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Romanian cybersecurity company Bitdefender has released a free decryptor to help victims recover data encrypted using the ShrinkLocker ransomware. The decryptor is the result of a comprehensive analysis of ShrinkLocker's inner workings, allowing the researchers to discover a "specific window of opportunity for data recovery immediately after the removal of protectors from BitLocker-encrypted disks." ShrinkLocker was first documented in May 2024 by Kaspersky, which found the malware's use of Microsoft's native BitLocker utility for encrypting files as part of extortion attacks targeting Mexico, Indonesia, and Jordan. It appears to have been adapted from benign ten-year-old code. Bitdefender, which investigated a ShrinkLocker incident targeting an unnamed healthcare company in the Middle East, said the attack likely originated from a machine belonging to a contractor, once again highlighting how threat actors are increasingly abusing trusted relationships to ...

The rise of SaaS and cloud-based work environments has fundamentally altered the cyber risk landscape. With more than 90% of organizational network traffic flowing through browsers and web applications, companies are facing new and serious cybersecurity threats. These include phishing attacks, data leakage, and malicious extensions. As a result, the browser also becomes a vulnerability that needs to be protected. LayerX has released a comprehensive guide titled "Kickstarting Your Browser Security Program" This in-depth guide serves as a roadmap for CISOs and security teams looking to secure browser activities within their organization; including step-by-step instructions, frameworks, and use cases. Below, we bring its main highlights. Prioritizing Browser Security Browsers now serve as the primary interface for SaaS applications, creating new malicious opportunities for cyber adversaries. The risks include: Data leakage - Browsers can expose sensitive data by allowing empl...

A security analysis of the OvrC cloud platform has uncovered 10 vulnerabilities that could be chained to allow potential attackers to execute code remotely on connected devices. "Attackers successfully exploiting these vulnerabilities can access, control, and disrupt devices supported by OvrC; some of those include smart electrical power supplies, cameras, routers, home automation systems, and more," Claroty researcher Uri Katz said in a technical report. Snap One's OvrC, pronounced "oversee," is advertised as a "revolutionary support platform" that enables homeowners and businesses to remotely manage, configure, and troubleshoot IoT devices on the network. According to its website, OvrC solutions are deployed at over 500,000 end-user locations. According to a coordinated advisory issued by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), successful exploitation of the identified vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to ...

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...

The Iranian threat actor known as TA455 has been observed taking a leaf out of a North Korean hacking group's playbook to orchestrate its own version of the Dream Job campaign targeting the aerospace industry by offering fake jobs since at least September 2023. "The campaign distributed the SnailResin malware, which activates the SlugResin backdoor," Israeli cybersecurity company ClearSky said in a Tuesday analysis. TA455, also tracked by Google-owned Mandiant as UNC1549 and by PwC as Yellow Dev 13, is assessed to be a sub-cluster within APT35 , which is known by the names CALANQUE, Charming Kitten, CharmingCypress, ITG18, Mint Sandstorm (formerly Phosphorus), Newscaster, TA453, and Yellow Garuda. Affiliated with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the group is said to share tactical overlaps with clusters referred to as Smoke Sandstorm (previously Bohrium) and Crimson Sandstorm (previously Curium). Earlier this February, the adversarial collecti...

Microsoft on Tuesday revealed that two security flaws impacting Windows NT LAN Manager ( NTLM ) and Task Scheduler have come under active exploitation in the wild. The security vulnerabilities are among the 90 security bugs the tech giant addressed as part of its Patch Tuesday update for November 2024. Of the 90 flaws, four are rated Critical, 85 are rated Important, and one is rated Moderate in severity. Fifty-two of the patched vulnerabilities are remote code execution flaws. The fixes are in addition to 31 vulnerabilities Microsoft resolved in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of the October 2024 Patch Tuesday update. The two vulnerabilities that have been listed as actively exploited are below - CVE-2024-43451 (CVSS score: 6.5) - Windows NTLM Hash Disclosure Spoofing Vulnerability CVE-2024-49039 (CVSS score: 8.8) - Windows Task Scheduler Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability "This vulnerability discloses a user's NTLMv2 hash to the attacker who c...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed new security flaws impacting Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop that could be exploited to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) The issue, per findings from watchTowr , is rooted in the Session Recording component that allows system administrators to capture user activity, and record keyboard and mouse input, along with a video stream of the desktop for audit, compliance, and troubleshooting purposes. Particularly, the vulnerability exploits the "combination of a carelessly-exposed MSMQ instance with misconfigured permissions that leverages BinaryFormatter can be reached from any host via HTTP to perform unauthenticated RCE," security researcher Sina Kheirkhah said. The vulnerability details are listed below - CVE-2024-8068 (CVSS score: 5.1) - Privilege escalation to NetworkService Account access CVE-2024-8069 (CVSS score: 5.1) - Limited remote code execution with the privilege of a NetworkService Account acces...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new sophisticated tool called GoIssue that can be used to send phishing messages at scale targeting GitHub users. The program, first marketed by a threat actor named cyberdluffy (aka Cyber D' Luffy) on the Runion forum earlier this August, is advertised as a tool that allows criminal actors to extract email addresses from public GitHub profiles and send bulk emails directly to user inboxes. "Whether you're aiming to reach a specific audience or expand your outreach, GoIssue offers the precision and power you need," the threat actor claimed in their post. "GoIssue can send bulk emails to GitHub users, directly to their inboxes, targeting any recipient." SlashNext said the tool marks a "dangerous shift in targeted phishing" that could act as a gateway to source code theft, supply chain attacks, and corporate network breaches via compromised developer credentials. "Armed with this inform...

Threat actors with ties to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK aka North Korea) have been found embedding malware within Flutter applications, marking the first time this tactic has been adopted by the adversary to infect Apple macOS devices. Jamf Threat Labs, which made the discovery based on artifacts uploaded to the VirusTotal platform earlier this month, said the Flutter-built applications are part of a broader activity that includes malware written in Golang and Python. It's currently not known how these samples are distributed to victims, and if it has been used against any targets, or if the attackers are switching to a new delivery method. That said, North Korean threat actors are known to engage in extensive social engineering efforts targeting employees of cryptocurrency and decentralized finance businesses. "We suspect these specific examples are testing," Jaron Bradley, director at Jamf Threat Labs, told The Hacker News. "It's p...

Behavioral analytics, long associated with threat detection (i.e. UEBA or UBA), is experiencing a renaissance. Once primarily used to identify suspicious activity, it's now being reimagined as a powerful post-detection technology that enhances incident response processes. By leveraging behavioral insights during alert triage and investigation, SOCs can transform their workflows to become more accurate, efficient, and impactful. Fortunately, many new cybersecurity products like AI SOC analysts are able to incorporate these techniques into their investigation capabilities, thus allowing SOCs to utilize them into their response processes. This post will provide a brief overview of behavior analytics then discuss 5 ways it's being reinvented to shake up SOC investigation and incident response work. Behavior Analysis is Back, But Why? Behavioral analytics was a hot topic back in 2015, promising to revolutionize static SIEM and SOC detections with dynamic anomaly detection to uncover t...