The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Cybersecurity News Site — Index Page

A new deceptive ad injection campaign has been found leveraging an ad blocker extension for Google Chrome and Opera web browsers to sneakily insert ads and affiliate codes on websites, according to new research from cybersecurity firm Imperva. The findings come following the discovery of rogue domains distributing an ad injection script in late August 2021 that the researchers connected to an add-on called AllBlock. The  extension  has since been pulled from both the Chrome Web Store and Opera add-ons marketplaces. While AllBlock is designed to block ads legitimately, the JavaScript code is injected into every new tab opened on the browser. It works by identifying and sending all links in a web page — typically on search engine results pages — to a remote server, which responds back with a list of websites to replace the genuine links with, leading to a scenario where upon clicking a link, the victim is redirected to a different page. "When the user clicks on any modified li

The U.S. Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday warned of continued ransomware attacks aimed at disrupting water and wastewater facilities (WWS), highlighting five incidents that occurred between March 2019 and August 2021. "This activity—which includes attempts to compromise system integrity via unauthorized access—threatens the ability of WWS facilities to provide clean, potable water to, and effectively manage the wastewater of, their communities," CISA, along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the National Security Agency (NSA),  said  in a joint bulletin. Citing spear-phishing, outdated operating systems and software, and control system devices running vulnerable firmware versions as the primary intrusion vectors, the agencies singled out five different cyber attacks from 2019 to early 2021 targeting the WWS Sector — A former employee at Kansas-based WWS facility unsuccessfully

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

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

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