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Microsoft has disclosed details of a large-scale, multi-phase phishing campaign that uses stolen credentials to register devices on a victim's network to further propagate spam emails and widen the infection pool. The tech giant said the attacks manifested through accounts that were not secured using multi-factor authentication (MFA), thereby making it possible for the adversary to take advantage of the target's bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy and introduce their own rogue devices using the pilfered credentials. The attacks took place in two stages. "The first campaign phase involved stealing credentials in target organizations located predominantly in Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand," Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team  said  in a technical report published this week. "Stolen credentials were then leveraged in the second phase, in which attackers used compromised accounts to expand their foothold within the organization via la

2021 was a year peppered by cyberattacks, with numerous data breaches happening. Not only that, but ransomware has also become a prominent player in the hackers' world. Now, more than ever, it's important for enterprises to step up cybersecurity measures. They can do this through several pieces of technology, such as an open-source security platform like Wazuh .  Wazuh is a free and open source security platform that unifies XDR and SIEM capabilities, which not only enables companies to detect sophisticated threats, but can also help immensely in preventing data breaches and leaks from happening. As a result, it can save businesses from costly fixes that can ultimately end in their closure. It is also possible to integrate Wazuh with a number of external services and tools. Some of them are VirusTotal, YARA, Amazon Macie, Slack, and Fortigate Firewall. Consequently, companies can improve their security against hackers from penetrating their networks. What's great abou

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

The notorious  Lazarus Group  actor has been observed mounting a new campaign that makes use of the Windows Update service to execute its malicious payload, expanding the arsenal of living-off-the-land (LotL) techniques leveraged by the APT group to further its objectives. The Lazarus Group, also known as  APT38 , Hidden Cobra, Whois Hacking Team, and Zinc, is the moniker assigned to the North Korea-based nation-state hacking group that's been active since at least 2009. Last year, the threat actor was  linked  to an elaborate  social engineering campaign  targeting security researchers. The latest spear-phishing attacks, which  Malwarebytes  detected on January 18, originate from weaponized documents with job-themed lures impersonating the American global security and aerospace company Lockheed Martin. Opening the decoy Microsoft Word file triggers the execution of a malicious macro embedded within the document that, in turn, executes a Base64-decoded shellcode to inject a nu

A cyberespionage group with ties to North Korea has resurfaced with a stealthier variant of its remote access trojan called Konni to attack political institutions located in Russia and South Korea. "The authors are constantly making code improvements," Malwarebytes researcher Roberto Santos  said . "Their efforts are aimed at breaking the typical flow recorded by sandboxes and making detection harder, especially via regular signatures as critical parts of the executable are now encrypted." Most  recent intrusions  staged by the group, believed to be operating under the Kimsuky umbrella, involved targeting the Russian Federation's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) with New Year lures to compromise Windows systems with malware. The infections, as with other attacks of this kind, starts with a malicious Microsoft Office document that, when opened, initiates a mult-stage process that involves several moving parts that help the attackers elevate privileges, eva

Microsoft this week revealed that it had fended off a record number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks aimed at its customers in 2021, three of which surpassed 2.4 terabit per second (Tbps). One of the DDoS attacks took place in November, targeting an unnamed Azure customer in Asia and lasted a total of 15 minutes. It hit a peak throughput of 3.47 Tbps and a packet rate of 340 million packets per second (pps), making it the largest attack ever reported in history. "This was a distributed attack originating from approximately 10,000 sources and from multiple countries across the globe, including the United States, China, South Korea, Russia, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Iran, Indonesia, and Taiwan," Alethea Toh, product manager of Azure Networking,  said . DDoS attacks occur when several compromised devices are employed as a conduit to overwhelm a targeted server, service, or network with a flood of internet traffic with the goal of overloading the systems and d

Taiwanese company QNAP has warned customers to secure network-attached storage (NAS) appliances and routers against a new ransomware variant called DeadBolt . "DeadBolt has been widely targeting all NAS exposed to the Internet without any protection and encrypting users' data for Bitcoin ransom," the company  said . "QNAP urges all QNAP NAS users to […] immediately update QTS to the latest available version." A query on IoT search engine Censys shows that at least 3,687 devices have been encrypted by the DeadBolt ransomware so far, with most NAS devices located in the U.S., Taiwan, France, Italy, the U.K., Hong Kong, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and South Korea. In addition, QNAP is also urging users to check if their NAS devices are public-facing, and if so, take steps to turn off the port forwarding function of the router and disable the Universal Plug and Play ( UPnP ) function of the QNAP NAS. The advisory comes as  Bleeping Computer  revealed t

There are three things you can be sure of in life: death, taxes – and new CVEs. For organizations that rely on CentOS 8, the inevitable has now happened, and it didn't take long. Just two weeks after reaching the official end of life, something broke spectacularly, leaving  CentOS 8  users at major risk of a severe attack – and with no support from CentOS. You'd think that this issue no longer affects a significant number of organizations because by now, companies would have migrated away from CentOS 8 to an OS that is actively supported by vendors. After all, vendor support is critical for security and compliance. But as it always is with these things, you can count on the fact that a big chunk of CentOS 8 users are soldiering on with an unsupported OS, despite being aware of the risks. With that risk now crystallizing we're using this article to examine  CVE-2021-4122 , the newly discovered vulnerability in LUKS encryption, and to discuss your options for mitigating it. Wait, wha