Security News

Threat actors started actively exploiting the critical Azure OMIGOD vulnerabilities two days after Microsoft disclosed them during this month's Patch Tuesday.The four security flaws were found in the Open Management Infrastructure software agent silently installed by Microsoft on more than half of all Azure instances.

A denial-of-service vulnerability affecting SDKs for Realtek chipsets used in 65 vendors' IoT devices has been incorporated into a son-of-Mirai botnet, according to new research. Warning that the vuln had been included in Dark.IoT's botnet "Less than a week" after it was publicly disclosed, Radware said: "This vulnerability was recently disclosed by IoT Inspectors Research Lab on August 16th and impacts IoT devices manufactured by 65 vendors relying on the Realtek chipsets and SDK.".

Cybersecurity researchers on Thursday revealed details about a new Mirai-inspired botnet called "Mirai ptea" that leverages an undisclosed vulnerability in digital video recorders provided by KGUARD to propagate and carry out distributed denial-of-service attacks. Chinese security firm Netlab 360 pinned the first probe against the flaw on March 23, 2021, before it detected active exploitation attempts by the botnet on June 22, 2021.

Several variants of the Gafgyt Linux-based botnet malware family have incorporated code from the infamous Mirai botnet, researchers have discovered. Gafgyt is a botnet that was first uncovered in 2014.

Cybersecurity researchers on Monday disclosed a new wave of ongoing attacks exploiting multiple vulnerabilities to deploy new Mirai variants on internet connected devices. Regardless of the flaws used to achieve successful exploitation, the attack chain involves the use of wget utility to download a shell script from the malware infrastructure that's then used to fetch Mirai binaries, a notorious malware that turns networked IoT devices running Linux into remotely controlled bots that can be used as part of a botnet in large-scale network attacks.

Over the past month, a variant of the Mirai botnet was observed targeting new security vulnerabilities within hours after they had been disclosed publicly, researchers with Palo Alto Networks reveal. What makes the variant tracked by Palo Alto Networks stand out in the crowd is the fact that, within a four-week timeframe, it started exploiting several vulnerabilities that have been disclosed this year.

A new Mirai variant is targeting known flaws in D-Link, Netgear and SonicWall devices, as well as newly-discovered flaws in unknown IoT devices. A new variant of the Mirai botnet has been discovered targeting a slew of vulnerabilities in unpatched D-Link, Netgear and SonicWall devices - as well as never-before-seen flaws in unknown internet-of-things gadgets.

Carnegie Mellon University PhD student Aqsa Kashaf and her advisors Dr. Vyas Sekar and Dr. Yuvraj Agarwal have analyzed third party service dependencies in modern web services, with a special focus on DNS, CDN, and SSL certificate revocation checking by CA. Their research was meant to determine if incidents like the 2016 Dyn DDoS attack, the 2016 GlobalSign certificate revocation error and the 2019 Amazon Route 53 DDoS attack would lead to similar results in 2020. "6% of the top-100K websites that were critically dependent in 2016, have moved to a private DNS in 2020. On the other hand, 10.7% of the websites which used a private DNS in 2016, have moved to a single third party DNS provider. Between these snapshots, redundancy has remained roughly similar. Overall, critical dependency has increased by 4.7% in 2020. More popular websites have decreased their critical dependency," they noted.

A newly identified version of the Mirai Internet of Things botnet includes an exploit for a vulnerability impacting Comtrend routers. According to Trend Micro's security researchers, this is the first botnet version to target CVE-2020-10173, a vulnerability in the Comtrend VR-3033 routers.

A man who developed distributed denial of service botnets based on the source code of Mirai was sentenced to 13 months in federal prison. Initially based on the publicly available Mirai source code, the botnets received additional capabilities over time, which increased their complexity and efficiency, the DoJ says.