The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) are warning of active exploitation of a newly patched flaw in Zoho's ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus product to deploy web shells and carry out an array of malicious activities. Tracked as  CVE-2021-44077  (CVSS score: 9.8), the issue relates to an unauthenticated, remote code execution vulnerability affecting ServiceDesk Plus versions up to and including 11305 that, if left unfixed, "allows an attacker to upload executable files and place web shells that enable post-exploitation activities, such as compromising administrator credentials, conducting lateral movement, and exfiltrating registry hives and Active Directory files," CISA  said . "A security misconfiguration in ServiceDesk Plus led to the vulnerability," Zoho  noted  in an independent advisory published on November 22. "This vulnerability can allow an adversary to execute arbitrary code

Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, on Thursday announced an expansion of its Facebook Protect security program to include human rights defenders, activists, journalists, and government officials who are more likely to be targeted by bad actors across its social media platforms. "These people are at the center of critical communities for public debate," said Nathaniel Gleicher, head of security policy at Meta. "They enable democratic elections, hold governments and organizations accountable, and defend human rights around the world. Unfortunately this also means that they are highly targeted by bad actors." Facebook Protect , currently being launched globally in phases, enables users who enroll for the initiative to adopt stronger account security protections, like two-factor authentication (2FA), and watch out for potential hacking threats. Meta said more than 1.5 million accounts have enabled Facebook Protect to date, of which nearly 950,000 account

Four different malicious frameworks designed to attack air-gapped networks were detected in the first half of 2020 alone, bringing the total number of such toolkits to 17 and offering adversaries a pathway to cyber espionage and exfiltrate classified information. "All frameworks are designed to perform some form of espionage, [and] all the frameworks used USB drives as the physical transmission medium to transfer data in and out of the targeted air-gapped networks," ESET researchers Alexis Dorais-Joncas and Facundo Muñoz  said  in a comprehensive study of the frameworks. Air-gapping is a network security measure designed to prevent unauthorized access to systems by physically isolating them from other unsecured networks, including local area networks and the public internet. This also implies that the only way to transfer data is by connecting a physical device to it, such as USB drives or external hard disks. Given that the mechanism is one of the most common ways  SCAD

The following article is based on a  webinar series on enterprise API security by Imvision , featuring expert speakers from IBM, Deloitte, Maersk, and Imvision discussing the importance of centralizing an organization's visibility of its APIs as a way to accelerate remediation efforts and improve the overall security posture. Centralizing security is challenging in today's open ecosystem When approaching API visibility, the first thing we have to recognize is that today's enterprises actively avoid managing all their APIs through one system. According to IBM's Tony Curcio, Director of Integration Engineering, many of his enterprise customers already work with hybrid architectures that leverage classic on-premise infrastructure while adopting SaaS and IaaS across various cloud vendors.  These architectures aim to increase resilience and flexibility, but are well aware that it complicates centralization efforts' to: 'These architectures aim to increase resilie

Socially engineered SMS messages are being used to install malware on Android devices as part of a widespread phishing campaign that impersonates the Iranian government and social security services to make away with credit card details and steal funds from victims' bank accounts. Unlike other variants of  banking malware  that bank of overlay attacks to capture sensitive data without the knowledge of the victim, the financially motivated operation uncovered by Check Point Research is designed to trick the targets into handing over their credit card information by sending them a legitimate-looking SMS message that contains a link, which, when clicked, downloads a malware-laced app onto their devices. "The malicious application not only collects the victim's credit card numbers, but also gains access to their 2FA authentication SMS, and turn[s] the victim's device into a bot capable of spreading similar phishing SMS to other potential victims," Check Point resear

A Russian national charged with providing bulletproof hosting services for cybercriminals, who used the platform to spread malware and attack U.S. organizations and financial institutions between 2009 to 2015, has received a 60-month prison sentence. 34-year-old Aleksandr Grichishkin, along with Andrei Skvortsov, founded the bulletproof hosting service and rented its infrastructure to other criminal clientele for distributing a wide range of malware and attempted to cause millions of dollars in losses to U.S. victims.  Skvortsov is pending sentencing and faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. Bulletproof hosting operations are similar to regular web hosting, but are a lot more lenient about what can be hosted on their servers. They are known for providing secure hosting for malicious content and activity and assuring anonymity to threat actors. Grichishkin, in May,  pleaded guilty  to conspiracy to engage in a racketeer-influenced corrupt organization (RICO). Acting as th

Mozilla has rolled out fixes to address a critical security weakness in its cross-platform Network Security Services ( NSS ) cryptographic library that could be potentially exploited by an adversary to crash a vulnerable application and even execute arbitrary code. Tracked as CVE-2021-43527, the flaw affects NSS versions prior to 3.73 or 3.68.1 ESR, and concerns a  heap overflow  vulnerability when verifying digital signatures such as  DSA  and  RSA-PSS  algorithms that are encoded using the  DER  binary format. Credited with reporting the issue is Tavis Ormandy of Google Project Zero, who codenamed it " BigSig ." "NSS (Network Security Services) versions prior to 3.73 or 3.68.1 ESR are vulnerable to a heap overflow when handling DER-encoded DSA or RSA-PSS signatures," Mozilla  said  in an advisory published Wednesday. "Applications using NSS for handling signatures encoded within CMS, S/MIME, PKCS #7, or PKCS #12 are likely to be impacted." NSS is a

A newly discovered botnet capable of staging distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeted unpatched Ribbon Communications (formerly Edgewater Networks) EdgeMarc appliances belonging to telecom service provider AT&T by exploiting a four-year-old flaw in the network appliances. Chinese tech giant Qihoo 360's Netlab network security division, which detected the botnet first on October 27, 2021, called it  EwDoor , noting it observed 5,700 compromised IP addresses located in the U.S. during a brief three-hour window. "So far, the EwDoor in our view has undergone three versions of updates, and its main functions can be summarized into two main categories of DDoS attacks and backdoor," the researchers  noted . "Based on the attacked devices are telephone communication related, we presume that its main purpose is DDoS attacks, and gathering of sensitive information, such as call logs." Propagating through a flaw in EdgeMarc devices, EwDoor supports a

Three different state-sponsored threat actors aligned with China, India, and Russia have been observed adopting a new method called  RTF  (aka Rich Text Format) template injection as part of their phishing campaigns to deliver malware to targeted systems. "RTF template injection is a novel technique that is ideal for malicious phishing attachments because it is simple and allows threat actors to retrieve malicious content from a remote URL using an RTF file," Proofpoint researchers said in a new report shared with The Hacker News. At the heart of the attack is an RTF file containing decoy content that can be  manipulated  to enable the retrieval of content, including malicious payloads, hosted at an external URL upon opening an RTF file. Specifically, it leverages the RTF  template functionality  to alter a document's formatting properties using a  hex editor  by specifying a URL resource instead of an accessible file resource destination from which a remote payload

A sixth member associated with an international hacking group known as  The Community  has been sentenced in connection with a multimillion-dollar SIM swapping conspiracy, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said. Garrett Endicott, 22, from the U.S. state of Missouri, who pleaded guilty to charges of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft following an indictment in 2019, was  sentenced  to 10 months in prison and ordered to pay an amount totaling $121,549.37 in restitution. SIM swapping , also called SIM hijacking, refers to an identity theft scheme wherein malicious parties persuade phone carriers into porting their victims' cell services to SIM cards under their control, often facilitated by bribing an employee of a mobile phone provider or by contacting the service provider's customer support by posing as the victim and requesting that the phone number be swapped to a SIM card operated by the group. The goal is to leverage the phone numbers as a gateway to hijack dif