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Cisco is warning about a global surge in brute-force attacks targeting various devices, including Virtual Private Network (VPN) services, web application authentication interfaces, and SSH services, since at least March 18, 2024. "These attacks all appear to be originating from TOR exit nodes and a range of other anonymizing tunnels and proxies," Cisco Talos  said . Successful attacks could pave the way for unauthorized network access, account lockouts, or denial-of-service conditions, the cybersecurity company added. The attacks, said to be broad and opportunistic, have been observed targeting the below devices - Cisco Secure Firewall VPN  Check Point VPN Fortinet VPN SonicWall VPN RD Web Services  MikroTik  Draytek  Ubiquiti  Cisco Talos described the brute-forcing attempts as using both generic and valid usernames for specific organizations, with the attacks indiscriminately targeting a wide range of sectors across geographies. The source IP addresses for

Security researchers have uncovered a "credible" takeover attempt targeting the OpenJS Foundation in a manner that evokes similarities to the recently uncovered incident aimed at the open-source XZ Utils project. "The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping GitHub-associated emails," OpenJS Foundation and Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF)  said  in a joint alert. According to Robin Bender Ginn, executive director of OpenJS Foundation, and Omkhar Arasaratnam, general manager at OpenSSF, the email messages urged OpenJS to take action to update one of its popular JavaScript projects to remediate critical vulnerabilities without providing any specifics. The email author(s) also called on OpenJS to designate them as a new maintainer of the project despite having little prior involvement. Two other popular JavaScript projects not hosted by OpenJS are also sai

In today's digital world, where connectivity is rules all, endpoints serve as the gateway to a business's digital kingdom. And because of this, endpoints are one of hackers' favorite targets.  According to the IDC,  70% of successful breaches start at the endpoint . Unprotected endpoints provide vulnerable entry points to launch devastating cyberattacks. With IT teams needing to protect more endpoints—and more kinds of endpoints—than ever before, that perimeter has become more challenging to defend. You need to improve your endpoint security, but where do you start? That's where this guide comes in.  We've curated the top 10 must-know endpoint security tips that every IT and security professional should have in their arsenal. From identifying entry points to implementing EDR solutions, we'll dive into the insights you need to defend your endpoints with confidence.  1. Know Thy Endpoints: Identifying and Understanding Your Entry Points Understanding your network's

The threat actor tracked as  TA558  has been observed leveraging steganography as an obfuscation technique to deliver a wide range of malware such as Agent Tesla, FormBook, Remcos RAT, LokiBot, GuLoader, Snake Keylogger, and XWorm, among others. "The group made extensive use of steganography by sending VBSs, PowerShell code, as well as RTF documents with an embedded exploit, inside images and text files," Russian cybersecurity company Positive Technologies  said  in a Monday report. The campaign has been codenamed SteganoAmor for its reliance on steganography and the choice of file names such as greatloverstory.vbs and easytolove.vbs. A majority of the attacks have targeted industrial, services, public, electric power, and construction sectors in Latin American countries, although companies located in Russia, Romania, and Turkey have also been singled out. The development comes as TA558 has also been spotted  deploying Venom RAT  via phishing attacks aimed at enterprise

New cybersecurity research has found that command-line interface (CLI) tools from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud can expose sensitive credentials in build logs, posing significant risks to organizations. The vulnerability has been codenamed  LeakyCLI  by cloud security firm Orca. "Some commands on Azure CLI, AWS CLI, and Google Cloud CLI can expose sensitive information in the form of environment variables, which can be collected by adversaries when published by tools such as GitHub Actions," security researcher Roi Nisimi  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Microsoft has since  addressed  the issue as part of security updates released in November 2023, assigned it the CVE identifier CVE-2023-36052 (CVSS score: 8.6). The idea, in a nutshell, has to do with how the CLI commands such as could be used to show (pre-)defined environment variables and output to Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) logs. A list of such commands spann

The maintainers of the  PuTTY Secure Shell (SSH) and Telnet client  are alerting users of a critical vulnerability impacting versions from 0.68 through 0.80 that could be exploited to achieve full recovery of NIST P-521 (ecdsa-sha2-nistp521) private keys. The flaw has been assigned the CVE identifier  CVE-2024-31497 , with the discovery credited to researchers Fabian Bäumer and Marcus Brinkmann from the Ruhr University Bochum. "The effect of the vulnerability is to compromise the private key," the PuTTY project  said  in an advisory. "An attacker in possession of a few dozen signed messages and the public key has enough information to recover the private key, and then forge signatures as if they were from you, allowing them to (for instance) log in to any servers you use that key for." However, in order to obtain the signatures, an attacker will have to compromise the server for which the key is used to authenticate to. In a message posted on the Open Source

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, organizations face an increasingly complex array of cybersecurity threats. The proliferation of cloud services and remote work arrangements has heightened the vulnerability of digital identities to exploitation, making it imperative for businesses to fortify their identity security measures. Our recent research report,  The Identity Underground Report , offers valuable insights into the challenges and vulnerabilities organizations encounter in managing digital identities. The report paints a vivid picture of the "hidden" identity security liabilities where attackers leverage Identity Threat Exposures (ITEs) such as forgotten user accounts and misconfigurations to breach organizations' defenses, with each ITE posing a significant threat to organizations' security posture. Discover the most common identity security gaps that lead to compromises in the first-ever threat report focused entirely on the prevalence of

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has ordered mental telehealth company Cerebral from using or disclosing personal medical data for advertising purposes. It has also been fined more than $7 million over charges that it revealed users' sensitive personal health information and other data to third-parties for advertising purposes and failed to honor its easy cancellation policies. "Cerebral and its former CEO, Kyle Robertson, repeatedly broke their privacy promises to consumers and misled them about the company's cancellation policies," the FTC  said  in a press statement. While claiming to offer "safe, secure, and discreet" services in order to get consumers to sign up and provide their data, the company, FTC alleged, did not clearly disclose that the information would be shared with third-parties for advertising. The agency also accused the company of burying its data sharing practices in dense privacy policies, with the company engaging in decept

Two individuals have been arrested in Australia and the U.S. in connection with an alleged scheme to develop and distribute a remote access trojan called Hive RAT (previously Firebird). The U.S. Justice Department (DoJ)  said  the malware "gave the malware purchasers control over victim computers and enabled them to access victims' private communications, their login credentials, and other personal information." A 24-year-old individual named Edmond Chakhmakhchyan (aka "Corruption") from Van Nuys in Los Angeles, California, was taken into custody after he was caught selling a license of Hive RAT to an undercover employee of a law enforcement agency. He has been charged with one count of conspiracy and one count of advertising a device as an interception device, each of which carries a penalty of five years in prison. Chakhmakhchyan pleaded not guilty and was ordered to stand trial on June 4, 2024. Court documents allege a partnership between the malware'

A security flaw impacting the Lighttpd web server used in baseboard management controllers ( BMCs ) has remained unpatched by device vendors like Intel and Lenovo, new findings from Binarly reveal. While the original shortcoming was  discovered and patched  by the Lighttpd maintainers way back in August 2018 with  version 1.4.51 , the lack of a CVE identifier or an advisory meant that it was overlooked by developers of AMI MegaRAC BMC, ultimately ending up in products made by Intel and Lenovo. Lighttpd  (pronounced "Lighty") is an open-source high-performance web server software designed for speed, security, and flexibility, while optimized for high-performance environments without consuming a lot of system resources. The silent fix for Lighttpd concerns an out-of-bounds read vulnerability that could be exploited to exfiltrate sensitive data, such as process memory addresses, thereby allowing threat actors to bypass crucial security mechanisms like address space layout ra