Security News
A new stealthy Linux malware known as Shikitega has been discovered infecting computers and IoT devices with additional payloads. The malware exploits vulnerabilities to elevate its privileges, adds persistence on the host via crontab, and eventually launches a cryptocurrency miner on infected devices.
To protect the victim's account, the organization had implemented Microsoft MFA through the Microsoft Authenticator app, which should have stopped any use of stolen credentials. Microsoft MFA doesn't always require a second form of authentication.
Once authenticated, a session cookie maintains the session state and the user's browsing session stays authenticated. Figure A. Each cookie stored in the browser's database contains a list of parameters and values, including in some cases a unique token provided by the web service once authentication is validated.
Active adversaries are increasingly exploiting stolen session cookies to bypass multi-factor authentication and gain access to corporate resources, according to Sophos. "Over the past year, we've seen attackers increasingly turn to cookie theft to work around the growing adoption of MFA. Attackers are turning to new and improved versions of information stealing malware like Raccoon Stealer to simplify the process of obtaining authentication cookies, also known as access tokens," said Sean Gallagher, principal threat researcher, Sophos.
A Chinese state-sponsored threat activity group named RedAlpha has been attributed to a multi-year mass credential theft campaign aimed at global humanitarian, think tank, and government organizations. The adversary's consistent targeting of think tanks and humanitarian organizations over the past three years falls in line with the strategic interests of the Chinese government, the report added.
RubyGems, the official package manager for the Ruby programming language, has become the latest platform to mandate multi-factor authentication for popular package maintainers, following the footsteps of NPM and PyPI. To that end, owners of gems with over 180 million total downloads are mandated to turn on MFA effective August 15, 2022. What's more, gem maintainers who cross 165 million cumulative downloads are expected to receive reminders to turn on MFA until the download count touches the 180 million thresholds, at which point it will be made mandatory.
RubyGems.org, the Ruby programming community's software package registry, now requires maintainers of popular "Gems" to secure their accounts using multi-factor authentication. The added security precaution is intended as an additional barrier to account takeovers, the second-most common software supply-chain attack, according to a 2021 research paper, "Towards Measuring Supply Chain Attacks on Package Managers for Interpreted Languages."
A report released Tuesday by the Cyber Readiness Institute looks at the slow state of MFA adoption among SMBs. CRI surveyed 1,403 small business owners across the U.S., the U.K., New Zealand, Japan, India, Germany, Canada and Australia from May 2 to May 15. Among the respondents, 55% admitted that they're not very aware of MFA and its security benefits, while 54% said they haven't adopted MFA for their business.
How do organizations make sure that cyber security and backup/recovery processes keep up with the evolution to multi-cloud? In addition, how do they ensure that the data which is being stored, accessed, and transferred between multiple clouds and on-premises data center locations meets increasingly stringent data protection and regulatory requirements? 63% believed the emergence of cloud native applications, Kubernetes containers and SaaS workloads posed a risk to data protection, primarily because they lacked adequate tools to manage data protection in so many different environments.
The current web hosting model usually depends on one pathway for data and energy to flow. Multi-data center clustering ensures high availability to websites and applications by hosting your data at two or more separate physical locations.