Security News
Data analysis firm Splunk says it's found a resurgence of the Crypto botnet - malware that attacks virtual servers running Windows Server inside Amazon Web Services. Splunk's Threat Research Team posted its analysis of the attack on Monday, suggesting it starts with a probe for Windows Server instances running on AWS, and seeks out those with remote desktop protocol enabled.
Organizations have been warned that hackers have started scanning the internet for Microsoft Exchange servers affected by a series of vulnerabilities that were disclosed by researchers last week. Orange Tsai, principal researcher at security consulting firm DEVCORE, discovered that Microsoft Exchange servers are affected by three vulnerabilities that can be exploited by unauthenticated attackers for remote code execution.
Threat actors are now actively scanning for the Microsoft Exchange ProxyShell remote code execution vulnerabilities after technical details were released at the Black Hat conference. ProxyShell is the name for three vulnerabilities that perform unauthenticated, remote code execution on Microsoft Exchange servers when chained together.
A systematic analysis of attacks against Microsoft's Internet Information Services servers has revealed as many as 14 malware families, 10 of them newly documented, indicating that the Windows-based web server software continues to be a hotbed for natively developed malware for close to eight years. IIS is an extensible web server software developed by Microsoft, enabling developers to take advantage of its modular architecture and use additional IIS modules to expand on its core functionality.
The BlackMatter gang has joined the ranks of ransomware operations to develop a Linux encryptor that targets VMware's ESXi virtual machine platform. With VMware ESXi being the most popular virtual machine platform, almost every enterprise-targeting ransomware operation has begun to release encryptors that specifically target its virtual machines.
If you're a regular reader of Naked Security and Sophos News, you'll almost certainly be familiar with Cobalt Strike, a network attack tool that's popular with cybercriminals and malware creators. By implanting the Cobalt Strike "Beacon" program on a network they've infiltrated, ransomware crooks can not only surreptitiously monitor but also sneakily control the network remotely, without even needing to login first.
Security researchers have discovered Cobalt Strike denial of service vulnerabilities that allow blocking beacon command-and-control communication channels and new deployments. Cobalt Strike is also used by threat actors for post-exploitation tasks after deploying so-called beacons, which provide them with persistent remote access to compromised devices.
A Chinese cyberespionage group known for targeting Southeast Asia leveraged flaws in the Microsoft Exchange Server that came to light earlier this March to deploy a previously undocumented variant of a remote access trojan on compromised systems. Attributing the intrusions to a threat actor named PKPLUG, Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 threat intelligence team said it identified a new version of the modular PlugX malware, called Thor, that was delivered as a post-exploitation tool to one of the breached servers.
Microsoft has suspended free trials of their newly launched Windows 365 Cloud PC service after running out of available servers. Yesterday, Microsoft launched their Windows 365 cloud-based virtual desktop experience that allows the enterprise to deploy Windows 10 Cloud PCs on the cloud.
Threat actors linked to China exploited the notorious Microsoft Exchange ProxyLogon vulnerabilities long before they were publicly disclosed, in attacks against telecommunications companies aimed at stealing sensitive customer data and maintaining network persistence, researchers have found. Threat actors used similar tactics to those exposed recently in the Hafnium zero-day attacks - which were recently blamed on China and condemned by the White House - that exploited ProxyLogon vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Servers to gain access to the targeted networks, according to the report.