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

Threat actors are exploiting unpatched Atlassian servers to deploy a Linux variant of Cerber (aka C3RB3R) ransomware. The attacks leverage  CVE-2023-22518  (CVSS score: 9.1), a critical security vulnerability impacting the Atlassian Confluence Data Center and Server that allows an unauthenticated attacker to reset Confluence and create an administrator account. Armed with this access, a threat actor could take over affected systems, leading to a full loss of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. According to cloud security firm Cado, financially motivated cybercrime groups have been observed abusing the newly created admin account to install the Effluence web shell plugin and allow for the execution of arbitrary commands on the host. "The attacker uses this web shell to download and run the primary Cerber payload," Nate Bill, threat intelligence engineer at Cado,  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "In a default install, the Confluence applicati

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new campaign that's exploiting a recently disclosed security flaw in Fortinet FortiClient EMS devices to deliver ScreenConnect and Metasploit Powerfun payloads. The activity entails the exploitation of  CVE-2023-48788  (CVSS score: 9.3), a critical SQL injection flaw that could permit an unauthenticated attacker to execute unauthorized code or commands via specifically crafted requests. Cybersecurity firm Forescout is  tracking  the campaign under the codename  Connect:fun  owing to the use of ScreenConnect and Powerfun for post-exploitation. The intrusion, which targeted an unnamed media company that had its vulnerable FortiClient EMS device exposed to the internet, took place shortly after the  release  of a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for the flaw on March 21, 2024. Over the next couple of days, the unknown adversary was observed leveraging the flaw to unsuccessfully download ScreenConnect and then install the remote desktop s

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

Permissions in SaaS platforms like Salesforce, Workday, and Microsoft 365 are remarkably precise. They spell out exactly which users have access to which data sets. The terminology differs between apps, but each user's base permission is determined by their role, while additional permissions may be granted based on tasks or projects they are involved with. Layered on top of that are custom permissions required by an individual user.  For example, look at a sales rep who is involved in a tiger team investigating churn while also training two new employees. The sales rep's role would grant her one set of permissions to access prospect data, while the tiger team project would grant access to existing customer data. Meanwhile, special permissions are set up, providing the sales rep with visibility into the accounts of the two new employees. While these permissions are precise, however, they are also very complex. Application admins don't have a single screen within these applications th

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

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