Security News

OpenSSL, LibreSSL, OpenSSH users, don't worry – you can sit this one out An academic study has shown how it's possible for someone to snoop on certain devices' SSH connections and, with a bit of...

For SOC teams to be able to defend their organization against ransomware attacks, they need to have the right security toolset, but also an understanding of the three primary ransomware attack stages. Instead, there are often many different indicators of compromise at different stages of the attack that seem benign when looked at individually.

Cisco Talos discovered a new critical zero-day vulnerability in the Web User Interface feature of Cisco IOS XE software that's currently being used in the wild. The vulnerability used to access the system and create those accounts is CVE-2023-20198; it received the highest Common Vulnerability Scoring System score of 10.

"The driver for the reduction in median dwell time is likely due to the cybercriminals' desire for a lower chance of detection. The cybersecurity industry has become much more adept at detecting activity that is a precursor to ransomware. As a result, threat actors are focusing on simpler and quicker to implement operations, rather than big, multi-site enterprise-wide encryption events that are significantly more complex. But the risk from those attacks is still high," said Don Smith, VP Threat Intelligence, Secureworks Counter Threat Unit. "While we still see familiar names as the most active threat actors, the emergence of several new and very active threat groups is fuelling a significant rise in victim and data leaks. Despite high-profile takedowns and sanctions, cybercriminals are masters of adaptation, and so the threat continues to gather pace," Smith continued.

Apple has released updates for iOS and iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and Safari to fix three zero-day vulnerabilities exploited "Against versions of iOS before iOS 16.7.". Earlier this month, Apple closed two zero-day vulnerabilities that have been chained together by attackers to deliver NSO Group's Pegasus spyware.

Mobile Verification Toolkit is a collection of utilities to simplify and automate the process of gathering forensic traces helpful to identify a potential compromise of Android and iOS devices. MVT supports using public indicators of compromise to scan mobile devices for potential traces of targeting or infection by known spyware campaigns.

Phishing attacks typically take the form of seemingly legitimate communication, often via email, but can also occur through text messages, phone calls, or social media messages. In this Help Net Security round-up, we bring insights from cybersecurity experts who share their knowledge about phishing attacks and the evolving strategies employed by cybercriminals to deceive and compromise unsuspecting victims.

An unknown threat actor has been observed weaponizing high-severity security flaws in the MinIO high-performance object storage system to achieve unauthorized code execution on affected servers. Cybersecurity and incident response firm Security Joes said the intrusion leveraged a publicly available exploit chain to backdoor the MinIO instance.

Administrators of Citrix NetScaler ADC and Gateway appliances should check for evidence of installed webshells even if they implemented fixes for CVE-2023-3519 quickly: A recent internet scan by Fox-IT researchers has revealed over 1,800 backdoored NetScaler devices, 69% of which have been patched for the flaw. CVE-2023-3519 exploited to drop webshells on NetScaler devices.

Key factors for effective security automationIn this Help Net Security interview, Oliver Rochford, Chief Futurist at Tenzir, discusses how automation can be strategically integrated with human expertise, the challenges in ensuring data integrity, and the considerations when automating advanced tasks. MikroTik vulnerability could be used to hijack 900,000 routersA privilege escalation vulnerability could allow attackers to commandeer up to 900,000 MikroTik routers, says VulnCheck researcher Jacob Baines.