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An unknown threat actor has been targeting Russian entities with a newly discovered remote access trojan called Woody RAT for at least a year as part of a spear-phishing campaign. The advanced custom backdoor is said to be delivered via either of two methods: archive files or Microsoft Office documents leveraging the now-patched "Follina" support diagnostic tool vulnerability ( CVE-2022-30190 ) in Windows. Like other implants engineered for espionage-oriented operations, Woody RAT sports a wide range of features that enables the threat actor to remotely commandeer and steal sensitive information from the infected systems. "The earliest versions of this RAT were typically archived into a ZIP file pretending to be a document specific to a Russian group," Malwarebytes researchers Ankur Saini and Hossein Jazi  said  in a Wednesday report. "When the Follina vulnerability became known to the world, the threat actor switched to it to distribute the payload.&quo

A threat actor is said to have "highly likely" exploited a security flaw in an outdated Atlassian Confluence server to deploy a never-before-seen backdoor against an unnamed organization in the research and technical services sector. The attack, which transpired over a seven-day-period during the end of May, has been attributed to a threat activity cluster tracked by cybersecurity firm Deepwatch as  TAC-040 . "The evidence indicates that the threat actor executed malicious commands with a parent process of tomcat9.exe in Atlassian's Confluence directory," the company  said . "After the initial compromise, the threat actor ran various commands to enumerate the local system, network, and Active Directory environment." The Atlassian vulnerability suspected to have been exploited is  CVE-2022-26134 , an Object-Graph Navigation Language (OGNL) injection flaw that paves the way for arbitrary code execution on a Confluence Server or Data Center instance.

Imagine a world where the software that powers your favorite apps, secures your online transactions, and keeps your digital life could be outsmarted and taken over by a cleverly disguised piece of code. This isn't a plot from the latest cyber-thriller; it's actually been a reality for years now. How this will change – in a positive or negative direction – as artificial intelligence (AI) takes on a larger role in software development is one of the big uncertainties related to this brave new world. In an era where AI promises to revolutionize how we live and work, the conversation about its security implications cannot be sidelined. As we increasingly rely on AI for tasks ranging from mundane to mission-critical, the question is no longer just, "Can AI  boost cybersecurity ?" (sure!), but also "Can AI  be hacked? " (yes!), "Can one use AI  to hack? " (of course!), and "Will AI  produce secure software ?" (well…). This thought leadership article is about the latter. Cydrill  (a

Phishing incidents are on the rise. A report from IBM shows that phishing was the most popular attack vector in 2021, resulting in one in five employees falling victim to phishing hacking techniques. The Need for Security Awareness Training  Although technical solutions protect against phishing threats, no solution is 100% effective . Consequently, companies have no choice but to involve their employees in the fight against hackers. This is where security awareness training comes into play.  Security awareness training gives companies the confidence that their employees will execute the right response when they discover a phishing message in their inbox. As the saying goes, "knowledge is power," but the effectiveness of knowledge depends heavily on how it is delivered. When it comes to phishing attacks, simulations are among the most effective forms of training because the events in training simulations directly mimic how an employee would react in the event of an actu

Cisco on Wednesday rolled out patches to address eight security vulnerabilities , three of which could be weaponized by an unauthenticated attacker to gain remote code execution (RCE) or cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition on affected devices. The most critical of the flaws impact Cisco Small Business RV160, RV260, RV340, and RV345 Series routers. Tracked as CVE-2022-20842 (CVSS score: 9.8), the weakness stems from an insufficient validation of user-supplied input to the web-based management interface of the appliances. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted HTTP input to an affected device," Cisco said in an advisory. "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code as the root user on the underlying operating system or cause the device to reload, resulting in a DoS condition." A second shortcoming relates to a command injection vulnerability residing in the routers' web filter database update featur

A late-stage candidate encryption algorithm that was meant to withstand decryption by powerful quantum computers in the future has been trivially cracked by using a computer running Intel Xeon CPU in an hour's time. The algorithm in question is SIKE — short for Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation — which made it to the  fourth round  of the Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standardization process initiated by the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). "Ran on a single core, the appended  Magma   code  breaks the Microsoft  SIKE challenges  $IKEp182 and $IKEp217 in about 4 minutes and 6 minutes, respectively," KU Leuven researchers Wouter Castryck and Thomas Decru  said  in a new paper. "A run on the SIKEp434 parameters, previously believed to meet NIST's quantum security level 1, took about 62 minutes, again on a single core." The code was executed on an Intel  Xeon CPU E5-2630v2  at 2.60GHz, which w

Threat actors are increasingly mimicking legitimate applications like Skype, Adobe Reader, and VLC Player as a means to abuse trust relationships and increase the likelihood of a successful social engineering attack. Other most impersonated legitimate apps by icon include 7-Zip, TeamViewer, CCleaner, Microsoft Edge, Steam, Zoom, and WhatsApp, an analysis from VirusTotal has revealed. "One of the simplest social engineering tricks we've seen involves making a malware sample seem a legitimate program," VirusTotal  said  in a Tuesday report. "The icon of these programs is a critical feature used to convince victims that these programs are legitimate." It's no surprise that threat actors resort to a variety of approaches to compromise endpoints by tricking unwitting users into downloading and running seemingly innocuous executables. This, in turn, is primarily achieved by taking advantage of genuine domains in a bid to get around IP-based firewall defenses

The only threat more persistent to organizations than cyber criminals? The cyber security skills crisis.  Nearly  60% of enterprises  can't find the staff to protect their data (and reputations!) from new and emerging breeds of cyber-attacks, reports the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA) in its 5th annual global industry study.  The result?  Heavier workloads, unfilled positions, and burnout.  And technology  isn't  easing the burden in many organizations, especially smaller ones. In fact, it's making the problem worse, suggests  Cynet's recent CISO survey . Big Tech Pushes Small Teams to the Limits Tech stacks normally supercharge cyber security teams, but in the case of crews of five or fewer — it just leads to overwhelm. For example, it took them an average of 18 months to fully implement and feel proficient in endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools — making the technology yet another barrier to cyber security for the  85% of teams adopting it in 2022 .  Su