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A coordinated law enforcement operation has led to the arrest of key individuals in Ukraine who are alleged to be a part of several ransomware schemes. "On 21 November, 30 properties were searched in the regions of Kyiv, Cherkasy, Rivne, and Vinnytsia, resulting in the arrest of the 32-year-old ringleader," Europol  said  in a statement today. "Four of the ringleader's most active accomplices were also detained." The  development  comes more than two years after  12 people were apprehended  in connection with the same operation. The individuals are primarily linked to LockerGoga, MegaCortex, and Dharma ransomware families. The suspects are estimated to have targeted over 1,800 victims across 71 countries since 2019. They have also been accused of deploying the now-defunct  Hive ransomware  against high-profile organizations. Some of the co-conspirators are believed to be involved in penetrating IT networks by orchestrating brute-force attacks, SQL injectio

Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems are a staple to ensure only authorized individuals or entities have access to specific resources in order to protect sensitive information and secure business assets. But did you know that today over 80% of attacks now involve identity, compromised credentials or bypassing the authentication mechanism? Recent breaches at MGM and Caesars have underscored that, despite best efforts, it is not "if" but "when" a successful attack will have bypassed authentication and authorization controls. Account takeover, when an unauthorized individual gains access to a legitimate user account, is now the number one attack vector of choice for malicious actors. With so much focus on controls for prevention, the necessary detection and rapid response to identity-based attacks is often overlooked. And since these attacks use stolen or compromised credentials, it can be difficult to distinguish from legitimate users without a layer of detection. Dive deep i

As a vCISO, you are responsible for your client's cybersecurity strategy and risk governance. This incorporates multiple disciplines, from research to execution to reporting. Recently, we published a comprehensive playbook for vCISOs, "Your First 100 Days as a vCISO – 5 Steps to Success" , which covers all the phases entailed in launching a successful vCISO engagement, along with recommended actions to take, and step-by-step examples.  Following the success of the playbook and the requests that have come in from the MSP/MSSP community, we decided to drill down into specific parts of vCISO reporting and provide more color and examples. In this article, we focus on how to create compelling narratives within a report, which has a significant impact on the overall MSP/MSSP value proposition.  This article brings the highlights of a recent guided workshop we held, covering what makes a successful report and how it can be used to enhance engagement with your cyber security clients.

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a case of "forced authentication" that could be exploited to leak a Windows user's NT LAN Manager (NTLM) tokens by tricking a victim into opening a specially crafted Microsoft Access file. The attack takes advantage of a legitimate feature in the database management system solution that allows users to  link to external data sources , such as a remote SQL Server table. "This feature can be abused by attackers to automatically leak the Windows user's NTLM tokens to any attacker-controlled server, via any TCP port, such as port 80," Check Point security researcher Haifei Li  said . "The attack can be launched as long as the victim opens an .accdb or .mdb file. In fact, any more-common Office file type (such as a .rtf ) can work as well." NTLM, an authentication protocol introduced by Microsoft in 1993, is a challenge-response protocol that's used to authenticate users during sign-in. Over the years,

The North Korean threat actors behind macOS malware strains such as RustBucket and KANDYKORN have been observed "mixing and matching" different elements of the two disparate attack chains, leveraging RustBucket droppers to deliver KANDYKORN. The  findings  come from cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, which also tied a third macOS-specific malware called ObjCShellz to the RustBucket campaign. RustBucket  refers to an  activity cluster  linked to the Lazarus Group in which a backdoored version of a PDF reader app, dubbed SwiftLoader, is used as a conduit to load a next-stage malware written in Rust upon viewing a specially crafted lure document. The  KANDYKORN campaign , on the other hand, refers to a malicious cyber operation in which blockchain engineers of an unnamed crypto exchange platform were targeted via Discord to initiate a sophisticated multi-stage attack sequence that led to the deployment of the eponymous full-featured memory resident remote access trojan. The t

If forecasters are right, over the course of today, consumers will spend  $13.7 billion . Just about every click, sale, and engagement will be captured by a CRM platform. Inventory applications will trigger automated re-orders; communication tools will send automated email and text messages confirming sales and sharing shipping information.  SaaS applications supporting retail efforts will host nearly all of this behind-the-scenes activity. While retailers are rightfully focused on sales during this time of year, they need to ensure that the SaaS apps supporting their business operations are secure. No one wants a repeat of one of the biggest retail cyber-snafus in history, like when one U.S.-based national retailer had 40 million credit card records stolen.  The attack surface is vast and retailers must remain vigilant in protecting their entire SaaS app stack. For example, many often use multiple instances of the same application. They may use a different Salesforce tenant for eve

A new study has demonstrated that it's possible for passive network attackers to obtain private RSA host keys from a vulnerable SSH server by observing when naturally occurring computational faults that occur while the connection is being established. The Secure Shell (SSH) protocol is a method for securely transmitting commands and logging in to a computer over an unsecured network. Based on a client-server architecture, SSH uses cryptography to authenticate and encrypt connections between devices. A host key is a cryptographic key used for authenticating computers in the SSH protocol. Host keys are key pairs that are typically generated using public-key cryptosystems like RSA . "If a signing implementation using CRT-RSA has a fault during signature computation, an attacker who observes this signature may be able to compute the signer's private key," a group of academics from the University of California, San Diego, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology said

The U.K. and U.S., along with international partners from 16 other countries, have released new guidelines for the development of secure artificial intelligence (AI) systems. "The approach prioritizes ownership of security outcomes for customers, embraces radical transparency and accountability, and establishes organizational structures where secure design is a top priority," the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)  said . The goal is to  increase cyber security levels of AI  and help ensure that the technology is designed, developed, and deployed in a secure manner, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)  added . The guidelines also build upon the U.S. government's  ongoing   efforts  to manage the risks posed by AI by ensuring that new tools are tested adequately before public release, there are guardrails in place to address societal harms, such as bias and discrimination, and privacy concerns, and setting up robust methods for consumer

An unspecified government entity in Afghanistan was targeted by a previously undocumented web shell called  HrServ  in what's suspected to be an advanced persistent threat (APT) attack. The web shell, a dynamic-link library (DLL) named "hrserv.dll," exhibits "sophisticated features such as custom encoding methods for client communication and in-memory execution," Kaspersky security researcher Mert Degirmenci  said  in an analysis published this week. The Russian cybersecurity firm said it identified variants of the malware dating all the way back to early 2021 based on the compilation timestamps of these artifacts. Web shells are typically  malicious tools  that provide remote control over a compromised server. Once uploaded, it allows threat actors to carry out a range of post-exploitation activities, including data theft, server monitoring, and lateral advancement within the network. The attack chain involves the  PAExec  remote administration tool, an alternative to  PsExec  t

The maintainers of the open-source file-sharing software ownCloud have warned of three critical security flaws that could be exploited to disclose sensitive information and modify files. A brief description of the vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2023-49103 (CVSS score: 10.0) - Disclosure of sensitive credentials and configuration in containerized deployments impacting graphapi versions from 0.2.0 to 0.3.0. CVE-2023-49105 (CVSS score: 9.8) - WebDAV Api Authentication Bypass using Pre-Signed URLs impacting core versions from 10.6.0 to 10.13.0. CVE-2023-49104 (CVSS score: 9.0) - Subdomain Validation Bypass impacting oauth2 prior to version 0.6.1. "The 'graphapi' app relies on a third-party library that provides a URL. When this URL is accessed, it reveals the configuration details of the PHP environment (phpinfo)," the company  said  of the first flaw. "This information includes all the environment variables of the web server. In containerized deplo