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Threat hunters have discovered a rogue WordPress plugin that's capable of creating bogus administrator users and injecting malicious JavaScript code to steal credit card information. The skimming activity is part of a  Magecart campaign  targeting e-commerce websites, according to Sucuri. "As with many other malicious or fake WordPress plugins it contains some deceptive information at the top of the file to give it a veneer of legitimacy," security researcher Ben Martin  said . "In this case, comments claim the code to be 'WordPress Cache Addons.'" Malicious plugins typically find their way to WordPress sites via either a  compromised admin user  or the  exploitation of security flaws  in another plugin already installed on the site. Post installation, the plugin replicates itself to the  mu-plugins  (or must-use plugins) directory so that it's automatically enabled and conceals its presence from the admin panel. "Since the only way to re

In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, it's crucial to reevaluate how we secure web environments. Traditional antivirus-approach solutions have their merits, but they're reactive. A new report delves into the reasons for embracing proactive web security solutions, ensuring you stay ahead of emerging threats.  To learn more, download the full report  here . The New Paradigm If you've been relying on the old-style antivirus-based approach to website security up to now, then we could summarize why you need to update to the more proactive approach simply by saying — prevention is always preferable to cure. That's the overarching rationale for adopting a proactive web security solution, but let's break it down into a few more detailed reasons for updating to the newer and more effective proactive approach.  To be clear, we're not denying that an antivirus-approach solution is ideal for detecting and responding to threats, but there's no escaping the fact that it's limited

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,

Veeam has released  security updates  to address four flaws in its ONE IT monitoring and analytics platform, two of which are rated critical in severity. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2023-38547  (CVSS score: 9.9) - An unspecified flaw that can be leveraged by an unauthenticated user to gain information about the SQL server connection Veeam ONE uses to access its configuration database, resulting in remote code execution on the SQL server. CVE-2023-38548  (CVSS score: 9.8) - A flaw in Veeam ONE that allows an unprivileged user with access to the Veeam ONE Web Client to obtain the NTLM hash of the account used by the Veeam ONE Reporting Service. CVE-2023-38549  (CVSS score: 4.5) - A cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that allows a user with the Veeam ONE Power User role to obtain the access token of a user with the Veeam ONE Administrator role. CVE-2023-41723  (CVSS score: 4.3) - A vulnerability in Veeam ONE that permits a user with the Veeam ONE Rea

How To Use This Report Enhance situational awareness of techniques used by threat actors Identify potential attacks targeting your industry Gain insights to help improve and accelerate your organization's threat response Summary of Findings The Network Effect Threat Report offers insights based on unique data from  Fastly's Next-Gen WAF  from Q2 2023 (April 1, 2023 to June 30, 2023). This report looks at traffic originating from IP addresses tagged by Fastly's Network Learning Exchange (NLX), our collective threat intelligence feed that anonymously shares attack source IP addresses across all Next-Gen WAF customer networks. Before diving deeper into the attack observations, here are five key takeaways that we found most significant in our research, covering global traffic across multiple industries, including High Tech, Financial Services, Commerce, Education, and Media and entertainment. Multi-customer attacks: 69% of IPs tagged by NLX targeted multiple customers, and 6

As many as 207 websites have been infected with malicious code designed to launch a cryptocurrency miner by leveraging WebAssembly (Wasm) on the browser. Web security company Sucuri, which published details of the campaign, said it launched an investigation after one of its clients had their computer slowed down significantly every time upon navigating to their own WordPress portal. This uncovered a compromise of a theme file to inject malicious JavaScript code from a remote server -- hxxps://wm.bmwebm[.]org/auto.js -- that's loaded whenever the website's page is accessed. "Once decoded, the contents of auto.js immediately reveal the functionality of a cryptominer which starts mining when a visitor lands on the compromised site," Sucuri malware researcher Cesar Anjos  said . What's more, the deobfuscated auto.js code makes use of WebAssembly to run low-level binary code directly on the browser. WebAssembly , which is supported by all major browsers, is a  b

Businesses know they need to secure their client-side scripts. Content security policies (CSPs) are a great way to do that. But CSPs are cumbersome. One mistake and you have a potentially significant client-side security gap. Finding those gaps means long and tedious hours (or days) in manual code reviews through thousands of lines of script on your web applications. Automated content security policies can help streamline the code review process by first identifying all first- and third-party scripts and the assets they access, and then generating an appropriate content security policy to help better secure the client-side attack surface. There are few developers or AppSec professionals who claim to enjoy deploying CSPs. First, the CSP has to work for the specific web application. Then the team needs to make sure it provides the appropriate level of protection. The CSP also can't conflict with any existing widgets or plugins (or the decision must be made to not deploy the CSP or dea

Set of must-have online security tools that we believe may make a real difference to your cybersecurity program and improve your 2021 budget planning. In September, Gartner published a  list  of "Top 9 Security and Risk Trends for 2020" putting a bold emphasis on the growing complexity and size of the modern threat landscape. Incomplete visibility of external Attack surfaces led to the dramatic increase in disastrous breaches and data leaks during 2020, compromising PII and other sensitive data of millions of victims. These incidents stemmed from sophisticated intrusions by malicious nation-state actors and APT hacking groups, human error, and widespread misconfigurations exposing unprotected cloud storage or databases with confidential data to the Internet. Gartner's security analysts recommend automating laborious security tasks and processes, amid the ongoing shortage of cybersecurity skills, and promptly addressing emerging cloud and containers security risks.  G

At present, web applications have become the top targets for attackers because of potential monetization opportunities. Security breaches on the web application can cost millions. Strikingly, DNS (Domain Name System) related outage and Distributed denial of service (DDoS) lead a negative impact on businesses. Among the wide range of countermeasures, a web application firewall is the first line of defense. Web Application Firewall's basic function is to establish a hardened boundary to prevent certain malicious traffic types from acquiring resources. Though WAFs have been available since the late nineties, this early generation technology is no match for recent sophisticated cyber-attacks. They are not capable enough to offer full application control and visibility. With these increasing security risks, the new age web application firewall is the only solution that can provide proper protection. Traditional WAFs Died Or At Least Dying In the early days, web apps were less common

A new research has identified four new variants of HTTP request smuggling attacks that work against various commercial off-the-shelf web servers and HTTP proxy servers. Amit Klein, VP of Security Research at SafeBreach who presented the findings today at the Black Hat security conference, said that the attacks highlight how web servers and HTTP proxy servers are still susceptible to HTTP request smuggling even after 15 years since they were first documented. What is HTTP Request Smuggling? HTTP request smuggling (or HTTP Desyncing) is a technique employed to interfere with the way a website processes sequences of HTTP requests that are received from one or more users. Vulnerabilities related to HTTP request smuggling typically arise when the front-end (a load balancer or proxy) and the back-end servers interpret the boundary of an HTTP request differently, thereby allowing a bad actor to send (or "smuggle") an ambiguous request that gets prepended to the next le

The City of Baltimore was under cyber-attack last year, with hackers demanding $76,000 in ransom. Though the city chose not to pay the ransom, the attack still cost them nearly $18 million in damages, and then the city signed up for a $20 million cyber insurance policy. It's very evident that cyber-attacks are not only costly in terms of time and money but also bring extensive legal liability with them. According to Juniper Research 's prediction, the cost of a data breach could cross $150 million by 2020. With the rising cost of data breaches and cyber-attacks, cybersecurity has become a board room conversation on an unprecedented scale. In this ever-connected online world, web application security is the cornerstone of the overall cybersecurity of any company. When it comes to application security, web application firewall (WAF) based protection has been the first line of defense against web attacks for a while now. A web application firewall is deployed in fron