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According to recent research on  employee offboarding , 70% of IT professionals say they've experienced the negative effects of incomplete IT offboarding, whether in the form of a security incident tied to an account that wasn't deprovisioned, a surprise bill for resources that aren't in use anymore, or a missed handoff of a critical resource or account. This is despite an average of five hours spent per departing employee on activities like finding and deprovisioning SaaS accounts. As the SaaS footprint within most organizations continues to expand, it is becoming exponentially more difficult (and time-consuming) to ensure all access is deprovisioned or transferred when an employee leaves the organization.  How Nudge Security can help Nudge Security is a  SaaS management platform  for modern IT governance and security. It discovers every cloud and SaaS account ever created by anyone in your organization, including generative AI apps, giving you a single source of...

Malicious actors are using a cloud attack tool named Xeon Sender to conduct SMS phishing and spam campaigns on a large scale by abusing legitimate services. "Attackers can use Xeon to send messages through multiple software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers using valid credentials for the service providers," SentinelOne security researcher Alex Delamotte said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Examples of the services used to facilitate the en masse distribution of SMS messages include Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Nexmo, Plivo, Proovl, Send99, Telesign, Telnyx, TextBelt, Twilio. It's important to note here that the activity does not exploit any inherent weaknesses in these providers. Rather, the tool uses legitimate APIs to conduct bulk SMS spam attacks. It joins tools like SNS Sender that have increasingly become a way to send bulk smishing messages and ultimately capture sensitive information from targets. Distributed via Telegram and hacking fo...

A newly patched security flaw in Microsoft Windows was exploited as a zero-day by Lazarus Group , a prolific state-sponsored actor affiliated with North Korea. The security vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-38193 (CVSS score: 7.8), has been described as a privilege escalation bug in the Windows Ancillary Function Driver (AFD.sys) for WinSock. "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges," Microsoft said in an advisory for the flaw last week. It was addressed by the tech giant as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday update. Credited with discovering and reporting the flaw are Gen Digital researchers Luigino Camastra and Milánek. Gen Digital owns a number of security and utility software brands like Norton, Avast, Avira, AVG, ReputationDefender, and CCleaner. "This flaw allowed them to gain unauthorized access to sensitive system areas," the company disclosed last week, adding it discovered the exploitation in early J...

I had the honor of hosting the first episode of the Xposure Podcast live from Xposure Summit 2025. And I couldn't have asked for a better kickoff panel: three cybersecurity leaders who don't just talk security, they live it. Let me introduce them. Alex Delay , CISO at IDB Bank, knows what it means to defend a highly regulated environment. Ben Mead , Director of Cybersecurity at Avidity Biosciences, brings a forward-thinking security perspective that reflects the innovation behind Avidity's targeted RNA therapeutics. Last but not least, Michael Francess , Director of Cybersecurity Advanced Threat at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, leads the charge in protecting the franchise. Each brought a unique vantage point to a common challenge: applying Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) to complex production environments. Gartner made waves in 2023 with a bold prediction: organizations that prioritize CTEM will be three times less likely to be breached by 2026. But here's the kicker -...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered new infrastructure linked to a financially motivated threat actor known as FIN7 . The two clusters of potential FIN7 activity "indicate communications inbound to FIN7 infrastructure from IP addresses assigned to Post Ltd (Russia) and SmartApe (Estonia), respectively," Team Cymru said in a report published this week as part of a joint investigation with Silent Push and Stark Industries Solutions. The findings build on a recent report from Silent Push, which found several Stark Industries IP addresses that are solely dedicated to hosting FIN7 infrastructure. The latest analysis indicates that the hosts linked to the e-crime group were likely procured from one of Stark's resellers. "Reseller programs are common in the hosting industry; many of the largest VPS (virtual private server) providers offer such services," the cybersecurity company said. "Customers procuring infrastructure via resellers generally must ...

OpenAI on Friday said it banned a set of accounts linked to what it said was an Iranian covert influence operation that leveraged ChatGPT to generate content that, among other things, focused on the upcoming U.S. presidential election. "This week we identified and took down a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that were generating content for a covert Iranian influence operation identified as Storm-2035," OpenAI said . "The operation used ChatGPT to generate content focused on a number of topics — including commentary on candidates on both sides in the U.S. presidential election – which it then shared via social media accounts and websites." The artificial intelligence (AI) company said the content did not achieve any meaningful engagement, with a majority of the social media posts receiving negligible to no likes, shares, and comments. It further noted it had found little evidence that the long-form articles created using ChatGPT were shared on social media platforms....

A large-scale extortion campaign has compromised various organizations by taking advantage of publicly accessible environment variable files (.env) that contain credentials associated with cloud and social media applications. "Multiple security missteps were present in the course of this campaign, including the following: Exposing environment variables, using long-lived credentials, and absence of least privilege architecture," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said in a Thursday report. The campaign is notable for setting up its attack infrastructure within the infected organizations' Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments and using them as a launchpad for scanning more than 230 million unique targets for sensitive data. With 110,000 domains targeted, the malicious activity is said to have netted over 90,000 unique variables in the .env files, out of which 7,000 belonged to organizations' cloud services and 1,500 variables are linked to social media accounts. "T...

A 27-year-old Russian national has been sentenced to over three years in prison in the U.S. for peddling financial information, login credentials, and other personally identifying information (PII) on a now-defunct dark web marketplace called Slilpp . Georgy Kavzharadze, 27, of Moscow, Russia, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and wire fraud earlier this February. In addition to a 40-month jail term, Kavzharadze has been ordered to pay $1,233,521.47 in restitution. The defendant, who went by the online monikers TeRorPP, Torqovec, and PlutuSS, is believed to have listed over 626,100 stolen login credentials for sale on Slilpp and sold more than 297,300 of them on the illicit marketplace between July 2016 and May 2021. "Those credentials were subsequently linked to $1.2 million in fraudulent transactions," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said . "On May 27, 2021, Kavzharadze's account on Slilpp listed 240,495 login credentials fo...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a sophisticated information stealer campaign that impersonates legitimate brands to distribute malware like DanaBot and StealC . The activity cluster, orchestrated by Russian-speaking cybercriminals and collectively codenamed Tusk, is said to encompass several sub-campaigns, leveraging the reputation of the platforms to trick users into downloading the malware using bogus sites and social media accounts. "All the active sub-campaigns host the initial downloader on Dropbox," Kaspersky researchers Elsayed Elrefaei and AbdulRhman Alfaifi said . "This downloader is responsible for delivering additional malware samples to the victim's machine, which are mostly info-stealers (DanaBot and StealC) and clippers." Of the 19 sub-campaigns identified to date, three are said to be currently active. The name "Tusk" is a reference to the word "Mammoth" used by the threat actors in log messages associated with t...

Chinese-speaking users are the target of an ongoing campaign that distributes a malware known as ValleyRAT. "ValleyRAT is a multi-stage malware that utilizes diverse techniques to monitor and control its victims and deploy arbitrary plugins to cause further damage," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researchers Eduardo Altares and Joie Salvio said . "Another noteworthy characteristic of this malware is its heavy usage of shellcode to execute its many components directly in memory, significantly reducing its file footprint in the victim's system." Details about the campaign first emerged in June 2024, when Zscaler ThreatLabz detailed attacks involving an updated version of the malware. Exactly how the latest iteration of ValleyRAT is distributed is currently not known, although previous campaigns have leveraged email messages containing URLs pointing to compressed executables. "Based on the filenames of the executables we found, they're likely using phis...