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A now-patched critical vulnerability in OpenSea, the world's largest non-fungible token ( NFT ) marketplace, could've been abused by malicious actors to drain cryptocurrency funds from a victim by sending a specially-crafted token, opening a new attack vector for exploitation. The findings come from cybersecurity firm Check Point Research, which began an investigation into the platform following public reports of stolen cryptocurrency wallets triggered by free airdropped NFTs. The issues were fixed in less than one hour of responsible disclosure on September 26, 2021. "Left unpatched, the vulnerabilities could allow hackers to hijack user accounts and steal entire cryptocurrency wallets by crafting malicious NFTs," Check Point researchers  said . As the name indicates, NFTs are unique digital assets such as photos, videos, audio, and other items that can be sold and traded on the blockchain, using the technology as a certificate of authenticity to establish a ver

The Software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry has gone from novelty to an integral part of today's business world in just a few years. While the benefits to most organizations are clear – more efficiency, greater productivity, and accessibility – the risks that the SaaS model poses are starting to become visible. It's not an overstatement to say that most companies today run on SaaS. This poses an increasing challenge to their security teams.  A new guide from XDR and SSPM provider Cynet, titled The Guide for Reducing SaaS Applications Risk for Lean IT Security Teams ( download here ), breaks down exactly why SaaS ecosystems are so risky, and how security teams can mitigate those dangers.  Today, the average midsize company uses 185 SaaS apps. What this means is that the number of app-to-person connections has risen exponentially. Most midsize companies have nearly 4,406 touch points, creating an attack surface that requires significant resources to simply monitor. The risk of a digital

Super Low RPO with Continuous Data Protection: Dial Back to Just Seconds Before an Attack Zerto , a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, can help you detect and recover from ransomware in near real-time. This solution leverages continuous data protection (CDP) to ensure all workloads have the lowest recovery point objective (RPO) possible. The most valuable thing about CDP is that it does not use snapshots, agents, or any other periodic data protection methodology. Zerto has no impact on production workloads and can achieve RPOs in the region of 5-15 seconds across thousands of virtual machines simultaneously. For example, the environment in the image below has nearly 1,000 VMs being protected with an average RPO of just six seconds! Application-Centric Protection: Group Your VMs to Gain Application-Level Control   You can protect your VMs with the Zerto application-centric approach using Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs). This logical grouping of VMs ensures that your whole applica

Microsoft on Tuesday rolled out  security patches  to contain a total of 71 vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows and other software, including a fix for an actively exploited privilege escalation vulnerability that could be exploited in conjunction with remote code execution bugs to take control over vulnerable systems. Two of the addressed security flaws are rated Critical, 68 are rated Important, and one is rated Low in severity, with three of the issues listed as publicly known at the time of the release. The four zero-days are as follows — CVE-2021-40449  (CVSS score: 7.8) - Win32k Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2021-41335  (CVSS score: 7.8) - Windows Kernel Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2021-40469  (CVSS score: 7.2) - Windows DNS Server Remote Code Execution Vulnerability CVE-2021-41338  (CVSS score: 5.5) - Windows AppContainer Firewall Rules Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability At the top of the list is CVE-2021-40449, a use-after-free vulnerability

The maintainers of LibreOffice and OpenOffice have shipped security updates to their productivity software to remediate multiple vulnerabilities that could be weaponized by malicious actors to alter documents to make them appear as if they are digitally signed by a trusted source. The list of the three flaws is as follows — CVE-2021-41830  /  CVE-2021-25633  - Content and Macro Manipulation with Double Certificate Attack CVE-2021-41831  /  CVE-2021-25634  - Timestamp Manipulation with Signature Wrapping CVE-2021-41832  /  CVE-2021-25635  - Content Manipulation with Certificate Validation Attack Successful exploitation of the vulnerabilities could permit an attacker to  manipulate the timestamp  of signed ODF documents, and worse,  alter the contents  of a document or  self-sign a document  with an untrusted signature, which is then tweaked to change the  signature algorithm  to an invalid or unknown algorithm.  In both the latter two attack scenarios — stemming as a result o

Code hosting platform GitHub has  revoked  weak SSH authentication keys that were generated via the GitKraken git GUI client due to a vulnerability in a third-party library that increased the likelihood of duplicated SSH keys. As an added precautionary measure, the Microsoft-owned company also said it's building safeguards to prevent vulnerable versions of GitKraken from adding newly generated weak keys. The problematic dependency, called " keypair ," is an open-source SSH key generation library that allows users to create RSA keys for authentication-related purposes. It has been found to impact  GitKraken  versions 7.6.x, 7.7.x, and 8.0.0, released between May 12, 2021, and September 27, 2021. The flaw — tracked as CVE-2021-41117 (CVSS score: 8.7) — concerns a bug in the pseudo-random number generator used by the library, resulting in the creation of a weaker form of public SSH keys, which, owing to their low entropy — i.e., the measure of randomness — could boost

Microsoft on Monday revealed that its Azure cloud platform mitigated a 2.4 Tbps distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in the last week of August targeting an unnamed customer in Europe, surpassing a  2.3 Tbps attack  stopped by Amazon Web Services in February 2020. "This is 140 percent higher than  2020's 1 Tbps attack  and higher than any network volumetric event previously detected on Azure," Amir Dahan, senior program manager for Azure Networking,  said  in a post, calling it a " UDP reflection " lasting for about 10 minutes. Reflected amplification attacks are a type of denial of service attacks wherein a threat actor takes advantage of the connectionless nature of UDP protocol with spoofed requests so as to overwhelm a target server or network with a flood of packets, causing disruption or rendering the server and its surrounding infrastructure unavailable. The attack is said to have originated from a botnet of approximately 70,000 compromised d

An emerging threat actor likely supporting Iranian national interests has been behind a password spraying campaign targeting U.S., E.U., and Israeli defense technology companies, with additional activity observed against regional ports of entry in the Persian Gulf as well as maritime and cargo transportation companies focused in the Middle East. Microsoft is tracking the hacking crew under the moniker DEV-0343 . The intrusions, which were first observed in late July 2021, are believed to have targeted more than 250 Office 365 tenants, fewer than 20 of which were successfully compromised following a  password spray  attack — a type of brute force attack wherein the same password is cycled against different usernames to log into an application or a network in an effort to avoid account lockouts. Indications thus far allude to the possibility that the activity is part of an intellectual property theft campaign aimed at government partners producing military-grade radars, drone techno