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SOC 2, ISO, HIPAA, Cyber Essentials – all the security frameworks and certifications today are an acronym soup that can make even a compliance expert's head spin. If you're embarking on your compliance journey, read on to discover the differences between standards, which is best for your business, and how vulnerability management can aid compliance. What is cybersecurity compliance? Cybersecurity compliance means you have met a set of agreed rules regarding the way you protect sensitive information and customer data. These rules can be set by law, regulatory authorities, trade associations or industry groups.  For example, the GDPR is set by the EU with a wide range of cybersecurity requirements that every organization within its scope must comply with, while ISO 27001 is a voluntary (but internationally recognized) set of best practices for information security management. Customers increasingly expect the assurance that compliance brings, because breaches and data disclosure will

An updated version of an  Android banking trojan  called  Xenomorph  has set its sights on more than 35 financial institutions in the U.S. The campaign, according to Dutch security firm ThreatFabric, leverages phishing web pages that are designed to entice victims into installing malicious Android apps that target a broader list of apps than its predecessors. Some of the other targeted prominent countries targeted comprise Spain, Canada, Italy, and Belgium. "This new list adds dozens of new overlays for institutions from the United States, Portugal, and multiple crypto wallets, following a trend that has been consistent amongst all banking malware families in the last year," the company  said  in an analysis published Monday. Xenomorph is a variant of another banker malware called Alien which  first emerged  in 2022. Later that year, the financial malware was propagated via a new dropper dubbed  BugDrop , which bypassed security features in Android 13. A subsequent iter

It's been a decade since the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) introduced its Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 1.0. Created following a 2013 Executive Order, NIST was tasked with designing a voluntary cybersecurity framework that would help organizations manage cyber risk, providing guidance based on established standards and best practices. While this version was originally tailored for Critical infrastructure, 2018's version 1.1 was designed for any organization looking to address cybersecurity risk management.  CSF is a valuable tool for organizations looking to evaluate and enhance their security posture. The framework helps security stakeholders understand and assess their current security measures, organize and prioritize actions to manage risks, and improve communication within and outside organizations using a common language. It's a comprehensive collection of guidelines, best practices, and recommendations, divided into five core functions: Identify, Protec

How To Use This Report Enhance situational awareness of techniques used by threat actors Identify potential attacks targeting your industry Gain insights to help improve and accelerate your organization's threat response Summary of Findings The Network Effect Threat Report offers insights based on unique data from  Fastly's Next-Gen WAF  from Q2 2023 (April 1, 2023 to June 30, 2023). This report looks at traffic originating from IP addresses tagged by Fastly's Network Learning Exchange (NLX), our collective threat intelligence feed that anonymously shares attack source IP addresses across all Next-Gen WAF customer networks. Before diving deeper into the attack observations, here are five key takeaways that we found most significant in our research, covering global traffic across multiple industries, including High Tech, Financial Services, Commerce, Education, and Media and entertainment. Multi-customer attacks: 69% of IPs tagged by NLX targeted multiple customers, and 6

A "multi-year" Chinese state-sponsored cyber espionage campaign has been observed targeting South Korean academic, political, and government organizations. Recorded Future's Insikt Group, which is  tracking  the activity under the moniker TAG-74, said the adversary has been linked to "Chinese military intelligence and poses a significant threat to academic, aerospace and defense, government, military, and political entities in South Korea, Japan, and Russia." The cybersecurity firm characterized the targeting of South Korean academic institutions as in alignment with China's broader efforts to conduct intellectual property theft and expand its influence, not to mention motivated by the country's strategic relations with the U.S. Social engineering attacks mounted by the adversary make use of Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) file lures to drop a custom variant of an open-source Visual Basic Script backdoor called  ReVBShell , which subsequently ser

A critical security vulnerability in the JetBrains TeamCity continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) software could be exploited by unauthenticated attackers to achieve remote code execution on affected systems. The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2023-42793 , carries a CVSS score of 9.8 and has been addressed in  TeamCity version 2023.05.4  following responsible disclosure on September 6, 2023. "Attackers could leverage this access to steal source code, service secrets, and private keys, take control over attached build agents, and poison build artifacts," Sonar security researcher Stefan Schiller  said  in a report last week. Successful exploitation of the bug could also permit threat actors to access the build pipelines and inject arbitrary code, leading to an integrity breach and supply chain compromise. It's worth noting that the shortcoming only affects on-premise versions of the JetBrains software. The TeamCity Cloud version has already been updated wit

Ukrainian military entities are the target of a phishing campaign that leverages drone manuals as lures to deliver a Go-based open-source post-exploitation toolkit called Merlin. "Since drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been an integral tool used by the Ukrainian military, malware-laced lure files themed as UAVs service manuals have begun to surface," Securonix researchers Den Iuzvyk, Tim Peck, and Oleg Kolesnikov said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The cybersecurity company is tracking the campaign under the name  STARK#VORTEX . The starting point of the attack is a Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) file that, when opened, runs malicious JavaScript embedded inside one of the HTML pages to execute PowerShell code designed to contact a remote server to fetch an obfuscated binary. The Windows-based payload is decoded to extract the  Merlin Agent , which, in turn, is configured to communicate with a command-and-control (C2) server for post-exploita

Generative AI is a double-edged sword, if there ever was one. There is broad agreement that tools like ChatGPT are unleashing waves of productivity across the business, from IT, to customer experience, to engineering. That's on the one hand.  On the other end of this fencing match: risk. From IP leakage and data privacy risks to the empowering of cybercriminals with AI tools, generative AI presents enterprises with concrete concerns. For example, the mass availability of AI tools was the second most-reported Q2 risk among senior enterprise risk executives — appearing in the top 10 for the first time — according to a  Gartner survey .  In this escalating AI arms race, how can enterprises separate fact from hype and comprehensively manage generative AI risk while accelerating productivity?  Register here and join Zscaler's Will Seaton, Product Marketing Manager, ThreatLabz, to: Uncover the  tangible risks of generative AI  — both for employee AI usage and by threat actors b

Weak password policies leave organizations vulnerable to attacks. But are the standard password complexity requirements enough to secure them?  83% of compromised passwords  would satisfy the password complexity and length requirements of compliance standards. That's because bad actors already have access to billions of stolen credentials that can be used to compromise additional accounts by reusing those same credentials. To strengthen password security, organizations need to look beyond complexity requirements and block the use of compromised credentials. Need stolen credentials? There's a market for that Every time an organization gets breached or a subset of customers' credentials is stolen, there's a high possibility all those passwords end up for sale on the dark web. Remember the  Dropbox and LinkedIn hack  that resulted in 71 million and 117 million stolen passwords? There is an underground market that sells those credentials to hackers which they can then use in cre

Tibetan, Uyghur, and Taiwanese individuals and organizations are the targets of a persistent campaign orchestrated by a threat actor codenamed  EvilBamboo  to gather sensitive information. "The attacker has created fake Tibetan websites, along with social media profiles, likely used to deploy browser-based exploits against targeted users," Volexity security researchers Callum Roxan, Paul Rascagneres, and Thomas Lancaster said in a report published last week. "Partly through impersonating existing popular communities, the attacker has built communities on online platforms, such as Telegram, to aid in distribution of their malware." EvilBamboo, formerly tracked by the cybersecurity firm under the name Evil Eye, has been linked to multiple attack waves  since at least 2019 , with the threat actor leveraging watering hole attacks to deliver spyware targeting Android and iOS devices. It's also known as Earth Empusa and POISON CARP. The intrusions directed agai

An unnamed Southeast Asian government has been targeted by multiple China-nexus threat actors as part of espionage campaigns targeting the region over extended periods of time. "While this activity occurred around the same time and in some instances even simultaneously on the same victims' machines, each cluster is characterized by distinct tools, modus operandi, and infrastructure," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers Lior Rochberger, Tom Fakterman, and Robert Falcone  said  in an exhaustive three-part report. The attacks, which targeted different governmental entities such as critical infrastructure, public healthcare institutions, public financial administrators and ministries, have been attributed with moderate confidence to three disparate clusters tracked as  Stately Taurus  (aka Mustang Panda),  Alloy Taurus  (aka Granite Typhoon), and  Gelsemium . Mustang Panda Uses TONESHELL Variant and ShadowPad "The attackers conducted a cyberespionage operation th