The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

Italy's data protection authority has fined ChatGPT maker OpenAI a fine of €15 million ($15.66 million) over how the generative artificial intelligence application handles personal data. The fine comes nearly a year after the Garante found that ChatGPT processed users' information to train its service in violation of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The authority said OpenAI did not notify it of a security breach that took place in March 2023, and that it processed the personal information of users to train ChatGPT without having an adequate legal basis to do so. It also accused the company of going against the principle of transparency and related information obligations toward users. "Furthermore, OpenAI has not provided for mechanisms for age verification, which could lead to the risk of exposing children under 13 to inappropriate responses with respect to their degree of development and self-awareness," the Garante said. ...

A dual Russian and Israeli national has been charged in the United States for allegedly being the developer of the now-defunct LockBit ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation since its inception in or around 2019 through at least February 2024. Rostislav Panev , 51, was arrested in Israel earlier this August and is currently awaiting extradition, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a statement. Based on fund transfers to a cryptocurrency wallet owned by Panev, he allegedly earned approximately $230,000 between June 2022 and February 2024. "Rostislav Panev for years built and maintained the digital weapons that enabled his LockBit co-conspirators to wreak havoc and cause billions of dollars in damage around the world," U.S. Attorney Philip R. Sellinger said . LockBit, which was one of the most prolific ransomware groups, had its infrastructure seized in February 2024 as part of an international law enforcement operation called Cronos. It gained notoriety for tar...

The Lazarus Group, an infamous threat actor linked to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), has been observed leveraging a "complex infection chain" targeting at least two employees belonging to an unnamed nuclear-related organization within the span of one month in January 2024. The attacks, which culminated in the deployment of a new modular backdoor referred to as CookiePlus , are part of a long-running cyber espionage campaign known as Operation Dream Job, which is also tracked as NukeSped by cybersecurity company Kaspersky. It's known to be active since at least 2020, when it was exposed by ClearSky. These activities often involve targeting developers and employees in various companies, including defense, aerospace, cryptocurrency, and other global sectors, with lucrative job opportunities that ultimately lead to the deployment of malware on their machines. "Lazarus is interested in carrying out supply chain attacks as part of the DeathNote...

While phishing and ransomware dominate headlines, another critical risk quietly persists across most enterprises: exposed Git repositories leaking sensitive data. A risk that silently creates shadow access into core systems Git is the backbone of modern software development, hosting millions of repositories and serving thousands of organizations worldwide. Yet, amid the daily hustle of shipping code, developers may inadvertently leave behind API keys, tokens, or passwords in configuration files and code files, effectively handing attackers the keys to the kingdom. This isn't just about poor hygiene; it's a systemic and growing supply chain risk. As cyber threats become more sophisticated, so do compliance requirements. Security frameworks like NIS2, SOC2, and ISO 27001 now demand proof that software delivery pipelines are hardened and third-party risk is controlled. The message is clear: securing your Git repositories is no longer optional, it's essential. Below, we look at the ris...

The developers of Rspack have revealed that two of their npm packages, @rspack/core and @rspack/cli , were compromised in a software supply chain attack that allowed a malicious actor to publish malicious versions to the official package registry with cryptocurrency mining malware. Following the discovery , versions 1.1.7 of both libraries have been unpublished from the npm registry. The latest safe version is 1.1.8. "They were released by an attacker who gained unauthorized npm publishing access, and contain malicious scripts," software supply chain security firm Socket said in an analysis. Rspack is billed as an alternative to the webpack , offering a "high performance JavaScript bundler written in Rust." Originally developed by ByteDance, it has since been adopted by several companies such as Alibaba, Amazon, Discord, and Microsoft, among others. The npm packages in question, @rspack/core, and @rspack/cli, attract weekly downloads of over 300,000 and 145...

Sophos has released hotfixes to address three security flaws in Sophos Firewall products that could be exploited to achieve remote code execution and allow privileged system access under certain conditions. Of the three, two are rated Critical in severity. There is currently no evidence that the shortcomings have been exploited in the wild. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2024-12727 (CVSS score: 9.8) - A pre-auth SQL injection vulnerability in the email protection feature that could lead to remote code execution, if a specific configuration of Secure PDF eXchange (SPX) is enabled in combination with the firewall running in High Availability ( HA ) mode. CVE-2024-12728 (CVSS score: 9.8) - A weak credentials vulnerability arising from a suggested and non-random SSH login passphrase for High Availability (HA) cluster initialization that remains active even after the HA establishment process completed, thereby exposing an account with privileged access if SSH is ena...

A now-patched critical security flaw impacting Fortinet FortiClient EMS is being exploited by malicious actors as part of a cyber campaign that installed remote desktop software such as AnyDesk and ScreenConnect.  The vulnerability in question is CVE-2023-48788 (CVSS score: 9.3), an SQL injection bug that allows attackers to execute unauthorized code or commands by sending specially crafted data packets. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky said the October 2024 attack targeted an unnamed company's Windows server that was exposed to the internet and had two open ports associated with FortiClient EMS. "The targeted company employs this technology to allow employees to download specific policies to their corporate devices, granting them secure access to the Fortinet VPN," it said in a Thursday analysis. Further analysis of the incident found that the threat actors took advantage of CVE-2023-48788 as an initial access vector, subsequently dropping a ScreenConnect exe...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added a critical security flaw impacting BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access (PRA) and Remote Support (RS) products to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-12356 (CVSS score: 9.8), is a command injection flaw that could be exploited by a malicious actor to run arbitrary commands as the site user. "BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access (PRA) and Remote Support (RS) contain a command injection vulnerability, which can allow an unauthenticated attacker to inject commands that are run as a site user," CISA said. While the issue has already been plugged into customers' cloud instances, those using self-hosted versions of the software are recommended to update to the below versions - Privileged Remote Access (versions 24.3.1 and earlier) - PRA patch BT24-10-ONPREM1 or BT24-10-ONPREM2 Rem...

Threat actors have been observed uploading malicious typosquats of legitimate npm packages such as typescript-eslint and @types/node that have racked up thousands of downloads on the package registry. The counterfeit versions, named @typescript_eslinter/eslint and types-node , are engineered to download a trojan and retrieve second-stage payloads, respectively. "While typosquatting attacks are hardly new, the effort spent by nefarious actors on these two libraries to pass them off as legitimate is noteworthy," Sonatype's Ax Sharma said in an analysis published Wednesday. "Furthermore, the high download counts for packages like "types-node" are signs that point to both some developers possibly falling for these typosquats, and threat actors artificially inflating these counts to boost the trustworthiness of their malicious components." The npm listing for @typescript_eslinter/eslint, Sonatype's analysis revealed, points to a phony GitHub repo...

Juniper Networks is warning that Session Smart Router (SSR) products with default passwords are being targeted as part of a malicious campaign that deploys the Mirai botnet malware. The company said it's issuing the advisory after "several customers" reported anomalous behavior on their Session Smart Network (SSN) platforms on December 11, 2024. "These systems have been infected with the Mirai malware and were subsequently used as a DDoS attack source to other devices accessible by their network," it said . "The impacted systems were all using default passwords." Mirai , which has had its source code leaked in 2016, has spawned several variants over the years. The malware is capable of scanning for known vulnerabilities as well as default credentials to infiltrate devices and enlist them into a botnet for mounting distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. To mitigate such threats, organizations are recommended to change their passwords with i...