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Threat actors affiliated with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) have targeted unpatched JetBrains TeamCity servers in widespread attacks since September 2023. The activity has been tied to a nation-state group known as  APT29 , which is also tracked as BlueBravo, Cloaked Ursa, Cozy Bear, Midnight Blizzard (formerly Nobelium), and The Dukes. It's notable for the supply chain attack  targeting SolarWinds  and its customers in 2020. "The SVR has, however, been observed using the initial access gleaned by exploiting the TeamCity CVE to escalate its privileges, move laterally, deploy additional backdoors, and take other steps to ensure persistent and long-term access to the compromised network environments," cybersecurity agencies from Poland, the U.K., and the U.S.  said . The vulnerability in question is  CVE-2023-42793  (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical security flaw that could be weaponized by unauthenticated attackers to achieve remote code exe...

A previously unknown hacker outfit called  GambleForce  has been attributed to a series of SQL injection attacks against companies primarily in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region since at least September 2023. "GambleForce uses a set of basic yet very effective techniques, including SQL injections and the exploitation of vulnerable website content management systems (CMS) to steal sensitive information, such as user credentials," Singapore-headquartered Group-IB  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The group is estimated to have targeted 24 organizations in the gambling, government, retail, and travel sectors across Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand. Six of these attacks were successful. The modus operandi of GambleForce is its exclusive reliance on open-source tools like dirsearch , sqlmap , tinyproxy , and redis-rogue-getshell at different stages of the attacks with the ultimate goal of exfiltrating ...

Microsoft on Wednesday said it obtained a court order to seize infrastructure set up by a group called Storm-1152 that peddled roughly 750 million fraudulent Microsoft accounts and tools through a network of bogus websites and social media pages to other criminal actors, netting the operators millions of dollars in illicit revenue. "Fraudulent online accounts act as the gateway to a host of cybercrime, including mass phishing, identity theft and fraud, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks," Amy Hogan-Burney, the company's associate general counsel for cybersecurity policy and protection,  said . These cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) offerings, per Redmond, are designed to get around identity verification software across various technology platforms and help minimize the efforts needed to conduct malicious activities online, including phishing, spamming, ransomware, and fraud, effectively lowering the barriers to entry for attackers. Multiple threat actors,...

Security operations centers (SOCs) are under pressure from both sides: threats are growing more complex and frequent, while security budgets are no longer keeping pace. Today's security leaders are expected to reduce risk and deliver results without relying on larger teams or increased spending. At the same time, SOC inefficiencies are draining resources. Studies show that up to half of all alerts are false positives, with some reports citing false positive rates as high as 99 percent . This means highly trained analysts spend a disproportionate amount of time chasing down harmless activity, wasting effort, increasing fatigue, and raising the chance of missing real threats. In this environment, the business imperative is clear: maximize the impact of every analyst and every dollar by making security operations faster, smarter, and more focused. Enter the Agentic AI SOC Analyst The agentic AI SOC Analyst is a force multiplier that enables organizations to do more with the team an...

The threat actors behind the  BazaCall  call back phishing attacks have been observed leveraging Google Forms to lend the scheme a veneer of credibility. The method is an "attempt to elevate the perceived authenticity of the initial malicious emails," cybersecurity firm Abnormal Security  said  in a report published today. BazaCall  (aka BazarCall), which was  first observed  in late 2020 , refers to a series of phishing attacks in which email messages impersonating legitimate subscription notices are sent to targets, urging them to contact a support desk to dispute or cancel the plan, or risk getting charged anywhere between $50 to $500. By inducing a false sense of urgency, the attacker convinces the target over a phone call to grant them remote access capabilities using remote desktop software and ultimately establish persistence on the host under the guise of offering help to cancel the supposed subscription. Some of the popular services that ...

Google is highlighting the role played by  Clang sanitizers  in hardening the security of the cellular baseband in the  Android operating system  and preventing specific kinds of vulnerabilities. This comprises Integer Overflow Sanitizer (IntSan) and BoundsSanitizer (BoundSan), both of which are part of UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer ( UBSan ), a tool designed to catch various kinds of undefined behavior during program execution. "They are architecture agnostic, suitable for bare-metal deployment, and should be enabled in existing C/C++ code bases to mitigate unknown vulnerabilities," Ivan Lozano and Roger Piqueras Jover  said  in a Tuesday post. The development comes months after the tech giant said it's  working with ecosystem partners  to increase the  security of firmware  that interacts with Android, thereby making it difficult for threat actors to achieve remote code execution within the Wi-Fi SoC or the cellular baseband. IntSan...

Malware analysis encompasses a broad range of activities, including examining the malware's network traffic. To be effective at it, it's crucial to understand the common challenges and how to overcome them. Here are three prevalent issues you may encounter and the tools you'll need to address them. Decrypting HTTPS traffic Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), the protocol for secure online communication, has become a tool for malware to conceal their malicious activities. By cloaking data exchange between infected devices and command-and-control (C&C) servers, malware can operate undetected, exfiltrating sensitive data, installing additional payloads, and receiving instructions from the operators. Yet, with the right tool, decrypting HTTPS traffic is an easy task. For this purpose, we can use a man-in-the-middle (MITM) proxy. The MITM proxy works as an intermediary between the client and the server, intercepting their communication. The MITM proxy aids analy...

Microsoft has warned that adversaries are using OAuth applications as an automation tool to deploy virtual machines (VMs) for cryptocurrency mining and launch phishing attacks. "Threat actors compromise user accounts to create, modify, and grant high privileges to OAuth applications that they can misuse to hide malicious activity," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team  said  in an analysis. "The misuse of OAuth also enables threat actors to maintain access to applications even if they lose access to the initially compromised account." OAuth , short for Open Authorization, is an  authorization and delegation framework  (as opposed to authentication) that provides applications the ability to securely access information from other websites without handing over passwords. In the attacks detailed by Microsoft, threat actors have been observed launching phishing or password-spraying attacks against poorly secured accounts with permissions to create or modify OAuth...

Ukraine's biggest telecom operator Kyivstar has  become  the victim of a " powerful hacker attack ," disrupting customer access to mobile and internet services. "The cyberattack on Ukraine's #Kyivstar telecoms operator has impacted all regions of the country with high impact to the capital, metrics show, with knock-on impacts reported to air raid alert network and banking sector as work continues to restore connectivity," NetBlocks  said  in a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter). Kyivstar, which is owned by Dutch-domiciled multinational telecommunication services company VEON,  serves  nearly 25 million mobile subscribers and more than 1 million home internet customers. The company said the attack was "a result of" the war with Russia and that it has notified law enforcement and special state services. While Kyivstar is working to restore the services, the internet watchdog noted that the telco is largely offline. That said, Kyivstar has yet ...

Microsoft released its final set of Patch Tuesday updates for 2023, closing out 34 flaws in its software, making it one of the lightest releases in recent years. Of the 34 shortcomings, four are rated Critical and 30 are rated Important in severity. The fixes are in addition to  18 flaws  Microsoft addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of  Patch Tuesday updates for November 2023 . According to data from the  Zero Day Initiative , the software giant has patched more than 900 flaws this year, making it one of the busiest years for Microsoft patches. For comparison, Redmond resolved 917 CVEs in 2022. While none of the vulnerabilities are listed as publicly known or under active attack at the time of release, some of the notable ones are listed below - CVE-2023-35628  (CVSS score: 8.1) - Windows MSHTML Platform Remote Code Execution Vulnerability CVE-2023-35630  (CVSS score: 8.8) - Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) Remote Code E...