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A team of five security researchers analyzed several Apple online services for three months and found as many as 55 vulnerabilities, 11 of which are critical in severity. The flaws — including 29 high severity, 13 medium severity, and 2 low severity vulnerabilities — could have allowed an attacker to "fully compromise both customer and employee applications, launch a worm capable of automatically taking over a victim's iCloud account, retrieve source code for internal Apple projects, fully compromise an industrial control warehouse software used by Apple, and take over the sessions of Apple employees with the capability of accessing management tools and sensitive resources." The flaws meant a bad actor could easily hijack a user's iCloud account and steal all the photos, calendar information, videos, and documents, in addition to forwarding the same exploit to all of their contacts. The findings were  reported by Sam Curry  along with Brett Buerhaus, Ben Sadeghipo

As businesses are increasingly migrating to the cloud, securing the infrastructure has never been more important. Now according to the latest research, two security flaws in Microsoft's Azure App Services could have enabled a bad actor to carry out server-side request forgery ( SSRF ) attacks or execute arbitrary code and take over the administration server. "This enables an attacker to quietly take over the App Service's git server, or implant malicious phishing pages accessible through Azure Portal to target system administrators," cybersecurity firm Intezer said in a report published today and shared with The Hacker News. Discovered by  Paul Litvak of Intezer Labs, the flaws were reported to Microsoft in June, after which the company subsequently addressed them. Azure App Service is a cloud computing-based platform that's used as a hosting web service for building web apps and mobile backends. When an App Service is created via Azure, a new Docker env

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

Every company needs help with cybersecurity. No CISO ever said, "I have everything I need and am fully confident that our organization is fully protected against breaches." This is especially true for small and mid-sized enterprises that don't have the luxury of enormous cybersecurity budgets and a deep bench of cybersecurity experts. To address this issue, especially for small and mid-sized enterprises, we've seen a sharp rise in Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services. MDR is essentially an outsourced cybersecurity expert service that monitors a company's environment and provides an improved ability to detect, investigate, and respond to threats. Think of it as augmenting your existing staff with a group of highly skilled cybersecurity experts. MDR Services Cynet recently published a new whitepaper that reviewed all of the services provided by their MDR team, which they refer to as "CyOps" [you can download the whitepaper here] . Interestin

Cybersecurity researchers have taken the wraps off a new botnet hijacking Internet-connected smart devices in the wild to perform nefarious tasks, mostly DDoS attacks, and illicit cryptocurrency coin mining. Discovered by Qihoo 360's Netlab security team, the  HEH Botnet  — written in Go language and armed with a proprietary peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol, spreads via a brute-force attack of the Telnet service on ports 23/2323 and can execute arbitrary shell commands. The researchers said the HEH botnet samples discovered so far support a wide variety of CPU architectures, including x86(32/64), ARM(32/64), MIPS(MIPS32/MIPS-III), and PowerPC (PPC). The botnet, despite being in its early stages of development, comes with three functional modules: a propagation module, a local HTTP service module, and a P2P module. Initially downloaded and executed by a malicious Shell script named "wpqnbw.txt," the HEH sample then uses the Shell script to download rogue programs for all

Cybersecurity researchers have spotted a rare kind of potentially dangerous malware that targets a machine's booting process to drop persistent malware. The campaign involved the use of a compromised  UEFI  (or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) containing a malicious implant, making it the  second known public case  where a UEFI rootkit has been used in the wild. According to  Kaspersky , the rogue UEFI firmware images were modified to incorporate several malicious modules, which were then used to drop malware on victim machines in a series of targeted cyberattacks directed against diplomats and members of an NGO from Africa, Asia, and Europe. Calling the malware framework " MosaicRegressor ," Kaspersky researchers Mark Lechtik, Igor Kuznetsov, and Yury Parshin said a telemetry analysis revealed several dozen victims between 2017 and 2019, all of whom had some ties to North Korea. UEFI is a firmware interface and a replacement for BIOS that improves security, e

As security professionals who have spent more than a few years in the industry, we know a good challenge when we see one. SaaS and cloud-based technologies are growing rapidly, offering organizations convenience and constant feature refreshes without the need to install and deploy software on-premises. However, even when referred to as 'a game-changer,' many organizations are still highly concerned by security breaches. Today, organizations have anywhere from 35-to literally hundreds of SaaS applications running. Slack, Office 365, Zoom, Zendesk, Salesforce, Hubspot, etc. These applications are at the core of modern enterprises, to the point where running a business without them would be nearly impossible, with the cost and time-saving benefits they provide enabling growth while conserving resources. SaaS applications are easy to use, scalable, and now, they even come with an impressive array of native security controls to secure sensitive corporate data. How to make the

Cybersecurity researchers today disclosed details of security vulnerabilities found in popular antivirus solutions that could enable attackers to elevate their privileges, thereby helping malware sustain its foothold on the compromised systems. According to a report published by CyberArk researcher Eran Shimony today and shared with The Hacker News, the high privileges often associated with anti-malware products render them more vulnerable to exploitation via file manipulation attacks, resulting in a scenario where malware gains elevated permissions on the system. The bugs impact a wide range of antivirus solutions, including those from Kaspersky, McAfee, Symantec, Fortinet, Check Point, Trend Micro, Avira, and Microsoft Defender, each of which has been fixed by the respective vendor. Chief among the flaws is the ability to delete files from arbitrary locations, allowing the attacker to delete any file in the system, as well as a file corruption vulnerability that permits a bad ac

Writing advanced malware for a threat actor requires different groups of people with diverse technical expertise to put them all together. But can the code leave enough clues to reveal the person behind it? To this effect, cybersecurity researchers on Friday detailed a new methodology to identify exploit authors that use their unique characteristics as a fingerprint to track down other exploits developed by them. By deploying this technique, the researchers were able to link 16 Windows local privilege escalation (LPE) exploits to two zero-day sellers "Volodya" (previously called "BuggiCorp") and "PlayBit" (or "luxor2008"). "Instead of focusing on an entire malware and hunting for new samples of the malware family or actor, we wanted to offer another perspective and decided to concentrate on these few functions that were written by an exploit developer," Check Point Research's Itay Cohen and Eyal Itkin noted. Fingerprinting an