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A new sophisticated cyber attack has been observed targeting endpoints geolocated to Ukraine with an aim to deploy Cobalt Strike and seize control of the compromised hosts. The attack chain, per Fortinet FortiGuard Labs, involves a Microsoft Excel file that carries an embedded VBA macro to initiate the infection, "The attacker uses a multi-stage malware strategy to deliver the notorious 'Cobalt Strike' payload and establish communication with a command-and-control (C2) server," security researcher Cara Lin said in a Monday report. "This attack employs various evasion techniques to ensure successful payload delivery." Cobalt Strike , developed and maintained by Fortra, is a legitimate adversary simulation toolkit used for red teaming operations. However, over the years, cracked versions of the software have been extensively exploited by threat actors for malicious purposes. The starting point of the attack is the Excel document that, when launched, dis

Cloud computing and analytics company Snowflake said a "limited number" of its customers have been singled out as part of a targeted campaign. "We have not identified evidence suggesting this activity was caused by a vulnerability, misconfiguration, or breach of Snowflake's platform," the company said in a joint statement along with CrowdStrike and Google-owned Mandiant. "We have not identified evidence suggesting this activity was caused by compromised credentials of current or former Snowflake personnel." It further said the activity is directed against users with single-factor authentication, with the unidentified threat actors leveraging credentials previously purchased or obtained through information-stealing malware. "Threat actors are actively compromising organizations' Snowflake customer tenants by using stolen credentials obtained by infostealing malware and logging into databases that are configured with single factor authenticat

For years, securing a company's systems was synonymous with securing its "perimeter." There was what was safe "inside" and the unsafe outside world. We built sturdy firewalls and deployed sophisticated detection systems, confident that keeping the barbarians outside the walls kept our data and systems safe. The problem is that we no longer operate within the confines of physical on-prem installations and controlled networks. Data and applications now reside in distributed cloud environments and data centers, accessed by users and devices connecting from anywhere on the planet. The walls have crumbled, and the perimeter has dissolved, opening the door to a new battlefield: identity . Identity is at the center of what the industry has praised as the new gold standard of enterprise security: "zero trust." In this paradigm, explicit trust becomes mandatory for any interactions between systems, and no implicit trust shall subsist. Every access request, regardless of its origin,

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as Andariel has been observed using a new Golang-based backdoor called Dora RAT in its attacks targeting educational institutes, manufacturing firms, and construction businesses in South Korea. "Keylogger, Infostealer, and proxy tools on top of the backdoor were utilized for the attacks," the AhnLab Security Intelligence Center (ASEC) said in a report published last week. "The threat actor probably used these malware strains to control and steal data from the infected systems." The attacks are characterized by the use of a vulnerable Apache Tomcat server to distribute the malware, the South Korean cybersecurity firm added, noting the system in question ran the 2013 version of Apache Tomcat, making it susceptible to several vulnerabilities. Andariel, also known by the names Nickel Hyatt, Onyx Sleet, and Silent Chollima, is an advanced persistent threat (APT) group that operates on behalf of North Korea's strategic

More than 600,000 small office/home office (SOHO) routers are estimated to have been bricked and taken offline following a destructive cyber attack staged by unidentified cyber actors, disrupting users' access to the internet. The mysterious event, which took place between October 25 and 27, 2023, and impacted a single internet service provider (ISP) in the U.S., has been codenamed Pumpkin Eclipse by the Lumen Technologies Black Lotus Labs team. It specifically affected three router models issued by the ISP: ActionTec T3200, ActionTec T3260, and Sagemcom. "The incident took place over a 72-hour period between October 25-27, rendered the infected devices permanently inoperable, and required a hardware-based replacement," the company said in a technical report. The blackout is significant, not least because it led to the abrupt removal of 49% of all modems from the impacted ISP's autonomous system number (ASN) during the time-frame. While the name of the ISP was

Microsoft has emphasized the need for securing internet-exposed operational technology (OT) devices following a spate of cyber attacks targeting such environments since late 2023. "These repeated attacks against OT devices emphasize the crucial need to improve the security posture of OT devices and prevent critical systems from becoming easy targets," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said . The company noted that a cyber attack on an OT system could allow malicious actors to tamper with critical parameters used in industrial processes, either programmatically via the programmable logic controller (PLC) or using the graphical controls of the human-machine interface (HMI), resulting in malfunctions and system outages. It further said that OT systems often lack adequate security mechanisms, making them ripe for exploitation by adversaries and carry out attacks that are "relatively easy to execute," a fact compounded by the additional risks introduced by direc

Check Point is warning of a zero-day vulnerability in its Network Security gateway products that threat actors have exploited in the wild. Tracked as CVE-2024-24919 (CVSS score: 8.6), the issue impacts CloudGuard Network, Quantum Maestro, Quantum Scalable Chassis, Quantum Security Gateways, and Quantum Spark appliances. "The vulnerability potentially allows an attacker to read certain information on Internet-connected Gateways with remote access VPN or mobile access enabled," Check Point said . Hotfixes are available in the following versions - Quantum Security Gateway and CloudGuard Network Security Versions - R81.20, R81.10, R81, R80.40 Quantum Maestro and Quantum Scalable Chassis - R81.20, R81.10, R80.40, R80.30SP, R80.20SP Quantum Spark Gateways Version - R81.10.x, R80.20.x, R77.20.x The development comes days after the Israeli cybersecurity company warned of attacks targeting its VPN devices to infiltrate enterprise networks. "By May 24, 2024, we identi

The MITRE Corporation has revealed that the cyber attack targeting the not-for-profit company towards late December 2023 by exploiting zero-day flaws in Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) involved the threat actor creating rogue virtual machines (VMs) within its VMware environment. "The adversary created their own rogue VMs within the VMware environment, leveraging compromised vCenter Server access," MITRE researchers Lex Crumpton and Charles Clancy  said . "They wrote and deployed a JSP web shell (BEEFLUSH) under the vCenter Server's Tomcat server to execute a Python-based tunneling tool, facilitating SSH connections between adversary-created VMs and the ESXi hypervisor infrastructure." The motive behind such a move is to sidestep detection by obscuring their malicious activities from centralized management interfaces like vCenter and maintain persistent access while reducing the risk of being discovered. Details of the attack  emerged  last month when MITRE rev

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a critical security flaw in a popular logging and metrics utility called Fluent Bit that could be exploited to achieve denial-of-service (DoS), information disclosure, or remote code execution. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2024-4323 , has been codenamed Linguistic Lumberjack by Tenable Research. It impacts versions from 2.0.7 through 3.0.3, with fixes  available  in  version 3.0.4 . The issue relates to a case of memory corruption in Fluent Bit's built-in HTTP server that could allow for DoS, information leakage, or remote code execution. Specifically, it relates to sending maliciously crafted requests to the  monitoring API  through endpoints such as /api/v1/traces and /api/v1/trace. "Regardless of whether or not any traces are configured, it is still possible for any user with access to this API endpoint to query it," security researcher Jimi Sebree  said . "During the parsing of incoming requests for the /api/

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

Microsoft has addressed a total of  61 new security flaws  in its software as part of its Patch Tuesday updates for May 2024, including two zero-days which have been actively exploited in the wild. Of the 61 flaws, one is rated Critical, 59 are rated Important, and one is rated Moderate in severity. This is in addition to  30 vulnerabilities  resolved in the Chromium-based Edge browser over the past month, including two recently disclosed zero-days ( CVE-2024-4671  and  CVE-2024-4761 ) that have been tagged as exploited in attacks. The two security shortcomings that have been weaponized in the wild are below - CVE-2024-30040  (CVSS score: 8.8) - Windows MSHTML Platform Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability CVE-2024-30051  (CVSS score: 7.8) - Windows Desktop Window Manager ( DWM ) Core Library Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability "An unauthenticated attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain code execution through convincing a user to open a malicious

With the browser becoming the most prevalent workspace in the enterprise, it is also turning into a popular attack vector for cyber attackers. From account takeovers to malicious extensions to phishing attacks, the browser is a means for stealing sensitive data and accessing organizational systems. Security leaders who are planning their security architecture require data and insights into the browser threat landscape. Recently, LayerX released the " Annual Browser Security Report 2024 ", providing an in-depth analysis of the evolving threat landscape for browser security.  This comprehensive report highlights the critical vulnerabilities and attack vectors that pose the greatest risks to enterprise security. It allows decision-makers and stakeholders to benchmark the security challenges of their environment so they can make actionable decisions. Below, we detail key findings from the report and a summarized list of security recommendations. We urge you to read the entire  report ,

Cybersecurity researchers have identified a malicious Python package that purports to be an offshoot of the  popular requests library  and has been found concealing a Golang-version of the Sliver command-and-control (C2) framework within a PNG image of the project's logo.  The package employing this steganographic trickery is  requests-darwin-lite , which has been downloaded 417 times prior to it being taken down from the Python Package Index (PyPI) registry. Requests-darwin-lite "appeared to be a fork of the ever-popular requests package with a few key differences, most notably the inclusion of a malicious Go binary packed into a large version of the actual requests side-bar PNG logo," software supply chain security firm Phylum  said . The changes have been introduced in the package's setup.py file, which has been configured to decode and execute a Base64-encoded command to gather the system's Universally Unique Identifier ( UUID ), but only after confirming

Polish government institutions have been targeted as part of a large-scale malware campaign orchestrated by a Russia-linked nation-state actor called  APT28 . "The campaign sent emails with content intended to arouse the recipient's interest and persuade him to click on the link," the computer emergency response team, CERT Polska,  said  in a Wednesday bulletin. Clicking on the link redirects the victim to the domain run.mocky[.]io, which, in turn, is used to redirect to another legitimate site named webhook[.]site, a  free service  that allows developers to inspect data that's being sent via a webhook, in an effort to evade detection. The next step involves the download of a ZIP archive file from webhook[.]site, which contains the Windows Calculator binary that masquerades as a JPG image file ("IMG-238279780.jpg.exe"), a hidden batch script file, and another hidden DLL file ("WindowsCodecs.dll"). Should a victim run the application, the malic

Czechia and Germany on Friday revealed that they were the target of a long-term cyber espionage campaign conducted by the Russia-linked nation-state actor known as  APT28 , drawing condemnation from the European Union (E.U.), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the U.K., and the U.S. The Czech Republic's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), in a statement, said some unnamed entities in the country have been attacked using a security flaw in Microsoft Outlook that came to light early last year. "Cyber attacks targeting political entities, state institutions and critical infrastructure are not only a threat to national security, but also disrupt the democratic processes on which our free society is based," the MFA  said . The security flaw in question is  CVE-2023-23397 , a now-patched critical privilege escalation bug in Outlook that could allow an adversary to access Net-NTLMv2 hashes and then use them to authenticate themselves by means of a relay attack. G

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

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a previously undocumented malware targeting Android devices that uses compromised WordPress sites as relays for its actual command-and-control (C2) servers for detection evasion. The malware, codenamed  Wpeeper , is an ELF binary that leverages the HTTPS protocol to secure its C2 communications. "Wpeeper is a typical backdoor Trojan for Android systems, supporting functions such as collecting sensitive device information, managing files and directories, uploading and downloading, and executing commands," researchers from the QiAnXin XLab team  said . The ELF binary is embedded within a repackaged application that purports to be the  UPtodown App Store  app for Android (package name "com.uptodown"), with the APK file acting as a delivery vehicle for the backdoor in a manner that evades detection. The Chinese cybersecurity firm said it discovered the malware after it detected a  Wpeeper artifact  with zero detection on t