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A previously undocumented threat actor with likely ties to Chinese-speaking groups has predominantly singled out drone manufacturers in Taiwan as part of a cyber attack campaign that commenced in 2024. Trend Micro is tracking the adversary under the moniker TIDRONE , stating the activity is espionage-driven given the focus on military-related industry chains. The exact initial access vector used to breach targets is presently unknown, with Trend Micro's analysis uncovering the deployment of custom malware such as CXCLNT and CLNTEND using remote desktop tools like UltraVNC. An interesting commonality observed across different victims is the presence of the same enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, raising the possibility of a supply chain attack. The attack chains subsequently go through three different stages that are designed to facilitate privilege escalation by means of a User Account Control ( UAC ) bypass, credential dumping, and defense evasion by disabling ant

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered weaknesses in Sonos smart speakers that could be exploited by malicious actors to clandestinely eavesdrop on users. The vulnerabilities "led to an entire break in the security of Sonos's secure boot process across a wide range of devices and remotely being able to compromise several devices over the air," NCC Group security researchers Alex Plaskett and Robert Herrera said . Successful exploitation of one of these flaws could allow a remote attacker to obtain covert audio capture from Sonos devices by means of an over-the-air attack. They impact all versions prior to Sonos S2 release 15.9 and Sonos S1 release 11.12, which were shipped in October and November 2023. The findings were presented at Black Hat USA 2024. A description of the two security defects is as follows - CVE-2023-50809 - A vulnerability in the Sonos One Gen 2 Wi-Fi stack that does not properly validate an information element while negotiating a WPA2 four-wa

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,

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new suspicious package uploaded to the npm package registry that's designed to drop a remote access trojan (RAT) on compromised systems. The package in question is glup-debugger-log , which targets users of the gulp toolkit by masquerading as a "logger for gulp and gulp plugins." It has been downloaded 175 times to date. Software supply chain security firm Phylum, which discovered the package, said the software comes fitted with two obfuscated files that work in tandem to deploy the malicious payload. "One worked as a kind of initial dropper setting the stage for the malware campaign by compromising the target machine if it met certain requirements, then downloading additional malware components, and the other script providing the attacker with a persistent remote access mechanism to control the compromised machine," it said . Phylum's closer examination of the library's package.json file – which acts as

In today's digital-first business environment dominated by SaaS applications, organizations increasingly depend on third-party vendors for essential cloud services and software solutions. As more vendors and services are added to the mix, the complexity and potential vulnerabilities within the  SaaS supply chain  snowball quickly. That's why effective vendor risk management (VRM) is a critical strategy in identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks to protect organizational assets and data integrity. Meanwhile, common approaches to vendor risk assessments are too slow and static for the modern world of SaaS. Most organizations have simply adapted their legacy evaluation techniques for on-premise software to apply to SaaS providers. This not only creates massive bottlenecks, but also causes organizations to inadvertently accept far too much risk. To effectively adapt to the realities of modern work, two major aspects need to change: the timeline of initial assessment must shorte

In a world where more & more organizations are adopting open-source components as foundational blocks in their application's infrastructure, it's difficult to consider traditional SCAs as complete protection mechanisms against open-source threats. Using open-source libraries saves tons of coding and debugging time, and by that - shortens the time to deliver our applications. But, as codebases become increasingly composed of open-source software, it's time to respect the entire attack surface - including attacks on the supply chain itself - when choosing an  SCA platform  to depend upon. The Impact of One Dependency When a company adds an open-source library, they are probably adding not just the library they intended to, but also many other libraries as well. This is due to the way open-source libraries are built: just like every other application on the planet, they aim for a speed of delivery and development and, as such, rely on code other people built - i.e., ot

A new deceptive campaign has been observed hijacking GitHub accounts and committing malicious code disguised as Dependabot contributions with an aim to steal passwords from developers. "The malicious code exfiltrates the GitHub project's defined secrets to a malicious C2 server and modify any existing javascript files in the attacked project with a web-form password-stealer malware code effecting any end-user submitting its password in a web form," Checkmarx  said  in a technical report. The malware is also designed to capture GitHub secrets and variables to a remote server by means of a GitHub Action. The software supply chain security firm said it observed the atypical commits to hundreds of public and private GitHub repositories between July 8 and 11, 2023. It has emerged that the victims had their GitHub personal access tokens stolen and used by the threat actors to make falsified code commits to users' repositories by posing as Dependabot. Dependabot  is d

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new ongoing campaign aimed at the npm ecosystem that leverages a unique execution chain to deliver an unknown payload to targeted systems. "The packages in question seem to be published in pairs, each pair working in unison to fetch additional resources which are subsequently decoded and/or executed," software supply chain security firm Phylum  said  in a report released last week. To that end, the order in which the pair of packages are installed is paramount to pulling off a successful attack, as the first of the two modules is designed to store locally a token retrieved from a remote server. The campaign was first discovered on June 11, 2023. The second package subsequently passes this token as a parameter alongside the operating system type to an  HTTP GET request  to acquire a second script from the remote server. A successful execution returns a Base64-encoded string that is immediately executed but only if that string is

Google on Wednesday announced the  0.1 Beta version  of  GUAC  (short for Graph for Understanding Artifact Composition) for organizations to secure their software supply chains. To that end, the search giant is  making available  the open source framework as an API for developers to integrate their own tools and policy engines. GUAC  aims to aggregate software security metadata from different sources into a graph database that maps out relationships between software, helping organizations determine how one piece of software affects another. "Graph for Understanding Artifact Composition ( GUAC ) gives you organized and actionable insights into your software supply chain security position," Google  says  in its documentation. "GUAC ingests software security metadata, like SBOMs, and maps out the relationship between software so that you can fully understand your software security position." In other words, it's designed to bring together Software Bill of M

The notorious North Korea-aligned state-sponsored actor known as the  Lazarus Group  has been attributed to a new campaign aimed at Linux users. The attacks are part of a persistent and long-running activity tracked under the name  Operation Dream Job , ESET said in a  new report  published today. The findings are crucial, not least because it marks the first publicly documented example of the adversary using Linux malware as part of this social engineering scheme. Operation Dream Job , also known as  DeathNote or NukeSped , refers to multiple attack waves wherein the group leverages fraudulent job offers as a lure to trick unsuspecting targets into downloading malware. It also  exhibits overlaps  with two other Lazarus clusters known as Operation In(ter)ception and Operation North Star. The attack chain discovered by ESET is no different in that it delivers a fake HSBC job offer as a decoy within a ZIP archive file that's then used to launch a Linux backdoor named SimplexTea

Microsoft on Tuesday disclosed the intrusion activity aimed at Indian power grid entities earlier this year likely involved the exploitation of security flaws in a now-discontinued web server called Boa . The tech behemoth's cybersecurity division  said  the vulnerable component poses a "supply chain risk that may affect millions of organizations and devices." The findings build on a prior report  published  by Recorded Future in April 2022, which delved into a sustained campaign orchestrated by suspected China-linked adversaries to strike critical infrastructure organizations in India. The cybersecurity firm attributed the attacks to a previously undocumented threat cluster called Threat Activity Group 38. While the Indian government described the attacks as unsuccessful "probing attempts," China denied it was behind the campaign. The connections to China stem from the use of a modular backdoor dubbed  ShadowPad , which is known to be shared among several

Introduction In many ways, the software supply chain is similar to that of manufactured goods, which we all know has been largely impacted by a global pandemic and shortages of raw materials.  However, in the IT world, it is not shortages or pandemics that have been the main obstacles to overcome in recent years, but rather attacks aimed at using them to harm hundreds or even thousands of victims simultaneously. If you've heard of a cyber attack between 2020 and today, it's likely that the software supply chain played a role.  When we talk about an attack on the software supply chain, we are actually referring to two successive attacks: one that targets a supplier, and one that targets one or more downstream users in the chain, using the first as a vehicle. In this article, we will dive into the mechanisms and risks of the software supply chain by looking at a typical vulnerability of the modern development cycle: the presence of personal identifying information, or "

More details have emerged about the operators behind the  first-known phishing campaign  specifically aimed at the Python Package Index (PyPI), the official third-party software repository for the programming language. Connecting it to a threat actor tracked as  JuiceLedger , cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, along with Checkmarx, described the group as a relatively new entity that surfaced in early 2022. Initial "low-key" campaigns are said to have involved the use of rogue Python installer applications to deliver a .NET-based malware called JuiceStealer that's engineered to siphon passwords and other sensitive data from victims' web browsers. The attacks received a significant facelift last month when the JuiceLedger actors  targeted PyPi package contributors  in a phishing campaign, resulting in the compromise of three packages with malware. "The supply chain attack on PyPI package contributors appears to be an escalation of a campaign begun earlier in th

In another finding that could expose developers to increased risk of a supply chain attack, it has emerged that nearly one-third of the packages in PyPI, the Python Package Index, trigger automatic code execution upon downloading them. "A worrying feature in pip/PyPI allows code to automatically run when developers are merely downloading a package," Checkmarx researcher Yehuda Gelb  said  in a technical report published this week. "Also, this feature is alarming due to the fact that a great deal of the malicious packages we are finding in the wild use this feature of code execution upon installation to achieve higher infection rates." One of the ways by which packages can be installed for Python is by executing the " pip install " command, which, in turn, invokes a file called "setup.py" that comes bundled along with the module. "setup.py," as the name implies, is a  setup script  that's used to specify metadata associated wit

Lazarus Group, the advanced persistent threat (APT) group attributed to the North Korean government, has been observed waging two separate supply chain attack campaigns as a means to gain a foothold into corporate networks and target a wide range of downstream entities. The latest intelligence-gathering operation involved the use of MATA malware framework as well as backdoors dubbed  BLINDINGCAN  and  COPPERHEDGE  to attack the defense industry, an IT asset monitoring solution vendor based in Latvia, and a think tank located in South Korea, according to a new  Q3 2021 APT Trends report  published by Kaspersky. In one instance, the supply-chain attack originated from an infection chain that stemmed from legitimate South Korean security software running a malicious payload, leading to the deployment of the BLINDINGCAN and COPPERHEDGE malware on the think tank's network in June 2021. The other attack on the Latvian company in May is an "atypical victim" for Lazarus, the