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Israel's Ministry of Defense has dramatically restricted the number of countries to which cybersecurity firms operating in the nation are allowed to sell offensive hacking and surveillance tools to, cutting off 65 nations from the export list. The revised list, details of which were first reported by the Israeli business newspaper  Calcalist , now only includes 37 countries, down from the previous 102: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the U.K., and the U.S. Notably missing from the list are countries such as Morocco, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E, which have been previously identified as customers of Israeli spyware vendor NSO Group. In curtailing the exports, the mov

Every Product Manager and Software Developer should know that pushing feature updates to production via traditional channels is as archaic as painting on cave walls. The smart are always quick to adapt to new, innovative technologies, and this mindset is exactly what makes normal companies great. The landscape is changing fast, especially in IT . Change isn't just necessary, but more often than not, it's the single-most-important variable that determines a company's chances of survival.  The fact of the matter is that NOT using Feature Flags leads to a more cumbersome, expensive, and slower type of rollout. Simply put, it makes your project less competitive with those that have their deployments better organized, and that's  an edge that you can't afford to lose . Feature Flags are changing how things work Many companies are using Feature Flags these days, and for good measure.  It's safer and allows for more granular control over what you're building.

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

Threat actors have been found using a previously undocumented JavaScript malware strain that functions as a loader to distribute an array of remote access Trojans (RATs) and information stealers. HP Threat Research dubbed the new, evasive loader "RATDispenser," with the malware responsible for deploying at least eight different malware families in 2021. Around 155 samples of this new malware have been discovered, spread across three different variants, hinting that it's under active development. "RATDispenser is used to gain an initial foothold on a system before launching secondary malware that establishes control over the compromised device," security researcher Patrick Schläpfer  said . "All the payloads were RATs, designed to steal information and give attackers control over victim devices." As with other attacks of this kind, the starting point of the infection is a phishing email containing a malicious attachment, which masquerades as a text

A new Iranian threat actor has been discovered exploiting a now-addressed critical flaw in the Microsoft Windows MSHTML platform to target Farsi-speaking victims with a previously undocumented PowerShell-based information stealer designed to harvest extensive details from infected machines. "[T]he stealer is a PowerShell script, short with powerful collection capabilities — in only ~150 lines, it provides the adversary a lot of critical information including screen captures, Telegram files, document collection, and extensive data about the victim's environment," SafeBreach Labs researcher Tomer Bar  said  in a report published Wednesday. Nearly half of the targets are from the U.S., with the cybersecurity firm noting that the attacks are likely aimed at "Iranians who live abroad and might be seen as a threat to Iran's Islamic regime." The phishing campaign, which began in July 2021, involved the exploitation of CVE-2021-40444, a remote code execution fl

Stop tempting fate and take a look at our picks for the best antivirus programs on the market today. Every year there are billions of malware attacks worldwide. And these threats are constantly evolving. So if you are not currently using antivirus software, or you still rely on some free software you downloaded back in 2017, you are putting your cybersecurity in serious jeopardy.  Need help picking out antivirus software? Well, we've got you covered. Below you can find our picks for the best antivirus products of 2021. But before we get to that, let's set a few things straight so we're all on the same page.  When we talk about antivirus products, we're really talking about anti- malware  products. Malware is a catchall term that refers to any malicious program created to damage, disrupt, or take charge of a computer. Types of malware include not only viruses but spyware, trojan horses, ransomware, adware, and scareware. Any good antivirus product in 2021 must be ab

Attackers are actively making efforts to exploit a new variant of a recently disclosed privilege escalation vulnerability to potentially execute arbitrary code on fully-patched systems, once again demonstrating how adversaries move quickly to weaponize a publicly available exploit. Cisco Talos  disclosed  that it "detected malware samples in the wild that are attempting to take advantage of this vulnerability." Tracked as  CVE-2021-41379  and discovered by security researcher Abdelhamid Naceri, the elevation of privilege flaw affecting the Windows Installer software component was originally resolved as part of Microsoft's  Patch Tuesday updates  for November 2021. However, in what's a case of an insufficient patch, Naceri found that it was not only possible to bypass the fix implemented by Microsoft but also  achieve  local privilege escalation via a newly discovered zero-day bug. The proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit, dubbed " InstallerFileTakeOver ," w

VMware has shipped updates to address two security vulnerabilities in vCenter Server and Cloud Foundation that could be abused by a remote attacker to gain access to sensitive information. The more severe of the issues concerns an arbitrary file read vulnerability in the vSphere Web Client. Tracked as CVE-2021-21980, the bug has been rated 7.5 out of a maximum of 10 on the CVSS scoring system, and impacts vCenter Server versions 6.5 and 6.7. "A malicious actor with network access to port 443 on vCenter Server may exploit this issue to gain access to sensitive information," the company  noted  in an advisory published on November 23, crediting ch0wn of Orz lab for reporting the flaw. The second shortcoming remediated by VMware relates to an  SSRF  (Server-Side Request Forgery) vulnerability in the Virtual storage area network (vSAN) Web Client plug-in that could allow a malicious actor with network access to port 443 on vCenter Server to exploit the flaw by accessing an i