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Slack said it took the step of resetting passwords for about 0.5% of its users after a flaw exposed salted password hashes when creating or revoking shared invitation links for workspaces. "When a user performed either of these actions, Slack transmitted a hashed version of their password to other workspace members," the enterprise communication and collaboration platform  said  in an alert on 4th August. Hashing refers to a cryptographic technique that transforms any form of data into a fixed-size output (called a hash value or simply hash).  Salting  is designed to add an extra security layer to the hashing process to make it resistant to brute-force attempts. The Salesforce-owned company, which reported more than  12 million daily active users  in September 2019, didn't reveal the exact  hashing algorithm  used to safeguard the passwords. The bug is said to have impacted all users who created or revoked shared invitation links between 17 April 2017 and 17 July 20

A threat actor working to further Iranian goals is said to have been behind a set of damaging cyberattacks against Albanian government services in mid-July 2022. Cybersecurity firm Mandiant  said  the malicious activity against a NATO state represented a "geographic expansion of Iranian disruptive cyber operations." The  July 17 attacks , according to Albania's National Agency of Information Society, forced the government to "temporarily close access to online public services and other government websites" because of a "synchronized and sophisticated cybercriminal attack from outside Albania." The politically motivated disruptive operation, per Mandiant, entailed the deployment of a new ransomware family called ROADSWEEP that included a ransom note with the text: "Why should our taxes be spent on the benefit of DURRES terrorists?" A front named HomeLand Justice has since claimed responsibility for the cyber offensive, with the group als

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

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has warned of critical security vulnerabilities in Emergency Alert System (EAS) encoder/decoder devices. If left unpatched, the issues could allow an adversary to issue fraudulent emergency alerts over TV, radio, and cable networks. The August 1 advisory comes courtesy of DHS' Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). CYBIR security researcher Ken Pyle has been credited with discovering the shortcoming. EAS is a U.S. national  public warning system  that enables state authorities to disseminate information within 10 minutes during an emergency. Such alerts can interrupt radio and television to broadcast emergency alert information. Details of the flaw have been kept under wraps to prevent active exploitation by malicious actors, although it's expected to be publicized as a proof-of-concept at the DEF CON conference to be held in Las Vegas next week. "In short, the vulnerability is public knowledge and will be demons

Conflicting business requirements is a common problem – and you find it in every corner of an organization, including in information technology. Resolving these conflicts is a must, but it isn't always easy – though sometimes there is a novel solution that helps. In IT management there is a constant struggle between security and operations teams. Yes, both teams ultimately want to have secure systems that are harder to breach. However, security can come at the expense of availability – and vice versa. In this article, we'll look at the availability vs. security conflict, and a solution that helps to resolve that conflict. Ops team focus on availability… security teams lock down Operations teams will always have stability, and therefore availability, as a top priority. Yes, ops teams will make security a priority too but only as far as it touches on either stability or availability, never as an absolute goal. It plays out in the "five nines" uptime goal that sets an incredibly high

A nascent service called Dark Utilities has already attracted 3,000 users for its ability to provide command-and-control (C2) services with the goal of commandeering compromised systems. "It is marketed as a means to enable remote access, command execution, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and cryptocurrency mining operations on infected systems," Cisco Talos  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Dark Utilities, which emerged in early 2022, is advertised as a "C2-as-a-Service" (C2aaS), offering access to infrastructure hosted on the clearnet as well as the TOR network and associated payloads with support for Windows, Linux, and Python-based implementations for a mere €9.99. Authenticated users on the platform are presented with a dashboard that makes it possible to generate new payloads tailored to a specific operating system that can then be deployed and executed on victim hosts. Additionally, users are provided an administrative panel

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added a recently disclosed high-severity vulnerability in the Zimbra email suite to its  Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog , citing  evidence of active exploitation . The issue in question is  CVE-2022-27924  (CVSS score: 7.5), a command injection flaw in the platform that could lead to the execution of arbitrary Memcached commands and theft of sensitive information. "Zimbra Collaboration (ZCS) allows an attacker to inject memcached commands into a targeted instance which causes an overwrite of arbitrary cached entries," CISA said. Specifically, the bug relates to a case of insufficient validation of user input that, if successfully exploited, could enable attackers to steal cleartext credentials from users of targeted Zimbra instances. The issue was  disclosed  by SonarSource in June, with  patches  released by Zimbra on May 10, 2022, in versions 8.8.15 P31.1 and 9.0.0 P24.1. CISA hasn

Imagine this: a company-wide lockout to the company CRM, like Salesforce, because the organization's external admin attempts to disable MFA for themselves. They don't think to consult with the security team and don't consider the security implications, only the ease which they need for their team to use their login.  This CRM, however, defines MFA as a top-tier security setting; for example, Salesforce has a "High Assurance Login Value" configuration and immediately locks out all users as a safety precaution. The entire organization hits a standstill and is frustrated and confused.  Deeply concerning, this is not a one-off event, admins for business-critical SaaS apps often sit outside the security department and have profound control. Untrained and not focused on security measures, these admins are working towards their departmental KPIs. For instance, Hubspot is usually owned by the marketing department, likewise, Salesforce is often owned by the business dep