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Microsoft released its final set of Patch Tuesday updates for 2023, closing out 34 flaws in its software, making it one of the lightest releases in recent years. Of the 34 shortcomings, four are rated Critical and 30 are rated Important in severity. The fixes are in addition to  18 flaws  Microsoft addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of  Patch Tuesday updates for November 2023 . According to data from the  Zero Day Initiative , the software giant has patched more than 900 flaws this year, making it one of the busiest years for Microsoft patches. For comparison, Redmond resolved 917 CVEs in 2022. While none of the vulnerabilities are listed as publicly known or under active attack at the time of release, some of the notable ones are listed below - CVE-2023-35628  (CVSS score: 8.1) - Windows MSHTML Platform Remote Code Execution Vulnerability CVE-2023-35630  (CVSS score: 8.8) - Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) Remote Code Execution Vulnerability CVE-2

Microsoft on Wednesday said that a user containment feature in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint helped thwart a "large-scale remote encryption attempt" made by  Akira ransomware actors  targeting an unknown industrial organization in early June 2023. The tech giant's threat intelligence team is tracking the operator as Storm-1567. The attack leveraged devices that were not onboarded to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint as a defense evasion tactic, while also conducting a series of reconnaissance and lateral movement activities prior to encrypting the devices using a compromised user account. But the new  automatic attack disruption capability  meant that the breached accounts are prevented from "accessing endpoints and other resources in the network, limiting attackers' ability to move laterally regardless of the account's Active Directory state or privilege level." In other words, the idea is to cut off all inbound and outbound communication and proh

Want to know what's the latest and greatest in SecOps for 2024? Gartner's recently released Hype Cycle for Security Operations report takes important steps to organize and mature the domain of Continuous Threat Exposure Management, aka CTEM. Three categories within this domain are included in this year's report: Threat Exposure Management, Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAP), and Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV). These category definitions are aimed at providing some structure to the evolving landscape of exposure management technologies. Pentera, listed as a sample vendor in the newly defined AEV category, is playing a pivotal role in increasing the adoption of CTEM, with a focus on security validation. Following is our take on the CTEM related product categories and what they mean for enterprise security leaders. The Industry is Maturing CTEM, coined by Gartner in 2022, presents a structural approach for continuously assessing, prioritizing, validating, and remediating expo

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a case of privilege escalation associated with a Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) application by taking advantage of an abandoned reply URL. "An attacker could leverage this abandoned URL to redirect authorization codes to themselves, exchanging the ill-gotten authorization codes for access tokens," Secureworks Counter Threat Unit (CTU)  said  in a technical report published last week. "The threat actor could then call Power Platform API via a middle-tier service and obtain elevated privileges." Following responsible disclosure on April 5, 2023, the issue was addressed by Microsoft via an update released a day later. Secureworks has also made available an  open-source tool  that other organizations can use to scan for abandoned reply URLs. Reply URL , also called redirect URI, refers to the location where the authorization server sends the user once the app has been successfully authorized and grant

Introduced in 1999, Microsoft Active Directory is the default identity and access management service in Windows networks, responsible for assigning and enforcing security policies for all network endpoints. With it, users can access various resources across networks. As things tend to do, times, they are a'changin' – and a few years back, Microsoft introduced Azure Active Directory, the cloud-based version of AD to extend the AD paradigm, providing organizations with an Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) solution across both the cloud and on-prem apps. (Note that as of July 11th 2023, this service was renamed to  Microsoft Entra ID , but for the sake of simplicity, we'll refer to it as Azure AD in this post) Both Active Directory and Azure AD are critical to the functioning of on-prem, cloud-based, and hybrid ecosystems, playing a key role in uptime and business continuity. And with 90% of organizations using the service for employee authentication, access control and ID manag

The recent attack against  Microsoft's email infrastructure  by a Chinese nation-state actor referred to as Storm-0558 is said to have a broader scope than previously thought. According to cloud security company Wiz, the inactive Microsoft account (MSA) consumer signing key used to forge Azure Active Directory (Azure AD or AAD) tokens to gain illicit access to Outlook Web Access (OWA) and Outlook.com could also have allowed the adversary to forge access tokens for various types of Azure AD applications. This  includes  every application that supports personal account authentication, such as OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams; customers applications that support the "Login with Microsoft functionality," and multi-tenant applications in certain conditions. "Everything in the world of Microsoft leverages Azure Active Directory auth tokens for access," Ami Luttwak, chief technology officer and co-founder of Wiz, said in a statement. "An attacker with an AAD si

A security shortcoming in Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) Open Authorization ( OAuth ) process could have been exploited to achieve full account takeover, researchers said. California-based identity and access management service Descope, which discovered and reported the issue in April 2023, dubbed it  nOAuth . "nOAuth is an authentication implementation flaw that can affect Microsoft Azure AD multi-tenant OAuth applications," Omer Cohen, chief security officer at Descope,  said . The misconfiguration has to do with how a malicious actor can modify email attributes under "Contact Information" in the Azure AD account and exploit the "Log in with Microsoft" feature to hijack a victim account. To pull off the attack, all an adversary has to do is to create and access an Azure AD admin account and modify their email address to that of a victim and take advantage of the single sign-on scheme on a vulnerable app or website. "If the app merges u

Active Directory (AD) is among the oldest pieces of software still used in the production environment and can be found in most organizations today. This is despite the fact that its historical security gaps have never been amended. For example, because of its inability to apply any security measures beyond checking for a password and username match, AD (as well the resources it manages) is dangerously exposed to the use of compromised credentials. Furthermore, this exposure is not confined to the on-prem environment. The common practice of syncing passwords between AD and the cloud identity provider means any AD breach is a potential risk to the SaaS environment as well. In this article, we'll explore AD's inherent security weaknesses and examine their scope and potential impact. We'll then learn how Silverfort's Unified Identity Protection platform can address these weaknesses at their root and provide organizations using AD with the resiliency they need to thwart identity threa

Active Directory (AD) is a powerful authentication and directory service used by organizations worldwide. With this ubiquity and power comes the potential for abuse. Insider threats offer some of the most potentials for destruction. Many internal users have over-provisioned access and visibility into the internal network. Insiders' level of access and trust in a network leads to unique vulnerabilities. Network security often focuses on keeping a threat actor out, not on existing users' security and potential vulnerabilities. Staying on top of potential threats means protecting against inside and outside threats. Active Directory Vulnerabilities From the outside, a properly configured AD domain offers a secure authentication and authorization solution. But with complex social engineering and phishing email attacks, an existing AD user can become compromised. Once inside, threat actors have many options to attack Active Directory. Insecure Devices With "Bring Your Own

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday moved to add a  critical SAP security flaw  to its  Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog , based on evidence of active exploitation. The issue in question is  CVE-2022-22536 , which has received the highest possible risk score of 10.0 on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system and was addressed by SAP as part of its Patch Tuesday updates for February 2022. Described as an HTTP request smuggling vulnerability, the shortcoming impacts the following product versions - SAP Web Dispatcher (Versions - 7.49, 7.53, 7.77, 7.81, 7.85, 7.22EXT, 7.86, 7.87) SAP Content Server (Version - 7.53) SAP NetWeaver and ABAP Platform (Versions - KERNEL 7.22, 8.04, 7.49, 7.53, 7.77, 7.81, 7.85, 7.86, 7.87, KRNL64UC 8.04, 7.22, 7.22EXT, 7.49, 7.53, KRNL64NUC 7.22, 7.22EXT, 7.49) "An unauthenticated attacker can prepend a victim's request with arbitrary data, allowing for function execution impersonating the victim

The malware loader known as Bumblebee is being increasingly co-opted by threat actors associated with BazarLoader, TrickBot, and IcedID in their campaigns to breach target networks for post-exploitation activities. "Bumblebee operators conduct intensive reconnaissance activities and redirect the output of executed commands to files for exfiltration," Cybereason researchers Meroujan Antonyan and Alon Laufer  said  in a technical write-up. Bumblebee  first came to light in March 2022 when Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) unmasked the activities of an initial access broker dubbed  Exotic Lily  with ties to the  TrickBot  and the larger  Conti  collectives. Typically delivered via initial access acquired through spear-phishing campaigns, the modus operandi has since been tweaked by eschewing macro-laced documents in favor of ISO and LNK files, primarily in response to Microsoft's decision to  block macros by default . "Distribution of the malware is done

Although there is a greater awareness of cybersecurity threats than ever before, it is becoming increasingly difficult for IT departments to get their security budgets approved. Security budgets seem to shrink each year and IT pros are constantly being asked to do more with less. Even so, the situation may not be hopeless. There are some things that IT pros can do to improve the chances of getting their security budgets approved.  Presenting the Problem in a Compelling Way If you want to get your proposed security budget approved, you will need to present security problems in a compelling way. While those who are in charge of the organization's finances are likely aware of the need for good security, they have probably also seen enough examples of "a security solution in search of a problem" to make them skeptical of security spending requests. If you want to persuade those who control the money, then you will need to convince them of three things: You are trying to

In any organization, there are certain accounts that are designated as being privileged. These privileged accounts differ from standard user accounts in that they have permission to perform actions that go beyond what standard users can do. The actions vary based on the nature of the account but can include anything from setting up new user accounts to shutting down mission-critical systems. Privileged accounts are essential tools. Without these accounts, the IT staff would be unable to do its job. At the same time, privileged accounts can pose a serious threat to an organization's security. Added risk of a privileged account  Imagine for a moment that a hacker manages to steal a standard user's password and is able to log in as that user. Even though the hacker would have access to certain resources at that point, they would be constrained by the user's privileges (or lack thereof). In other words, the hacker would be able to browse the Internet, open some applications, and access

Microsoft is urging customers to patch two security vulnerabilities in Active Directory domain controllers that it  addressed in November  following the availability of a proof-of-concept (PoC) tool on December 12. The two vulnerabilities — tracked as  CVE-2021-42278  and  CVE-2021-42287  — have a severity rating of 7.5 out of a maximum of 10 and concern a privilege escalation flaw affecting the Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) component. Credited with discovering and reporting both the bugs is Andrew Bartlett of Catalyst IT. Active Directory is a  directory service  that runs on Microsoft Windows Server and is used for identity and access management. Although the tech giant marked the shortcomings as " exploitation Less Likely " in its assessment, the public disclosure of the PoC has prompted renewed calls for applying the fixes to mitigate any potential exploitation by threat actors. While CVE-2021-42278 enables an attacker to tamper with the SAM-Account-Name

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed an unpatched security vulnerability in the protocol used by Microsoft Azure Active Directory that potential adversaries could abuse to stage undetected brute-force attacks. "This flaw allows threat actors to perform single-factor brute-force attacks against Azure Active Directory ( Azure AD ) without generating sign-in events in the targeted organization's tenant," researchers from Secureworks Counter Threat Unit (CTU)  said  in a report published on Wednesday. Azure Active Directory is Microsoft's enterprise cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) solution designed for single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication. It's also a core component of Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), with capabilities to provide authentication to other applications via OAuth. The weakness resides in the  Seamless Single Sign-On  feature that allows employees to automatically sign in when using their corporate devices that