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Popular short-form social video service TikTok denied reports that it was breached by a hacking group, after it claimed to have gained access to an insecure cloud server. "TikTok prioritizes the privacy and security of our users' data," the ByteDance-owned company told The Hacker News. "Our security team investigated these claims and found no evidence of a security breach." The denial follows alleged reports of a hack that surfaced on the Breach Forums message board on September 3, with the threat actor noting that the server holds 2.05 billion records in a humongous 790GB database. "Who would have thought that TikTok would decide to store all their internal backend source code on one Alibaba Cloud instance using a trashy password?," the hacking group known as BlueHornet (aka  AgainstTheWest )  tweeted  over the weekend. Bob Diachenko, threat intelligence researcher at Security Discovery,  said  the breach is "real" and that the data i

Not all security teams are born equal. Each organization has a different objective. In cybersecurity, adopting a proactive approach is not just a buzzword. It actually is what makes the difference between staying behind attackers and getting ahead of them. And the solutions to do that do exist! Most attacks succeed by taking advantage of common failures in their target's systems. Whether new or not, known, unknown, or even unknown, attacks leverage security gaps such as  unpatched or uncharted vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, out-of-date systems, expired certificates, human errors, etc. As attackers rely on a range of automated offensive testing tools to scan their targets' attack surfaces and propagate inside their network, a purely reactive defensive stance based on detection and response is increasingly likely to be overwhelmed by an attack. The logical tactical move is to emulate attackers' TTPs and behaviors beforehand by integrating attack simulation tools to

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

A vulnerable anti-cheat driver for the Genshin Impact video game has been leveraged by a cybercrime actor to disable antivirus programs to facilitate the deployment of ransomware, according to findings from Trend Micro. The ransomware infection, which was triggered in the last week of July 2022, banked on the fact that the driver in question ("mhyprot2.sys") is signed with a valid certificate, thereby making it possible to circumvent privileges and terminate services associated with endpoint protection applications. Genshin Impact is a popular action role-playing game that was developed and published by Shanghai-based developer miHoYo in September 2020. The driver used in the attack chain is said to have been built in August 2020, with the existence of the flaw in the module  discussed  after the release of the game, and leading to  exploits   demonstrating  the ability to kill any arbitrary process and escalate to kernel mode. The idea, in a nutshell, is to use the leg

The notorious Android banking trojan known as  SharkBot  has once again made an appearance on the Google Play Store by masquerading as antivirus and cleaner apps. "This new dropper doesn't rely on Accessibility permissions to automatically perform the installation of the dropper Sharkbot malware," NCC Group's Fox-IT  said  in a report. "Instead, this new version asks the victim to install the malware as a fake update for the antivirus to stay protected against threats." The apps in question, Mister Phone Cleaner and Kylhavy Mobile Security, have over 60,000 installations between them and are designed to target users in Spain, Australia, Poland, Germany, the U.S., and Austria - Mister Phone Cleaner (com.mbkristine8.cleanmaster, 50,000+ downloads) Kylhavy Mobile Security (com.kylhavy.antivirus, 10,000+ downloads) The  droppers  are designed to drop a new version of SharkBot,  dubbed V2  by Dutch security firm ThreatFabric, which features an updated co

South Korean chaebol Samsung on Friday said it experienced a cybersecurity incident that resulted in the unauthorized access of some customer information, the second time this year it has reported such a breach. "In late July 2022, an unauthorized third-party acquired information from some of Samsung's U.S. systems," the company  disclosed  in a notice. "On or around August 4, 2022, we determined through our ongoing investigation that personal information of certain customers was affected." Samsung said the infiltration enabled hackers to access certain data such as names, contact and demographic information, dates of birth, and product registration details. It stressed that the incident did not affect users' Social Security numbers or credit and debit card numbers, but noted the information leaked for each relevant customer may vary. The collected information is necessary to help the company deliver the best experience with its products and services,

Google on Friday shipped emergency fixes to address a security vulnerability in the Chrome web browser that it said is being actively exploited in the wild. The issue, assigned the identifier  CVE-2022-3075 , concerns a case of insufficient data validation in  Mojo , which refers to a collection of runtime libraries that provide a platform-agnostic mechanism for inter-process communication (IPC). An anonymous researcher has been credited with reporting the high-severity flaw on August 30, 2022. "Google is aware of reports that an exploit for CVE-2022-3075 exists in the wild," the internet giant  said , without delving into additional specifics about the nature of the attacks to prevent additional threat actors from taking advantage of the flaw. The latest update makes it the sixth zero-day vulnerability in Chrome that Google has resolved since the start of the year - CVE-2022-0609  - Use-after-free in Animation CVE-2022-1096  - Type confusion in V8 CVE-2022-1364  -

Researchers discovered a private Telegram channel-based backdoor in the information stealing malware, dubbed Prynt Stealer , which its developer added with the intention of secretly stealing a copy of victims' exfiltrated data when used by other cybercriminals. "While this untrustworthy behavior is nothing new in the world of cybercrime, the victims' data end up in the hands of multiple threat actors, increasing the risks of one or more large scale attacks to follow," Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers Atinderpal Singh and Brett Stone-Gross  said  in a new report. Prynt Stealer, which  came to light  earlier this April, comes with capabilities to log keystrokes, steal credentials from web browsers, and siphon data from Discord and Telegram. It's sold for $100 for a one-month license and $900 for a lifetime subscription. The cybersecurity firm analysis of Prynt Stealer shows that its codebase is derived from two other open source malware families,  AsyncRAT  and 

More details have emerged about the operators behind the  first-known phishing campaign  specifically aimed at the Python Package Index (PyPI), the official third-party software repository for the programming language. Connecting it to a threat actor tracked as  JuiceLedger , cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, along with Checkmarx, described the group as a relatively new entity that surfaced in early 2022. Initial "low-key" campaigns are said to have involved the use of rogue Python installer applications to deliver a .NET-based malware called JuiceStealer that's engineered to siphon passwords and other sensitive data from victims' web browsers. The attacks received a significant facelift last month when the JuiceLedger actors  targeted PyPi package contributors  in a phishing campaign, resulting in the compromise of three packages with malware. "The supply chain attack on PyPI package contributors appears to be an escalation of a campaign begun earlier in th

How much time do developers spend actually writing code? According to recent studies , developers spend more time maintaining, testing and securing existing code than they do writing or improving code. Security vulnerabilities have a bad habit of popping up during the software development process, only to surface after an application has been deployed. The disappointing part is that many of these security flaws and bugs could have been resolved in an earlier stage and there are proper methods and tools to uncover them. How much time does a developer spend on learning to write a functioning code? And how much is spent on learning about code security? Or learning how not to code?" Wouldn't it be better to eradicate the problem from the system rather than having it there, and then trying to detect and stop an ongoing attack targeting it? You can test your secure coding skills with this short  self-assessment. The true cost of bugs Everyone makes mistakes, even developers.