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GitHub on Thursday announced that it's enabling secret scanning push protection by default for all pushes to public repositories. "This means that when a supported secret is detected in any push to a public repository, you will have the option to remove the secret from your commits or, if you deem the secret safe, bypass the block," Eric Tooley and Courtney Claessens  said . Push protection  was  first piloted  as an opt-in feature in August 2023, although it has been under testing since April 2022. It became  generally available  in May 2023. The  secret scanning  feature is designed to identify over  200 token types  and patterns from more than 180 service providers in order to prevent their fraudulent use by malicious actors.  The development comes nearly five months after the Microsoft subsidiary  expanded  secret scanning to include validity checks for popular services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsof...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new attack technique called  Silver SAML  that can be successful even in cases where mitigations have been applied against Golden SAML attacks. Silver SAML "enables the exploitation of SAML to launch attacks from an identity provider like Entra ID against applications configured to use it for authentication, such as Salesforce," Semperis researchers Tomer Nahum and Eric Woodruff  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Golden SAML (short for  Security Assertion Markup Language ) was  first documented  by CyberArk in 2017. The attack vector, in a nutshell, entails the abuse of the interoperable authentication standard to impersonate almost any identity in an organization. It's also similar to the  Golden Ticket attack  in that it grants attackers the ability to gain unauthorized access to any service in a federation with any privileges and to stay persistent in this environment in a stealth...

Threat hunters have discovered a new Linux malware called  GTPDOOR  that's designed to be deployed in telecom networks that are adjacent to GPRS roaming exchanges ( GRX ) The  malware  is novel in the fact that it leverages the GPRS Tunnelling Protocol ( GTP ) for command-and-control (C2) communications. GPRS roaming allows subscribers to access their GPRS services while they are beyond the reach of their home mobile network. This is facilitated by means of a GRX that transports the roaming traffic using GTP between the visited and the home Public Land Mobile Network ( PLMN ). Security researcher haxrob, who discovered two  GTPDOOR   artifacts  uploaded to VirusTotal from China and Italy, said the backdoor is likely linked to a known threat actor tracked as  LightBasin  (aka UNC1945), which was previously disclosed by CrowdStrike in October 2021 in connection with a series of attacks targeting the telecom sector to steal subscriber infor...

The notorious Lazarus Group actors exploited a recently patched privilege escalation flaw in the Windows Kernel as a zero-day to obtain kernel-level access and disable security software on compromised hosts. The vulnerability in question is  CVE-2024-21338  (CVSS score: 7.8), which can permit an attacker to gain SYSTEM privileges. It was resolved by Microsoft earlier this month as part of  Patch Tuesday updates . "To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker would first have to log on to the system," Microsoft  said . "An attacker could then run a specially crafted application that could exploit the vulnerability and take control of an affected system." While there were no indications of active exploitation of CVE-2024-21338 at the time of the release of the updates, Redmond on Wednesday revised its "Exploitability assessment" for the flaw to "Exploitation Detected."  It's currently not clear when the attacks took place, but the vulnerability...

As an IT leader, staying on top of the latest cybersecurity developments is essential to keeping your organization safe. But with threats coming from all around — and hackers dreaming up new exploits every day — how do you create proactive, agile cybersecurity strategies? And what cybersecurity approach gives you the most bang for your buck, mitigating your risks and maximizing the value of your cybersecurity investments? Let's take a closer look at the trends that are impacting organizations today, including the growing reach of data breaches and the increase in cybersecurity spending, and explore how you can get the most out of your cybersecurity resources, effectively securing your digital assets and maintaining your organization's integrity in the face of ever-evolving cyber threats. Successful data breaches In 2022, the number of people affected by data breaches increased significantly. According to the  Identity Theft Resource Center's 2022 Data Breach Report , more than ...

A previously undocumented threat actor dubbed  SPIKEDWINE  has been observed targeting officials in European countries with Indian diplomatic missions using a new backdoor called WINELOADER . The adversary, according to a  report  from Zscaler ThreatLabz, used a PDF file in emails that purported to come from the Ambassador of India, inviting diplomatic staff to a wine-tasting event on February 2, 2024. The  PDF document  was uploaded to VirusTotal from Latvia on January 30, 2024. That said, there is evidence to suggest that this campaign may have been active at least since July 6, 2023, going by the discovery of  another similar PDF file  uploaded from the same country. "The attack is characterized by its very low volume and the advanced tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) employed in the malware and command-and-control (C2) infrastructure," security researchers Sudeep Singh and Roy Tay said. Central to the novel attack is the PDF fi...

The notorious North Korean state-backed hacking group Lazarus uploaded four packages to the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository with the goal of infecting developer systems with malware. The packages, now taken down, are  pycryptoenv ,  pycryptoconf ,  quasarlib , and  swapmempool . They have been collectively downloaded 3,269 times, with pycryptoconf accounting for the most downloads at 1,351. "The package names pycryptoenv and pycryptoconf are similar to pycrypto, which is a Python package used for encryption algorithms in Python," JPCERT/CC researcher Shusei Tomonaga  said . "Therefore, the attacker probably prepared the malware-containing malicious packages to target users' typos in installing Python packages." The disclosure comes days after Phylum  uncovered  several rogue packages on the npm registry that have been used to single out software developers as part of a campaign codenamed Contagious Interview. An interesting commonality bet...

At least two different suspected China-linked cyber espionage clusters, tracked as  UNC5325  and  UNC3886 , have been attributed to the exploitation of security flaws in Ivanti Connect Secure VPN appliances. UNC5325 abused  CVE-2024-21893  to deliver a wide range of new malware called LITTLELAMB.WOOLTEA, PITSTOP, PITDOG, PITJET, and PITHOOK, as well as attempted to maintain persistent access to compromised appliances, Mandiant said. The Google-owned threat intelligence firm has assessed with moderate confidence that UNC5325 is associated with UNC3886 owing to source code overlaps in LITTLELAMB.WOOLTEA and PITHOOK with malware used by the latter. It's worth pointing out that  UNC3886  has a track record of leveraging zero-day flaws in Fortinet and VMware solutions to deploy a variety of implants like VIRTUALPITA, VIRTUALPIE, THINCRUST, and CASTLETAP. "UNC3886 has primarily targeted the defense industrial base, technology, and telecommunication orga...

U.S. President Joe Biden has  issued  an Executive Order that prohibits the mass transfer of citizens' personal data to countries of concern. The Executive Order also "provides safeguards around other activities that can give those countries access to Americans' sensitive data," the White House said in a statement. This includes sensitive information such as genomic data, biometric data, personal health data, geolocation data, financial data, and certain kinds of personally identifiable information (PII). The U.S. government said threat actors could weaponize this information to track their citizens and pass that information to  data brokers  and foreign intelligence services, which can then be used for intrusive surveillance, scams, blackmail, and other violations of privacy. "Commercial data brokers and other companies can sell this data to countries of concern, or entities controlled by those countries, and it can land in the hands of foreign intelligenc...