The ransomware industry surged in 2023 as it saw an alarming 55.5% increase in victims worldwide, reaching a staggering 4,368 cases. Figure 1: Year over year victims per quarter The rollercoaster ride from explosive growth in 2021 to a momentary…
Category: The Hacker News
Opera MyFlaw Bug Could Let Hackers Run ANY File on Your Mac or Windows
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a security flaw in the Opera web browser for Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS that could be exploited to execute any file on the underlying operating system. The remote code execution vulnerability has been codenamed MyFlaw…
Balada Injector Infects Over 7,100 WordPress Sites Using Plugin Vulnerability
Thousands of WordPress sites using a vulnerable version of the Popup Builder plugin have been compromised with a malware called Balada Injector. First documented by Doctor Web in January 2023, the campaign takes place in a series of periodic attack waves, weaponizing security…
High-Severity Flaws Uncovered in Bosch Thermostats and Smart Nutrunners
Multiple security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Bosch BCC100 thermostats and Rexroth NXA015S-36V-B smart nutrunners that, if successfully exploited, could allow attackers to execute arbitrary code on affected systems. Romanian cybersecurity firm Bitdefender, which discovered the flaw in Bosch BCC100 thermostats last…
DDoS Attacks on the Environmental Services Industry Surge by 61,839% in 2023
The environmental services industry witnessed an “unprecedented surge” in HTTP-based distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, accounting for half of all its HTTP traffic. This marks a 61,839% increase in DDoS attack traffic year-over-year, web infrastructure and security company Cloudflare said in…
New Findings Challenge Attribution in Denmark’s Energy Sector Cyberattacks
The cyber attacks targeting the energy sector in Denmark last year may not have had the involvement of the Russia-linked Sandworm hacking group, new findings from Forescout show. The intrusions, which targeted around 22 Danish energy organizations in May 2023, occurred in two distinct…
Critical RCE Vulnerability Uncovered in Juniper SRX Firewalls and EX Switches
Juniper Networks has released updates to fix a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in its SRX Series firewalls and EX Series switches. The issue, tracked as CVE-2024-21591, is rated 9.8 on the CVSS scoring system. “An out-of-bounds write vulnerability in…
29-Year-Old Ukrainian Cryptojacking Kingpin Arrested for Exploiting Cloud Services
A 29-year-old Ukrainian national has been arrested in connection with running a “sophisticated cryptojacking scheme,” netting them over $2 million (€1.8 million) in illicit profits. The person was apprehended in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, on January 9 by the National Police of…
Medusa Ransomware on the Rise: From Data Leaks to Multi-Extortion
The threat actors associated with the Medusa ransomware have ramped up their activities following the debut of a dedicated data leak site on the dark web in February 2023 to publish sensitive data of victims who are unwilling to agree to their…
Nation-State Actors Weaponize Ivanti VPN Zero-Days, Deploying 5 Malware Families
As many as five different malware families were deployed by suspected nation-state actors as part of post-exploitation activities leveraging two zero-day vulnerabilities in Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) VPN appliances since early December 2023. “These families allow the threat actors to circumvent authentication…
Applying the Tyson Principle to Cybersecurity: Why Attack Simulation is Key to Avoiding a KO
Picture a cybersecurity landscape where defenses are impenetrable, and threats are nothing more than mere disturbances deflected by a strong shield. Sadly, this image of fortitude remains a pipe dream despite its comforting nature. In the security world, preparedness is…
Cryptominers Targeting Misconfigured Apache Hadoop and Flink with Rootkit in New Attacks
Cybersecurity researchers have identified a new attack that exploits misconfigurations in Apache Hadoop and Flink to deploy cryptocurrency miners within targeted environments. “This attack is particularly intriguing due to the attacker’s use of packers and rootkits to conceal the malware,”…
Act Now: CISA Flags Active Exploitation of Microsoft SharePoint Vulnerability
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added a critical security vulnerability impacting Microsoft SharePoint Server to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The issue, tracked as CVE-2023-29357 (CVSS score: 9.8), is a privilege escalation flaw that…
Threat Actors Increasingly Abusing GitHub for Malicious Purposes
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…
New Python-based FBot Hacking Toolkit Aims at Cloud and SaaS Platforms
A new Python-based hacking tool called FBot has been uncovered targeting web servers, cloud services, content management systems (CMS), and SaaS platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft 365, PayPal, Sendgrid, and Twilio. “Key features include credential harvesting for spamming attacks,…
New PoC Exploit for Apache OfBiz Vulnerability Poses Risk to ERP Systems
Cybersecurity researchers have developed a proof-of-concept (PoC) code that exploits a recently disclosed critical flaw in the Apache OfBiz open-source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to execute a memory-resident payload. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2023-51467 (CVSS score: 9.8), a bypass for another severe shortcoming in…
Atomic Stealer Gets an Upgrade – Targeting Mac Users with Encrypted Payload
Cybersecurity researchers have identified an updated version of a macOS information stealer called Atomic (or AMOS), indicating that the threat actors behind the malware are actively enhancing its capabilities. “It looks like Atomic Stealer was updated around mid to late December 2023,…
There is a Ransomware Armageddon Coming for Us All
Generative AI will enable anyone to launch sophisticated phishing attacks that only Next-generation MFA devices can stop The least surprising headline from 2023 is that ransomware again set new records for a number of incidents and the damage inflicted. We…
Mandiant’s X Account Was Hacked Using Brute-Force Attack
The compromise of Mandiant’s X (formerly Twitter) account last week was likely the result of a “brute-force password attack,” attributing the hack to a drainer-as-a-service (DaaS) group. “Normally, [two-factor authentication] would have mitigated this, but due to some team transitions…
Cisco Fixes High-Risk Vulnerability Impacting Unity Connection Software
Cisco has released software updates to address a critical security flaw impacting Unity Connection that could permit an adversary to execute arbitrary commands on the underlying system. Tracked as CVE-2024-20272 (CVSS score: 7.3), the vulnerability is an arbitrary file upload bug residing…