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A new pair of security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in JetBrains TeamCity On-Premises software that could be exploited by a threat actor to take control of affected systems. The flaws, tracked as CVE-2024-27198 (CVSS score: 9.8) and CVE-2024-27199 (CVSS score: 7.3), have been addressed in version 2023.11.4. They impact all TeamCity On-Premises versions through 2023.11.3. "The vulnerabilities may enable an unauthenticated attacker with HTTP(S) access to a TeamCity server to bypass authentication checks and gain administrative control of that TeamCity server," JetBrains  said  in an advisory released Monday. TeamCity Cloud instances have already been patched against the two flaws. Cybersecurity firm Rapid7, which discovered and reported the issues on February 20, 2024, said CVE-2024-27198 is a case of authentication bypass that allows for a complete compromise of a susceptible server by a remote unauthenticated attacker. "Compromising a TeamCity server allows an at...

Cybercriminals are using a network of hired money mules in India using an Android-based application to orchestrate a massive money laundering scheme. The malicious application, called  XHelper , is a "key tool for onboarding and managing these money mules," CloudSEK researchers Sparsh Kulshrestha, Abhishek Mathew, and Santripti Bhujel  said  in a report. Details about the scam  first emerged  in late October 2023, when Chinese cyber criminals were found to take advantage of the fact that Indian Unified Payments Interface ( UPI ) service providers operate without coverage under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) to initiate illegal transactions under the guise of offering an instant loan. The ill-gotten proceeds from the operation are transferred to other accounts belonging to hired mules, who are recruited from Telegram in return for commissions ranging from 1-2% of the total transaction amounts. "Central to this operation are Chinese payment ga...

A company's lifecycle stage, size, and state have a significant impact on its security needs, policies, and priorities. This is particularly true for modern mid-market companies that are either experiencing or have experienced rapid growth. As requirements and tasks continue to accumulate and malicious actors remain active around the clock, budgets are often stagnant at best. Yet, it is crucial to keep track of the tools and solutions that employees are introducing, the data and know-how shared through these tools, and to ensure that these processes are secure. This need is even more pronounced in today's dynamic and interconnected world, where third-party applications and solutions can be easily accessed and onboarded. The potential damage of losing control over the numerous applications with access and permissions to your data requires no explanation. Security leaders in mid-market companies face a unique set of challenges that demand a distinct approach to overcome.  To begin...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

As many as 100 malicious artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) models have been discovered in the Hugging Face platform. These include instances where loading a  pickle file  leads to code execution, software supply chain security firm JFrog said. "The model's payload grants the attacker a shell on the compromised machine, enabling them to gain full control over victims' machines through what is commonly referred to as a 'backdoor,'" senior security researcher David Cohen  said . "This silent infiltration could potentially grant access to critical internal systems and pave the way for large-scale data breaches or even corporate espionage, impacting not just individual users but potentially entire organizations across the globe, all while leaving victims utterly unaware of their compromised state." Specifically, the rogue model initiates a reverse shell connection to 210.117.212[.]93, an IP address that belongs to the Korea Research...

U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies have warned of  Phobos ransomware  attacks targeting government and critical infrastructure entities, outlining the various tactics and techniques the threat actors have adopted to deploy the file-encrypting malware. "Structured as a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) model, Phobos ransomware actors have targeted entities including municipal and county governments, emergency services, education, public healthcare, and critical infrastructure to successfully ransom several million in U.S. dollars," the government  said . The advisory comes from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC). Active since May 2019, multiple variants of Phobos ransomware have been identified to date, namely Eking, Eight, Elbie, Devos, Faust, and Backmydata. Late last year, Cisco Talos  revealed  that the thr...

A U.S. judge has ordered NSO Group to hand over its source code for  Pegasus  and other remote access trojans to Meta as part of the social media giant's ongoing litigation against the Israeli spyware vendor. The decision marks a major legal victory for Meta, which  filed the lawsuit  in October 2019 for using its infrastructure to  distribute the spyware  to approximately 1,400 mobile devices between April and May. This also  included  two dozen Indian activists and journalists. These attacks leveraged a then zero-day flaw in the instant messaging app ( CVE-2019-3568 , CVSS score: 9.8), a critical  buffer overflow bug  in the voice call functionality, to deliver Pegasus by merely placing a call, even in scenarios where the calls were left unanswered. In addition, the attack chain included steps to erase the incoming call information from the logs in an attempt to sidestep detection. Court documents released late last month show t...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Friday unsealed an indictment against an Iranian national for his alleged involvement in a multi-year cyber-enabled campaign designed to compromise U.S. governmental and private entities. More than a dozen entities are said to have been targeted, including the U.S. Departments of the Treasury and State, defense contractors that support U.S. Department of Defense programs, and an accounting firm and a hospitality company, both based in New York. Alireza Shafie Nasab, 39, claimed to be a cybersecurity specialist for a company named Mahak Rayan Afraz while participating in a persistent campaign targeting the U.S. from at least in or about 2016 through or about April 2021. "As alleged, Alireza Shafie Nasab participated in a cyber campaign using spear-phishing and other hacking techniques to infect more than 200,000 victim devices, many of which contained sensitive or classified defense information,"  said  U.S. Attorney Damian Williams f...

A novel phishing kit has been observed impersonating the login pages of well-known cryptocurrency services as part of an attack cluster codenamed CryptoChameleon that's designed to primarily target mobile devices. "This kit enables attackers to build carbon copies of single sign-on (SSO) pages, then use a combination of email, SMS, and voice phishing to trick the target into sharing usernames, passwords, password reset URLs, and even photo IDs from hundreds of victims, mostly in the United States," Lookout  said  in a report. Targets of the phishing kit include employees of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Binance, Coinbase, and cryptocurrency users of various platforms like Binance, Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, ShakePay, Caleb & Brown, and Trezor. More than 100 victims have been successfully phished to date. The phishing pages are designed such that the fake login screen is displayed only after the victim completes a CAPTCHA test using hCaptcha, thus pre...

More than a decade ago, the concept of the  'blameless'  postmortem changed how tech companies recognize failures at scale. John Allspaw, who coined the term during his tenure at Etsy, argued postmortems were all about controlling our natural reaction to an incident, which is to point fingers: "One option is to assume the single cause is incompetence and scream at engineers to make them 'pay attention!' or 'be more careful!' Another option is to take a hard look at how the accident actually happened, treat the engineers involved with respect, and learn from the event." What can we, in turn, learn from some of the most honest and blameless—and public—postmortems of the last few years? GitLab: 300GB of user data gone in seconds What happened : Back in 2017, GitLab experienced a painful 18-hour outage. That story, and GitLab's subsequent honesty and transparency, has significantly impacted how organizations handle data security today. The incident began when GitLab's second...