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The move to SaaS and other cloud tools has put an emphasis on Identity & Access Management (IAM). After all, user identity is one of the only barriers standing between sensitive corporate data and any unauthorized access.  The tools used to define IAM make up its identity fabric. The stronger the fabric, the more resistant identities are to pressure from threat actors. However, those pressures are only increasing. Decentralized IT, evolving threats, and zero-trust tools are pushing many IAM tools to their limits.  To maintain their effectiveness, IAM are shifting to operating as an agile, interconnected identity fabric rather than just siloed IAM tools. The demands of today's IT operating environment are forcing IAM to support decentralized IT environments while still providing centralized management and governance for its users. Interestingly, many of the identity fabric principles they define are currently found in leading SSPM tools. It's important to note that identity fabr

The legitimate command-and-control (C2) framework known as Sliver is  gaining   more traction  from threat actors as it emerges as an open source alternative to  Cobalt Strike  and Metasploit. The findings come from Cybereason, which  detailed  its inner workings in an exhaustive analysis last week. Sliver, developed by cybersecurity company BishopFox, is a Golang-based cross-platform post-exploitation framework that's designed to be used by security professionals in their red team operations. Its myriad features for adversary simulation – including dynamic code generation, in-memory payload execution, and process injection – have also made it an appealing tool for threat actors looking to gain elevated access to the target system upon gaining an initial foothold. In other words, the software is used as a second-stage to conduct next steps of the attack chain after already compromising a machine using one of the initial intrusion vectors such as spear-phishing or exploitatio

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,

Researchers have shut down an "expansive" ad fraud scheme that spoofed more than 1,700 applications from 120 publishers and impacted roughly 11 million devices.  "VASTFLUX was a malvertising attack that injected malicious JavaScript code into digital ad creatives, allowing the fraudsters to stack numerous invisible video ad players behind one another and register ad views," fraud prevention firm HUMAN  said . The operation gets its name from the use of a DNS evasion technique called  Fast Flux  and  VAST , a Digital Video Ad Serving Template that's employed to serve ads to video players. The sophisticated operation particularly exploited the restricted in-app environments that run ads on iOS to place bids for displaying ad banners. Should the auction be won, the hijacked ad slot is leveraged to inject rogue JavaScript that establishes contact with a remote server to retrieve the list of apps to be targeted. This includes the  bundle IDs  that belong to leg

Threat actors associated with the Roaming Mantis attack campaign have been observed delivering an updated variant of their patent mobile malware known as Wroba to infiltrate Wi-Fi routers and undertake Domain Name System ( DNS ) hijacking. Kaspersky, which carried out an  analysis  of the malicious artifact, said the feature is designed to target specific Wi-Fi routers located in South Korea. Roaming Mantis, also known as Shaoye, is a long-running financially motivated operation that singles out Android smartphone users with malware capable of stealing bank account credentials as well as harvesting other kinds of sensitive information. Although primarily  targeting the Asian region  since 2018, the hacking crew was detected  expanding  its  victim range  to include France and Germany for the first time in early 2022 by camouflaging the malware as the Google Chrome web browser application. The attacks leverage smishing messages as the initial intrusion vector of choice to deliver

The Russian state-sponsored cyber espionage group known as Gamaredon has continued its digital onslaught against Ukraine, with recent attacks leveraging the popular messaging app Telegram to strike military and law enforcement sectors in the country. "The Gamaredon group's network infrastructure relies on multi-stage Telegram accounts for victim profiling and confirmation of geographic location, and then finally leads the victim to the next stage server for the final payload," the BlackBerry Research and Intelligence Team  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This kind of technique to infect target systems is new." Gamaredon , also known by names such as Actinium, Armageddon, Iron Tilden, Primitive Bear, Shuckworm, Trident Ursa, and Winterflounder, is known for its assaults aimed at Ukrainian entities since at least 2013. Last month, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42  disclosed  the threat actor's unsuccessful attempts to break into an unnamed petrol

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) on Thursday imposed fresh fines of €5.5 million against Meta's WhatsApp for violating data protection laws when processing users' personal information. At the heart of the ruling is an update to the messaging platform's Terms of Service that was imposed in the days leading to the enforcement of the General Data Protection Regulation ( GDPR ) in May 2018, requiring that users agree to the revised terms in order to continue using the service or risk losing access. The complaint, filed by privacy non-profit NOYB, alleged that WhatsApp breached the regulation by compelling its users to "consent to the processing of their personal data for service improvement and security" by "making the accessibility of its services conditional on users accepting the updated Terms of Service." "WhatsApp Ireland is not entitled to rely on the contract legal basis for the delivery of service improvement and security," th

A suspected China-nexus threat actor exploited a recently patched vulnerability in Fortinet FortiOS SSL-VPN as a zero-day in attacks targeting a European government entity and a managed service provider (MSP) located in Africa. Telemetry evidence gathered by Google-owned Mandiant indicates that the exploitation occurred as early as October 2022, at least nearly two months before fixes were released. "This incident continues China's pattern of exploiting internet facing devices, specifically those used for managed security purposes (e.g., firewalls, IPS\IDS appliances etc.)," Mandiant researchers  said  in a technical report. The attacks entailed the use of a sophisticated backdoor dubbed  BOLDMOVE , a Linux variant of which is specifically designed to run on Fortinet's FortiGate firewalls. The intrusion vector in question relates to the exploitation of  CVE-2022-42475 , a heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability in FortiOS SSL-VPN that could result in unauthenti

A new critical remote code execution (RCE) flaw discovered impacting multiple services related to Microsoft Azure could be exploited by a malicious actor to completely take control of a targeted application. "The vulnerability is achieved through  CSRF  (cross-site request forgery) on the ubiquitous SCM service Kudu," Ermetic researcher Liv Matan  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "By abusing the vulnerability, attackers can deploy malicious ZIP files containing a payload to the victim's Azure application." The Israeli cloud infrastructure security firm, which dubbed the shortcoming  EmojiDeploy , said it could further enable the theft of sensitive data and lateral movement to other Azure services. Microsoft has since fixed the vulnerability as of December 6, 2022, following responsible disclosure on October 26, 2022, in addition to awarding a bug bounty of $30,000. The Windows maker  describes  Kudu as the "engine behind a number of feat

The threat actor behind the  BlackRock  and  ERMAC  Android banking trojans has unleashed yet another malware for rent called  Hook  that introduces new capabilities to access files stored in the devices and create a remote interactive session. ThreatFabric, in a  report  shared with The Hacker News, characterized Hook as a novel ERMAC fork that's advertised for sale for $7,000 per month while featuring "all the capabilities of its predecessor." "In addition, it also adds to its arsenal Remote Access Tooling (RAT) capabilities, joining the ranks of families such as  Octo  and  Hydra , which are capable performing a full Device Take Over (DTO), and complete a full fraud chain, from PII exfiltration to transaction, with all the intermediate steps, without the need of additional channels," the Dutch cybersecurity firm said. A majority of the financial apps targeted by the malware are located in the U.S., Spain, Australia, Poland, Canada, Turkey, the U.K., Fran