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Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) on Thursday  said  it's tracking more than 270 government-backed threat actors from more than 50 countries, adding it has approximately sent 50,000 alerts of state-sponsored phishing or malware attempts to customers since the start of 2021. The warnings mark a 33% increase from 2020, the internet giant said, with the spike largely  stemming  from "blocking an unusually large campaign from a Russian actor known as APT28 or Fancy Bear." Additionally, Google said it disrupted a number of campaigns mounted by an Iranian state-sponsored attacker group tracked as  APT35  (aka Charming Kitten, Phosphorous, or Newscaster), including a sophisticated social engineering attack dubbed "Operation SpoofedScholars" aimed at think tanks, journalists, and professors with the goal of soliciting sensitive information by masquerading as scholars with the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Details

Cloud security is the umbrella that holds within it: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Gartner created the SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) category for solutions that continuously assess security risk and manage the SaaS applications' security posture. With enterprises having 1,000 or more employees relying on dozens to hundreds of apps, the need for deep visibility and remediation for SaaS security settings is only getting more critical.  The top pain points for SaaS security stem from: Lack of control  over the growing SaaS app estate Lack of governance in the lifecycle  of SaaS apps: from purchase to deployment, operation and maintenance Lack of visibility  of all the configurations in SaaS app estate Skills gap  in ever-evolving, accelerating, complex cloud security  Laborious and  overwhelming workload  to stay on top of hundreds to thousands (to tens of thousands) of settings and permissions. The capability of governance across the whole SaaS estate is both nuanced and compl

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,

Multiple security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in softphone software from Linphone and MicroSIP that could be exploited by an unauthenticated remote adversary to crash the client and even extract sensitive information like password hashes by simply making a malicious call. The vulnerabilities, which were discovered by Moritz Abrell of German pen-testing firm SySS GmbH, have since been addressed by the respective manufacturers following responsible disclosure. Softphones are essentially software-based phones that mimic desk phones and allow for making telephone calls over the Internet without the need for using dedicated hardware. At the core of the issues are the SIP services offered by the clients to connect two peers to facilitate telephony services in IP-based mobile networks. SIP aka Session Initiation Protocol is a  signaling protocol  that's used to control interactive communication sessions, such as voice, video, chat and instant messaging, as well as games and v

As many as 130 different ransomware families have been found to be active in 2020 and the first half of 2021, with Israel, South Korea, Vietnam, China, Singapore, India, Kazakhstan, Philippines, Iran, and the U.K. emerging as the most affected territories, a comprehensive analysis of 80 million ransomware-related samples has revealed. Google's cybersecurity arm VirusTotal attributed a significant chunk of the activity to the GandCrab ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) group (78.5%), followed by Babuk (7.61%), Cerber (3.11%), Matsnu (2.63%), Wannacry (2.41%), Congur (1.52%), Locky (1.29%), Teslacrypt (1.12%), Rkor (1.11%), and Reveon (0.70%). "Attackers are using a range of approaches, including well-known botnet malware and other Remote Access Trojans (RATs) as vehicles to deliver their ransomware," VirusTotal Threat Intelligence Strategist Vicente Diaz  said . "In most cases, they are using fresh or new ransomware samples for their campaigns." Some of the oth

A large-scale unauthenticated scraping of publicly available and non-secured endpoints from older versions of Prometheus event monitoring and alerting solution could be leveraged to inadvertently leak sensitive information, according to the latest research. "Due to the fact that authentication and encryption support is relatively new, many organizations that use Prometheus haven't yet enabled these features and thus many Prometheus endpoints are completely exposed to the Internet (e.g. endpoints that run earlier versions), leaking metric and label dat," JFrog researchers Andrey Polkovnychenko and Shachar Menashe  said  in a report. Prometheus  is an open-source system monitoring and alerting toolkit used to collect and process metrics from different endpoints, alongside enabling easy observation of software metrics such as memory usage, network usage, and software-specific defined metrics, such as the number of failed logins to a web application. Support for Transport

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