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Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack campaign targeting misconfigured Jupyter Notebooks. The activity, codenamed Panamorfi by cloud security firm Aqua, utilizes a Java-based tool called mineping to launch a TCP flood DDoS attack. Mineping is a DDoS package designed for Minecraft game servers. Attack chains entail the exploitation of internet-exposed Jupyter Notebook instances to run wget commands for fetching a ZIP archive hosted on a file-sharing site called Filebin. The ZIP file contains two Java archive (JAR) files, conn.jar and mineping.jar, with the former used to establish connections to a Discord channel and trigger the execution of the mineping.jar package. "This attack aims to consume the resources of the target server by sending a large number of TCP connection requests," Aqua researcher Assaf Morag said . "The results are written to the Discord channel." The attack campaign has bee

A Russia-linked threat actor has been linked to a new campaign that employed a car for sale as a phishing lure to deliver a modular Windows backdoor called HeadLace . "The campaign likely targeted diplomats and began as early as March 2024," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said in a report published today, attributing it with medium to high level of confidence to APT28 , which is also referred to as BlueDelta, Fancy Bear, Fighting Ursa, Forest Blizzard, FROZENLAKE, Iron Twilight, ITG05, Pawn Storm, Sednit, Sofacy, and TA422. It's worth noting that car-for-sale phishing lure themes have been previously put to use by a different Russian nation-state group called APT29 as far back as May 2023, indicating that APT28 is repurposing successful tactics for its own campaigns. Earlier this May, the threat actor was implicated in a series of campaigns targeting networks across Europe with the HeadLace malware and credential-harvesting web pages. The attacks are characterize

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

We'll TL;DR the FUDdy introduction: we all know that phishing attacks are on the rise in scale and complexity, that AI is enabling more sophisticated attacks that evade traditional defenses, and the never-ending cybersecurity talent gap means we're all struggling to keep security teams fully staffed.  Given that reality, security teams need to be able to monitor and respond to threats effectively and efficiently. You obviously can't let real threats slip past unnoticed, but you also can't afford to waste time chasing false positives.  In this post, we're going to look at some of the ways Material Security 's unique approach to email security and data protection can dramatically–and quantifiably–save your security teams hours each week while improving the effectiveness of your security program.  What's Your Alert Budget? Before we dive into the "how," let's take a moment to look at why efficiency is critical in security operations. To do that, let's think about how many alerts can

A new iteration of a sophisticated Android spyware called Mandrake has been discovered in five applications that were available for download from the Google Play Store and remained undetected for two years. The applications attracted a total of more than 32,000 installations before being pulled from the app storefront, Kaspersky said in a Monday write-up. A majority of the downloads originated from Canada, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Peru, and the U.K. "The new samples included new layers of obfuscation and evasion techniques, such as moving malicious functionality to obfuscated native libraries, using certificate pinning for C2 communications, and performing a wide array of tests to check if Mandrake was running on a rooted device or in an emulated environment," researchers Tatyana Shishkova and Igor Golovin said . Mandrake was first documented by Romanian cybersecurity vendor Bitdefender in May 2020, describing its deliberate approach to infect a handful of devices

As more people work remotely, IT departments must manage devices distributed over different cities and countries relying on VPNs and remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools for system administration.  However, like any new technology, RMM tools can also be used maliciously. Threat actors can establish connections to a victim's device and run commands, exfiltrate data, and stay undetected.  This article will cover real-world examples of RMM exploits and show you how to protect your organization from these attacks.  What are RMM tools?  RMM software simplifies network management, allowing IT professionals to remotely solve problems, install software, and upload or download files to or from devices.  Unfortunately, this connection is not always secure, and attackers can use malicious software to connect their servers to a victim's device. As these connections become easier to detect, however,  ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) groups have had to adjust their methods.  In

French judicial authorities, in collaboration with Europol, have launched a so-called "disinfection operation" to rid compromised hosts of a known malware called PlugX. The Paris Prosecutor's Office, Parquet de Paris, said the initiative was launched on July 18 and that it's expected to continue for "several months." It further said around a hundred victims located in France, Malta, Portugal, Croatia, Slovakia, and Austria have already benefited from the cleanup efforts. The development comes nearly three months after French cybersecurity firm Sekoia disclosed it sinkholed a command-and-control (C2) server linked to the PlugX trojan in September 2023 by spending $7 to acquire the IP address. It also noted that nearly 100,000 unique public IP addresses have been sending PlugX requests daily to the seized domain. PlugX (aka Korplug) is a remote access trojan (RAT) widely used by China-nexus threat actors since at least 2008, alongside other malware fam

"Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime. Yet it is often in the furnace of war that the sharpest tools of peace are forged." - Victor Hugo. In 1971, an unsettling message started appearing on several computers that comprised ARPANET, the precursor to what we now know as the Internet. The message, which read "I'm the Creeper: catch me if you can." was the output of a program named Creeper, which was developed by the famous programmer Bob Thomas while he worked at BBN Technologies. While Thomas's intentions were not malicious, the Creeper program represents the advent of what we now call a computer virus. The appearance of Creeper on ARPANET set the stage for the emergence of the first Antivirus software. While unconfirmed, it is believed that Ray Thomlinson, famously known for inventing email, developed Reaper, a program designed to remove Creeper from Infected Machines. The development of this tool used to defensively chase down and remove

Cybersecurity researchers are sounding the alarm over an ongoing campaign that's leveraging internet-exposed Selenium Grid services for illicit cryptocurrency mining. Cloud security firm Wiz is tracking the activity under the name SeleniumGreed . The campaign, which is targeting older versions of Selenium (3.141.59 and prior), is believed to be underway since at least April 2023 . "Unbeknownst to most users, Selenium WebDriver API enables full interaction with the machine itself, including reading and downloading files, and running remote commands," Wiz researchers Avigayil Mechtinger, Gili Tikochinski, and Dor Laska said . "By default, authentication is not enabled for this service. This means that many publicly accessible instances are misconfigured and can be accessed by anyone and abused for malicious purposes." Selenium Grid, part of the Selenium automated testing framework, enables parallel execution of tests across multiple workloads, different bro

The browser is the nerve center of the modern workspace. Ironically, however, the browser is also one of the least protected threat surfaces of the modern enterprise. Traditional security tools provide little protection against browser-based threats, leaving organizations exposed. Modern cybersecurity requires a new approach based on the protection of the browser itself, which offers both security and frictionless deployment.  In an upcoming live webinar ( Register here ), Or Eshed, CEO of browser security company LayerX, and Christopher Smedberg, Director of Cybersecurity at Advance Publishing, will discuss the challenges facing modern enterprise in the new hybrid-work world, the gaps found in existing security solutions, and a new approach to securing the modern enterprise workspace, which is centered on the browser. The Browser is Where Work Takes Place The browser is the key to the organization's critical assets. It connects all organizational devices, identities, and SaaS and

The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) has released patches to address multiple security vulnerabilities in the Berkeley Internet Name Domain ( BIND ) 9 Domain Name System (DNS) software suite that could be exploited to trigger a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. "A cyber threat actor could exploit one of these vulnerabilities to cause a denial-of-service condition," the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said in an advisory. The list of four vulnerabilities is listed below - CVE-2024-4076 (CVSS score: 7.5) - Due to a logic error, lookups that triggered serving stale data and required lookups in local authoritative zone data could have resulted in an assertion failure CVE-2024-1975 (CVSS score: 7.5) - Validating DNS messages signed using the SIG(0) protocol could cause excessive CPU load, leading to a denial-of-service condition. CVE-2024-1737 (CVSS score: 7.5) - It is possible to craft excessively large numbers of resource record typ

The initial onboarding stage is a crucial step for both employees and employers. However, this process often involves the practice of sharing temporary first-day passwords, which can expose organizations to security risks. Traditionally, IT departments have been cornered into either sharing passwords in plain text via email or SMS, or arranging in-person meetings to verbally communicate these credentials. Both methods carry inherent risks, from man-in-the-middle attacks to the simple human error of password mismanagement. This vulnerability creates openings for hackers, who will aim to use weak or intercepted passwords to gain unauthorized access to corporate systems. In this post, we explore the pitfalls of traditional password distribution methods during employee onboarding and introduce a solution that enhances security without compromising the ease of access for new hires. It's possible for organizations to safeguard their digital environments right from the start, ensuring a se

The JavaScript downloader malware known as SocGholish (aka FakeUpdates) is being used to deliver a remote access trojan called AsyncRAT as well as a legitimate open-source project called BOINC. BOINC , short for Berkeley Open Infrastructure Network Computing Client, is an open-source "volunteer computing" platform maintained by the University of California with an aim to carry out "large-scale distributed high-throughput computing" using participating home computers on which the app is installed. "It's similar to a cryptocurrency miner in that way (using computer resources to do work), and it's actually designed to reward users with a specific type of cryptocurrency called Gridcoin, designed for this purpose," Huntress researchers Matt Anderson, Alden Schmidt, and Greg Linares said in a report published last week. These malicious installations are designed to connect to an actor-controlled domain ("rosettahome[.]cn" or "rosettah

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new Linux variant of a ransomware strain known as Play (aka Balloonfly and PlayCrypt) that's designed to target VMware ESXi environments. "This development suggests that the group could be broadening its attacks across the Linux platform, leading to an expanded victim pool and more successful ransom negotiations," Trend Micro researchers said in a report published Friday. Play, which arrived on the scene in June 2022, is known for its double extortion tactics, encrypting systems after exfiltrating sensitive data and demanding payment in exchange for a decryption key. According to estimates released by Australia and the U.S., as many as 300 organizations have been victimized by the ransomware group as of October 2023. Statistics shared by Trend Micro for the first seven months of 2024 show that the U.S. is the country with the highest number of victims, followed by Canada, Germany, the U.K., and the Netherlands. Manufactu

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which is facing the heat for causing worldwide IT disruptions by pushing out a flawed update to Windows devices, is now warning that threat actors are exploiting the situation to distribute Remcos RAT to its customers in Latin America under the guise of providing a hotfix. The attack chains involve distributing a ZIP archive file named " crowdstrike-hotfix.zip ," which contains a malware loader named Hijack Loader (aka DOILoader or IDAT Loader) that, in turn, launches the Remcos RAT payload. Specifically, the archive file also includes a text file ("instrucciones.txt") with Spanish-language instructions that urges targets to run an executable file ("setup.exe") to recover from the issue. "Notably, Spanish filenames and instructions within the ZIP archive indicate this campaign is likely targeting Latin America-based (LATAM) CrowdStrike customers," the company said , attributing the campaign to a suspected e-