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The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Friday announced sanctions against an official associated with Hamas for his involvement in cyber influence operations. Hudhayfa Samir 'Abdallah al-Kahlut, 39, also known as Abu Ubaida, has served as the public spokesperson of Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, since at least 2007. "He publicly threatened to execute civilian hostages held by Hamas following the terrorist group's October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel," the Treasury Department  said . "Al-Kahlut leads the cyber influence department of al-Qassam Brigades. He was involved in procuring servers and domains in Iran to host the official al-Qassam Brigades website in cooperation with Iranian institutions." Alongside Al-Kahlut, two other individuals named William Abu Shanab, 56, and Bara'a Hasan Farhat, 35, for their role in the manufacturing of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) used by Hamas to cond

Threat actors have been exploiting the newly disclosed zero-day flaw in Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS software dating back to March 26, 2024, nearly three weeks before it came to light yesterday. The network security company's Unit 42 division is  tracking  the activity under the name  Operation MidnightEclipse , attributing it as the work of a single threat actor of unknown provenance. The security vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2024-3400  (CVSS score: 10.0), is a command injection flaw that enables unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code with root privileges on the firewall. It's worth noting that the issue is applicable only to PAN-OS 10.2, PAN-OS 11.0, and PAN-OS 11.1 firewall configurations that have GlobalProtect gateway and device telemetry enabled. Operation MidnightEclipse entails the exploitation of the flaw to create a cron job that runs every minute to fetch commands hosted on an external server ("172.233.228[

Over the past two years, a shocking  51% of organizations surveyed in a leading industry report have been compromised by a cyberattack.  Yes, over half.  And this, in a world where enterprises deploy  an average of 53 different security solutions  to safeguard their digital domain.  Alarming? Absolutely. A recent survey of CISOs and CIOs, commissioned by Pentera and conducted by Global Surveyz Research, offers a quantifiable glimpse into this evolving battlefield, revealing a stark contrast between the growing risks and the tightening budget constraints under which cybersecurity professionals operate. With this report, Pentera has once again taken a magnifying glass to the state of pentesting to release its annual report about today's pentesting practices. Engaging with 450 security executives from North America, LATAM, APAC, and EMEA—all in VP or C-level positions at organizations with over 1,000 employees—the report paints a current picture of modern security validation prac

"Test files" associated with the  XZ Utils backdoor  have made their way to a Rust crate known as  liblzma-sys , new  findings  from Phylum reveal. liblzma-sys, which has been downloaded over 21,000 times to date, provides Rust developers with bindings to the liblzma implementation, an underlying library that is part of the  XZ Utils  data compression software. The impacted version in question is 0.3.2. "The current distribution (v0.3.2) on Crates.io contains the test files for XZ that contain the backdoor," Phylum  noted  in a GitHub issue raised on April 9, 2024. "The test files themselves are not included in either the .tar.gz nor the .zip tags  here on GitHub  and are only present in liblzma-sys_0.3.2.crate that is installed from Crates.io." Following responsible disclosure, the files in question ("tests/files/bad-3-corrupt_lzma2.xz" and "tests/files/good-large_compressed.lzma") have since been removed from liblzma-sys version

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

The Iranian threat actor known as MuddyWater has been attributed to a new command-and-control (C2) infrastructure called  DarkBeatC2 , becoming the latest such tool in its arsenal after  SimpleHarm ,  MuddyC3, PhonyC2 , and  MuddyC2Go . "While occasionally switching to a new remote administration tool or changing their C2 framework, MuddyWater's methods remain constant," Deep Instinct security researcher Simon Kenin  said  in a technical report published last week. MuddyWater, also called Boggy Serpens, Mango Sandstorm, and TA450, is assessed to be affiliated with Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). It's known to be active since at least 2017, orchestrating spear-phishing attacks that lead to the deployment of various legitimate Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) solutions on compromised systems. Prior findings from Microsoft show that the group has ties with another Iranian threat activity cluster tracked as  Storm-1084  (aka DarkBit), with t

Palo Alto Networks is warning that a critical flaw impacting PAN-OS software used in its GlobalProtect gateways is being actively exploited in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2024-3400 , the issue has a CVSS score of 10.0, indicating maximum severity. "A command injection vulnerability in the GlobalProtect feature of Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS software for specific PAN-OS versions and distinct feature configurations may enable an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code with root privileges on the firewall," the company  said  in an advisory published today. The flaw impacts the following versions of PAN-OS, with fixes expected to be released on April 14, 2024 - PAN-OS < 11.1.2-h3 PAN-OS < 11.0.4-h1 PAN-OS < 10.2.9-h1 The company also said that the issue is applicable only to firewalls that have the configurations for both  GlobalProtect gateway  (Network > GlobalProtect > Gateways) and  device telemetry  (Device > Setup > Telemetry) enabled.

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a credit card skimmer that's concealed within a fake  Meta Pixel tracker script  in an attempt to evade detection. Sucuri said that the malware is injected into websites through tools that allow for custom code, such as WordPress plugins like  Simple Custom CSS and JS  or the " Miscellaneous Scripts " section of the Magento admin panel. "Custom script editors are popular with bad actors because they allow for external third party (and malicious) JavaScript and can easily pretend to be benign by leveraging naming conventions that match popular scripts like Google Analytics or libraries like JQuery," security researcher Matt Morrow  said . The bogus Meta Pixel tracker script identified by the web security company contains similar elements as its legitimate counterpart, but a closer examination reveals the addition of JavaScript code that substitutes references to the domain "connect.facebook[.]net" with "

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday issued an emergency directive (ED 24-02) urging federal agencies to hunt for signs of compromise and enact preventive measures following the recent compromise of Microsoft's systems that led to the theft of email correspondence with the company. The attack, which  came to light  earlier this year, has been attributed to a Russian nation-state group tracked as Midnight Blizzard (aka APT29 or Cozy Bear). Last month, Microsoft revealed that the adversary managed to access some of its source code repositories but noted that there is no evidence of a breach of customer-facing systems. The emergency directive, which was originally issued privately to federal agencies on April 2, was  first reported  on by CyberScoop two days later. "The threat actor is using information initially exfiltrated from the corporate email systems, including authentication details shared between Microsoft customers and Micros

GitGuardian is famous for its annual  State of Secrets Sprawl  report. In their 2023 report, they found over 10 million exposed passwords, API keys, and other credentials exposed in public GitHub commits. The takeaways in their 2024 report did not just highlight 12.8 million  new  exposed secrets in GitHub, but a number in the popular Python package repository  PyPI . PyPI, short for the Python Package Index, hosts over 20 terabytes of files that are freely available for use in Python projects. If you've ever typed pip install [name of package], it likely pulled that package from PyPI. A lot of people use it too. Whether it's GitHub, PyPI, or others, the report states, "open-source packages make up an estimated 90% of the code run in production today. "  It's easy to see why that is when these packages help developers avoid the reinvention of millions of wheels every day. In the 2024 report, GitGuardian reported finding over 11,000 exposed  unique  secrets, wit