Security News

What researchers are calling a "Horde" of miner bots and backdoors are using the Log4Shell bug to take over vulnerable VMware Horizon servers, with threat actors still actively waging some attacks. On Tuesday, Sophos reported that the remote code execution Log4j vulnerability in the ubiquitous Java logging library is under active attack, "Particularly among cryptocurrency mining bots." Besides cryptominers, attackers are also prying open Log4Shell to deliver backdoors that Sophos believes are initial access brokers that could lay the groundwork for later ransomware infections.

The ever-evolving banking trojan IcedID is back again with a phishing campaign that uses previously compromised Microsoft Exchange servers to send emails that appear to come from legitimate accounts. The actors behind IcedID - as well as other spearphishers - have previously used phishing emails that "Reuse previously stolen emails to make the lure more convincing," researchers wrote.

A threat actor is exploiting vulnerable on-prem Microsoft Exchange servers and using hijacked email threads to deliver the IceID trojan without triggering email security solutions. The threat actor - believe to be an initial access broker - compromises vulnerable on-prem Microsoft Exchange servers and existing email accounts, then hijacks email threads by replying to them.

Cyber-criminals are using compromised Microsoft Exchange servers to spam out emails designed to infect people's PCs with IcedID,. It popped up last year when crooks hijacked a BP Chargemaster domain to spam out emails to spread IcedID. On Monday, Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs said it observed an email sent to a Ukrainian fuel company with a.zip containing a file that when opened drops IcedID on the PC. Security vendor Intezer also on Monday said it had seen unsecured Microsoft Exchange servers spamming out IcedID emails.

A new email phishing campaign has been spotted leveraging the tactic of conversation hijacking to deliver the IceID info-stealing malware onto infected machines by making use of unpatched and publicly-exposed Microsoft Exchange servers. "The emails use a social engineering technique of conversation hijacking," Israeli company Intezer said in a report shared with The Hacker News.

Muhstik, a botnet infamous for propagating via web application exploits, has been observed targeting Redis servers using a recently disclosed vulnerability in the database system. The vulnerability relates to CVE-2022-0543, a Lua sandbox escape flaw in the open-source, in-memory, key-value data store that could be abused to achieve remote code execution on the underlying machine.

Microsoft has addressed a new known issue causing DNS stub zones loading failures that could lead to DNS resolution issues on Windows Server 2019 systems. DNS stub zones are copies of DNS zones containing resource records needed to determine the authoritative DNS servers for a specific zone and resolve names between separate DNS namespaces.

Hackers target poorly secured Microsoft SQL and MySQL database servers to deploy the Gh0stCringe remote access trojans on vulnerable devices. In a new report today by cybersecurity firm AhnLab, researchers outline how the threat actors behind GhostCringe are targeting poorly secured database servers with weak account credentials and no oversight.

The maintainers of OpenSSL have shipped patches to resolve a high-severity security flaw in its software library that could lead to a denial-of-service condition when parsing certificates. "Since certificate parsing happens prior to verification of the certificate signature, any process that parses an externally supplied certificate may thus be subject to a denial-of-service attack," OpenSSL said in an advisory published on March 15, 2022.

Microsoft has addressed 71 security flaws, including three critical remote code execution vulnerabilities, in its monthly Patch Tuesday update. Yes, an attacker needs to be authenticated, though Sophos Lab threat researcher Christopher Budd noted: "Given what we've seen recently around attacks against Exchange vulnerabilities, the critical severity rating and the nature of the vulnerability makes this an issue that should be patched as soon as possible."