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Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two security flaws in Microsoft's Azure Health Bot Service that, if exploited, could permit a malicious actor to achieve lateral movement within customer environments and access sensitive patient data. The critical issues, now patched by Microsoft, could have allowed access to cross-tenant resources within the service, Tenable said in a new report shared with The Hacker News. The Azure AI Health Bot Service is a cloud platform that enables developers in healthcare organizations to build and deploy AI-powered virtual health assistants and create copilots to manage administrative workloads and engage with their patients. This includes bots created by insurance service providers to allow customers to look up the status of a claim and ask questions about benefits and services, as well as bots managed by healthcare entities to help patients find appropriate care or look up nearby doctors. Tenable's research specifically focuses on on

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Monday announced the disruption of online infrastructure associated with a nascent ransomware group called Radar/Dispossessor. The effort saw the dismantling of three U.S. servers, three United Kingdom servers, 18 German servers, eight U.S.-based criminal domains, and one German-based criminal domain. Dispossessor is said to be led by individual(s) who go by the online moniker "Brain." "Since its inception in August 2023, Radar/Dispossessor has quickly developed into an internationally impactful ransomware group, targeting and attacking small-to-mid-sized businesses and organizations from the production, development, education, healthcare, financial services, and transportation sectors," the FBI said in a statement. As many as 43 companies have been identified as victims of Dispossessor attacks, including those located in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Honduras, India, Peru, Pol

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 multiple critical flaws in Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings that, if successfully exploited, could result in serious consequences. "The impact of these vulnerabilities range between remote code execution (RCE), full-service user takeover (which might provide powerful administrative access), manipulation of AI modules, exposing sensitive data, data exfiltration, and denial-of-service," cloud security firm Aqua said in a detailed report shared with The Hacker News. Following responsible disclosure in February 2024, Amazon addressed the shortcomings over several months from March to June. The findings were presented at Black Hat USA 2024. Central to the issue, dubbed Bucket Monopoly, is an attack vector referred to as Shadow Resource, which, in this case, refers to the automatic creation of an AWS S3 bucket when using services like CloudFormation, Glue, EMR, SageMaker, ServiceCatalog, and CodeStar. The S3 bucket name created in

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of security flaws in the Roundcube webmail software that could be exploited to execute malicious JavaScript in a victim's web browser and steal sensitive information from their account under specific circumstances. "When a victim views a malicious email in Roundcube sent by an attacker, the attacker can execute arbitrary JavaScript in the victim's browser," cybersecurity company Sonar said in an analysis published this week. "Attackers can abuse the vulnerability to steal emails, contacts, and the victim's email password as well as send emails from the victim's account." Following responsible disclosure on June 18, 2024, the three vulnerabilities have been addressed in Roundcube versions 1.6.8 and 1.5.8 released on August 4, 2024. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2024-42008 - A cross-site scripting flaw via a malicious email attachment served with a dangerous Content-Type head

Everyone loves the double-agent plot twist in a spy movie, but it's a different story when it comes to securing company data. Whether intentional or unintentional, insider threats are a legitimate concern. According to CSA research , 26% of companies who reported a SaaS security incident were struck by an insider.  The challenge for many is detecting those threats before they lead to full breaches. Many security professionals assume there is nothing they can do to protect themselves from a legitimate managed user who logs in with valid credentials using a company MFA method. Insiders can log in during regular business hours, and can easily justify their access within the application.  Cue the plot twist: With the right tools in place, businesses can protect themselves from the enemy from within (and without).  Learn how to secure your entire SaaS stack from both internal and external threats Subduing Identity-Centric Threats with ITDR  In SaaS security, an Identity Threat Detect

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), along with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), filed a lawsuit against popular video-sharing platform TikTok for "flagrantly violating" children's privacy laws in the country. The agencies claimed the company knowingly permitted children to create TikTok accounts and to view and share short-form videos and messages with adults and others on the service. They also accused it of illegally collecting and retaining a wide variety of personal information from these children without notifying or obtaining consent from their parents, in contravention of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). TikTok's practices also infringed a 2019 consent order between the company and the government in which it pledged to notify parents before collecting children's data and remove videos from users under 13 years old, they added. COPPA requires online platforms to gather, use, or disclose personal information from children unde

How to detect and prevent attackers from using these various techniques Obfuscation is an important technique for protecting software that also carries risks, especially when used by malware authors. In this article, we examine obfuscation, its effects, and responses to it. What Is Obfuscation? Obfuscation is the technique of intentionally making information difficult to read, especially in computer coding. An important use case is data obfuscation, in which sensitive data is made unrecognizable to protect it from unauthorized access. Various methods are used for this.  For example, only the last four digits of a credit card number are often displayed, while the remaining digits are replaced by Xs or asterisks. In contrast, encryption involves converting data into an unreadable form that can only be decrypted using a special key. Obfuscation In Code When computer code is obfuscated, complex language and redundant logic are used to make the code difficult to understand. The aim?

Certificate authority (CA) DigiCert has warned that it will be revoking a subset of SSL/TLS certificates within 24 hours due to an oversight with how it verified if a digital certificate is issued to the rightful owner of a domain. The company said it will be taking the step of revoking certificates that do not have proper Domain Control Validation ( DCV ). "Before issuing a certificate to a customer, DigiCert validates the customer's control or ownership over the domain name for which they are requesting a certificate using one of several methods approved by the CA/Browser Forum ( CABF )," it said . One of the ways this is done hinges on the customer setting up a DNS CNAME record containing a random value provided to them by DigiCert, which then performs a DNS lookup for the domain in question to make sure that the random values are the same. The random value, per DigiCert, is prefixed with an underscore character so as to prevent a possible collision with an actu

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

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, agreed to a record $1.4 billion settlement with the U.S. state of Texas over allegations that it illegally collected biometric data of millions of users without their permission, marking one of the largest penalties levied by regulators against the tech giant. "This historic settlement demonstrates our commitment to standing up to the world's biggest technology companies and holding them accountable for breaking the law and violating Texans' privacy rights," Attorney General Ken Paxton said . "Any abuse of Texans' sensitive data will be met with the full force of the law." The development arrived more than two years after the social media behemoth was sued for unlawfully capturing facial data belonging to Texas without their informed consent as is required by the law. The Menlo Park-based company, however, did not admit to any wrongdoing. Tag Suggestions, as the feature was originally c

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

A recently patched security flaw impacting VMware ESXi hypervisors has been actively exploited by "several" ransomware groups to gain elevated permissions and deploy file-encrypting malware. The attacks involve the exploitation of CVE-2024-37085 (CVSS score: 6.8), an Active Directory integration authentication bypass that allows an attacker to obtain administrative access to the host. "A malicious actor with sufficient Active Directory (AD) permissions can gain full access to an ESXi host that was previously configured to use AD for user management by re-creating the configured AD group ('ESXi Admins' by default) after it was deleted from AD," Broadcom-owned VMware noted in an advisory released in late June 2024. In other words, escalating privileges on ESXi to the administrator was as simple as creating a new AD group named "ESX Admins" and adding any user to it, or renaming any group in the domain to "ESX Admins" and adding a user