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

A previously undocumented threat actor has been linked to a cyber attack targeting an aerospace organization in the U.S. as part of what's suspected to be a cyber espionage mission. The BlackBerry Threat Research and Intelligence team is tracking the activity cluster as  AeroBlade . Its origin is currently unknown and it's not clear if the attack was successful. "The actor used spear-phishing as a delivery mechanism: A weaponized document, sent as an email attachment, contains an embedded remote template injection technique and a malicious VBA macro code, to deliver the next stage to the final payload execution," the company  said  in an analysis published last week. The network infrastructure used for the attack is said to have gone live around September 2022, with the offensive phase of the intrusion occurring nearly a year later in July 2023, but not before the adversary took steps to improvise its toolset to make it more stealthy in the intervening time perio...

Microsoft on Monday said it detected Kremlin-backed nation-state activity exploiting a now-patched critical security flaw in its Outlook email service to gain unauthorized access to victims' accounts within Exchange servers. The tech giant  attributed  the intrusions to a threat actor it called  Forest Blizzard  (formerly Strontium), which is also widely tracked under the monikers APT28, BlueDelta, Fancy Bear, FROZENLAKE, Iron Twilight, Sednit, Sofacy, and TA422. The security vulnerability in question is  CVE-2023-23397  (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical privilege escalation bug that could allow an adversary to access a user's Net-NTLMv2 hash that could then be used to conduct a relay attack against another service to authenticate as the user. It was patched by Microsoft in March 2023. The goal, according to the Polish Cyber Command (DKWOC), is to obtain unauthorized access to mailboxes belonging to public and private entities in the country. "In the next...

CrowdStrike is named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Endpoint Protection Platforms for the fifth consecutive time, positioned highest on Ability to Execute and furthest to the right on Completeness of Vision.

New research has unearthed multiple novel attacks that break Bluetooth Classic's forward secrecy and future secrecy guarantees, resulting in adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) scenarios between two already connected peers. The issues, collectively named  BLUFFS , impact Bluetooth Core Specification 4.2 through 5.4. They are tracked under the identifier  CVE-2023-24023  (CVSS score: 6.8) and were responsibly disclosed in October 2022. The attacks "enable device impersonation and machine-in-the-middle across sessions by only compromising one session key," EURECOM researcher Daniele Antonioli said in a study published late last month. This is made possible by leveraging two new flaws in the Bluetooth standard's session key derivation mechanism that allow the derivation of the same key across sessions. While forward secrecy in key-agreement cryptographic protocols ensures that past communications are not revealed, even if the private keys to a particular exchange are re...

As work ebbs with the typical end-of-year slowdown, now is a good time to review user roles and privileges and remove anyone who shouldn't have access as well as trim unnecessary permissions. In addition to saving some unnecessary license fees, a clean user inventory significantly enhances the security of your SaaS applications. From reducing risk to protecting against data leakage, here is how you can start the new year with a clean user list.  How Offboarded Users  Still  Have Access to Your Apps When employees leave a company, they trigger a series of changes to backend systems in their wake. First, they are removed from the company's identity provider (IdP), which kicks off an automated workflow that deactivates their email and removes access to all internal systems. When enterprises use an SSO (single sign-on), these former employees lose access to any online properties – including SaaS applications – that require SSO for login.  However, that doesn't mean t...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new variant of an emerging botnet called  P2PInfect  that's capable of targeting routers and IoT devices. The latest version, per Cado Security Labs, is compiled for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipelined Stages ( MIPS ) architecture, broadening its capabilities and reach. "It's highly likely that by targeting MIPS, the P2PInfect developers intend to infect routers and IoT devices with the malware," security researcher Matt Muir  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. P2PInfect, a Rust-based malware, was  first   disclosed  back in July 2023, targeting unpatched Redis instances by exploiting a critical Lua sandbox escape vulnerability ( CVE-2022-0543 , CVSS score: 10.0) for initial access. A subsequent analysis from the cloud security firm in September  revealed  a surge in P2PInfect activity, coinciding with the release of iterative variants of the malware. The new artifacts, b...

The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ( UEFI ) code from various independent firmware/BIOS vendors (IBVs) has been found vulnerable to potential attacks through high-impact flaws in image parsing libraries embedded into the firmware. The shortcomings, collectively labeled  LogoFAIL  by Binarly, "can be used by threat actors to deliver a malicious payload and bypass Secure Boot, Intel Boot Guard, and other security technologies by design." Furthermore, they can be weaponized to bypass security solutions and deliver persistent malware to compromised systems during the boot phase by injecting a malicious logo image file into the  EFI system partition . While the issues are not silicon-specific, meaning they impact both x86 and ARM-based devices, they are also UEFI and IBV-specific. The vulnerabilities comprise a heap-based buffer overflow flaw and an out-of-bounds read, details of which are expected to be made public later this week at the  Black Hat Europe con...

Microsoft has warned of a new wave of CACTUS ransomware attacks that leverage malvertising lures to deploy DanaBot as an initial access vector. The DanaBot infections led to "hands-on-keyboard activity by ransomware operator Storm-0216 (Twisted Spider, UNC2198), culminating in the deployment of CACTUS ransomware," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team  said  in a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter). DanaBot , tracked by the tech giant as Storm-1044, is a multi-functional tool along the lines of Emotet, TrickBot, QakBot, and IcedID that's capable of acting as a stealer and a point of entry for next-stage payloads. UNC2198, for its part, has been previously observed infecting endpoints with IcedID to deploy ransomware families such as Maze and Egregor, as  detailed  by Google-owned Mandiant in February 2021. Per Microsoft, the threat actor has also taken advantage of initial access provided by QakBot infections. The shift to DanaBot, therefore, is likely the...

Organizations in the Middle East, Africa, and the U.S. have been targeted by an unknown threat actor to distribute a new backdoor called  Agent Racoon . "This malware family is written using the .NET framework and leverages the domain name service (DNS) protocol to create a covert channel and provide different backdoor functionalities," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researcher Chema Garcia  said  in a Friday analysis. Targets of the attacks span various sectors such as education, real estate, retail, non-profits, telecom, and governments. The activity has not been attributed to a known threat actor, although it's assessed to be nation-state aligned owing to the victimology pattern and the detection and defense evasion techniques used. The cybersecurity firm is tracking the cluster under the moniker CL-STA-0002. It's currently not clear how these organizations were breached, and when the attacks took place. Some of the other tools deployed by the adversary include a...

A Russian national has been found guilty in connection with his role in developing and deploying a malware known as TrickBot, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announced. Vladimir Dunaev, 40, was  arrested  in South Korea in September 2021 and extradited to the U.S. a month later. "Dunaev developed browser modifications and malicious tools that aided in credential harvesting and data mining from infected computers, facilitated and enhanced the remote access used by TrickBot actors, and created a program code to prevent the TrickBot malware from being detected by legitimate security software," the DoJ  said . "During Dunaev's participation in the scheme, 10 victims in the Northern District of Ohio, including Avon schools and a North Canton real-estate company, were defrauded of more than $3.4 million via ransomware deployed by TrickBot." Dunaev, who pleaded guilty to committing computer fraud and identity theft and conspiracy to commit wire fraud and ban...