Search results for Scripts | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Third-party apps such as Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, HotJar, and JQuery have become critical tools for businesses to optimize their website performance and services for a global audience. However, as their importance has grown, so has the threat of cyber incidents involving unmanaged third-party apps and open-source tools. Online businesses increasingly struggle to maintain complete visibility and control over the ever-changing third-party threat landscape, with sophisticated threats like evasive skimmers, Magecart attacks, and unlawful tracking practices potentially causing severe damage. This article explores the challenges of protecting modern websites from third-party scripts and the security risks associated with a lack of visibility over these scripts. Invisible to Standard Security Controls  Third-party scripts are often invisible to standard security controls like Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) because they are loaded from external sources that are not under the con...

A new attack campaign dubbed  CLOUD#REVERSER  has been observed leveraging legitimate cloud storage services like Google Drive and Dropbox to stage malicious payloads. "The VBScript and PowerShell scripts in the CLOUD#REVERSER inherently involves command-and-control-like activities by using Google Drive and Dropbox as staging platforms to manage file uploads and downloads," Securonix researchers Den Iuzvyk, Tim Peck, and Oleg Kolesnikov  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The scripts are designed to fetch files that match specific patterns, suggesting they are waiting for commands or scripts placed in Google Drive or Dropbox." The starting point of the attack chain is a phishing email bearing a ZIP archive file, which contains an executable that masquerades as a Microsoft Excel file. In an interesting twist, the filename makes use of the hidden right-to-left override ( RLO ) Unicode character (U+202E) to reverse the order of the characters that co...

Businesses know they need to secure their client-side scripts. Content security policies (CSPs) are a great way to do that. But CSPs are cumbersome. One mistake and you have a potentially significant client-side security gap. Finding those gaps means long and tedious hours (or days) in manual code reviews through thousands of lines of script on your web applications. Automated content security policies can help streamline the code review process by first identifying all first- and third-party scripts and the assets they access, and then generating an appropriate content security policy to help better secure the client-side attack surface. There are few developers or AppSec professionals who claim to enjoy deploying CSPs. First, the CSP has to work for the specific web application. Then the team needs to make sure it provides the appropriate level of protection. The CSP also can't conflict with any existing widgets or plugins (or the decision must be made to not deploy the CSP or dea...

A simple yet serious application-level denial of service (DoS) vulnerability has been discovered in WordPress CMS platform that could allow anyone to take down most WordPress websites even with a single machine—without hitting with a massive amount of bandwidth, as required in network-level DDoS attacks to achieve the same. Since the company has denied patching the issue, the vulnerability ( CVE-2018-6389 ) remains unpatched and affects almost all versions of WordPress released in last nine years, including the latest stable release of WordPress (Version 4.9.2). Discovered by Israeli security researcher Barak Tawily , the vulnerability resides in the way " load-scripts.php ," a built-in script in WordPress CMS, processes user-defined requests. For those unaware, load-scripts.php file has only been designed for admin users to help a website improve performance and load page faster by combining (on the server end) multiple JavaScript files into a single request. Howe...

The PCI DSS landscape is evolving rapidly. With the Q1 2025 deadline looming ever larger, businesses are scrambling to meet the stringent new requirements of PCI DSS v4.0. Two sections in particular, 6.4.3 and 11.6.1, are troublesome as they demand that organizations rigorously monitor and manage payment page scripts and use a robust change detection mechanism. With the deadline fast approaching and the consequences of non-compliance so severe, there is no room for complacency, so, in this article, we look at the best way to meet these complex coding requirements. PCI DSS v4: Understanding Requirements 6.4.3 and 11.6.1 These changes to PCI DSS in v4.0 acknowledge the urgent need to tighten client-side security in the face of pervasive supply-chain threats. They call for beefed-up payment page security to keep customers' sensitive payment details safe from malicious script injection attacks: 6.4.3: To meet this requirement your organization needs to monitor and manage all payment ...

Think your WAF has you covered? Think again. This holiday season, unmonitored JavaScript is a critical oversight allowing attackers to steal payment data while your WAF and intrusion detection systems see nothing. With the 2025 shopping season weeks away, visibility gaps must close now. Get the complete Holiday Season Security Playbook here . Bottom Line Up Front The 2024 holiday season saw major attacks on website code: the Polyfill.io breach hit 500,000+ websites, and September's Cisco Magecart attack targeted holiday shoppers. These attacks exploited third-party code and online store weaknesses during peak shopping, when attacks jumped 690% . For 2025: What security steps and monitoring should online retailers take now to prevent similar attacks while still using the third-party tools they need? As holiday shopping traffic increases, companies strengthen their servers and networks, but a critical weak spot remains unwatched: the browser environment where malicious code r...

How many times it has happened to you when you look for something online and the next moment you find its advertisement on almost every other web page or social media site you visit? Web-tracking is not new. Most of the websites log its users' online activities, but a recent study from Princeton University has suggested that hundreds of sites record your every move online, including your searches, scrolling behavior, keystrokes and every movement. Researchers from Princeton University's Centre for Information Technology Policy (CITP) analyzed the Alexa top 50,000 websites in the world and found that 482 sites, many of which are high profile, are using a new web-tracking technique to track every move of their users. Dubbed " Session Replay ," the technique is used even by most popular websites, including The Guardian, Reuters, Samsung, Al-Jazeera, VK, Adobe, Microsoft, and WordPress, to record every single movement a visitor does while navigating a web page,...

In coordination with Metasploit Express and Metasploit Pro, version 3.6 of the Metasploit Framework is now available. Hot on the heels of 3.5.2, this release comes with 8 new exploits and 12 new auxiliaries. A whopping 10 of those new auxiliary modules are Chris John Riley's foray into SAP, giving you the ability to extract a range of information from servers' management consoles via the SOAP interface. This release fixes an annoying installer bug on Linux where Postgres would not automatically start on reboot. The feature I am most excited about is the new Post Exploitation support. I hinted at this new module type in the 3.5.2 release announcement and with 3.6, more than 20 new modules are available. Post modules are a new, more powerful, replacement for meterpreter scripts. Scripts were clearly tied to a single platform: meterpreter for Windows. With modules it is much easier to abstract common tasks into libraries for any platform that can expose a session. For example, f...

Threat hunters are alerting to a new campaign that employs deceptive websites to trick unsuspecting users into executing malicious PowerShell scripts on their machines and infect them with the NetSupport RAT malware. The DomainTools Investigations (DTI) team said it identified "malicious multi-stage downloader Powershell scripts" hosted on lure websites that masquerade as Gitcode and Docusign. "These sites attempt to deceive users into copying and running an initial PowerShell script on their Windows Run command," the company said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "Upon doing so, the powershell script downloads another downloader script and executes on the system, which in turn retrieves additional payloads and executes them eventually installing NetSupport RAT on the infected machines." It's believed that these counterfeit sites may be propagated via social engineering attempts over email and/or social media platforms. The Po...

Addressing cyber threats before they have a chance to strike or inflict serious damage is by far the best security approach any company can embrace. Achieving this takes a lot of research and proactive threat hunting. The problem here is that it is easy to get stuck in endless arrays of data and end up with no relevant intel.  To avoid this, use these five battle-tested techniques that are certain to improve your company's threat awareness and overall security. Finding threats targeting orgs in your region The most basic, yet high-impact way to learn about the current threat landscape for your company is to go and see what type of attacks other organizations in your region are experiencing.  In most cases, threat actors attempt to target dozens of businesses at the same time as part of a single campaign. This makes it possible to catch the threat early and make correct adjustments in your organization. How it contributes to your security: More targeted and effective de...

An unknown cybercrime threat actor has been observed targeting Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking victims to compromise online banking accounts in Mexico, Peru, and Portugal. "This threat actor employs tactics such as LOLBaS (living-off-the-land binaries and scripts), along with CMD-based scripts to carry out its malicious activities," the BlackBerry Research and Intelligence Team  said  in a report published last week. The cybersecurity company attributed the campaign, dubbed Operation CMDStealer , to a Brazilian threat actor based on an analysis of the artifacts. The attack chain primarily leverages social engineering, banking on Portuguese and Spanish emails containing tax- or traffic violation-themed lures to trigger the infections and gain unauthorized access to victims' systems. The emails come fitted with an HTML attachment that contains obfuscated code to fetch the next-stage payload from a remote server in the form of a RAR archive file. The files, which are...