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New research has discovered over 800 packages in the npm registry which have discrepancies from their registry entries, out of which 18 have been found to exploit a technique called  manifest confusion . The findings come from cybersecurity firm JFrog, which said the issue could be exploited by threat actors to trick developers into running malicious code. "It's an actual threat since developers may be tricked into downloading packages that look innocent, but whose hidden dependencies are actually malicious," security researcher Andrey Polkovnichenko told The Hacker News. Manifest confusion was  first documented  in July 2023, when security researcher Darcy Clarke found that mismatches in manifest and package metadata could be weaponized to stage software supply chain attacks. The problem stems from the fact that the npm registry does not validate whether the manifest file contained in the tarball (package.json) matches the manifest data provided to the npm server d...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a tool referred to as  AndroxGh0st  that's used to target Laravel applications and steal sensitive data. "It works by scanning and taking out important information from .env files, revealing login details linked to AWS and Twilio," Juniper Threat Labs researcher Kashinath T Pattan  said . "Classified as an SMTP cracker, it exploits SMTP using various strategies such as credential exploitation, web shell deployment, and vulnerability scanning." AndroxGh0st has been detected in the wild since at least 2022, with threat actors leveraging it to access Laravel environment files and steal credentials for various cloud-based applications like Amazon Web Services (AWS), SendGrid, and Twilio. Attack chains involving the Python malware are known to exploit known security flaws in Apache HTTP Server, Laravel Framework, and PHPUnit to gain initial access and for privilege escalation and persistence. Earlier this January, U...

In today's digital-first business environment dominated by SaaS applications, organizations increasingly depend on third-party vendors for essential cloud services and software solutions. As more vendors and services are added to the mix, the complexity and potential vulnerabilities within the  SaaS supply chain  snowball quickly. That's why effective vendor risk management (VRM) is a critical strategy in identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks to protect organizational assets and data integrity. Meanwhile, common approaches to vendor risk assessments are too slow and static for the modern world of SaaS. Most organizations have simply adapted their legacy evaluation techniques for on-premise software to apply to SaaS providers. This not only creates massive bottlenecks, but also causes organizations to inadvertently accept far too much risk. To effectively adapt to the realities of modern work, two major aspects need to change: the timeline of initial assessment must s...

GitHub on Wednesday announced that it's making available a feature called code scanning autofix in public beta for all  Advanced Security customers  to provide targeted recommendations in an effort to avoid introducing new security issues. "Powered by  GitHub Copilot  and  CodeQL , code scanning autofix covers more than 90% of alert types in JavaScript, Typescript, Java, and Python, and delivers code suggestions shown to remediate more than two-thirds of found vulnerabilities with little or no editing," GitHub's Pierre Tempel and Eric Tooley  said . The capability,  first previewed  in November 2023, leverages a combination of CodeQL, Copilot APIs, and OpenAI GPT-4 to generate code suggestions. The Microsoft-owned subsidiary also said it plans to add support for more programming languages, including C# and Go, in the future. Code scanning autofix is designed to help developers resolve vulnerabilities as they code by generating potential fixes ...

When you read reports about cyber-attacks affecting operational technology (OT), it's easy to get caught up in the hype and assume every single one is sophisticated. But are OT environments all over the world really besieged by a constant barrage of complex cyber-attacks? Answering that would require breaking down the different types of OT cyber-attacks and then looking back on all the historical attacks to see how those types compare.  The Types of OT Cyber-Attacks Over the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the need for improved cybersecurity practices in IT's lesser-known counterpart, OT. In fact, the lines of what constitutes a cyber-attack on OT have never been well defined, and if anything, they have further blurred over time. Therefore, we'd like to begin this post with a discussion around the ways in which cyber-attacks can either target or just simply impact OT, and why it might be important for us to make the distinction going forward. Figure 1 Th...

The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Wednesday announced sanctions against two 46-year-old Russian nationals and the respective companies they own for engaging in cyber influence operations. Ilya Andreevich Gambashidze (Gambashidze), the founder of the Moscow-based company Social Design Agency (SDA), and Nikolai Aleksandrovich Tupikin (Tupikin), the CEO and current owner of Russia-based Company Group Structura LLC (Structura), have been accused of providing services to the Russian government in connection to a "foreign malign influence campaign." The disinformation campaign is tracked by the broader cybersecurity community under the name  Doppelganger , which is known to target audiences in Europe and the U.S. using inauthentic news sites and social media accounts. "SDA and Structura have been identified as key actors of the campaign, responsible for providing [the Government of the Russian Federation] with a variety of servic...

Ivanti has disclosed details of a critical remote code execution flaw impacting Standalone Sentry, urging customers to apply the fixes immediately to stay protected against potential cyber threats. Tracked as  CVE-2023-41724 , the vulnerability carries a CVSS score of 9.6. "An unauthenticated threat actor can execute arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system of the appliance within the same physical or logical network," the company  said . The flaw impacts all supported versions 9.17.0, 9.18.0, and 9.19.0, as well as older versions. The company said it has made available a patch (versions 9.17.1, 9.18.1, and 9.19.1) that can be downloaded via the standard download portal. It credited Vincent Hutsebaut, Pierre Vivegnis, Jerome Nokin, Roberto Suggi Liverani and Antonin B. of NATO Cyber Security Centre for "their collaboration on this issue." Ivanti emphasized that it's not aware of any customers affected by CVE-2023-41724, and  added  that ...

Atlassian has released patches for  more than two dozen security flaws , including a critical bug impacting Bamboo Data Center and Server that could be exploited without requiring user interaction. Tracked as  CVE-2024-1597 , the vulnerability carries a CVSS score of 10.0, indicating maximum severity. Described as an SQL injection flaw, it's rooted in a dependency called org.postgresql:postgresql, as a result of which the company said it "presents a lower assessed risk" despite the criticality. "This org.postgresql:postgresql dependency vulnerability [...] could allow an unauthenticated attacker to expose assets in your environment susceptible to exploitation which has high impact to confidentiality, high impact to integrity, high impact to availability, and requires no user interaction," Atlassian  said . According to a  description  of the flaw in the NIST's National Vulnerability Database (NVD), "pgjdbc, the PostgreSQL JDBC Driver, allows attac...

A novel denial-of-service (DoS) attack vector has been found to target application-layer protocols based on User Datagram Protocol (UDP), putting hundreds of thousands of hosts likely at risk. Called  Loop DoS attacks , the  approach  pairs "servers of these protocols in such a way that they communicate with each other indefinitely," researchers from the CISPA Helmholtz-Center for Information Security said. UDP, by design, is a  connectionless protocol  that does not validate source IP addresses, making it susceptible to IP spoofing. Thus, when attackers forge several UDP packets to include a victim IP address, the destination server responds to the victim (as opposed to the threat actor), creating a reflected denial-of-service (DoS) attack. The latest study found that certain implementations of the UDP protocol, such as DNS, NTP, TFTP, Active Users, Daytime, Echo, Chargen, QOTD, and Time, can be weaponized to create a self-perpetuating attack loop. "It p...