New evidence amidst the ongoing probe into the espionage campaign targeting SolarWinds has uncovered an unsuccessful attempt to compromise cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike and access the company’s email. The hacking endeavor was reported to the company by Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence Center on December 15, which identified a third-party reseller’s Microsoft Azure account to be making “abnormal
Cyber Security
Citrix has issued an emergency advisory warning its customers of a security issue affecting its NetScaler application delivery controller (ADC) devices that attackers are abusing to launch amplified distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against several targets. “An attacker or bots can overwhelm the Citrix ADC [Datagram Transport Layer Security] network throughput, potentially leading to outbound bandwidth
Google’s Project Zero team has made public details of an improperly patched zero-day security vulnerability in Windows print spooler API that could be leveraged by a bad actor to execute arbitrary code. Details of the unpatched flaw were revealed publicly after Microsoft failed to patch it within 90 days of responsible disclosure on September 24.
Threat actors such as the notorious Lazarus group are continuing to tap into the ongoing COVID-19 vaccine research to steal sensitive information to speed up their countries’ vaccine-development efforts. Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky detailed two incidents at a pharmaceutical company and a government ministry in September and October leveraging different tools and techniques but exhibiting similarities
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Interpol have allegedly seized proxy servers used in connection with Blockchain-based domains belonging to Joker’s Stash, a notorious fraud bazaar known for selling compromised payment card data in underground forums. The takedown happened last week on December 17. The operators of Joker’s Stash operate several versions of
As if the exponential rise in phishing scams and malware attacks in the last five years wasn’t enough, the COVID-19 crisis has worsened it further. The current scenario has given a viable opportunity to cybercriminals to find a way to target individuals, small and large enterprises, government corporations. According to Interpol’s COVID-19 Cybercrime Analysis Report,
The US Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) has warned of critical vulnerabilities in a low-level TCP/IP software library developed by Treck that, if weaponized, could allow remote attackers to run arbitrary commands and mount denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. The four flaws affect Treck TCP/IP stack version 6.0.1.67 and earlier and were reported to the company
Law enforcement agencies from the US, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, France, along with Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), announced today the coordinated takedown of Safe-Inet, a popular virtual private network (VPN) service that was used to facilitate criminal activity. The three domains in question — insorg[.]org, safe-inet[.]com, and safe-inet[.]net — were shut down, and their infrastructure
As the probe into the SolarWinds supply chain attack continues, new digital forensic evidence has brought to light that a separate threat actor may have been abusing the IT infrastructure provider’s Orion software to drop a similar persistent backdoor on target systems. “The investigation of the whole SolarWinds compromise led to the discovery of an
Three dozen journalists working for Al Jazeera had their iPhones stealthily compromised via a zero-click exploit to install spyware as part of a Middle East cyberespionage campaign. In a new report published yesterday by University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, researchers said personal phones of 36 journalists, producers, anchors, and executives at Al Jazeera, and a
A team of researchers today unveils two critical security vulnerabilities it discovered in Dell Wyse Thin clients that could have potentially allowed attackers to remotely execute malicious code and access arbitrary files on affected devices. The flaws, which were uncovered by healthcare cybersecurity provider CyberMDX and reported to Dell in June 2020, affects all devices
Everyone makes mistakes. That one sentence was drummed into me in my very first job in tech, and it has held true since then. In the cybersecurity world, misconfigurations can create exploitable issues that can haunt us later – so let’s look at a few common security misconfigurations. The first one is development permissions that
How can your app hook into a geocoding service that offers forward and reverse geocoding and an auto-completion facility? Geocoding turns a location name or address into geocoordinates. The service gets used by thousands of applications like Uber and Grubhub to track and plot their map data. Yet, it can also help web development by
As 5G networks are being gradually rolled out in major cities across the world, an analysis of its network architecture has revealed a number of potential weaknesses that could be exploited to carry out a slew of cyber assaults, including denial-of-service (DoS) attacks to deprive subscribers of Internet access and intercept data traffic. The findings
The massive state-sponsored espionage campaign that compromised software maker SolarWinds also targeted Microsoft, as the unfolding investigation into the hacking spree reveals the incident may have been far more wider in scope, sophistication, and impact than previously thought. News of Microsoft’s compromise was first reported by Reuters, which also said the company’s own products were
Cybersecurity researchers today disclosed a new supply-chain attack targeting the Vietnam Government Certification Authority (VGCA) that compromised the agency’s digital signature toolkit to install a backdoor on victim systems. Uncovered by Slovak internet security company ESET early this month, the “SignSight” attack involved modifying software installers hosted on the CA’s website (“ca.gov.vn”) to insert a
One of the many features of an Active Directory Password Policy is the maximum password age. Traditional Active Directory environments have long using password aging as a means to bolster password security. Native password aging in the default Active Directory Password Policy is relatively limited in configuration settings. Let’s take a look at a few
Cybercriminals are increasingly outsourcing the task of deploying ransomware to affiliates using commodity malware and attack tools, according to new research. In a new analysis published by Sophos today and shared with The Hacker News, recent deployments of Ryuk and Egregor ransomware have involved the use of SystemBC backdoor to laterally move across the network
The investigation into how the attackers managed to compromise SolarWinds’ internal network and poison the company’s software updates is still underway, but we may be one step closer to understanding what appears to be a very meticulously planned and highly-sophisticated supply chain attack. A new report published by ReversingLabs today and shared in advance with
Network monitoring services provider SolarWinds officially released a second hotfix to address a critical vulnerability in its Orion platform that was exploited to insert malware and breach public and private entities in a wide-ranging espionage campaign. In a new update posted to its advisory page, the company urged its customers to update Orion Platform to
SolarWinds, the enterprise monitoring software provider who found itself at the epicenter of the most consequential supply chain attacks, said as many as 18,000 of its high-profile customers might have installed a tainted version of its Orion products. The acknowledgment comes as part of a new filing made by the company to the US Securities
In the classic children’s movie ‘The Princess Bride,’ one of the characters utters the phrase, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” It’s freely used as a response to someone’s misuse or misunderstanding of a word or phrase. “Response Automation” is another one of those phrases
A new wormable botnet that spreads via GitHub and Pastebin to install cryptocurrency miners and backdoors on target systems has returned with expanded capabilities to compromise web applications, IP cameras, and routers. Early last month, researchers from Juniper Threat Labs documented a crypto-mining campaign called “Gitpaste-12,” which used GitHub to host malicious code containing as
Cybersecurity firms Sophos and ReversingLabs on Monday jointly released the first-ever production-scale malware research dataset to be made available to the general public that aims to build effective defenses and drive industry-wide improvements in security detection and response. “SoReL-20M” (short for Sophos-ReversingLabs – 20 Million), as it’s called, is a dataset containing metadata, labels, and
State-sponsored actors allegedly working for Russia have targeted the US Treasury, the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), and other government agencies to monitor internal email traffic as part of a widespread cyberespionage campaign. The Washington Post, citing unnamed sources, said the latest attacks were the work of APT29 or Cozy Bear, the
The US Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of 48 state attorneys general on Wednesday filed a pair of sweeping antitrust suits against Facebook, alleging that the company abused its power in the marketplace to neutralize competitors through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp and depriving users of better privacy-friendly alternatives. “Facebook has engaged in
With the continuing rise of IoT devices, mobile networks, and digital channels, companies face a lot of pressure to generate meaningful and actionable insights from the wealth of data they capture. Gartner Research lists data democratization as one of the top strategic technology trends to watch out for. While empowering non-technical users to run ad-hoc
Microsoft on Thursday took the wraps off an ongoing campaign impacting popular web browsers that stealthily injects malware-infested ads into search results to earn money via affiliate advertising. “Adrozek,” as it’s called by the Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team, employs an “expansive, dynamic attacker infrastructure” consisting of 159 unique domains, each of which hosts an
A relatively new ransomware strain behind a series of breaches on corporate networks has developed new capabilities that allow it to broaden the scope of its targeting and evade security software—as well as with ability for its affiliates to launch double extortion attacks. The MountLocker ransomware, which only began making the rounds in July 2020,
Cybersecurity researchers from Facebook today formally linked the activities of a Vietnamese threat actor to an IT company in the country after the group was caught abusing its platform to hack into people’s accounts and distribute malware. Tracked as APT32 (or Bismuth, OceanLotus, and Cobalt Kitty), the state-aligned operatives affiliated with the Vietnam government have