Security News > 2023 > January
Microsoft is urging customers to keep their Exchange servers updated as well as take steps to bolster the environment, such as enabling Windows Extended Protection and configuring certificate-based signing of PowerShell serialization payloads."Attackers looking to exploit unpatched Exchange servers are not going to go away," the tech giant's Exchange Team said in a post.
Wing Security recently announced that it is making its SaaS application discovery engine available as a free, self-service product. The risks associated with SaaS Shadow IT have become more prevalent in recent years due to the widespread use of SaaS within organizations.
A French citizen was scheduled to appear before a US court on Friday on a nine-count indictment related to his alleged involvement in the ShinyHunters cybercrime gang that trafficked in identity and corporate data theft and sometimes extortion. Since early 2020, the ShinyHunters crew has stolen "Millions of customer records" and sold sensitive data belonging to more than 60 companies in Washington state and elsewhere around the world, according to the US Attorney's office.
The Internet Systems Consortium has released patches to address multiple security vulnerabilities in the Berkeley Internet Name Domain 9 Domain Name System software suite that could lead to a denial-of-service condition. "A remote attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to potentially cause denial-of-service conditions and system failures," the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in an advisory released Friday.
Ukraine has come under a fresh cyber onslaught from Russia that involved the deployment of a previously undocumented Golang-based data wiper dubbed SwiftSlicer. ESET attributed the attack to Sandworm, a nation-state group linked to Military Unit 74455 of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.
Microsoft is urging organizations to protect their Exchange servers from cyberattacks by keeping them updated and hardened, since online criminals are still going after valuable data in the email system. Enterprises need to make sure to install the latest Cumulative Updates and Security Updates on the Exchange servers - and occasionally on Exchange Management Tools workstations - and to run manual tasks like enabling Extended Protection and certificate signing of PowerShell serialization payloads, according to the vendor's Exchange Team.
For the most part, this week has been relatively quiet regarding ransomware attacks and researcher - that is, until the FBI announced the disruption of the Hive ransomware operation. Hive ransomware launched in June 2021 and quickly became one of the most active and prominent ransomware operations.
Uncle Sam has put up a $10 million reward for intel on Hive ransomware criminals' identities and whereabouts, while Russia has blocked the FBI and CIA websites, along with the Rewards for Justice site offering the bounty. The $10 million bonty is part of the US State Department's Rewards for Justice program, and in a Thursday tweet the agency sought tips for Hive members "Acting under the direction or control of a foreign government." The notice also referenced the FBI's Hive website takedown, which the feds announced earlier that day.
"Renan Rodrigues had been working as a food delivery driver at Swiss company Smood for about a year and a half when"The robot" took over. Smood had used such software since he started working there in 2020, Rodrigues told DW. But at a certain point, "The robot" became entirely responsible for planning his working day,according to him, and appealing to human managers was no longer possible.
Microsoft says this week's five-hour-long Microsoft 365 worldwide outage was caused by a router IP address change that led to packet forwarding issues between all other routers in its Wide Area Network. Redmond said at the time that the outage resulted from DNS and WAN networking configuration issues caused by a WAN update and that users across all regions serviced by the impacted infrastructure were having problems accessing the affected Microsoft 365 services.