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An Iran-nexus threat actor known as  UNC1549  has been attributed with medium confidence to a new set of attacks targeting aerospace, aviation, and defense industries in the Middle East, including Israel and the U.A.E. Other targets of the cyber espionage activity likely include Turkey, India, and Albania, Google-owned Mandiant said in a new analysis. UNC1549 is said to overlap with  Smoke Sandstorm  (previously Bohrium) and  Crimson Sandstorm  (previously Curium), the latter of which is an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) affiliated group also known as Imperial Kitten, TA456, Tortoiseshell, and Yellow Liderc. "This suspected UNC1549 activity has been active since at least June 2022 and is still ongoing as of February 2024," the company  said . "While regional in nature and focused mostly in the Middle East, the targeting includes entities operating worldwide." The attacks entail the use of Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure for command-and-control (C2) and social engin

Details have emerged about a now-patched high-severity security flaw in Apple's Shortcuts app that could permit a shortcut to access sensitive information on the device without users' consent. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2024-23204  (CVSS score: 7.5), was addressed by Apple on January 22, 2024, with the release of  iOS 17.3, iPadOS 17.3 ,  macOS Sonoma 14.3 , and  watchOS 10.3 . "A shortcut may be able to use sensitive data with certain actions without prompting the user," the iPhone maker said in an advisory, stating it was fixed with "additional permissions checks." Apple Shortcuts is a  scripting application  that allows users to create personalized workflows (aka macros) for  executing   specific tasks  on their devices. It comes installed by default on iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS operating systems. Bitdefender security researcher Jubaer Alnazi Jabin, who discovered and reported the Shortcuts bug, said it could be weaponized to create a

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

The Midnight Blizzard and Cloudflare-Atlassian cybersecurity incidents raised alarms about the vulnerabilities inherent in major SaaS platforms. These incidents illustrate the stakes involved in SaaS breaches — safeguarding the integrity of SaaS apps and their sensitive data is critical but is not easy. Common threat vectors such as sophisticated spear-phishing, misconfigurations and vulnerabilities in third-party app integrations demonstrate the complex security challenges facing IT systems. In the case of Midnight Blizzard, password spraying against a test environment was the initial attack vector. For Cloudflare-Atlassian, threat actors initiated the attack via compromised  OAuth tokens  from a prior breach at Okta, a SaaS identity security provider.  What Exactly Happened? Microsoft Midnight Blizzard Breach Microsoft was targeted by the Russian "Midnight Blizzard" hackers (also known as Nobelium, APT29, or Cozy Bear) who are linked to the SVR, the Kremlin's forei

Cloudflare has revealed that it was the target of a likely nation-state attack in which the threat actor leveraged stolen credentials to gain unauthorized access to its Atlassian server and ultimately access some documentation and a limited amount of source code. The intrusion, which took place between November 14 and 24, 2023, and detected on November 23, was carried out "with the goal of obtaining persistent and widespread access to Cloudflare's global network," the web infrastructure company  said , describing the actor as "sophisticated" and one who "operated in a thoughtful and methodical manner." As a precautionary measure, the company further said it rotated more than 5,000 production credentials, physically segmented test and staging systems, carried out forensic triages on 4,893 systems, reimaged and rebooted every machine across its global network. The incident involved a four-day reconnaissance period to access Atlassian Confluence and J

Google-owned Mandiant said it identified new malware employed by a China-nexus espionage threat actor known as UNC5221 and other threat groups during post-exploitation activity targeting Ivanti Connect Secure VPN and Policy Secure devices. This includes custom web shells such as BUSHWALK, CHAINLINE, FRAMESTING, and a variant of  LIGHTWIRE . "CHAINLINE is a Python web shell backdoor that is embedded in a Ivanti Connect Secure Python package that enables arbitrary command execution," the company  said , attributing it to UNC5221, adding it also detected multiple new versions of  WARPWIRE , a JavaScript-based credential stealer. The infection chains entail a successful exploitation of  CVE-2023-46805 and CVE-2024-21887 , which allow an unauthenticated threat actor to execute arbitrary commands on the Ivanti appliance with elevated privileges. The flaws have been abused as zero-days since early December 2023. Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI)  said

Microsoft on Thursday said the Russian state-sponsored threat actors responsible for a  cyber attack on its systems  in late November 2023 have been targeting other organizations and that it's currently beginning to notify them. The development comes a day after Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)  revealed  that it had been the victim of an attack perpetrated by a hacking crew tracked as  APT29 , which is also known as BlueBravo, Cloaked Ursa, Cozy Bear, Midnight Blizzard (formerly Nobelium), and The Dukes. "This threat actor is known to primarily target governments, diplomatic entities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and IT service providers, primarily in the U.S. and Europe," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team  said  in a new advisory. The primary goal of these espionage missions is to gather sensitive information that is of strategic interest to Russia by maintaining footholds for extended periods of time without attracting any attention. The latest disc

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered an updated version of a backdoor called  LODEINFO  that's distributed via spear-phishing attacks. The findings come from Japanese company ITOCHU Cyber & Intelligence, which  said  the malware "has been updated with new features, as well as changes to the anti-analysis (analysis avoidance) techniques." LODEINFO (versions 0.6.6 and 0.6.7) was  first documented  by Kaspersky in November 2022, detailing its capabilities to execute arbitrary shellcode, take screenshots, and exfiltrate files back to an actor-controlled server. A month later, ESET  disclosed attacks  targeting Japanese political establishments that led to the deployment of LODEINFO. The backdoor is the work of a Chinese nation-state actor known as Stone Panda (aka APT10, Bronze Riverside, Cicada, Earth Tengshe, MirrorFace, and Potassium), which has a history of orchestrating attacks targeting Japan since 2021. Attack chains commence with phishing emails bearing

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday issued an  emergency directive  urging Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to implement mitigations against two actively exploited zero-day flaws in Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) and Ivanti Policy Secure (IPS) products. The development arrives as the  vulnerabilities  – an authentication bypass (CVE-2023-46805) and a code injection bug (CVE-2024-21887) – have come under widespread exploitation by multiple threat actors. The flaws allow a malicious actor to craft malicious requests and execute arbitrary commands on the system. The U.S. company  acknowledged  in an advisory that it has witnessed a "sharp increase in threat actor activity" starting on January 11, 2024, after the shortcomings were publicly disclosed. "Successful exploitation of the vulnerabilities in these affected products allows a malicious threat actor to move laterally, perform data exfiltration, and establish per

The ubiquity of GitHub in information technology (IT) environments has made it a lucrative choice for threat actors to host and deliver malicious payloads and act as  dead drop resolvers , command-and-control, and data exfiltration points. "Using GitHub services for malicious infrastructure allows adversaries to blend in with legitimate network traffic, often bypassing traditional security defenses and making upstream infrastructure tracking and actor attribution more difficult," Recorded Future  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The cybersecurity firm described the approach as "living-off-trusted-sites" (LOTS), a spin on the living-off-the-land (LotL) techniques often adopted by threat actors to conceal rogue activity and fly under the radar. Prominent among the methods by which GitHub is  abused   relates  to  payload   delivery , with some actors leveraging its features for command-and-control (C2) obfuscation. Last month, ReversingLabs  detailed  a number of rogue

Threat actors affiliated with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) have targeted unpatched JetBrains TeamCity servers in widespread attacks since September 2023. The activity has been tied to a nation-state group known as  APT29 , which is also tracked as BlueBravo, Cloaked Ursa, Cozy Bear, Midnight Blizzard (formerly Nobelium), and The Dukes. It's notable for the supply chain attack  targeting SolarWinds  and its customers in 2020. "The SVR has, however, been observed using the initial access gleaned by exploiting the TeamCity CVE to escalate its privileges, move laterally, deploy additional backdoors, and take other steps to ensure persistent and long-term access to the compromised network environments," cybersecurity agencies from Poland, the U.K., and the U.S.  said . The vulnerability in question is  CVE-2023-42793  (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical security flaw that could be weaponized by unauthenticated attackers to achieve remote code execution on affec

Malware analysis encompasses a broad range of activities, including examining the malware's network traffic. To be effective at it, it's crucial to understand the common challenges and how to overcome them. Here are three prevalent issues you may encounter and the tools you'll need to address them. Decrypting HTTPS traffic Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), the protocol for secure online communication, has become a tool for malware to conceal their malicious activities. By cloaking data exchange between infected devices and command-and-control (C&C) servers, malware can operate undetected, exfiltrating sensitive data, installing additional payloads, and receiving instructions from the operators. Yet, with the right tool, decrypting HTTPS traffic is an easy task. For this purpose, we can use a man-in-the-middle (MITM) proxy. The MITM proxy works as an intermediary between the client and the server, intercepting their communication. The MITM proxy aids analy

A phishing campaign has been observed delivering an information stealer malware called  MrAnon Stealer  to unsuspecting victims via seemingly benign booking-themed PDF lures. "This malware is a Python-based information stealer compressed with cx-Freeze to evade detection," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin  said . "MrAnon Stealer steals its victims' credentials, system information, browser sessions, and cryptocurrency extensions." There is evidence to suggest that Germany is the primary target of the attack as of November 2023, owing to the number of times the downloader URL hosting the payload has been queried. Masquerading as a company looking to book hotel rooms, the phishing email bears a PDF file that, upon opening, activates the infection by prompting the recipient to download an updated version of Adobe Flash. Doing so results in the execution of .NET executables and PowerShell scripts to ultimately run a pernicious Python script, which i

The North Korean threat actor known as  Kimsuky  has been observed targeting research institutes in South Korea as part of a spear-phishing campaign with the ultimate goal of distributing backdoors on compromised systems. "The threat actor ultimately uses a backdoor to steal information and execute commands," the AhnLab Security Emergency Response Center (ASEC)  said  in an analysis posted last week. The attack chains commence with an import declaration lure that's actually a malicious JSE file containing an obfuscated PowerShell script, a Base64-encoded payload, and a decoy PDF document. The next stage entails opening the PDF file as a diversionary tactic, while the PowerShell script is executed in the background to launch the backdoor. The malware, for its part, is configured to collect network information and other relevant data (i.e., host name, user name, and operating system version) and transmit the encoded details to a remote server. It's also capable of

Threat actors can take advantage of Amazon Web Services Security Token Service (AWS STS) as a way to infiltrate cloud accounts and conduct follow-on attacks. The service enables threat actors to impersonate user identities and roles in cloud environments, Red Canary researchers Thomas Gardner and Cody Betsworth  said  in a Tuesday analysis. AWS STS is a  web service  that enables users to request temporary, limited-privilege credentials for users to access AWS resources without needing to create an AWS identity. These STS tokens can be valid  anywhere from 15 minutes to 36 hours . Threat actors can steal long-term IAM tokens through a variety of methods like malware infections, publicly exposed credentials, and phishing emails, subsequently using them to determine roles and privileges associated with those tokens via API calls. "Depending on the token's permission level, adversaries may also be able to use it to create additional IAM users with long-term AKIA tokens to e

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned of active exploitation of a  high-severity Adobe ColdFusion vulnerability  by unidentified threat actors to gain initial access to government servers. "The vulnerability in ColdFusion (CVE-2023-26360) presents as an improper access control issue and exploitation of this CVE can result in arbitrary code execution," CISA  said , adding an unnamed federal agency was targeted between June and July 2023. The shortcoming affects ColdFusion 2018 (Update 15 and earlier versions) and ColdFusion 2021 (Update 5 and earlier versions). It has been addressed in versions Update 16 and Update 6, respectively, released on March 14, 2023. It was added by CISA to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog a day later, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. Adobe, in an advisory released around that time, said it's aware of the flaw being "exploited in the wild in very limited attacks."

Organizations in the Middle East, Africa, and the U.S. have been targeted by an unknown threat actor to distribute a new backdoor called  Agent Racoon . "This malware family is written using the .NET framework and leverages the domain name service (DNS) protocol to create a covert channel and provide different backdoor functionalities," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researcher Chema Garcia  said  in a Friday analysis. Targets of the attacks span various sectors such as education, real estate, retail, non-profits, telecom, and governments. The activity has not been attributed to a known threat actor, although it's assessed to be nation-state aligned owing to the victimology pattern and the detection and defense evasion techniques used. The cybersecurity firm is tracking the cluster under the moniker CL-STA-0002. It's currently not clear how these organizations were breached, and when the attacks took place. Some of the other tools deployed by the adversary include a

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed a "severe design flaw" in Google Workspace's domain-wide delegation ( DWD ) feature that could be exploited by threat actors to facilitate privilege escalation and obtain unauthorized access to Workspace APIs without super admin privileges. "Such exploitation could result in theft of emails from Gmail, data exfiltration from Google Drive, or other unauthorized actions within Google Workspace APIs on all of the identities in the target domain," cybersecurity firm Hunters  said  in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. The design weakness – which remains active to this date – has been codenamed  DeleFriend  for its ability to manipulate existing delegations in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google Workspace without possessing super admin privileges. When reached for comment, Google disputed the characterization of the issue as a design flaw. "This report does not identify an underlying security issue in ou