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The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday  released  an advisory regarding multiple security vulnerabilities affecting all versions of Honeywell Experion Process Knowledge System C200, C200E, C300, and ACE controllers that could be exploited to achieve remote code execution and denial-of-service (DoS) conditions. "A Control Component Library (CCL) may be modified by a bad actor and loaded to a controller such that malicious code is executed by the controller," Honeywell  noted  in an independent security notification published earlier this February. Credited with discovering and reporting the flaws are Rei Henigman and Nadav Erez of industrial cybersecurity firm Claroty. Experion Process Knowledge System (PKS) is a distributed control system ( DCS ) that's designed to control large industrial processes spanning a variety of sectors ranging from petrochemical refineries to nuclear power plants where high reliability and security is imp

Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday revealed details of a previously undocumented  UEFI  (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) bootkit that has been put to use by threat actors to backdoor Windows systems as early as 2012 by modifying a legitimate Windows Boot Manager binary to achieve persistence, once again demonstrating how technology meant to secure the environment prior to loading the operating system is increasingly becoming a "tempting target." Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET codenamed the new malware "ESPecter" for its ability to persist on the EFI System Partition ( ESP ), in addition to circumventing Microsoft Windows Driver Signature Enforcement to load its own unsigned driver that can be used to facilitate espionage activities such as document theft, keylogging, and screen monitoring by periodically capturing screenshots. The intrusion route of the malware remains unknown as yet. "ESPecter shows that threat actors are relying not only on UEFI

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

Apache has issued patches to address two security vulnerabilities, including a path traversal and file disclosure flaw in its HTTP server that it said is being actively exploited in the wild. "A flaw was found in a change made to path normalization in Apache HTTP Server 2.4.49. An attacker could use a path traversal attack to map URLs to files outside the expected document root," the open-source project maintainers  noted  in an advisory published Tuesday. "If files outside of the document root are not protected by 'require all denied' these requests can succeed. Additionally this flaw could leak the source of interpreted files like CGI scripts." The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2021-41773 , affects only Apache HTTP server version 2.4.49. Ash Daulton and cPanel Security Team have been credited with discovering and reporting the issue on September 29, 2021. Source: PT SWARM Also resolved by Apache is a null pointer dereference vulnerability observed during pr

Chinese cyber espionage group APT41 has been linked to seemingly disparate malware campaigns, according to fresh research that has mapped together additional parts of the group's network infrastructure to hit upon a state-sponsored campaign that takes advantage of COVID-themed phishing lures to target victims in India.  "The image we uncovered was that of a state-sponsored campaign that plays on people's hopes for a swift end to the pandemic as a lure to entrap its victims," the BlackBerry Research and Intelligence team said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "And once on a user's machine, the threat blends into the digital woodwork by using its own customized profile to hide its network traffic." APT41 (aka Barium or Winnti) is a moniker assigned to a prolific Chinese cyber threat group that carries out state-sponsored espionage activity in conjunction with financially motivated operations for personal gain as far back as 2012. Calling the gro

Law enforcement agencies have announced the arrest of two "prolific ransomware operators" in Ukraine who allegedly conducted a string of targeted attacks against large industrial entities in Europe and North America since at least April 2020, marking the latest step in combating ransomware incidents. The joint exercise was undertaken on September 28 by officials from the French National Gendarmerie, the Ukrainian National Police, and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), alongside participation from the Europol's European Cybercrime Centre and the INTERPOL's Cyber Fusion Centre. "The criminals would deploy malware and steal sensitive data from these companies, before encrypting their files," Europol  said  in a press statement on Monday. "They would then proceed to offer a decryption key in return for a ransom payment of several millions of euros, threatening to leak the stolen data on the dark web should their demands not be met." B

A newly discovered data exfiltration mechanism employs Ethernet cables as a "transmitting antenna" to stealthily siphon highly-sensitive data from air-gapped systems, according to the latest research. "It's interesting that the wires that came to protect the air-gap become the vulnerability of the air gap in this attack," Dr. Mordechai Guri, the head of R&D in the Cyber Security Research Center in the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, told The Hacker News. Dubbed " LANtenna Attack ," the novel technique enables malicious code in air-gapped computers to amass sensitive data and then encode it over radio waves emanating from Ethernet cables just as if they are antennas. The transmitted signals can then be intercepted by a nearby software-defined radio (SDR) receiver wirelessly, the data decoded, and sent to an attacker who is in an adjacent room. "Notably, the malicious code can run in an ordinary user-mode process and successful

Cybersecurity researchers on Monday discovered misconfigurations across older versions of Apache Airflow instances belonging to a number of high-profile companies across various sectors, resulting in the exposure of sensitive credentials for popular platforms and services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Binance, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), PayPal, Slack, and Stripe. "These unsecured instances expose sensitive information of companies across the media, finance, manufacturing, information technology (IT), biotech, e-commerce, health, energy, cybersecurity, and transportation industries," Intezer said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Originally launched in June 2015,  Apache Airflow  is an open-source workflow management platform that enables programmatic scheduling and monitoring of workflows on AWS, GCP, Microsoft Azure, and other third-party services. It's also one of the most popular task orchestration tools, followed by Luigi, Kubeflow, and MLflow. It&