE-2023-3676, CVE-2023-3893, and CVE-2023-3955, carry CVSS scores of 8.8 and impact all Kubernetes environments with Windows nodes. Fixes for the vulnerabilities were  released  on August 23, 2023, following responsible disclosure by Akamai on July 13, 2023. "The vulnerability allows remote code execution with SYSTEM privileges on all Windows endpoints within a Kubernetes cluster," Akamai security researcher Tomer Peled said in a technical write-up shared with The Hacker News. "To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker needs to apply a malicious YAML file on the cluster." Amazon Web Services  (AWS),  Google Cloud , and  Microsoft Azure  have all released advisories for the bugs, which affect the following versions of Kubelet - kube...