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A set of fake npm packages discovered on the Node.js repository has been found to share ties with North Korean state-sponsored actors, new findings from Phylum show. The packages are named execution-time-async, data-time-utils, login-time-utils, mongodb-connection-utils, and mongodb-execution-utils. One of the packages in question,  execution-time-async , masquerades as its legitimate counterpart  execution-time , a library with more than 27,000 weekly downloads. Execution-time is a Node.js utility used to measure execution time in code. It "actually installs several malicious scripts including a cryptocurrency and credential stealer," Phylum  said , describing the campaign as a software supply chain attack targeting developers. The package was  downloaded 302 times  since February 4, 2024, before being taken down. In an interesting twist, the threat actors made efforts to conceal the obfuscated malicious code in a test file, which is designed to fetch nex...

Last year, the Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) published multiple versions of the " OWASP Top 10 For Large Language Models ," reaching a 1.0 document in August and a 1.1 document in October. These documents not only demonstrate the rapidly evolving nature of Large Language Models, but the evolving ways in which they can be attacked and defended. We're going to talk in this article about four items in that top 10 that are most able to contribute to the accidental disclosure of secrets such as passwords, API keys, and more. We're already aware that LLMs can reveal secrets because it's happened. In early 2023, GitGuardian reported it found over 10 million secrets in public Github commits. Github's Copilot AI coding tool was trained on public commits, and in September of 2023, researchers at the University of Hong Kong published a paper on how they created an algorithm that generated 900 prompts designed to get Copilot to reveal secrets from ...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning about a spike in email phishing campaigns that are weaponizing the Google Cloud Run service to deliver various banking trojans such as  Astaroth  (aka Guildma),  Mekotio , and  Ousaban  (aka Javali) to targets across Latin America (LATAM) and Europe. "The infection chains associated with these malware families feature the use of malicious Microsoft Installers (MSIs) that function as droppers or downloaders for the final malware payload(s)," Cisco Talos researchers  disclosed  last week. The high-volume malware distribution campaigns, observed since September 2023, have employed the same storage bucket within Google Cloud for propagation, suggesting potential links between the threat actors behind the distribution campaigns. Google Cloud Run is a  managed compute platform  that enables users to run frontend and backend services, batch jobs, deploy websites and applications, and queue processing workloa...

The threat actors behind the LockBit ransomware operation have resurfaced on the dark web using new infrastructure, days after an international law enforcement exercise  seized control  of its servers. To that end, the notorious group has moved its data leak portal to a new .onion address on the TOR network, listing 12 new victims as of writing. The administrator behind LockBit, in a  lengthy follow-up message , said some of their websites were confiscated by most likely exploiting a critical PHP flaw tracked as CVE-2023-3824, acknowledging that they didn't update PHP due to "personal negligence and irresponsibility." "I realize that it may not have been this CVE, but something else like 0-day for PHP, but I can't be 100% sure, because the version installed on my servers was already known to have a known vulnerability, so this is most likely how the victims' admin and chat panel servers and the blog server were accessed," they noted. They also cla...

LockBitSupp, the individual(s) behind the persona representing the LockBit ransomware service on cybercrime forums such as Exploit and XSS, "has engaged with law enforcement," authorities said. The development comes following the  takedown  of the prolific ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation as part of a coordinated international operation codenamed Cronos. Over 14,000 rogue accounts on third-party services like Mega, Protonmail, and Tutanota used by the criminals have been shuttered. "We know who he is. We know where he lives. We know how much he is worth. LockbitSupp has engaged with law enforcement," according to a  message  posted on the now-seized (and offline) dark web data leak site. The move has been  interpreted  by long-term watchers of LockBit as an attempt to create suspicion and sow the seeds of distrust among affiliates, ultimately undermining trust in the group within the cybercrime ecosystem. According to research published by Anal...

Microsoft has expanded free logging capabilities to all U.S. federal agencies using Microsoft Purview Audit irrespective of the license tier, more than six months after a China-linked cyber espionage campaign targeting two dozen organizations came to light. "Microsoft will automatically enable the logs in customer accounts and increase the default log retention period from 90 days to 180 days," the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)  said . "Also, this data will provide new telemetry to help more federal agencies meet logging requirements mandated by [Office of Management and Budget]  Memorandum M-21-31 ." Microsoft, in July 2023,  disclosed  that a China-based nation-state activity group known as Storm-0558 gained unauthorized access to approximately 25 entities in the U.S. and Europe as well as a small number of related individual consumer accounts. "Storm-0558 operates with a high degree of technical tradecraft and operational...

A dormant package available on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository was updated nearly after two years to propagate an information stealer malware called Nova Sentinel. The package, named  django-log-tracker , was first published to PyPI in April 2022, according to software supply chain security firm Phylum, which  detected  an anomalous update to the library on February 21, 2024. While the  linked GitHub repository  hasn't been updated since April 10, 2022, the introduction of a malicious update suggests a likely compromise of the PyPI account belonging to the developer. Django-log-tracker has been  downloaded 3,866 times  to date, with the rogue version (1.0.4) downloaded 107 times on the date it was published. The package is no longer available for download from PyPI. "In the malicious update, the attacker stripped the package of most of its original content, leaving only an __init__.py and example.py file behind," the company said. The...

Microsoft has released an open access automation framework called  PyRIT  (short for Python Risk Identification Tool) to proactively identify risks in generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The red teaming tool is designed to "enable every organization across the globe to innovate responsibly with the latest artificial intelligence advances," Ram Shankar Siva Kumar, AI red team lead at Microsoft,  said . The company said PyRIT could be used to assess the robustness of large language model (LLM) endpoints against different harm categories such as fabrication (e.g., hallucination), misuse (e.g., bias), and prohibited content (e.g., harassment). It can also be used to identify security harms ranging from malware generation to jailbreaking, as well as privacy harms like identity theft. PyRIT comes with five interfaces: target, datasets, scoring engine, the ability to support multiple attack strategies, and incorporating a memory component that can either take ...

Details have emerged about a now-patched high-severity security flaw in Apple's Shortcuts app that could permit a shortcut to access sensitive information on the device without users' consent. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2024-23204  (CVSS score: 7.5), was addressed by Apple on January 22, 2024, with the release of  iOS 17.3, iPadOS 17.3 ,  macOS Sonoma 14.3 , and  watchOS 10.3 . "A shortcut may be able to use sensitive data with certain actions without prompting the user," the iPhone maker said in an advisory, stating it was fixed with "additional permissions checks." Apple Shortcuts is a  scripting application  that allows users to create personalized workflows (aka macros) for  executing   specific tasks  on their devices. It comes installed by default on iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS operating systems. Bitdefender security researcher Jubaer Alnazi Jabin, who discovered and reported the Shortcuts bug, said it could be we...