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Security researchers Thursday disclosed a new critical vulnerability affecting Domain Name System (DNS) resolvers that could be exploited by adversaries to carry out reflection-based denial-of-service attacks against authoritative nameservers. The flaw, called  'TsuNAME ,' was discovered by researchers from SIDN Labs and InternetNZ, which manage the national top-level internet domains '.nl' and '.nz' for the Netherlands and New Zealand, respectively. "TsuNAME occurs when domain names are misconfigured with cyclic dependent DNS records, and when vulnerable resolvers access these misconfigurations, they begin looping and send DNS queries rapidly to authoritative servers and other resolvers," the researchers said. A recursive DNS resolver is one of the core components involved in  DNS resolution , i.e., converting a hostname such as www.google.com into a computer-friendly IP address like 142.250.71.36. To achieve this, it responds to a client's r

An unknown threat actor with the capabilities to evolve and tailor its toolset to target environments infiltrated high-profile organizations in Asia and Africa with an evasive Windows rootkit since at least 2018. Called  'Moriya ,' the malware is a "passive backdoor which allows attackers to inspect all incoming traffic to the infected machine, filter out packets that are marked as designated for the malware and respond to them," said Kaspersky researchers Mark Lechtik and Giampaolo Dedola in a Thursday deep-dive. The Russian cybersecurity firm termed the ongoing espionage campaign  'TunnelSnake .' Based on telemetry analysis, less than 10 victims around the world have been targeted to date, with the most prominent targets being two large diplomatic entities in Southeast Asia and Africa. All the other victims were located in South Asia. The first reports of Moriya emerged last November when Kaspersky said it discovered the stealthy implant in the networks

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,

InfoSec leaders tend to be a specific type. Their jobs require them to think of possible threats, take actions that may not pay immediate results, plan for unknown security risks, and react quickly when emergencies arise, often before the morning's first coffee. The high-stakes position also means that CISOs need to keep their knowledge and skills sharp – you can never really know what's around the corner. So, what can security leaders do to make sure they're prepared and hone their skills ahead of the next inevitable threat? Now, they can test themselves and their knowledge at a new website, 'The CISO Challenge' ( visit it here ). The website, launched by XDR provider Cynet, aims to let information security leaders test their cybersecurity mettle. The website features a challenge for InfoSec leaders (and those who are looking to become one) to test their knowledge in an exciting, high-stakes, realistic series of scenarios. The challenge consists of 25 scenario

Networking equipment major Cisco has rolled out software updates to address multiple critical vulnerabilities impacting HyperFlex HX and SD-WAN vManage Software that could allow an attacker to perform command injection attacks, execute arbitrary code, and gain access to sensitive information. In a series of advisories published on May 5, the company said there are no workarounds that remediate the issues. The HyperFlex HX command injection vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2021-1497 and CVE-2021-1498 (CVSS scores 9.8), affect all Cisco devices running HyperFlex HX software versions 4.0, 4.5, and those prior to 4.0. Arising due to insufficient validation of user-supplied input in the web-based management interface of Cisco HyperFlex HX Data Platform, the flaws could enable an unauthenticated, remote attacker to perform a command injection attack against a vulnerable device. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted request to the web-based management int

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new security vulnerability in Qualcomm's mobile station modems (MSM) that could potentially allow an attacker to leverage the underlying Android operating system to slip malicious code into mobile phones, undetected. "If exploited, the vulnerability would have allowed an attacker to use Android OS itself as an entry point to inject malicious and invisible code into phones, granting them access to SMS messages and audio of phone conversations," researchers from Israeli security firm Check Point  said  in an analysis published today. The heap overflow vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2020-11292 , resides in the QMI voice service API exposed by the modem to the high level operating system, and could be exploited by a malicious app to conceal its activities "underneath" the OS in the modem chip itself, thus making it invisible to the security protections built into the device. Designed since the 1990s, Qualcomm  MSM  chip

When Spectre, a class of critical vulnerabilities impacting modern processors, was  publicly revealed  in January 2018, the researchers behind the discovery  said , "As it is not easy to fix, it will haunt us for quite some time," explaining the inspiration behind naming the speculative execution attacks. Indeed, it's been more than three years, and there is no end to Spectre in sight. A team of academics from the University of Virginia and University of California, San Diego, have discovered a  new line of attack  that bypasses all current Spectre protections built into the chips, potentially putting almost every system — desktops, laptops, cloud servers, and smartphones — once again at risk just as they were three years ago. The disclosure of  Spectre and Meltdown  opened a  floodgates  of sorts, what with  endless   variants  of the  attacks  coming to light in the intervening years, even as chipmakers like Intel, ARM, and AMD have continually scrambled to incorpo

A new academic study has highlighted a number of privacy and security pitfalls associated with recycling mobile phone numbers that could be abused to stage a variety of exploits, including account takeovers, conduct phishing and spam attacks, and even prevent victims from signing up for online services. Nearly 66% of the recycled numbers that were sampled were found to be tied to previous owners' online accounts at popular websites, potentially enabling account hijacks by simply recovering the accounts tied to those numbers. "An attacker can cycle through the available numbers shown on online number change interfaces and check if any of them are associated with online accounts of previous owners," the researchers  said . If so, the attacker can then obtain these numbers and reset the password on the accounts, and receive and correctly enter the OTP sent via SMS upon login." The findings are part of an analysis of a sample of 259 phone numbers available to new su

PC maker Dell has issued an update to fix multiple critical privilege escalation vulnerabilities that went undetected since 2009, potentially allowing attackers to gain kernel-mode privileges and cause a denial-of-service condition. The issues, reported to Dell by researchers from SentinelOne on Dec. 1, 2020, reside in a firmware update driver named "dbutil_2_3.sys" that comes pre-installed on its devices. Hundreds of millions of desktops, laptops, notebooks, and tablets manufactured by the company are said to be vulnerable. "Dell dbutil_2_3.sys driver contains an insufficient access control vulnerability which may lead to escalation of privileges, denial-of-service, or information disclosure. Local authenticated user access is required," Dell  said  in an advisory. All five separate flaws have been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2021-21551 with a CVSS score of 8.8. A breakdown of the shortcomings is as follows -  CVE-2021-21551: Local Elevation Of Privilege

The maintainers of Exim have  released patches  to remediate as many as 21 security vulnerabilities in its software that could enable unauthenticated attackers to achieve complete remote code execution and gain root privileges. Collectively named  '21Nails ,' the flaws include 11 vulnerabilities that require local access to the server and 10 other weaknesses that could be exploited remotely. The issues were discovered by Qualys and reported to Exim on Oct. 20, 2020. "Some of the vulnerabilities can be chained together to obtain a full remote unauthenticated code execution and gain root privileges on the Exim Server," Bharat Jogi, senior manager at Qualys, said in a public disclosure. "Most of the vulnerabilities discovered by the Qualys Research Team for e.g. CVE-2020-28017 affects all versions of Exim going back all the way to 2004." Exim is a popular mail transfer agent (MTA) used on Unix-like operating systems, with over 60% of the publicly reachable