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SonicWall, a popular internet security provider of firewall and VPN products, on late Friday disclosed that it fell victim to a coordinated attack on its internal systems. The San Jose-based company said the attacks leveraged zero-day vulnerabilities in SonicWall secure remote access products such as NetExtender VPN client version 10.x and Secure Mobile Access ( SMA ) that are used to provide users with remote access to internal resources. "Recently, SonicWall identified a coordinated attack on its internal systems by highly sophisticated threat actors exploiting probable zero-day vulnerabilities on certain SonicWall secure remote access products," the company exclusively told The Hacker News. The development comes after The Hacker News received reports that SonicWall's internal systems went down earlier this week on Tuesday and that the source code hosted on the company's GitLab repository was accessed by the attackers. SonicWall wouldn't confirm the re

Amazon has addressed a number of flaws in its Kindle e-reader platform that could have allowed an attacker to take control of victims' devices by simply sending them a malicious e-book. Dubbed " KindleDrip ," the exploit chain takes advantage of a feature called " Send to Kindle " to send a malware-laced document to a Kindle device that, when opened, could be leveraged to remotely execute arbitrary code on the device and make unauthorized purchases. "The code runs as root, and the attacker only needs to know the email address assigned to the victim's device,"  said  Yogev Bar-On, a security researcher for Readlmode Labs, in a technical write-up on Thursday. The first vulnerability lets a bad actor send an e-book to a Kindle, the second flaw allows for remote code execution while the e-book is parsed, and a third issue makes it possible to escalate privileges and run the code as the "root" user. When linked together, these weaknesses

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,

Like it or not, 2020 was the year that proved that teams could work from literally anywhere. While terms like "flex work" and "WFH" were thrown around before COVID-19 came around, thanks to the pandemic, remote working has become the defacto way people work nowadays. Today, digital-based work interactions take the place of in-person ones with near-seamless fluidity, and the best part is that going remote helps companies save their cash in this bootstrapped time.  But while the ability to work from anywhere has truly been essential to keeping businesses and the economy functional, it has opened up new challenges that need to be addressed.  Your Devices Are Your Weakest Link With nearly ⅔ of employees still working remotely to some degree, the boundaries that once separated work and home have been completely washed away. A major ramification of this shift has been an increase in the volume of corporate and non-corporate devices connecting from remote to sensitive

A relatively new crypto-mining malware that surfaced last year and infected thousands of Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL) databases has now been linked to a small software development company based in Iran. The attribution was made possible due to an operational security oversight, said researchers from cybersecurity firm Sophos, that led to the company's name inadvertently making its way into the cryptominer code. First documented by Chinese tech giant Tencent last September,  MrbMiner  was found to target internet-facing MSSQL servers with the goal of installing a cryptominer, which hijacks the processing power of the systems to mine Monero and funnel them into accounts controlled by the attackers. The name "MrbMiner" comes after one of the domains used by the group to host their malicious mining software. "In many ways, MrbMiner's operations appear typical of most cryptominer attacks we've seen targeting internet-facing servers,"  said  Gabor Szappa

Microsoft on Wednesday shared more specifics about the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) adopted by the attackers behind the SolarWinds hack to stay under the radar and avoid detection, as cybersecurity companies work towards getting a "clearer picture" of one of the most sophisticated attacks in recent history. Calling the threat actor "skillful and methodic operators who follow operations security (OpSec) best practices," the company said the attackers went out of their way to ensure that the initial backdoor ( Sunburst  aka Solorigate) and the post-compromise implants ( Teardrop  and  Raindrop ) are separated as much as possible so as to hinder efforts to spot their malicious activity. "The attackers behind Solorigate are skilled campaign operators who carefully planned and executed the attack, remaining elusive while maintaining persistence," researchers from Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team, Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC)

When you are a startup, there are umpteen things that demand your attention. You must give your hundred percent (probably even more!) to work effectively and efficiently with the limited resources. Understandably, the  application security importance  may be pushed at the bottom of your things-to-do list. One other reason to ignore web application protectioncould be your belief that only large enterprises are prone to data breaches, and your startup is hardly noticeable to become a target. Well, these eye-opening  statistics  prove otherwise. 43% of security attacks target small businesses New small businesses witnessed a 424% rise in security breaches in 2019 60% of small businesses close within six months of cyberattacks SMEs can lose more than $2.2 million a year to cyberattacks How Can Cyber Breaches Impact Your Startup? Unless you belong to the category of data security startups ,  which are thoroughly familiar with the importance of a secure web app, your startup can f

A new large-scale phishing campaign targeting global organizations has been found to bypass Microsoft Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) and steal credentials belonging to over a thousand corporate employees. The cyber offensive is said to have originated in August last year, with the attacks aimed specifically at energy and construction companies, said researchers from Check Point Research today in a joint analysis in partnership with industrial cybersecurity firm Otorio. Although phishing campaigns engineered for credential theft are among the most prevalent reasons for data breaches, what makes this operation stand out is an operational security failure that led to the attackers unintentionally exposing the credentials they had stolen to the public Internet. "With a simple Google search, anyone could have found the password to one of the compromised, stolen email addresses: a gift to every opportunistic attacker," the researchers said . The attack chain comm

In January 2019, a  critical flaw  was reported in Apple's FaceTime group chats feature that made it possible for users to initiate a FaceTime video call and eavesdrop on targets by adding their own number as a third person in a group chat even before the person on the other end accepted the incoming call. The vulnerability was deemed so severe that the iPhone maker removed the FaceTime group chats feature altogether before the issue was resolved in a subsequent iOS update. Since then, a number of similar shortcomings have been discovered in multiple video chat apps such as Signal, JioChat, Mocha, Google Duo, and Facebook Messenger — all thanks to the work of Google Project Zero researcher Natalie Silvanovich. "While [the Group FaceTime] bug was soon fixed, the fact that such a serious and easy to reach vulnerability had occurred due to a logic bug in a calling state machine — an attack scenario I had never seen considered on any platform — made me wonder whether other sta

Malwarebytes on Tuesday said it was breached by the same group who broke into SolarWinds to access some of its internal emails, making it the fourth major cybersecurity vendor to be targeted after  FireEye ,  Microsoft , and  CrowdStrike . The company said its intrusion was not the result of a SolarWinds compromise, but rather due to a separate initial access vector that works by "abusing applications with privileged access to Microsoft Office 365 and Azure environments." The discovery was made after Microsoft notified Malwarebytes of suspicious activity from a dormant email protection app within its  Office 365 tenant  on December 15, following which it performed a detailed investigation into the incident. "While Malwarebytes does not use SolarWinds, we, like many other companies were recently targeted by the same threat actor," the company's CEO Marcin Kleczynski  said  in a post. "We found no evidence of unauthorized access or compromise in any of o