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Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched vulnerability impacting the Microsoft SharePoint connector on Power Platform that, if successfully exploited, could allow threat actors to harvest a user's credentials and stage follow-on attacks. This could manifest in the form of post-exploitation actions that allow the attacker to send requests to the SharePoint API on behalf of the impersonated user, enabling unauthorized access to sensitive data, Zenity Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News ahead of publication. "This vulnerability can be exploited across Power Automate, Power Apps, Copilot Studio, and Copilot 365, which significantly broadens the scope of potential damage," senior security researcher Dmitry Lozovoy said . "It increases the likelihood of a successful attack, allowing hackers to target multiple interconnected services within the Power Platform ecosystem." Following responsible disclosure in September 2024, ...

As many as 768 vulnerabilities with designated CVE identifiers were reported as exploited in the wild in 2024, up from 639 CVEs in 2023, registering a 20% increase year-over-year. Describing 2024 as "another banner year for threat actors targeting the exploitation of vulnerabilities," VulnCheck said 23.6% of known exploited vulnerabilities (KEV) were known to be weaponized either on or before the day their CVEs were publicly disclosed. This marks a slight decrease from 2023's 26.8%, indicating that exploitation attempts can take place at any time in a vulnerability's lifecycle. "During 2024, 1% of the CVEs published were reported publicly as exploited in the wild," VulnCheck's Patrick Garrity said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This number is expected to grow as exploitation is often discovered long after a CVE is published." The report comes over two months after the company revealed that 15 different Chinese hacking groups o...

The maintainers of the Python Package Index (PyPI) registry have announced a new feature that allows package developers to archive a project as part of efforts to improve supply chain security . "Maintainers can now archive a project to let users know that the project is not expected to receive any more updates," Facundo Tuesca, senior engineer at Trail of Bits, said . In doing so, the idea is to clearly signal to developers that the Python libraries are no longer being actively maintained and that no future security fixes or product updates should be expected. That said, projects labeled as archived will continue to remain available on PyPI and users can continue to install it without any issues. In a separate blog post detailing the feature, Tuesca said the maintainers are considering additional maintainer-controlled statuses to better communicate a project's status to downstream consumers. PyPI also recommends that package developers release a final version pr...

This week, our news radar shows that every new tech idea comes with its own challenges. A hot AI tool is under close watch, law enforcement is shutting down online spots that help cybercriminals, and teams are busy fixing software bugs that could let attackers in. From better locks on our devices to stopping sneaky tricks online, simple steps are making a big difference.  Let's take a closer look at how these efforts are shaping a safer digital world. ⚡ Threat of the Week DeepSeek's Popularity Invites Scrutiny — The overnight popularity of DeepSeek, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform originating from China, has led to extensive scrutiny of its models, with several analyses finding ways to jailbreak its system and produce malicious or prohibited content. While jailbreaks and prompt injections are a persistent concern in mainstream AI products, the findings also show that the model lacks enough protections to prevent potential abuse by malicious actors . The AI chatbot ha...

Brazilian Windows users are the target of a campaign that delivers a banking malware known as Coyote . "Once deployed, the Coyote Banking Trojan can carry out various malicious activities, including keylogging, capturing screenshots, and displaying phishing overlays to steal sensitive credentials," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin said in an analysis published last week. The cybersecurity company said it discovered over the past month several Windows Shortcut (LNK) file artifacts that contain PowerShell commands responsible for delivering the malware. Coyote was first documented by Kaspersky in early 2024, detailing its attacks targeting users in the South American nation. It's capable of harvesting sensitive information from over 70 financial applications. In the previous attack chain documented by the Russian cybersecurity firm, a Squirrel installer executable is used to trigger a Node.js application compiled with Electron, that, for its part, runs a...

Attack surfaces are growing faster than security teams can keep up – to stay ahead, you need to know what's exposed and where attackers are most likely to strike. With cloud adoption dramatically increasing the ease of exposing new systems and services to the internet, prioritizing threats and managing your attack surface from an attacker's perspective has never been more important. In this guide, we look at why attack surfaces are growing and how to monitor and manage them properly with  tools like Intruder . Let's dive in. What is your attack surface? First, it's important to understand what we mean when we talk about an attack surface. An attack surface is the sum of your digital assets that are 'reachable' by an attacker – whether they are secure or vulnerable, known or unknown, in active use or not. You can also have both internal and external attack surfaces - imagine for example a malicious email attachment landing in a colleague's inbox, vs a new FTP server being...

A Russian-speaking cybercrime gang known as Crazy Evil has been linked to over 10 active social media scams that leverage a wide range of tailored lures to deceive victims and trick them into installing malware such as StealC , Atomic macOS Stealer (aka AMOS ), and Angel Drainer . "Specializing in identity fraud, cryptocurrency theft, and information-stealing malware, Crazy Evil employs a well-coordinated network of traffers — social engineering experts tasked with redirecting legitimate traffic to malicious phishing pages," Recorded Future's Insikt Group said in an analysis. The use of a diverse malware arsenal cryptoscam group is a sign that the threat actor is targeting users of both Windows and macOS systems, posing a risk to the decentralized finance ecosystem. Crazy Evil has been assessed to be active since at least 2021, functioning primarily as a traffer team tasked with redirecting legitimate traffic to malicious landing pages operated by other criminal cre...

U.S. and Dutch law enforcement agencies have announced that they have dismantled 39 domains and their associated servers as part of efforts to disrupt a network of online marketplaces originating from Pakistan. The action, which took place on January 29, 2025, has been codenamed Operation Heart Blocker. The vast array of sites in question peddled phishing toolkits and fraud-enabling tools and was operated by a group known as Saim Raza since at least 2020, which is also known as HeartSender. These offerings were then used by transnational organized crime groups to target several victims in the United States as part of various business email compromise ( BEC ) schemes, leading to losses totaling over $3 million. "The Saim Raza-run websites operated as marketplaces that advertised and facilitated the sale of tools such as phishing kits, scam pages, and email extractors, often used to build and maintain fraud operations," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said . "N...

BeyondTrust has revealed it completed an investigation into a recent cybersecurity incident that targeted some of the company's Remote Support SaaS instances by making use of a compromised API key. The company said the breach involved 17 Remote Support SaaS customers and that the API key was used to enable unauthorized access by resetting local application passwords. The breach was first flagged on December 5, 2024. "The investigation determined that a zero-day vulnerability of a third-party application was used to gain access to an online asset in a BeyondTrust AWS account," the company said this week. "Access to that asset then allowed the threat actor to obtain an infrastructure API key that could then be leveraged against a separate AWS account which operated Remote Support infrastructure." The American access management company did not name the application that was exploited to obtain the API key, but said the probe uncovered two separate flaws in it...

Meta-owned WhatsApp on Friday said it disrupted a campaign that involved the use of spyware to target journalists and civil society members. The campaign, which targeted around 90 members, involved the use of spyware from an Israeli company known as Paragon Solutions. The attackers were neutralized in December 2024. In a statement to The Guardian, the encrypted messaging app said it has reached out to affected users, stating it had "high confidence" that the users were targeted and "possibly compromised." It's currently not known who is behind the campaign and for how long it took place. The attack chain is said to be zero-click, meaning the deployment of the spyware occurs without requiring any user interaction. It's suspected to involve the distribution of a specially-crafted PDF file sent to individuals who were added to group chats on WhatsApp. The company noted the targets were spread across over two dozen countries, including several in Europe, ...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malvertising campaign that's targeting Microsoft advertisers with bogus Google ads that aim to take them to phishing pages that are capable of harvesting their credentials. "These malicious ads, appearing on Google Search, are designed to steal the login information of users trying to access Microsoft's advertising platform," Jérôme Segura, senior director of research at Malwarebytes, said in a Thursday report. The findings came a few weeks after the cybersecurity company exposed a similar campaign that leveraged sponsored Google Ads to target individuals and businesses advertising via the search giant's advertising platform. The latest set of attacks targets users who search for terms like "Microsoft Ads" on Google Search, hoping to trick them into clicking on malicious links served in the form of sponsored ads in the search results pages. At the same time, the threat actors behind the campaign employ s...