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Google Accuses Spanish Spyware Vendor of Exploiting Chrome, Firefox, & Windows Zero-Days

Google Accuses Spanish Spyware Vendor of Exploiting Chrome, Firefox, & Windows Zero-Days

Dec 01, 2022 Threat Detection / Zero Day
A Barcelona-based surveillanceware vendor named Variston IT is said to have surreptitiously planted spyware on targeted devices by exploiting several zero-day flaws in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Windows, some of which date back to December 2018. "Their Heliconia framework exploits n-day vulnerabilities in Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Defender, and provides all the tools necessary to deploy a payload to a target device," Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) researchers Clement Lecigne and Benoit Sevens  said  in a write-up. Variston, which has a  bare-bones website , claims to "offer tailor made Information Security Solutions to our customers," "design custom security patches for any kind of proprietary system," and support the "the discovery of digital information by [law enforcement agencies]," among other services. The vulnerabilities, which have been patched by Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla in 2021 and early 2022, are believed to
Hackers Leak Another Set of Medibank Customer Data on the Dark Web

Hackers Leak Another Set of Medibank Customer Data on the Dark Web

Dec 01, 2022 Data Security / Security Breach
Medibank on Thursday confirmed that the threat actors behind the  devastating cyber attack  have posted another dump of data stolen from its systems on the dark web after its refusal to pay a ransom. "We are in the process of analyzing the data, but the data released appears to be the data we believed the criminal stole," the Australian health insurer  said . "While our investigation continues there are currently no signs that financial or banking data has been taken. And the personal data stolen, in itself, is not sufficient to enable identity and financial fraud. The raw data we have analyzed today so far is incomplete and hard to understand." The leak comes almost a month after the company acknowledged that personal data belonging to  around 9.7 million  of its current and former customers were accessed following a ransomware incident in October 2022. This includes 5.1 million Medibank customers, 2.8 million ahm customers, and 1.8 million international cust
Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Mar 21, 2024Operational Technology / SCADA Security
When you read reports about cyber-attacks affecting operational technology (OT), it's easy to get caught up in the hype and assume every single one is sophisticated. But are OT environments all over the world really besieged by a constant barrage of complex cyber-attacks? Answering that would require breaking down the different types of OT cyber-attacks and then looking back on all the historical attacks to see how those types compare.  The Types of OT Cyber-Attacks Over the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the need for improved cybersecurity practices in IT's lesser-known counterpart, OT. In fact, the lines of what constitutes a cyber-attack on OT have never been well defined, and if anything, they have further blurred over time. Therefore, we'd like to begin this post with a discussion around the ways in which cyber-attacks can either target or just simply impact OT, and why it might be important for us to make the distinction going forward. Figure 1 The Pu
Researchers Disclose Critical RCE Vulnerability Affecting Quarkus Java Framework

Researchers Disclose Critical RCE Vulnerability Affecting Quarkus Java Framework

Dec 01, 2022 Kubernetes / Vulnerability Management
A critical security vulnerability has been disclosed in the Quarkus Java framework that could be potentially exploited to achieve remote code execution on affected systems. Tracked as  CVE-2022-4116  (CVSS score: 9.8), the shortcoming could be trivially abused by a malicious actor without any privileges. "The vulnerability is found in the Dev UI Config Editor, which is vulnerable to drive-by localhost attacks that could lead to remote-code execution (RCE)," Contrast Security researcher Joseph Beeton, who reported the bug,  said  in a write-up. Quarkus, developed by Red Hat, is an  open source project  that's used for creating Java applications in  containerized  and serverless environments. It's worth pointing out that the  issue  only impacts developers who are running Quarkus and are tricked into visiting a specially crafted website, which is embedded with malicious JavaScript code designed to install or execute arbitrary payloads. This could take the form o
cyber security

Automated remediation solutions are crucial for security

websiteWing SecurityShadow IT / SaaS Security
Especially when it comes to securing employees' SaaS usage, don't settle for a longer to-do list. Auto-remediation is key to achieving SaaS security.
What Developers Need to Fight the Battle Against Common Vulnerabilities

What Developers Need to Fight the Battle Against Common Vulnerabilities

Dec 01, 2022 DevSecOps / Secure Coding
Today's threat landscape is constantly evolving, and now more than ever, organizations and businesses in every sector have a critical need to consistently produce and maintain secure software. While some verticals - like the finance industry, for example - have been subject to regulatory and compliance requirements for some time, we are seeing a steady increase in attention on cybersecurity best practices at the highest levels of government, with the US, UK, and Australia all shining very recent light on the need for secure development at every stage of the SDLC.  Despite this, attackers are constantly finding new ways to bypass even the most advanced protections and defenses. For example, many have shifted their focus from delivering malware to instead compromising APIs, or launching targeted attacks  against a supply chain . And while those high-level incidents are happening with much greater frequency, so too are the more simplistic exploits like cross-site scripting and SQL i
Schoolyard Bully Trojan Apps Stole Facebook Credentials from Over 300,000 Android Users

Schoolyard Bully Trojan Apps Stole Facebook Credentials from Over 300,000 Android Users

Dec 01, 2022 Mobile Threat Advisory
More than 300,000 users across 71 countries have been victimized by a new Android threat campaign called the  Schoolyard Bully Trojan . Mainly designed to steal Facebook credentials, the malware is camouflaged as legitimate education-themed applications to lure unsuspecting users into downloading them. The apps, which were available for download from the official Google Play Store, have now been taken down. That said, they still continue to be available on third-party app stores. "This trojan uses JavaScript injection to steal the Facebook credentials," Zimperium researchers Nipun Gupta and Aazim Bill SE Yaswant said in a report shared with The Hacker News. It achieves this by launching Facebook's login page in a WebView, which also embeds within it malicious JavasCript code to exfiltrate the user's phone number, email address, and password to a configured command-and-control (C2) server. The Schoolyard Bully Trojan further makes use of native libraries such
Malware Authors 'Accidentally' Crash KmsdBot Cryptocurrency Mining Botnet

Malware Authors 'Accidentally' Crash KmsdBot Cryptocurrency Mining Botnet

Dec 01, 2022 Threat Intelligence / Botnet
An ongoing analysis into an up-and-coming cryptocurrency mining botnet known as KmsdBot has led to it being accidentally taken down by the threat actors themselves. KmsdBot, as christened by the Akamai Security Intelligence Response Team (SIRT), came to light mid-November 2022 for its ability to  brute-force systems  with weak SSH credentials. The botnet strikes both Windows and Linux devices spanning a wide range of microarchitectures with the primary goal of deploying mining software and corralling the compromised hosts into a DDoS bot. Some of the major targets included gaming firms, technology companies, and luxury car manufacturers. Akamai researcher Larry W. Cashdollar, in a new update, explained how commands sent by the malware operators to carry out a DDoS attack against the bitcoin[.]com website inadvertently neutralized the malware. "Interestingly, after one single improperly formatted command, the bot stopped sending commands," Cashdollar  said . "It&#
LastPass Suffers Another Security Breach; Exposed Some Customers Information

LastPass Suffers Another Security Breach; Exposed Some Customers Information

Dec 01, 2022 Password Management
Popular password management service LastPass said it's investigating a second security incident that involved attackers accessing some of its customer information. "We recently detected unusual activity within a third-party cloud storage service, which is currently shared by both LastPass and its affiliate, GoTo," LastPass CEO Karim Toubba  said . GoTo, formerly called LogMeIn, acquired LastPass in October 2015. In December 2021, the Boston-based firm  announced  plans to spin off LastPass as an independent company. The digital break-in resulted in the unauthorized third-party leveraging information obtained following a previous breach in August 2022 to access "certain elements of our customers' information." The August 2022 security event  targeted  its development environment, leading to the theft of some of its source code and technical information. In September, LastPass  revealed  the threat actor had access for four days. The scope of the breach
North Korea Hackers Using New "Dolphin" Backdoor to Spy on South Korean Targets

North Korea Hackers Using New "Dolphin" Backdoor to Spy on South Korean Targets

Nov 30, 2022
The North Korea-linked  ScarCruft  group has been attributed to a previously undocumented backdoor called Dolphin that the threat actor has used against targets located in its southern counterpart. "The backdoor [...] has a wide range of spying capabilities, including monitoring drives and portable devices and exfiltrating files of interest, keylogging and taking screenshots, and stealing credentials from browsers," ESET researcher Filip Jurčacko  said  in a new report published today. Dolphin is said to be selectively deployed, with the malware using cloud services like Google Drive for data exfiltration as well as command-and-control. The Slovak cybersecurity company said it found the implant deployed as a final-stage payload as part of a watering hole attack in early 2021 directed against a South Korean digital newspaper. The campaign, first uncovered by  Kaspersky  and  Volexity  last year,  entailed  the weaponization of two Internet Explorer flaws ( CVE-2020-1380
Researchers Find a Way Malicious NPM Libraries Can Evade Vulnerability Detection

Researchers Find a Way Malicious NPM Libraries Can Evade Vulnerability Detection

Nov 30, 2022
New findings from cybersecurity firm JFrog show that malware targeting the npm ecosystem can evade security checks by taking advantage of an "unexpected behavior" in the npm command line interface (CLI) tool. npm CLI's  install  and  audit   commands  have built-in capabilities to check a package and all of its dependencies for known vulnerabilities, effectively acting as a warning mechanism for developers by highlighting the flaws. But as JFrog established, the security advisories are not displayed when the packages follow certain version formats, creating a scenario where critical flaws could be introduced into their systems either directly or via the package's dependencies. Specifically, the problem arises only when the installed package version contains a hyphen (e.g., 1.2.3-a), which is included to denote a  pre-release version  of an npm module. While the project maintainers treat the discrepancy between regular npm package versions and pre-release version
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