The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Cybersecurity News Site — Index Page

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

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

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