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A new security weakness has been disclosed in the WinRAR trialware file archiver utility for Windows that could be abused by a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on targeted systems, underscoring how vulnerabilities in such software could beсome a gateway for a roster of attacks. Tracked as CVE-2021-35052, the bug impacts the trial version of the software running version 5.70. "This vulnerability allows an attacker to intercept and modify requests sent to the user of the application," Positive Technologies' Igor Sak-Sakovskiy  said  in a technical write-up. "This can be used to achieve remote code execution (RCE) on a victim's computer." The issue has since been addressed in WinRAR version 6.02 released on June 14, 2021. Sak-Sakovskiy noted that an investigation into WinRAR began after observing a JavaScript error rendered by MSHTML (aka Trident), a proprietary browser engine for the now-discontinued Internet Explorer and which is used in Office

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications have gone from novelty to business necessity in a few short years, and its positive impact on organizations is clear. It's safe to say that most industries today run on SaaS applications, which is undoubtedly positive, but it does introduce some critical new challenges to organizations.  As SaaS application use expands, as well as the number of touchpoints they create, the attack surface also becomes significantly larger. As an answer to this emerging challenge, XDR provider Cynet has added a new SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) tool to its existing platform ( you can learn more here ). Regardless of the size of an organization or its security team, managing the security policy and posture of dozens to hundreds of SaaS applications is a complex task, and one that requires the right tools to expedite and optimize. Using SSPM can centralize many of the management and logistics requirements and offer a more unified way to establish secur

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,

Three JavaScript libraries uploaded to the official NPM package repository have been unmasked as crypto-mining malware, once again demonstrating how open-source software package repositories are becoming a lucrative target for executing an array of attacks on Windows, macOS, and Linux systems. The malicious packages in question — named  okhsa ,  klow , and  klown  — were published by the same developer and falsely claimed to be JavaScript-based user-agent string parsers designed to extract hardware specifics from the " User-Agent " HTTP header. But unbeknownst to the victims who imported them, the author hid cryptocurrency mining malware inside the libraries. The bad actor's NPM account has since been deactivated, and all the three libraries, each of which were downloaded 112, 4, and 65 times respectively, have been removed from the repository as of October 15, 2021. Attacks involving the three libraries worked by detecting the current operating system, before procee

The U.S. Commerce Department on Wednesday announced new rules barring the sales of hacking software and equipment to authoritarian regimes and potentially facilitate human rights abuse for national security (NS) and anti-terrorism (AT) reasons. The  mandate , which is set to go into effect in 90 days, will forbid the export, reexport and transfer of "cybersecurity items" to countries of "national security or weapons of mass destruction concern" such as China and Russia without a license from the department's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS). "The United States Government opposes the misuse of technology to abuse human rights or conduct other malicious cyber activities, and these new rules will help ensure that U.S. companies are not fueling authoritarian practices," BIS  said  in a press release. The rule does not cover "intrusion software" itself, but rather the following — Systems, equipment, and components specially designed or

Since at least late 2019, a network of hackers-for-hire have been hijacking the channels of YouTube creators, luring them with bogus collaboration opportunities to broadcast cryptocurrency scams or sell the accounts to the highest bidder. That's according to a new report published by Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG), which said it disrupted financially motivated phishing campaigns targeting the video platform with cookie theft malware. The actors behind the infiltration have been attributed to a group of hackers recruited in a Russian-speaking forum. "Cookie Theft, also known as 'pass-the-cookie attack,' is a session hijacking technique that enables access to user accounts with session cookies stored in the browser," TAG's Ashley Shen  said . "While the technique has been around for decades, its resurgence as a top security risk could be due to a wider adoption of multi-factor authentication (MFA) making it difficult to conduct abuse, and shif

Two Eastern European nationals have been sentenced in the U.S. for offering "bulletproof hosting" services to cybercriminals, who used the technical infrastructure to distribute malware and attack financial institutions across the country between 2009 to 2015. Pavel Stassi, 30, of Estonia, and Aleksandr Shorodumov, 33, of Lithuania, have been each sentenced to 24 months and 48 months in prison, respectively, for their roles in the scheme. Court documents showed that both the individuals worked as administrators for an unnamed bulletproof hosting service provider that rented out IP addresses, servers, and domains to cybercriminal clients to disseminate malware such as Zeus, SpyEye, Citadel, and the Blackhole Exploit kit that were used to gain access to victims' machines, co-opt them to a botnet, and siphon banking credentials. The development comes months after Stassi and Shorodumov, along with the service's Russian founders Aleksandr Grichishkin and Andrei Skvort

A newly disclosed vulnerability affecting Intel processors could be abused by an adversary to gain access to sensitive information stored within enclaves and even run arbitrary code on vulnerable systems. The vulnerability ( CVE-2021-0186 , CVSS score: 8.2) was discovered by a group of academics from ETH Zurich, the National University of Singapore, and the Chinese National University of Defense Technology in early May 2021, who used it to stage a confidential data disclosure attack called " SmashEx " that can corrupt private data housed in the enclave and break its integrity. Introduced with Intel's Skylake processors, SGX (short for Software Guard eXtensions) allows developers to run selected application modules in a completely isolated secure compartment of memory, called an enclave or a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), which is designed to be protected from processes running at higher privilege levels like the operating system. SGX ensures that data is secure

Code injection attacks, the infamous king of vulnerabilities, have lost the top spot to broken access control as the worst of the worst, and developers need to take notice. In this increasingly chaotic world, there have always been a few constants that people could reliably count on: The sun will rise in the morning and set again at night, Mario will always be cooler than Sonic the Hedgehog, and code injection attacks will always occupy the top spot on the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) list of the  top ten most common  and dangerous vulnerabilities that attackers are actively exploiting. Well, the sun will rise tomorrow, and Mario still has "one-up" on Sonic, but code injection attacks have fallen out of the number one spot on the infamous OWASP list, refreshed in 2021. One of the oldest forms of attacks,  code injection vulnerabilities  have been around almost as long as computer networking. The blanket vulnerability is responsible for a wide range of attacks, inclu

A highly sophisticated adversary named LightBasin has been identified as behind a string of attacks targeting the telecom sector with the goal of collecting "highly specific information" from mobile communication infrastructure, such as subscriber information and call metadata.  "The nature of the data targeted by the actor aligns with information likely to be of significant interest to signals intelligence organizations," researchers from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike  said  in an analysis published Tuesday. Known to be active as far back as 2016, LightBasin (aka UNC1945) is believed to have compromised 13 telecommunication companies across the world since 2019 by leveraging custom tools and their extensive knowledge of telecommunications protocols for scything through organizations' defenses. The identities of the targeted entities were not disclosed, nor did the findings link the cluster's activity to a specific country. Indeed, a recent incident in

Microsoft has published a new advisory warning of a security bypass vulnerability affecting Surface Pro 3 convertible laptops that could be exploited by an adversary to introduce malicious devices within enterprise networks and defeat the device attestation mechanism. Tracked as  CVE-2021-42299  (CVSS score: 5.6), the issue has been codenamed " TPM Carte Blanche " by Google software engineer Chris Fenner, who is credited with discovering and reporting the attack technique. As of writing, other Surface devices, including the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book, have been deemed unaffected, although other non-Microsoft machines using a similar BIOS may be vulnerable. "Devices use Platform Configuration Registers ( PCRs ) to record information about device and software configuration to ensure that the boot process is secure," the Windows maker noted in a bulletin. "Windows uses these PCR measurements to determine device health. A vulnerable device can masquerade as

Researchers have disclosed an out-of-bounds read vulnerability in the Squirrel programming language that can be abused by attackers to break out of the sandbox restrictions and execute arbitrary code within a SquirrelVM, thus giving a malicious actor complete access to the underlying machine.  Tracked as CVE-2021-41556 , the issue occurs when a game library referred to as Squirrel Engine is used to execute untrusted code and affects stable release branches 3.x and 2.x of Squirrel. The vulnerability was responsibly disclosed on August 10, 2021. Squirrel is an open-source, object-oriented programming language that's used for scripting video games and as well as in IoT devices and distributed transaction processing platforms such as Enduro/X. "In a real-world scenario, an attacker could embed a malicious Squirrel script into a community map and distribute it via the trusted Steam Workshop," researchers Simon Scannell and Niklas Breitfeld said in a report shared with

Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday took the wraps off a mass volume email attack staged by a prolific cybercriminal gang affecting a wide range of industries, with one of its region-specific operations notably targeting Germany and Austria. Enterprise security firm Proofpoint tied the malware campaign with high confidence to  TA505 , which is the name assigned to the financially motivated threat group that's been active in the cybercrime business since at least 2014, and is behind the infamous Dridex banking trojan and an arsenal of other malicious tools such as FlawedAmmyy, FlawedGrace, Neutrino botnet, and Locky ransomware, among others. Cybersecurity company Morphisec Labs is tracking the same attack chain under the independent moniker " MirrorBlast ." The attacks are said to have started as a series of low-volume email waves, delivering only several thousand messages in each phase, before ramping up in late September and as recently as October 13, resulting in

A threat actor, previously known for striking organizations in the energy and telecommunications sectors across the Middle East as early as April 2018, has evolved its malware arsenal to strike two entities in Tunisia. Security researchers at Kaspersky, who presented their findings at the VirusBulletin VB2021 conference earlier this month, attributed the attacks to a group tracked as  Lyceum  (aka Hexane), which was first  publicly documented  in 2019 by Secureworks. "The victims we observed were all high-profile Tunisian organizations, such as telecommunications or aviation companies," researchers Aseel Kayal, Mark Lechtik, and Paul Rascagneres  detailed . "Based on the targeted industries, we assume that the attackers might have been interested in compromising such entities to track the movements and communications of individuals of interest to them." Analysis of the threat actor's toolset has shown that the attacks have shifted from leveraging a combinat

Patching really, really matters – patching is what keeps technology solutions from becoming like big blocks of Swiss cheese, with endless security vulnerabilities punching hole after hole into critical solutions. But anyone who's spent any amount of time maintaining systems will know that patching is often easier said than done. Yes, in some instances, you can just run a command line to install that patch, and that's it. These instances are increasingly rare though – given the complexity of the technology environment, you're more likely faced with a complex process to achieve patching best practice. In this article, we'll outline why database patching matters (yes, databases are vulnerable too!), explain what the problem is with patching databases, and point to a novel solution that takes the pain out of database patching. Watch out – your database services are vulnerable too We know that database services are critical – databases underpin IT operations in countle

Representatives from the U.S., the European Union, and 30 other countries pledged to mitigate the risk of ransomware and harden the financial system from exploitation with the goal of disrupting the ecosystem, calling it an "escalating global security threat with serious economic and security consequences."  "From malign operations against local health providers that endanger patient care, to those directed at businesses that limit their ability to provide fuel, groceries, or other goods to the public, ransomware poses a significant risk to critical infrastructure, essential services, public safety, consumer protection and privacy, and economic prosperity," officials  said  in a statement released last week. To that end, efforts are expected to be made to enhance network resilience by adopting cyber hygiene good practices, such as using strong passwords, securing accounts with multi-factor authentication, maintaining periodic offline data backups, keeping softwa

REvil, the notorious ransomware gang behind a string of cyberattacks in recent years, appears to have gone off the radar once again, a little over a month after the cybercrime group staged a surprise return following a two-month-long hiatus. The development, first  spotted  by Recorded Future's  Dmitry Smilyanets , comes after a member affiliated with the REvil operation posted on the XSS hacking forum that unidentified actors had taken control of the gang's Tor payment portal and data leak website. "The server was compromised and they were looking for me. To be precise, they deleted the path to my hidden service in the  torrc file  and raised their own so that I would (sic) go there. I checked on others - this was not. Good luck everyone, I'm off," user 0_neday said in the post. As of writing, it isn't clear exactly who was behind the compromise of REvil's servers, although it wouldn't be entirely surprising if law enforcement agencies played a r

Since cybersecurity is definitely an issue that's here to stay, I've just checked out the recently released first episodes of Cato Networks  Cybersecurity Master Class Series .  According to Cato, the series aims to teach and demonstrate cybersecurity tools and best practices; provide research and real-world case studies on cybersecurity; and bring the voices and opinions of top cybersecurity thought-leaders. Designed for security and IT professionals, C-level managers and security experts, each session contains both theory and hands-on examples about strategic, tactical, and operational issues on a wide range of topics.  The classes are hosted by industry-recognized cybersecurity researcher and keynote speaker, Etay Maor, who is also Senior Director of Security Strategy at Cato. Four out of the planned annual 8-10 episodes are currently available online.  Episode 1 , entitled  How (and Why) to Apply OSINT to Protect your Enterprise  takes an in-depth look at our era of data proli

Windows 10, iOS 15, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Microsoft Exchange Server, and Ubuntu 20 were successfully broken into using original, never-before-seen exploits at the Tianfu Cup 2021, the fourth edition of the international cybersecurity contest held in the city of Chengdu, China. Targets this year  included  Google Chrome running on Windows 10 21H1, Apple Safari running on Macbook Pro, Adobe PDF Reader, Docker CE, Ubuntu 20/CentOS 8, Microsoft Exchange Server 2019, Windows 10, VMware Workstation, VMware ESXi, Parallels Desktop, iPhone 13 Pro running iOS 15, domestic mobile phones running Android, QEMU VM, Synology DS220j DiskStation, and ASUS RT-AX56U router. The Chinese version of Pwn2Own was  started  in 2018 in the wake of government regulation in the country that barred security researchers from participating in international hacking competitions because of national security concerns. With the exception of Synology DS220j NAS, Xiaomi Mi 11 smartphone, and an unnamed Chine