Security News
Cloud environments continue to be at the receiving end of an ongoing advanced attack campaign dubbed SCARLETEEL, with the threat actors now setting their sights on Amazon Web Services Fargate. SCARLETEEL was first exposed by the cybersecurity company in February 2023, detailing a sophisticated attack chain that culminated in the theft of proprietary data from AWS infrastructure and the deployment of cryptocurrency miners to profit off the compromised systems' resources illegally.
Building a custom cracking rig for research can be expensive, so penetration tester Max Ahartz built one on AWS. In this Help Net Security interview, he takes us through the process and unveils the details of his creation. What motivated you to undertake this project, and what were your objectives in creating the automated cracking rig?
Researchers from Cado Labs recently encountered an update to the emerging cloud-focused malware family, Legion. This sample iterates upon the credential harvesting features of its predecessor, with a continued emphasis on exploiting PHP web applications.
An updated version of the commodity malware called Legion comes with expanded features to compromise SSH servers and Amazon Web Services credentials associated with DynamoDB and CloudWatch. "This recent update demonstrates a widening of scope, with new capabilities such the ability to compromise SSH servers and retrieve additional AWS-specific credentials from Laravel web applications," Cado Labs researcher Matt Muir said in a report shared with The Hacker News.
A financially motivated threat actor of Indonesian origin has been observed leveraging Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud instances to carry out illicit crypto mining operations. Cloud security company's Permiso P0 Labs, which first detected the group in November 2021, has assigned it the moniker GUI-vil.
The bad news train keeps rolling for Capita, with more local British councils surfacing to say their data was put on the line by an unsecured AWS bucket, and, separately, pension clients warning of possible data theft in March's mega breach. Alison Parkin, director of financial services at Derby CC, said Capita supported its council tax and benefits service, and data left exposed was collected in early 2021.
Capita is facing criticism about its security hygiene on a new front after an Amazon bucket containing benefits data on residents in a south east England city council was left exposed to the public web. Colchester City Council said on Monday it had launched a probe following the discovery of the open bucket, and was working with Capita to fully understand the "Extent of the data spill and take all necessary steps to minimize any impact on residents."
A new "Comprehensive toolset" called AlienFox is being distributed on Telegram as a way for threat actors to harvest credentials from API keys and secrets from popular cloud service providers. "The spread of AlienFox represents an unreported trend towards attacking more minimal cloud services, unsuitable for crypto mining, in order to enable and expand subsequent campaigns," SentinelOne security researcher Alex Delamotte said in a report shared with The Hacker News.
Given how many organizations now use two or more public clouds - 87 percent of respondents in Flexera's 2023 State of the Cloud report said they have a multicloud strategy - it was important that Microsoft also look outward when talking about security baselines, according to Jim Cheng, senior software engineer at Microsoft. "Today we see that our customers often have to aggregate and reconcile their security management across multiple cloud platforms to meet security and compliance requirements," Cheng wrote in October 2022, when MCSB v1 entered public preview.
A new phishing campaign targeting Amazon Web Services logins is abusing Google ads to sneak phishing sites into Google Search to steal your login credentials. The malicious Google ads take the victim to a blogger website under the attackers' control, which is a copy of a legitimate vegan food blog.