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A recently disclosed server-side request forgery ( SSRF ) vulnerability impacting Ivanti Connect Secure and Policy Secure products has come under mass exploitation. The Shadowserver Foundation  said  it observed exploitation attempts originating from more than 170 unique IP addresses that aim to establish a reverse shell, among others. The attacks exploit  CVE-2024-21893  (CVSS score: 8.2), an SSRF flaw in the SAML component of Ivanti Connect Secure, Policy Secure, and Neurons for ZTA that allows an attacker to access otherwise restricted resources without authentication. Ivanti had previously divulged that the vulnerability had been exploited in targeted attacks aimed at a "limited number of customers," but cautioned the status quo could change post public disclosure. That's exactly what appears to have happened, especially following the  release  of a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit by cybersecurity firm Rapid7 last week. The PoC involves fashioning...

The U.S. State Department said it's implementing a new policy that imposes visa restrictions on individuals who are linked to the illegal use of commercial spyware to surveil civil society members. "The  misuse of commercial spyware  threatens privacy and freedoms of expression, peaceful assembly, and association," Secretary of State Antony Blinken  said . "Such targeting has been linked to arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings in the most egregious of cases." The latest measures, underscoring continued efforts on part of the U.S. government to curtail the proliferation of surveillance tools, are designed to "promote accountability" for individuals involved in commercial spyware misuse. The new policy covers people who have used such tools to "unlawfully surveil, harass, suppress, or intimidate individuals," as well as those who stand to financially benefit from the misuse. It also includes the companie...

A 42-year-old Belarusian and Cypriot national with alleged connections to the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e is facing charges related to money laundering and operating an unlicensed money services business. Aliaksandr Klimenka , who was arrested in Latvia on December 21, 2023, was extradited to the U.S. and is currently being held in custody. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison. BTC-e, which had been operating since 2011, was seized by law enforcement authorities in late July 2017 following the arrest of another key member  Alexander Vinnik , in Greece. The exchange is alleged to have received deposits valued at over $4 billion, with Vinnik laundering funds received from the hack of another digital exchange, Mt. Gox, through various online exchanges, including BTC-e. Court documents  allege  that the exchange was a "significant cybercrime and online money laundering entity," allowing its users to trade in bitcoin with high level...

A significant challenge within cyber security at present is that there are a lot of risk management platforms available in the market, but only some deal with cyber risks in a very good way. The majority will shout alerts at the customer as and when they become apparent and cause great stress in the process. The issue being that by using a reactive, rather than proactive approach, many risks just sit there, dormant, until an emergency happens.  'Dealing with SOC Operations for more than a decade, I have seen nearly 60 percent of SOC Incidents are repeat findings that keep re-surfacing due to underlying unmitigated Risks. Here the actors may be different, however the risk is mostly the same. This is causing significant alert fatigue.' – Deodatta Wandhekar, Head of Global SOC, SecurityHQ. Combining Frameworks and Best Practices These risks can be prevented. A platform that combines the best practices of multiple frameworks is the solution to tackle this issue.  What is NIST...

The threat actor known as Patchwork likely used romance scam lures to trap victims in Pakistan and India, and infect their Android devices with a remote access trojan called  VajraSpy . Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET said it uncovered 12 espionage apps, six of which were available for download from the official Google Play Store and were collectively downloaded more than 1,400 times between April 2021 and March 2023. "VajraSpy has a range of espionage functionalities that can be expanded based on the permissions granted to the app bundled with its code," security researcher Lukáš Štefanko  said . "It steals contacts, files, call logs, and SMS messages, but some of its implementations can even extract WhatsApp and Signal messages, record phone calls, and take pictures with the camera." As many as 148 devices in Pakistan and India are estimated to have been compromised in the wild. The malicious apps distributed via Google Play and elsewhere primarily masqueraded ...

Companies are engaged in a seemingly endless cat-and-mouse game when it comes to cybersecurity and cyber threats. As organizations put up one defensive block after another, malicious actors kick their game up a notch to get around those blocks. Part of the challenge is to coordinate the defensive abilities of disparate security tools, even as organizations have limited resources and a dearth of skilled cybersecurity experts. XDR, or Extended Detection and Response, addresses this challenge. XDR platforms correlate indicators from across security domains to detect threats and then provide the tools to remediate incidents.  While XDR has many benefits, legacy approaches have been hampered by the lack of good-quality data. You might end up having a very good view of a threat from events generated by your EPP/EDR system but lack events about the network perspective (or vice versa). XDR products will import data from third-party sensors, but data comes in different formats. The XDR p...

The iPhones belonging to nearly three dozen journalists, activists, human rights lawyers, and civil society members in Jordan have been targeted with NSO Group's Pegasus spyware, according to joint findings from Access Now and the Citizen Lab. Nine of the 35 individuals have been  publicly confirmed  as  targeted , out of whom six had their devices compromised with the mercenary surveillanceware tool. The infections are estimated to have taken place from at least 2019 until September 2023. "In some cases, perpetrators posed as journalists, seeking an interview or a quote from victims, while embedding malicious links to Pegasus spyware amid and in between their messages," Access Now  said . "A number of victims were reinfected with Pegasus spyware multiple times — demonstrating the relentless nature of this targeted surveillance campaign." The Israeli company has been under the radar for failing to implement rigorous human rights safeguards prior to selling ...

The threat actors behind the Mispadu banking Trojan have become the latest to exploit a now-patched Windows SmartScreen security bypass flaw to compromise users in Mexico. The attacks entail a new variant of the malware that was first observed in 2019, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said in a report published last week. Propagated via phishing mails, Mispadu is a Delphi-based information stealer known to specifically infect victims in the Latin American (LATAM) region. In March 2023, Metabase Q  revealed  that Mispadu spam campaigns harvested no less than 90,000 bank account credentials since August 2022. It's also part of the larger family of LATAM banking malware, including  Grandoreiro , which was dismantled by Brazilian law enforcement authorities last week. The latest infection chain identified by Unit 42 employs rogue internet shortcut files contained within bogus ZIP archive files that leverage CVE-2023-36025 (CVSS score: 8.8), a high-severity bypass flaw in Wi...

The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced sanctions against six officials associated with the Iranian intelligence agency for attacking critical infrastructure entities in the U.S. and other countries. The  officials  include Hamid Reza Lashgarian, Mahdi Lashgarian, Hamid Homayunfal, Milad Mansuri, Mohammad Bagher Shirinkar, and Reza Mohammad Amin Saberian, who are part of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Cyber-Electronic Command (IRGC-CEC). Reza Lashgarian is also the head of the IRGC-CEC and a commander in the IRGC-Qods Force. He is alleged to have been involved in various IRGC cyber and intelligence operations. The Treasury Department  said  it's holding these individuals responsible for carrying out "cyber operations in which they hacked and posted images on the screens of programmable logic controllers manufactured by Unitronics, an Israeli company." In late November 2023, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infra...