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Law enforcement agencies have officially seized control of the notorious  BreachForums  platform, an online bazaar known for peddling stolen data, for the second time within a year. The website ("breachforums[.]st") has been replaced by a seizure banner stating the clearnet cybercrime forum is under the control of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).  The operation is the result of a collaborative effort from authorities in Australia, Iceland, New Zealand, Switzerland, the U.K., the U.S., and Ukraine. The FBI has also taken control of the  Telegram channel  operated by Baphomet, who became the administrator of the forum following the  arrest  of his predecessor Conor Brian Fitzpatrick (aka  pompompurin ) in March last year. It's worth noting a prior iteration of BreachForums, hosted at breached.vc/.to/.co and managed by pompompurin, was seized by law enforcement in late June 2023. "This Telegram chat is under the control of the FBI," a message

The Black Basta ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation has targeted more than 500 private industry and critical infrastructure entities in North America, Europe, and Australia since its emergence in April 2022. In a joint advisory published by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), the agencies said the threat actors encrypted and stole data from at least 12 out of 16 critical infrastructure sectors. "Black Basta affiliates use common initial access techniques — such as phishing and exploiting known vulnerabilities — and then employ a double-extortion model, both encrypting systems and exfiltrating data," the bulletin  read . Unlike other ransomware groups, the ransom notes dropped at the end of the attack do not contain an initial ransom demand or payment instructions. Rather, the note

The U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA) has unmasked the administrator and developer of the LockBit ransomware operation, revealing it to be a 31-year-old Russian national named  Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev . In addition, Khoroshev has been sanctioned  by the U.K. Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCD), the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs. Europol, in a  press statement , said authorities are in possession of over 2,500 decryption keys and are continuing to contact LockBit victims to offer support. Khoroshev, who went by the monikers LockBitSupp and putinkrab, has also become the subject of asset freezes and travel bans, with the U.S. Department of State offering a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to his arrest and/or conviction. Previously, the agency had  announced  reward offers of up to $15 million seeking information leading to the identity and location of k

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

How safe is your comments section? Discover how a seemingly innocent 'thank you' comment on a product page concealed a malicious vulnerability, underscoring the necessity of robust security measures. Read the full real-life case study  here .  When is a 'Thank you' not a 'Thank you'? When it's a sneaky bit of code that's been hidden inside a 'Thank You' image that somebody posted in the comments section of a product page! The guilty secret hidden inside this particular piece of code was designed to let hackers bypass security controls and steal the personal identifying information of online shoppers, which could have meant big trouble for them and the company. The page in question belongs to a global retailer. User communities are often a great source of unbiased advice from fellow enthusiasts, which was why a Nikon camera owner was posting there. They were looking for the ideal 50mm lens and asked for a recommendation. They offered thanks in advance to whoever might take th

Several popular Android applications available in Google Play Store are susceptible to a path traversal-affiliated vulnerability codenamed the Dirty Stream attack that could be exploited by a malicious app to overwrite arbitrary files in the vulnerable app's home directory. "The implications of this vulnerability pattern include arbitrary code execution and token theft, depending on an application's implementation," Dimitrios Valsamaras of the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team  said  in a report published Wednesday. Successful exploitation could allow an attacker to take full control of the application's behavior and leverage the stolen tokens to gain unauthorized access to the victim's online accounts and other data. Two of the apps that were found vulnerable to the problem are as follows - Xiaomi File Manager (com.mi. Android.globalFileexplorer) - Over 1 billion installs WPS Office (cn.wps.moffice_eng) - Over 500 million installs While Android implem

Cloud storage services provider Dropbox on Wednesday disclosed that Dropbox Sign (formerly HelloSign) was breached by unidentified threat actors, who accessed emails, usernames, and general account settings associated with all users of the digital signature product. The company, in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), said it became aware of the "unauthorized access" on April 24, 2024. Dropbox  announced  its plans to acquire HelloSign in January 2019. "The threat actor had accessed data related to all users of Dropbox Sign, such as emails and usernames, in addition to general account settings," it  said  in the Form 8-K filing.. "For subsets of users, the threat actor also accessed phone numbers, hashed passwords, and certain authentication information such as API keys, OAuth tokens, and multi-factor authentication." Even worse, the intrusion also affects third-parties who received or signed a document through Dropbox Sig

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has  added  a critical flaw impacting GitLab to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, owing to active exploitation in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2023-7028  (CVSS score: 10.0), the maximum severity vulnerability could facilitate account takeover by sending password reset emails to an unverified email address. GitLab, which disclosed details of the shortcoming earlier this January, said it was introduced as part of a code change in version 16.1.0 on May 1, 2023. "Within these versions, all authentication mechanisms are impacted," the company  noted  at the time. "Additionally, users who have two-factor authentication enabled are vulnerable to password reset but not account takeover as their second authentication factor is required to login." Successful exploitation of the issue can have serious consequences as it not only enables an adversary to take control of a GitLab user account, b

A new malware called  Cuttlefish  is targeting small office and home office (SOHO) routers with the goal of stealthily monitoring all traffic through the devices and gather authentication data from HTTP GET and POST requests. "This malware is modular, designed primarily to steal authentication material found in web requests that transit the router from the adjacent local area network (LAN)," the Black Lotus Labs team at Lumen Technologies  said  in a report published today. "A secondary function gives it the capacity to perform both DNS and HTTP hijacking for connections to private IP space, associated with communications on an internal network." There is source code evidence suggesting overlaps with another previously known activity cluster called  HiatusRAT , although no shared victimology has been observed to date. It's said that these two operations are running concurrently. Cuttlefish has been active since at least July 27, 2023, with the latest campa

Identity and access management (IAM) services provider Okta has warned of a spike in the "frequency and scale" of credential stuffing attacks aimed at online services. These unprecedented attacks, observed over the last month, are said to be facilitated by "the broad availability of residential proxy services, lists of previously stolen credentials ('combo lists'), and scripting tools," the company  said  in an alert published Saturday. The findings build on a  recent advisory  from Cisco, which cautioned of 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," Talos noted at the time, adding targets of the attacks comprise VPN appliances from Cisco, Check Point, Fortinet, Soni

Cybersecurity breaches can be devastating for both individuals and businesses alike. While many people tend to focus on understanding how and why they were targeted by such breaches, there's a larger, more pressing question: What is the true financial impact of a cyberattack? According to research by Cybersecurity Ventures, the global cost of cybercrime is projected to reach an astonishing 10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025, which marks a dramatic increase from the 3 trillion USD reported in 2015. This sharp rise highlights a concerning trend: cybercriminals have significantly improved their methods for conducting sophisticated and successful cyberattacks over the years. According to research firm Cybersecurity Ventures, the cost of global cybercrime will reach a staggering 10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025, up from the 3 trillion USD that it was in 2015. It's clear, then, that these threat actors have found ways to pull off sophisticated and successful cyberattacks over the yea

Users of the CrushFTP enterprise file transfer software are being urged to update to the latest version following the discovery of a security flaw that has come under targeted exploitation in the wild. "CrushFTP v11 versions below 11.1 have a vulnerability where users can escape their VFS and download system files," CrushFTP  said  in an advisory released Friday. "This has been patched in v11.1.0." That said, customers who are operating their CrushFTP instances within a  DMZ  ( demilitarized zone ) restricted environment are protected against the attacks. Simon Garrelou of Airbus CERT has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. It has yet to be assigned a CVE identifier. Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, in a post shared on Reddit, said it has observed an exploit for the flaw being used in the wild in a "targeted fashion." These intrusions are said to have mainly targeted U.S. entities, with the intelligence gathering activity suspe

A new Android trojan called  SoumniBot  has been detected in the wild targeting users in South Korea by leveraging weaknesses in the manifest extraction and parsing procedure. The malware is "notable for an unconventional approach to evading analysis and detection, namely obfuscation of the Android manifest," Kaspersky researcher Dmitry Kalinin  said  in a technical analysis. Every Android app comes with a  manifest XML file  ("AndroidManifest.xml") that's located in the root directory and declares the various components of the app, as well as the permissions and the hardware and software features it requires. Knowing that threat hunters typically commence their analysis by inspecting the app's manifest file to determine its behavior, the threat actors behind the malware have been found to leverage three different techniques to make the process a lot more challenging. The first method involves the use of an invalid Compression method value when unpackin

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

The threat actor known as  Muddled Libra  has been observed actively targeting software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and cloud service provider (CSP) environments in a bid to exfiltrate sensitive data. "Organizations often store a variety of data in SaaS applications and use services from CSPs," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42  said  in a report published last week. "The threat actors have begun attempting to leverage some of this data to assist with their attack progression, and to use for extortion when trying to monetize their work." Muddled Libra, also called Scatter Swine, Scattered Spider, Starfraud, and UNC3944, is a notorious cybercriminal group that has leveraged sophisticated social engineering techniques to gain initial access to target networks.  "Scattered Spider threat actors have historically evaded detection on target networks by using living off the land techniques and allowlisted applications to navigate victim networks, as well as frequen

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