supply chain attack | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have warned of a new malicious Python package that has been discovered in the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository to facilitate cryptocurrency theft as part of a broader campaign. The package in question is pytoileur , which has been downloaded 316 times as of writing. Interestingly, the package author, who goes by the name PhilipsPY, has uploaded a new version of the package (1.0.2) with identical functionality after a previous version (1.0.1) was yanked by PyPI maintainers on May 28, 2024. According to an analysis released by Sonatype, the malicious code is embedded in the package's setup.py script, allowing it to execute a Base64-encoded payload that's responsible for retrieving a Windows binary from an external server. "The retrieved binary, 'Runtime.exe,' is then run by leveraging Windows PowerShell and VBScript commands on the system," security researcher Ax Sharma said . Once installed, the binary establishes persiste

Malicious actors have backdoored the installer associated with courtroom video recording software developed by Justice AV Solutions (JAVS) to deliver malware that's associated with a known implant called RustDoor. The software supply chain attack, tracked as CVE-2024-4978 (CVSS score: 8.7), impacts JAVS Viewer v8.3.7, a component of the  JAVS Suite 8  that allows users to create, manage, publish, and view digital recordings of courtroom proceedings, business meetings, and city council sessions. Cybersecurity firm Rapid7  said  it commenced an investigation earlier this month after discovering a malicious executable called "fffmpeg.exe" (note the three Fs) in the Windows installation folder of the software, tracing it to a binary named "JAVS Viewer Setup 8.3.7.250-1.exe" that was downloaded from the official JAVS site on March 5, 2024. "Analysis of the installer JAVS Viewer Setup 8.3.7.250-1.exe showed that it was signed with an unexpected Authenticode

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 U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has  added  a critical flaw impacting GitLab to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, owing to active exploitation in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2023-7028  (CVSS score: 10.0), the maximum severity vulnerability could facilitate account takeover by sending password reset emails to an unverified email address. GitLab, which disclosed details of the shortcoming earlier this January, said it was introduced as part of a code change in version 16.1.0 on May 1, 2023. "Within these versions, all authentication mechanisms are impacted," the company  noted  at the time. "Additionally, users who have two-factor authentication enabled are vulnerable to password reset but not account takeover as their second authentication factor is required to login." Successful exploitation of the issue can have serious consequences as it not only enables an adversary to take control of a GitLab user account, b

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered multiple campaigns targeting  Docker Hub  by planting millions of malicious "imageless" containers over the past five years, once again underscoring how open-source registries could pave the way for supply chain attacks. "Over four million of the repositories in Docker Hub are imageless and have no content except for the repository documentation," JFrog security researcher Andrey Polkovnichenko said in a report shared with The Hacker News. What's more, the documentation has no connection whatsoever to the container. Instead, it's a web page that's designed to lure users into visiting phishing or malware-hosting websites. Of the 4.6 million imageless Docker Hub repositories uncovered, 2.81 million of them are said to have been used as landing pages to redirect unsuspecting users to fraudulent sites as part of three broad campaigns - Downloader (repositories created in the first half of 2021 and September 2

A security vulnerability has been discovered in the R programming language that could be exploited by a threat actor to create a malicious RDS (R Data Serialization) file such that it results in code execution when loaded and referenced. The flaw, assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2024-27322 (CVSS score: 8.8), "involves the use of promise objects and lazy evaluation in R," AI application security company HiddenLayer said in a report shared with The Hacker News. RDS,  like pickle in Python , is a format used to serialize and save the state of data structures or objects in R, an open-source programming language used in statistical computing, data visualization, and machine learning. This process of serialization – serialize() or saveRDS() – and deserialization – unserialize() and readRDS() – is also leveraged when saving and loading R packages. The root cause behind CVE-2024-27322 lies in the fact that it could lead to arbitrary code execution when deserializing untrusted

Several security vulnerabilities disclosed in Brocade SANnav storage area network (SAN) management application could be exploited to compromise susceptible appliances. The 18 flaws  impact  all versions up to and including 2.3.0, according to independent security researcher Pierre Barre, who discovered and reported them. The issues range from incorrect firewall rules, insecure root access, and Docker misconfigurations to lack of authentication and encryption, thus allowing an attacker to intercept credentials, overwrite arbitrary files, and completely breach the device. Some of the most severe flaws are listed below - CVE-2024-2859  (CVSS score: 8.8) - A vulnerability that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to log in to an affected device using the root account and execute arbitrary commands CVE-2024-29960  (CVSS score: 7.5) - The use of hard-coded SSH keys in the OVA image, which could be exploited by an attacker to decrypt the SSH traffic to the SANnav applianc

Researchers have identified a dependency confusion vulnerability impacting an archived Apache project called Cordova App Harness . Dependency confusion attacks  take place owing to the fact that package managers check the public repositories before private registries, thus allowing a threat actor to publish a malicious package with the same name to a public package repository. This causes the package manager to inadvertently download the fraudulent package from the public repository instead of the intended private repository. If successful, it can have serious consequences, such as infecting all downstream customers that install the package. A May 2023 analysis of npm and PyPI packages stored in cloud environments by enterprise security company Orca  revealed  that nearly 49% of organizations are vulnerable to a dependency confusion attack. While npm and other package managers have since introduced fixes to prioritize the private versions, application security firm Legit Security

In the high-stakes world of cybersecurity, the battleground has shifted. Supply chain attacks have emerged as a potent threat, exploiting the intricate web of interconnected systems and third-party dependencies to breach even the most formidable defenses. But what if you could turn the tables and proactively hunt these threats before they wreak havoc? We invite you to join us for an exclusive webinar that will equip you with the knowledge and strategies to stay ahead of the curve: " Supply Chain Under Siege: Unveiling Hidden Threats ." This comprehensive session, led by industry experts Rhys Arkins (VP of Product) and Jeffrey Martin (VP of Product Marketing), promises an in-depth exploration of the supply chain threat landscape. Brace yourself for a revelatory journey through: The Anatomy of Supply Chain Threats:  Gain a deep understanding of these insidious attacks, their far-reaching consequences, and the vulnerabilities they exploit. Proactive Threat Hunting Methodol

Microsoft has revealed that North Korea-linked state-sponsored cyber actors have begun to use artificial intelligence (AI) to make their operations more effective and efficient. "They are learning to use tools powered by AI large language models (LLM) to make their operations more efficient and effective," the tech giant  said  in its latest report on East Asia hacking groups. The company specifically highlighted a group named  Emerald Sleet  (aka Kimusky or TA427), which has been observed using LLMs to bolster spear-phishing efforts aimed at Korean Peninsula experts. The adversary is also said to have relied on the latest advancements in AI to research vulnerabilities and conduct reconnaissance on organizations and experts focused on North Korea, joining  hacking crews from China , who have turned to AI-generated content for influence operations. It further employed LLMs to troubleshoot technical issues, conduct basic scripting tasks, and draft content for spear-phishi

Security researchers have uncovered a "credible" takeover attempt targeting the OpenJS Foundation in a manner that evokes similarities to the recently uncovered incident aimed at the open-source XZ Utils project. "The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping GitHub-associated emails," OpenJS Foundation and Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF)  said  in a joint alert. According to Robin Bender Ginn, executive director of OpenJS Foundation, and Omkhar Arasaratnam, general manager at OpenSSF, the email messages urged OpenJS to take action to update one of its popular JavaScript projects to remediate critical vulnerabilities without providing any specifics. The email author(s) also called on OpenJS to designate them as a new maintainer of the project despite having little prior involvement. Two other popular JavaScript projects not hosted by OpenJS are also sai

"Test files" associated with the  XZ Utils backdoor  have made their way to a Rust crate known as  liblzma-sys , new  findings  from Phylum reveal. liblzma-sys, which has been downloaded over 21,000 times to date, provides Rust developers with bindings to the liblzma implementation, an underlying library that is part of the  XZ Utils  data compression software. The impacted version in question is 0.3.2. "The current distribution (v0.3.2) on Crates.io contains the test files for XZ that contain the backdoor," Phylum  noted  in a GitHub issue raised on April 9, 2024. "The test files themselves are not included in either the .tar.gz nor the .zip tags  here on GitHub  and are only present in liblzma-sys_0.3.2.crate that is installed from Crates.io." Following responsible disclosure, the files in question ("tests/files/bad-3-corrupt_lzma2.xz" and "tests/files/good-large_compressed.lzma") have since been removed from liblzma-sys version

The Iranian threat actor known as MuddyWater has been attributed to a new command-and-control (C2) infrastructure called  DarkBeatC2 , becoming the latest such tool in its arsenal after  SimpleHarm ,  MuddyC3, PhonyC2 , and  MuddyC2Go . "While occasionally switching to a new remote administration tool or changing their C2 framework, MuddyWater's methods remain constant," Deep Instinct security researcher Simon Kenin  said  in a technical report published last week. MuddyWater, also called Boggy Serpens, Mango Sandstorm, and TA450, is assessed to be affiliated with Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). It's known to be active since at least 2017, orchestrating spear-phishing attacks that lead to the deployment of various legitimate Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) solutions on compromised systems. Prior findings from Microsoft show that the group has ties with another Iranian threat activity cluster tracked as  Storm-1084  (aka DarkBit), with t

Threat actors are now taking advantage of GitHub's search functionality to trick unsuspecting users looking for popular repositories into downloading spurious counterparts that serve malware. The latest assault on the open-source software supply chain involves concealing malicious code within Microsoft Visual Code project files that's designed to download next-stage payloads from a remote URL, Checkmarx  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Attackers create malicious repositories with popular names and topics, using techniques like automated updates and fake stars to boost search rankings and deceive users," security researcher Yehuda Gelb said. The idea is to manipulate the search rankings in GitHub and bring threat actor-controlled repositories to the top when users filter and sort their results based on the most recent updates by consistently committing small changes to a file named "log," and increase the popularity via bogus stars added v

Microsoft has released security updates for the month of April 2024 to remediate a record  149 flaws , two of which have come under active exploitation in the wild. Of the 149 flaws, three are rated Critical, 142 are rated Important, three are rated Moderate, and one is rated Low in severity. The update is aside from  21 vulnerabilities  that the company addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser following the release of the  March 2024 Patch Tuesday fixes . The two shortcomings that have come under active exploitation are below - CVE-2024-26234  (CVSS score: 6.7) - Proxy Driver Spoofing Vulnerability CVE-2024-29988  (CVSS score: 8.8) - SmartScreen Prompt Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability While Microsoft's own advisory provides no information about CVE-2024-26234, cybersecurity firm Sophos said it discovered in December 2023 a malicious executable ("Catalog.exe" or "Catalog Authentication Client Service") that's  signed  by a valid Microsoft Wi

New research has found that artificial intelligence (AI)-as-a-service providers such as Hugging Face are susceptible to two critical risks that could allow threat actors to escalate privileges, gain cross-tenant access to other customers' models, and even take over the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. "Malicious models represent a major risk to AI systems, especially for AI-as-a-service providers because potential attackers may leverage these models to perform cross-tenant attacks," Wiz researchers Shir Tamari and Sagi Tzadik  said . "The potential impact is devastating, as attackers may be able to access the millions of private AI models and apps stored within AI-as-a-service providers." The development comes as machine learning pipelines have emerged as a brand new supply chain attack vector, with repositories like Hugging Face becoming an attractive target for staging adversarial attacks designed to glean sensitive infor