Security News > 2023 > February

In a continuing sign that threat actors are adapting well to a post-macro world, it has emerged that the use of Microsoft OneNote documents to deliver malware via phishing attacks is on the rise. Enterprise firm Proofpoint said it detected over 50 campaigns leveraging OneNote attachments in the month of January 2023 alone.

A critical vulnerability in Atlassian's Jira Service Management Server and Data Center could allow an unauthenticated attacker to impersonate other users and gain remote access to the systems.Atlassian explains that the security issue affects versions 5.3.0 through 5.5.0 and that hackers can get "Access to a Jira Service Management instance under certain circumstances."

A critical vulnerability in Atlassian's Jira Service Management Server and Data Center could allow an unauthenticated attacker to impersonate other users and gain remote access to the systems. Atlassian explains that the security issue affects versions 5.3.0 through 5.5.0 and that hackers can get "Access to a Jira Service Management instance under certain circumstances."

The Iranian nation-state hacking group known as OilRig has continued to target government organizations in the Middle East as part of a cyber espionage campaign that leverages a new backdoor to exfiltrate data. "The campaign abuses legitimate but compromised email accounts to send stolen data to external mail accounts controlled by the attackers," Trend Micro researchers Mohamed Fahmy, Sherif Magdy, and Mahmoud Zohdy said.

Abstract: In this paper we describe how to plant novel types of backdoors in any facial recognition model based on the popular architecture of deep Siamese neural networks, by mathematically changing a small fraction of its weights. These backdoors force the system to err only on specific persons which are preselected by the attacker.

The pandemic has made security teams more aware of digital risks and the importance of strategic defense, security planning, and risk management. Not to forget the struggle to hire skilled security specialists and the complexity of many security products.

A former employee of RAC, one of Britain's major roadside recovery service operators, has pleaded guilty to data theft after he stored traffic accident information on his personal device that was passed onto claims companies. He admitted two counts of data theft last month, the UK data watchdog said.

Australian software maker Atlassian has released patches for CVE-2023-22501, a critical authentication vulnerability in Jira Service Management Server and Data Center, and is urging users to upgrade quickly. "Installing a fixed version of Jira Service Management is the recommended way to remediate this vulnerability. If you are unable to immediately upgrade Jira Service Management, you can manually upgrade the version-specific servicedesk-variable-substitution-plugin JAR file as a temporary workaround," they advised.

The growing impact of new data privacy and compliance laws, coupled with the importance of strong data security measures, makes having a comprehensive data retention strategy less of a want and more of a need at this point in time. Data retention is the preservation and usage of data for a predefined period - called a data retention period - to satisfy business, technical and legal requirements.

Atlassian has released fixes to resolve a critical security flaw in Jira Service Management Server and Data Center that could be abused by an attacker to pass off as another user and gain unauthorized access to susceptible instances. The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2023-22501 and has been described as a case of broken authentication with low attack complexity.