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The U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposed sanctions against a dozen individuals serving executive and senior leadership roles at Kaspersky Lab, a day after the Russian company was banned by the Commerce Department. The move "underscores our commitment to ensure the integrity of our cyber domain and to protect our citizens against malicious cyber threats," Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Brian E. Nelson, said. "The United States will take action where necessary to hold accountable those who would seek to facilitate or otherwise enable these activities." The sanctions, however, do not extend to Kaspersky Lab, its parent or subsidiary companies, nor the company's founder and chief executive officer (CEO), Eugene Kaspersky, OFAC noted. The 12 C-suite and senior-level executives sanctioned are listed below - Andrei Gennadyevich Tikhonov, Chief Operating Officer (COO) and

A previously undocumented Chinese-speaking threat actor codenamed SneakyChef has been linked to an espionage campaign primarily targeting government entities across Asia and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) with SugarGh0st malware since at least August 2023. "SneakyChef uses lures that are scanned documents of government agencies, most of which are related to various countries' Ministries of Foreign Affairs or embassies," Cisco Talos researchers Chetan Raghuprasad and Ashley Shen said in an analysis published today. Activities related to the hacking crew were first highlighted by the cybersecurity company in late November 2023 in connection with an attack campaign that singled out South Korea and Uzbekistan with a custom variant of Gh0st RAT called SugarGh0st . A subsequent analysis from Proofpoint last month uncovered the use of SugarGh0st RAT against U.S. organizations involved in artificial intelligence efforts, including those in academia, private indust

The link between detection and response (DR) practices and cloud security has historically been weak. As global organizations increasingly adopt cloud environments, security strategies have largely focused on "shift-left" practices—securing code, ensuring proper cloud posture, and fixing misconfigurations. However, this approach has led to an over-reliance on a multitude of DR tools spanning cloud infrastructure, workloads, and even applications. Despite these advanced tools, organizations often take weeks or even months to identify and resolve incidents.  Add to this the challenges of tool sprawl, soaring cloud security costs, and overwhelming volumes of false positives, and it becomes clear that security teams are stretched thin. Many are forced to make hard decisions about which cloud breaches they can realistically defend against.  By following these five targeted steps, security teams can greatly improve their real-time detection and response capabilities for cloud a

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new phishing campaign that has been identified as targeting people in Pakistan using a custom backdoor. Dubbed PHANTOM#SPIKE by Securonix, the unknown threat actors behind the activity have leveraged military-related phishing documents to activate the infection sequence. "While there are many methods used today to deploy malware, the threat actors made use of ZIP files with a password-protected payload archive contained within," researchers Den Iuzvyk, Tim Peck, and Oleg Kolesnikov said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The campaign is notable for its lack of sophistication and the use of simple payloads to achieve remote access to target machines. The email messages come bearing a ZIP archive that purports to be meeting minutes related to the International Military-Technical Forum Army 2024, a legitimate event organized by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. It's set to be held in Moscow in mid

Created by John Tuckner and the team at automation and AI-powered workflow platform  Tines , the  SOC Automation Capability Matrix (SOC ACM)  is a set of techniques designed to help security operations teams understand their automation capabilities and respond more effectively to incidents.  A customizable, vendor-agnostic tool featuring lists of automation opportunities, it's been shared and recommended by members of the security community since its launch in January 2023, notably by Airbnb engineer Allyn Stott in his BSides and Black Hat talk,  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Build a Modern Detection & Response Program .   The SOC ACM has been compared to the MITRE ATT&CK and RE&CT frameworks, with one user saying, "it could be a standard for classification of SOAR automations, a bit like the RE&CT framework, but with more automation focus." It's been used by organizations in Fintech, Cloud Security, and beyond, as a basis for assessing and optimizing

A malvertising campaign is leveraging trojanized installers for popular software such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Teams to drop a backdoor called Oyster (aka Broomstick and CleanUpLoader). That's according to findings from Rapid7, which identified lookalike websites hosting the malicious payloads that users are redirected to after searching for them on search engines like Google and Bing. The threat actors are luring unsuspecting users to fake websites purporting to contain legitimate software. But attempting to download the setup binary launches a malware infection chain instead. Specifically, the executable serves as a pathway for a backdoor called Oyster, which is capable of gathering information about the compromised host, communicating with a hard-coded command-and-control (C2) address, and supporting remote code execution. While Oyster has been observed in the past being delivered by means of a dedicated loader component known as Broomstick Loader (aka Oyster Instal

A recently patched high-severity flaw impacting SolarWinds Serv-U file transfer software is being actively exploited by malicious actors in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-28995 (CVSS score: 8.6), concerns a directory transversal bug that could allow attackers to read sensitive files on the host machine. Affecting all versions of the software prior to and including Serv-U 15.4.2 HF 1, it was addressed by the company in version Serv-U 15.4.2 HF 2 (15.4.2.157) released earlier this month. The list of products susceptible to CVE-2024-28995 is below - Serv-U FTP Server 15.4 Serv-U Gateway 15.4 Serv-U MFT Server 15.4, and Serv-U File Server 15.4 Security researcher Hussein Daher of Web Immunify has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. Following the public disclosure, additional technical details and a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit have since been made available. Cybersecurity firm Rapid7 described the vulnerability as trivial to exploit

The U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) on Thursday announced a "first of its kind" ban that prohibits Kaspersky Lab's U.S. subsidiary from directly or indirectly offering its security software in the country. The blockade also extends to the cybersecurity company's affiliates, subsidiaries and parent companies, the department said, adding the action is based on the fact that its operations in the U.S. posed a national security risk. News of the ban was first reported by Reuters. "The company's continued operations in the United States presented a national security risk — due to the Russian Government's offensive cyber capabilities and capacity to influence or direct Kaspersky's operations — that could not be addressed through mitigation measures short of a total prohibition," the BIS said . It further said Kaspersky is subject to the jurisdiction and control of the Russian government and that its software pro

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched security flaw in Phoenix SecureCore UEFI firmware that affects multiple families of Intel Core desktop and mobile processors. Tracked as CVE-2024-0762 (CVSS score: 7.5), the "UEFIcanhazbufferoverflow" vulnerability has been described as a case of a buffer overflow stemming from the use of an unsafe variable in the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) configuration that could result in the execution of malicious code. "The vulnerability allows a local attacker to escalate privileges and gain code execution within the UEFI firmware during runtime," supply chain security firm Eclypsium said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This type of low-level exploitation is typical of firmware backdoors (e.g., BlackLotus ) that are increasingly observed in the wild. Such implants give attackers ongoing persistence within a device and often, the ability to evade higher-level security measures running in

State-sponsored actors with ties to Russia have been linked to targeted cyber attacks aimed at French diplomatic entities, the country's information security agency ANSSI said in an advisory. The attacks have been attributed to a cluster tracked by Microsoft under the name Midnight Blizzard (formerly Nobelium), which overlaps with activity tracked as APT29 , BlueBravo, Cloaked Ursa, Cozy Bear, and The Dukes. While the monikers APT29 and Midnight Blizzard have been interchangeably used to refer to intrusion sets associated with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), ANSSI said it prefers to treat them as disparate threat clusters alongside a third one dubbed Dark Halo , which has been held responsible for the 2020 supply chain attack via SolarWinds software. "Nobelium is characterized by the use of specific codes, tactics, techniques, and procedures. Most of Nobelium campaigns against diplomatic entities use compromised legitimate email accounts belonging to dipl