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Microsoft has shared technical details about a now-fixed, actively exploited critical security vulnerability affecting SolarWinds Serv-U managed file transfer service that it has attributed with "high confidence" to a threat actor operating out of China. In mid-July, the Texas-based company  remedied  a remote code execution flaw ( CVE-2021-35211 ) that was rooted in Serv-U's implementation of the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol, which could be abused by attackers to run arbitrary code on the infected system, including the ability to install malicious programs and view, change, or delete sensitive data. "The Serv-U SSH server is subject to a pre-auth remote code execution vulnerability that can be easily and reliably exploited in the default configuration," Microsoft Offensive Research and Security Engineering team said in a  detailed write-up  describing the exploit. "An attacker can exploit this vulnerability by connecting to the open SSH port and sendin

The U.S. Cyber Command on Friday warned of ongoing mass exploitation attempts in the wild targeting a now-patched critical security vulnerability affecting Atlassian Confluence deployments that could be abused by unauthenticated attackers to take control of a vulnerable system. "Mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluence  CVE-2021-26084  is ongoing and expected to accelerate," the Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF)  said  in a tweet. The warning was also echoed by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency ( CISA ) and  Atlassian itself  in a series of independent advisories. Bad Packets  noted  on Twitter it "detected mass scanning and exploit activity from hosts in Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Nepal, Romania, Russia and the U.S. targeting Atlassian Confluence servers vulnerable to remote code execution." Atlassian Confluence is a widely popular web-based documentation service that allows teams to create, collaborate, and organize on different proj

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,

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details about a new malware family that relies on the Common Log File System ( CLFS ) to hide a second-stage payload in registry transaction files in an attempt to evade detection mechanisms. FireEye's Mandiant Advanced Practices team, which made the discovery, dubbed the malware PRIVATELOG , and its installer, STASHLOG . Specifics about the identities of the threat actor or their motives remain unclear. Although the malware is yet to be detected in real-world attacks aimed at customer environments or be spotted launching any second-stage payloads, Mandiant suspects that PRIVATELOG could still be in development, the work of a researcher, or deployed as part of a highly targeted activity. CLFS is a general-purpose logging subsystem in Windows that's accessible to both kernel-mode as well as user-mode applications such as database systems, OLTP systems, messaging clients, and network event management systems for building and sharing h

A recent wave of spear-phishing campaigns leveraged weaponized Windows 11 Alpha-themed Word documents with Visual Basic macros to drop malicious payloads, including a JavaScript implant, against a point-of-sale (PoS) service provider located in the U.S. The attacks, which are believed to have taken place between late June to late July 2021, have been attributed with "moderate confidence" to a financially motivated threat actor dubbed FIN7, according to researchers from cybersecurity firm Anomali. "The specified targeting of the Clearmind domain fits well with FIN7's preferred modus operandi," Anomali Threat Research  said  in a technical analysis published on September 2. "The group's goal appears to have been to deliver a variation of a JavaScript backdoor used by FIN7 since at least 2018." An Eastern European group active since at least mid-2015, FIN7 has a checkered history of targeting restaurant, gambling, and hospitality industries in th

Cisco has patched a critical security vulnerability impacting its Enterprise Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure Software (NFVIS) that could be exploited by an attacker to take control of an affected system. Tracked as  CVE-2021-34746 , the weakness has been rated 9.8 out of a maximum of 10 on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) and could allow a remote attacker to circumvent authentication and log in to a vulnerable device as an administrator. The network equipment maker said it's aware of a publicly available proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code targeting the vulnerability, but added it's not detected any successful weaponization attempts in the wild. CVE-2021-34746 issue is caused due to an incomplete validation of user-supplied input that's passed to an authentication script during the sign-in process, enabling an attacker to inject parameters into an authentication request. "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to bypass authenti

Microsoft's Active Directory is  said to be used by 95%  of Fortune 500. As a result, it is a prime target for attackers as they look to gain access to credentials in the organization, as compromised credentials provide one of the easiest ways for hackers to access your data. A key authentication technology that underpins Microsoft Active Directory is Kerberos. Unfortunately, hackers use many different attacks against Active Directory's implementation of the Kerberos authentication protocol. One of those is AS-REP Roasting. So what is AS-REP Roasting, and how can businesses protect themselves? What is Active Directory Kerberos? Kerberos was originally developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and centered around using tickets to establish trust. Microsoft's implementation of Kerberos found in Active Directory is based on Kerberos Network Authentication Service (V5) as defined in  RFC 4120 . However, Microsoft has added to and enhanced Kerberos with it

A set of new security vulnerabilities has been disclosed in commercial Bluetooth stacks that could enable an adversary to execute arbitrary code and, worse, crash the devices via denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.  Collectively dubbed " BrakTooth " (referring to the Norwegian word "Brak" which translates to "crash"), the 16 security weaknesses span across 13 Bluetooth chipsets from 11 vendors such as Intel, Qualcomm, Zhuhai Jieli Technology, and Texas Instruments, covering an estimated 1,400 or more commercial products, including laptops, smartphones, programmable logic controllers, and IoT devices. The flaws were disclosed by researchers from the ASSET (Automated Systems SEcuriTy) Research Group at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). "All the vulnerabilities […] can be triggered without any previous pairing or authentication," the researchers noted. "The impact of our discovered vulnerabilities is categorized into