Security News
The report highlights the four top attack trends that every organization should build resilience against: business email compromise, ransomware, supply chain targeting, and cryptojacking. 2022 cybersecurity trends and predictions BEC: This type of attack is still public enemy number one.
An advanced persistent threat group with links to Iran has updated its malware toolset to include a novel PowerShell-based implant called PowerLess Backdoor, according to new research published by Cybereason. The Boston-headquartered cybersecurity company attributed the malware to a hacking group known as Charming Kitten, while also calling out the backdoor's evasive PowerShell execution.
Cybersecurity researchers on Monday said they uncovered evidence of attempted attacks by a Russia-linked hacking operation targeting a Ukrainian entity in July 2021. Broadcom-owned Symantec, in a new report published Monday, attributed the attacks to an actor tracked as Gamaredon, a cyber-espionage collective known to be active since at least 2013.
Advanced DDoS attacks that are typically targeted, known as smart attacks, rose by 31% in the same period. Further, 73% of DDoS attacks in Q3 2021 were multi-vector attacks that combined multiple techniques to attack the targeted systems.
Researchers at Symantec's Threat Hunter team, a part of Broadcom Software, have analyzed eight malware samples used by Gamaredon against Ukrainian targets in recent attacks, which could provide essential information for defenders to protect against the ongoing wave attacks. These files launched a VBS file that dropped "Pteranodon," a well-documented backdoor that Gamaredon has been developing and improving for almost seven years now.
UPnP is a connectivity protocol optionally available in most modern routers that allows other devices on a network to create port forwarding rules on a router automatically. It is yet another technology that trades convenience for security, especially when the UPnP implementation is potentially vulnerable to attacks allowing remote actors to add UPnP port-forwarding entries via a device's exposed WAN connection.
Given the rapidly increasing complexity of today's cyber threat landscape, these scanners are not enough to win the fight against an increasingly overwhelming volume of vulnerability alerts. Yes, vulnerability scanners are needed in most security toolkits.
Microsoft this week revealed that it had fended off a record number of distributed denial-of-service attacks aimed at its customers in 2021, three of which surpassed 2.4 terabit per second. One of the DDoS attacks took place in November, targeting an unnamed Azure customer in Asia and lasted a total of 15 minutes.
An initial access broker group tracked as Prophet Spider has been linked to a set of malicious activities that exploits the Log4Shell vulnerability in unpatched VMware Horizon Servers. The payloads observed include cryptocurrency miners, Cobalt Strike Beacons, and web shells, corroborating a previous advisory from the U.K. National Health Service that sounded the alarm on active exploitation of the vulnerabilities in VMware Horizon servers to drop malicious web shells and establish persistence on affected networks for follow-on attacks.
Unpatched vulnerabilities remain the most prominent attack vectors exploited by ransomware groups. The analysis uncovered 65 new vulnerabilities tied to ransomware last year, representing a 29% growth compared to the previous year and bringing the total number of vulnerabilities associated with ransomware to 288.