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The financially motivated FIN7 cybercrime gang has masqueraded as yet another fictitious cybersecurity company called "Bastion Secure" to recruit unwitting software engineers under the guise of penetration testing in a likely lead-up to a ransomware scheme. "With FIN7's latest fake company, the criminal group leveraged true, publicly available information from various legitimate cybersecurity companies to create a thin veil of legitimacy around Bastion Secure," Recorded Future's Gemini Advisory unit said in a report. "FIN7 is adopting disinformation tactics so that if a potential hire or interested party were to fact check Bastion Secure, then a cursory search on Google would return 'true' information for companies with a similar name or industry to FIN7's Bastion Secure." FIN7 , also known as Carbanak, Carbon Spider, and Anunak, has a track record of striking restaurant, gambling, and hospitality industries in the U.S. to infect

A newly identified rootkit has been found with a valid digital signature issued by Microsoft that's used to proxy traffic to internet addresses of interest to the attackers for over a year targeting online gamers in China. Bucharest-headquartered cybersecurity technology company Bitdefender named the malware " FiveSys ," calling out its possible credential theft and in-game-purchase hijacking motives. The Windows maker has since revoked the signature following responsible disclosure. "Digital signatures are a way of establishing trust," Bitdefender researchers said in a white paper, adding "a valid digital signature helps the attacker navigate around the operating system's restrictions on loading third-party modules into the kernel. Once loaded, the rootkit allows its creators to gain virtually unlimited privileges." Rootkits are both evasive and stealthy as they offer threat actors an entrenched foothold onto victims' systems and conceal

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

An effective cybersecurity strategy can be challenging to implement correctly and often involves many layers of security. Part of a robust security strategy involves performing what is known as a penetration test (pen test). The penetration test helps to discover vulnerabilities and weaknesses in your security defenses before the bad guys discover these. They can also help validate remedial efforts and solutions put in place to overcome previously discovered security vulnerabilities.  Let's look more closely at the pen test. What is included in a penetration test? How are they performed, and by whom? What steps should be taken after a penetration test? What is a penetration test? 1 — Simulated cyberattack A penetration test is, for all practical purposes, a simulated cyberattack on your business. However, it is carried out by the "good guys." An outside resource often conducts a penetration test, whether a third-party security consulting company or another security entity. Securit

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

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