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Professional developers want to do the right thing, but in terms of security, they are rarely set up for success. Organizations must support their upskilling with precision training and incentives if they want secure software from the ground up. The cyber threat landscape grows more complex by the day, with our data widely considered highly desirable "digital gold". Attackers are constantly scanning networks for vulnerable applications, programs, cloud instances, and the latest flavor of the month is APIs, with Gartner  correctly predicting  that they would become the most common attack vector in 2022, and that is in no small part thanks to their often lax security controls.  Threat actors are so persistent that new apps can sometimes be compromised and exploited within hours of deployment. The  Verizon 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report  reveals that errors and misconfigurations were the cause of 13% of breaches, with the human element responsible overall for 82% of the 23,000

U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies on Tuesday disclosed that multiple nation-state hacking groups potentially targeted a "Defense Industrial Base (DIB) Sector organization's enterprise network" as part of a cyber espionage campaign. "[Advanced persistent threat] actors used an open-source toolkit called  Impacket  to gain their foothold within the environment and further compromise the network, and also used a custom data exfiltration tool, CovalentStealer, to steal the victim's sensitive data," the authorities  said . The  joint advisory , which was authored by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the National Security Agency (NSA), said the adversaries likely had long-term access to the compromised environment. The findings are the result of CISA's incident response efforts in collaboration with cybersecurity company Mandiant from November 2021 through January 2022. I

Over the past two years, a shocking  51% of organizations surveyed in a leading industry report have been compromised by a cyberattack.  Yes, over half.  And this, in a world where enterprises deploy  an average of 53 different security solutions  to safeguard their digital domain.  Alarming? Absolutely. A recent survey of CISOs and CIOs, commissioned by Pentera and conducted by Global Surveyz Research, offers a quantifiable glimpse into this evolving battlefield, revealing a stark contrast between the growing risks and the tightening budget constraints under which cybersecurity professionals operate. With this report, Pentera has once again taken a magnifying glass to the state of pentesting to release its annual report about today's pentesting practices. Engaging with 450 security executives from North America, LATAM, APAC, and EMEA—all in VP or C-level positions at organizations with over 1,000 employees—the report paints a current picture of modern security validation prac

A former affiliate of the Netwalker ransomware has been sentenced to 20 years in prison in the U.S., a little over three months after the  Canadian national pleaded guilty  to his role in the crimes. Sebastien Vachon-Desjardins, 35, has also been ordered to forfeit $21,500,000 that was illicitly obtained from dozens of victims globally, including companies, municipalities, hospitals, law enforcement, emergency services, school districts, colleges, and universities. Launched in 2019, the Netwalker attacks particularly singled out the healthcare sector during the COVID-19 pandemic, opportunistically taking advantage of the situation to extort money from victims. "The defendant in this case used sophisticated technological means to exploit hundreds of victims in numerous countries at the height of an international health crisis," U.S. Attorney Roger B. Handberg for the Middle District of Florida  said . Vachon-Desjardins, an IT engineer working for the Canadian government

Microsoft has updated its mitigation measures for the newly disclosed and actively exploited zero-day flaws in Exchange Server after it was found that they could be trivially bypassed. The two vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082, have been codenamed  ProxyNotShell  due to similarities to another set of flaws called  ProxyShell , which the tech giant resolved last year. In-the-wild attacks abusing the  shortcomings  have chained the two flaws to gain remote code execution on compromised servers with elevated privileges, leading to the deployment of web shells. The Windows maker, which is yet to release a fix for the bugs, has acknowledged that a single state-sponsored threat actor may have been weaponizing the flaws since August 2022 in limited targeted attacks. In the meantime, the company has made available temporary workarounds to reduce the risk of exploitation by restricting known attack patterns through a rule in the IIS Manager. However, accordin

India's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Monday disclosed that it has detained a Russian national for allegedly hacking into a software platform used to conduct engineering entrance assessments in the country in 2021. "The said accused was detained by the Bureau of Immigration at Indira Gandhi International Airport, Delhi while arriving in India from Almaty, Kazakhstan," the primary investigating agency  said  in a press release. The name of the individual was not disclosed by law enforcement authorities, but Indian news reports identified the person as  Mikhail Shargin . The CBI further said that Shargin's role was uncovered as part of its investigation into alleged irregularities committed in the Joint Entrance Examination ( JEE-Main ) conducted last year. JEE is a standardized test used for admissions to engineering colleges in India. The September 2021 incident, per the agency, involved breaking into iLeon software, the platform on which the exam was

A popular Chinese-language YouTube channel has emerged as a means to distribute a trojanized version of a Windows installer for the Tor Browser. Kaspersky  dubbed  the campaign  OnionPoison , with all of the victims located in China. The scale of the attack remains unclear, but the Russian cybersecurity company said it detected victims appearing in its telemetry in March 2022. The malicious version of the Tor Browser installer is being distributed via a link present in the description of a video that was uploaded to YouTube on January 9, 2022. It has been viewed over 64,500 times to date. Google has moved to pull the video from the social media platform for violating YouTube's Harmful and Dangerous policies. The channel that hosted the video has 181,000 subscribers and claims to be based in Hong Kong. The attack banks on the fact that the actual Tor Browser website is blocked in China, thus tricking unsuspecting users searching for "Tor浏览器" (i.e., Tor Browser in Ch

Researchers have disclosed details about a now-patched high-severity security flaw in Packagist, a PHP software package repository, that could have been exploited to mount software supply chain attacks. "This vulnerability allows gaining control of  Packagist ," SonarSource researcher Thomas Chauchefoin  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Packagist is used by the PHP package manager Composer to determine and download software dependencies that are included by developers in their projects. The disclosure comes as planting malware in open source repositories is turning into an attractive conduit for performing  software supply chain attacks . Tracked as  CVE-2022-24828  (CVSS score: 8.8), the  issue  has been described as a case of command injection and is linked to another similar Composer bug ( CVE-2021-29472 ) that came to light in April 2021, suggesting an inadequate patch. "An attacker controlling a Git or Mercurial repository explicitly listed by UR

A big promise with a big appeal. You hear that a lot in the world of cybersecurity, where you're often promised a fast, simple fix that will take care of all your cybersecurity needs, solving your security challenges in one go.  It could be an AI-based tool, a new superior management tool, or something else – and it would probably be quite effective at what it promises to do. But is it a silver bullet for all your cybersecurity problems? No. There's no easy, technology-driven fix for what is really cybersecurity's biggest challenge: the actions of human beings.  It doesn't matter how state-of-the-art your best defenses are. Perimeter firewalls, multi-tiered logins, multi-factor authentication, AI tools – all of these are easily rendered ineffective when Bob from a nondescript department clicks on a phishing link in an email. This isn't news to anyone We've all heard this before. The fact that humans are a key flaw in cybersecurity strategy is hardly news –

A 46-year-old man in the U.S. has been sentenced to 25 years in prison after being found guilty of laundering over $9.5 million accrued by carrying out cyber-enabled financial fraud. Elvis Eghosa Ogiekpolor of Norcross, Georgia, operated a money laundering network that opened at least 50 business bank accounts for illicitly receiving funds from unsuspecting individuals and businesses after falling victim to romance frauds and business email compromise ( BEC ) scams. Ogiekpolor was charged by a federal grand jury in February 2022 with one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering and 15 counts of substantive money laundering. The scheme was operational from October 2018 to August 2020. According to the U.S. Justice Department (DoJ), Ogiekpolor enlisted the help of eight "money mules" to open the phony bank accounts under the names of non-existent companies, which were subsequently used to stash the proceeds from their criminal activities. These included creating fic

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a new Binding Operational Directive (BOD) that directs federal agencies in the country to keep track of assets and vulnerabilities on their networks six months from now. To that end, Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) enterprises have been tasked with two sets of activities: Asset discovery and vulnerability enumeration, which are seen as essential steps to gain "greater visibility into risks facing federal civilian networks." This  involves  carrying out automated asset discovery every seven days and initiating vulnerability enumeration across those discovered assets every 14 days by April 3, 2023, in addition to having the capabilities to do so on an on-demand basis within 72 hours of receiving a request from CISA. Similar baseline vulnerability enumeration obligations have also been put in place for Android and iOS devices as well as other devices that reside outside of agency on-premise

Nicknamed ProxyNotShell, a new exploit used in the wild takes advantage of the recently published Microsoft Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability CVE-2022-41040 and a second vulnerability, CVE-2022-41082 that allows Remote Code Execution (RCE) when PowerShell is available to unidentified attackers. Based on ProxyShell, this new zero-day abuse risk leverage a chained attack similar to the one used in the 2021 ProxyShell attack that exploited the combination of multiple vulnerabilities - CVE-2021-34523, CVE-2021-34473, and CVE-2021-31207 – to permit a remote actor to execute arbitrary code. Despite the potential severity of attacks using them, ProxyShell vulnerabilities are still on CISA's list of top 2021 routinely exploited vulnerabilities. Meet ProxyNotShell  Recorded on September 19, 2022, CVE-2022-41082 is an attack vector targeting Microsoft's Exchange Servers, enabling attacks of low complexity with low privileges required. Impacted services, if vulnerable, enable

Australian telecom giant Optus on Monday confirmed that nearly 2.1 million of its current and former customers suffered a leak of their personal information and at least one form of identification number as a result of a  data breach  late last month. The company also  said  it has engaged the services of Deloitte to conduct an external forensic assessment of the attack to "understand how it occurred and how we can prevent it from occurring again." Optus is fully owned by Singaporean telecommunications conglomerate Singtel, which also has a significant stake in Bharti Airtel, the second largest carrier in India. "Approximately 1.2 million customers have had at least one number from a current and valid form of identification, and personal information, compromised," Singtel  said  in an announcement made on its website. It also said the breach affected expired IDs and personal information of about 900,000 additional customers. It further emphasized that the expo

A threat actor likely with associations to China has been attributed to a new supply chain attack that involves the use of a trojanized installer for the Comm100 Live Chat application to distribute a JavaScript backdoor. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said the attack made use of a signed Comm100 desktop agent app for Windows that was downloadable from the company's website. The scale of the attack is currently unknown, but the trojanized file is said to have been identified at organizations in the industrial, healthcare, technology, manufacturing, insurance, and telecom sectors in North America and Europe. Comm100 is a Canadian provider of live audio/video chat and customer engagement software for enterprises. It  claims  to have more than 15,000 customers across 51 countries. "The installer was signed on September 26, 2022 at 14:54:00 UTC using a valid Comm100 Network Corporation certificate," the company  noted , adding it remained available until September 29. E

The recently discovered Linux-Based ransomware strain known as Cheerscrypt has been outed as a handiwork of a Chinese cyber espionage group known for operating short-lived ransomware schemes . Cybersecurity firm Sygnia attributed the attacks to a threat actor it tracks under the name Emperor Dragonfly, which is also known as Bronze Starlight (Secureworks) and DEV-0401 (Microsoft). "Emperor Dragonfly deployed open source tools that were written by Chinese developers for Chinese users," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This reinforces claims that the 'Emperor Dragonfly' ransomware operators are based in China." The use of Cheerscrypt is the latest addition to a long list of ransomware families previously deployed by the group in little over a year, including LockFile, Atom Silo, Rook, Night Sky, Pandora, and LockBit 2.0. Secureworks, in its profile of the group, noted "it is plausible that Bronze Starlight deploys ransomw

The North Korea-backed Lazarus Group has been observed deploying a Windows rootkit by taking advantage of an exploit in a Dell firmware driver, highlighting new tactics adopted by the state-sponsored adversary. The Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver ( BYOVD ) attack, which took place in the autumn of 2021, is another variant of the threat actor's espionage-oriented activity called Operation In(ter)ception  that's directed against aerospace and defense industries. "The campaign started with spear-phishing emails containing malicious Amazon-themed documents and targeted an employee of an aerospace company in the Netherlands, and a political journalist in Belgium," ESET researcher Peter Kálnai  said . Attack chains unfolded upon the opening of the lure documents, leading to the distribution of malicious droppers that were trojanized versions of open source projects, corroborating recent reports from Google's  Mandiant  and  Microsoft . ESET said it uncovered evid

A former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) employee has been arrested on charges of attempting to sell classified information to a foreign spy, who was actually an undercover agent working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Jareh Sebastian Dalke, 30, was employed at the NSA for less than a month from June 6, 2022, to July 1, 2022, serving as an Information Systems Security Designer as part of a temporary assignment in Washington D.C. According to an  affidavit  filed by the FBI, Dalke was also a member of the U.S. Army from about 2015 to 2018 and held a Secret security clearance, which he received in 2016. The defendant further held a Top Secret security clearance during his tenure at the NSA. "Between August and September 2022, Dalke used an encrypted email account to transmit excerpts of three classified documents he had obtained during his employment to an individual Dalke believed to be working for a foreign government," the Justice Department (DoJ)  sai

Whether you relish a mental challenge or fancy a six-figure paycheck, there are many good reasons to get into  white hat hacking . That said, picking up the necessary knowledge to build a  new career  can seem like a daunting task. There is a lot to learn, after all. To help you get started, The Hacker News Deals is currently running an eye-catching offer:  pay what you want  for one video course, and get another eight courses if you beat the average price paid.  Special Offer  — For a limited time, name your price for one cybersecurity course and beat the average price paid to  get lifetime access to nine courses . The full bundle is worth $1,668! With thousands of unfilled positions, white hat hacking is a lucrative and exciting career path. This bundle provides a solid introduction to the world of penetration testing and general cybersecurity, with over 65 hours of intensive training. Through concise video tutorials, you learn how to secure your own machine with Kali Linux and

Microsoft on Friday disclosed that a single activity group in August 2022 achieved initial access and breached Exchange servers by chaining the  two newly disclosed zero-day flaws  in a limited set of attacks aimed at less than 10 organizations globally. "These attacks installed the Chopper web shell to facilitate hands-on-keyboard access, which the attackers used to perform Active Directory reconnaissance and data exfiltration," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC)  said  in a new analysis. The weaponization of the vulnerabilities is expected to ramp up in the coming days, Microsoft further warned, as malicious actors co-opt the exploits into their toolkits, including deploying ransomware, due to the "highly privileged access Exchange systems confer onto an attacker." The tech giant attributed the ongoing attacks with medium confidence to a state-sponsored organization, adding it was already investigating these attacks when the Zero Day Initiative d

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday  added  a recently disclosed critical flaw impacting Atlassian's Bitbucket Server and Data Center to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. Tracked as  CVE-2022-36804 , the issue relates to a command injection vulnerability that could allow malicious actors to gain arbitrary code execution on susceptible installations by sending a specially crafted HTTP request. Successful exploitation, however, banks on the prerequisite that the attacker already has access to a public repository or possesses read permissions to a private Bitbucket repository. "All versions of Bitbucket Server and Datacenter released after 6.10.17 including 7.0.0 and newer are affected, this means that all instances that are running any versions between 7.0.0 and 8.3.0 inclusive are affected by this vulnerability," Atlassian  noted  in a late August 2022 advisory. CISA did

Threat actors have been found deploying never-before-seen post-compromise implants in VMware's virtualization software to seize control of infected systems and evade detection. Google's Mandiant threat intelligence division referred to it as a "novel malware ecosystem" that impacts VMware ESXi, Linux vCenter servers, and Windows virtual machines, allowing attackers to maintain persistent access to the  hypervisor  as well as execute arbitrary commands. The  hyperjacking attacks , per the cybersecurity vendor, involved the use of malicious vSphere Installation Bundles ( VIBs ) to sneak in two implants, dubbed VIRTUALPITA and VIRTUALPIE, on the ESXi hypervisors. "It is important to highlight that this is not an external remote code execution vulnerability; the attacker needs admin-level privileges to the ESXi hypervisor before they can deploy malware," Mandiant researchers Alexander Marvi, Jeremy Koppen, Tufail Ahmed, and Jonathan Lepore said in an exhaus