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A reverse engineering of the firmware running on Ivanti Pulse Secure appliances has revealed numerous weaknesses, once again underscoring the challenge of securing software supply chains. Eclypsiusm, which acquired firmware version 9.1.18.2-24467.1 as part of the process, said the base operating system used by the Utah-based software company for the device is CentOS 6.4. "Pulse Secure runs an 11-year-old version of Linux which hasn't been supported since November 2020," the firmware security company  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The development comes as threat actors are capitalizing on a number of security flaws discovered in Ivanti Connect Secure, Policy Secure, and ZTA gateways to  deliver  a  wide range of malware , including web shells, stealers, and backdoors. The vulnerabilities that have come under active exploitation in recent months comprise CVE-2023-46805, CVE-2024-21887, and CVE-2024-21893. Last week, Ivanti also  disclose...

With many of the highly publicized 2023 cyber attacks revolving around one or more SaaS applications, SaaS has become a cause for genuine concern in many boardroom discussions. More so than ever, considering that GenAI applications are, in fact, SaaS applications. Wing Security (Wing), a SaaS security company, conducted an analysis of 493 SaaS-using companies in Q4 of 2023.  Their study reveals  how companies use SaaS today, and the wide variety of threats that result from that usage. This unique analysis provides rare and important insights into the breadth and depth of SaaS-related risks, but also provides practical tips to mitigate them and ensure SaaS can be widely used without compromising security posture.  The TL;DR Version Of SaaS Security 2023 brought some now infamous examples of malicious players leveraging or directly targeting SaaS, including the North Korean group UNC4899, 0ktapus ransomware group, and Russian Midnight Blizzard APT, which targeted well-k...

A Chinese-speaking threat actor codenamed  GoldFactory  has been attributed to the development of highly sophisticated banking trojans, including a previously undocumented iOS malware called GoldPickaxe that's capable of harvesting identity documents, facial recognition data, and intercepting SMS. "The GoldPickaxe family is available for both iOS and Android platforms," Singapore-headquartered Group-IB  said  in an extensive report shared with The Hacker News. "GoldFactory is believed to be a well-organized Chinese-speaking cybercrime group with close connections to  Gigabud ." Active since at least mid-2023, GoldFactory is also responsible for another Android-based banking malware called  GoldDigger  and its enhanced variant GoldDiggerPlus as well as GoldKefu, an embedded trojan inside GoldDiggerPlus. Social engineering campaigns distributing the malware have been found to target the Asia-Pacific region, specifically Thailand and Vietnam, by masqu...

If you invite guest users into your Entra ID tenant, you may be opening yourself up to a surprising risk.  A gap in access control in Microsoft Entra's subscription handling is allowing guest users to create and transfer subscriptions into the tenant they are invited into, while maintaining full ownership of them.  All the guest user needs are the permissions to create subscriptions in their home tenant, and an invitation as a guest user into an external tenant. Once inside, the guest user can create subscriptions in their home tenant, transfer them into the external tenant, and retain full ownership rights. This stealthy privilege escalation tactic allows a guest user to gain a privileged foothold in an environment where they should only have limited access. Many organizations treat guest accounts as low-risk based on their temporary, limited access, but this behavior, which works as designed, opens the door to known attack paths and lateral movement within the resource t...

Microsoft on Wednesday acknowledged that a newly disclosed critical security flaw in Exchange Server has been actively exploited in the wild, a day after it released fixes for the vulnerability as part of its  Patch Tuesday updates . Tracked as  CVE-2024-21410  (CVSS score: 9.8), the issue has been described as a case of privilege escalation impacting the Exchange Server. "An attacker could target an NTLM client such as Outlook with an NTLM credentials-leaking type vulnerability," the company  said  in an advisory published this week. "The leaked credentials can then be relayed against the Exchange server to gain privileges as the victim client and to perform operations on the Exchange server on the victim's behalf." Successful exploitation of the flaw could permit an attacker to relay a user's leaked Net-NTLMv2 hash against a susceptible Exchange Server and authenticate as the user, Redmond added. The tech giant, in an update to its bulletin, revised...

Nation-state actors associated with Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China are experimenting with artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) to complement their ongoing cyber attack operations. The findings come from a report published by Microsoft in collaboration with OpenAI, both of which  said  they disrupted efforts made by five state-affiliated actors that used its AI services to perform malicious cyber activities by terminating their assets and accounts. "Language support is a natural feature of LLMs and is attractive for threat actors with continuous focus on social engineering and other techniques relying on false, deceptive communications tailored to their targets' jobs, professional networks, and other relationships," Microsoft  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. While no significant or novel attacks employing the LLMs have been detected to date, adversarial exploration of AI technologies has transcended various phases of t...

Cybersecurity researchers have found that it's possible for threat actors to exploit a well-known utility called command-not-found to recommend their own rogue packages and compromise systems running Ubuntu operating system. "While 'command-not-found' serves as a convenient tool for suggesting installations for uninstalled commands, it can be inadvertently manipulated by attackers through the snap repository, leading to deceptive recommendations of malicious packages," cloud security firm Aqua said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Installed by default on Ubuntu systems, command-not-found  suggests  packages to install in interactive bash sessions when attempting to run commands that are not available. The suggestions include both the Advanced Packaging Tool ( APT ) and  snap packages . While the tool uses an internal database ("/var/lib/command-not-found/commands.db") to suggest APT packages, it relies on the " advise-snap " comman...

The landscape of cybersecurity in financial services is undergoing a rapid transformation. Cybercriminals are exploiting advanced technologies and methodologies, making traditional security measures obsolete. The challenges are compounded for community banks that must safeguard sensitive financial data against the same level of sophisticated threats as larger institutions, but often with more limited resources. The FinServ Threat Landscape Recent trends show an alarming increase in sophisticated cyber-attacks. Cybercriminals now deploy advanced techniques like deep fake technology and AI-powered attacks, making it increasingly difficult for banks to differentiate between legitimate and malicious activities. These developments necessitate a shift towards more sophisticated and adaptive cybersecurity measures. Take these industry statistics, for example. Financial firms report 703 cyberattack attempts per week.1 On average, 270 attacks (entailing unauthorized access of data, appl...

The infamous malware loader and initial access broker known as  Bumblebee  has resurfaced after a four-month absence as part of a new phishing campaign observed in February 2024. Enterprise security firm Proofpoint said the activity targets organizations in the U.S. with voicemail-themed lures containing links to OneDrive URLs. "The URLs led to a Word file with names such as "ReleaseEvans#96.docm" (the digits before the file extension varied)," the company  said  in a Tuesday report. "The Word document spoofed the consumer electronics company Humane." Opening the document leverages VBA macros to launch a PowerShell command to download and execute another PowerShell script from a remote server that, in turn, retrieves and runs the Bumblebee loader. Bumblebee,  first spotted  in March 2022, is mainly designed to download and execute follow-on payloads such as ransomware. It has been put to use by multiple crimeware threat actors that previously observe...

A newly disclosed security flaw in the Microsoft Defender SmartScreen has been exploited as a zero-day by an advanced persistent threat actor called  Water Hydra  (aka DarkCasino) targeting financial market traders. Trend Micro, which began tracking the campaign in late December 2023, said it entails the exploitation of CVE-2024-21412, a security bypass vulnerability related to Internet Shortcut Files (.URL).  "In this attack chain, the threat actor leveraged CVE-2024-21412 to bypass Microsoft Defender SmartScreen and infect victims with the DarkMe malware," the cybersecurity firm  said  in a Tuesday report. Microsoft, which  addressed  the flaw in its February Patch Tuesday update, said an unauthenticated attacker could exploit the flaw by sending the targeted user a specially crafted file in order to bypass displayed security checks. However, successful exploitation banks on the prerequisite that the threat actor convinces the victim to click o...