Security News
One of the zero-day purveyors that may have done a brisk trade in 2019 was the controversial Israeli firm known as NSO Group. The private company has been criticized in the past for selling zero-day exploits to "Authorized governments" who may have launched targeted attacks against human rights activists and journalists.
A threat actor linked to South Korea has launched attacks against Chinese government agencies using a zero-day vulnerability affecting a local VPN service, Chinese cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360 reported on Monday. Qihoo 360 does not directly accuse South Korea of being behind the attacks, but says the threat actor is located in the Korean Peninsula and notes that its victims include North Korea.
"Furthermore, we noted a significant increase over time in the number of zero-days leveraged by groups suspected to be customers of companies that supply offensive cyber capabilities," said FireEye, which went on to refer to a group of malicious persons variously named by researchers as Stealth Falcon and FruityArmor [sic]. This group "Used malware sold by NSO Group", said FireEye, which speculated that it might also be linked to Uzbekistani state spying operations: "The zero-days used in SandCat operations were also used in Stealth Falcon operations, and it is unlikely that these distinct activity sets independently discovered the same three zero-days."
As the Chinese government turns to virtual private networks to provide access to official resources for those working remotely amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the DarkHotel APT has seized the opportunity to target those VPNs in a zero-day attack, researchers said. According to security analysts from Chinese firm Qihoo 360, attacks began in March on a Chinese VPN provider called SangFor, used by a number of Chinese governmental agencies.
Mozilla just pushed out an update for its Firefox browser to patch a security hole that was already being exploited in the wild. Given that the bug needed patching in both the latest and the ESR versions, we can assume either that the vulnerability has been in the Firefox codebase at least since version 68 first appeared, which was back in July 2019, or that it was introduced as a side effect of a security fix that came out after version 68.0 showed up.0, so the ESR is popular with IT departments who want to avoid frequent feature updates that might require changes in company workflow, but don't want to lag behind on security patches.
Mozilla patched two Firefox browser zero-day vulnerabilities actively being exploited in the wild. Both bugs have critical ratings and allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or trigger crashes on machines running versions of Firefox prior to 74.0.1 and its business-friendly Firefox Extended Support Release 68.6.1.
UPDATE. Two zero-day flaws have been uncovered in Zoom's macOS client version, according to researchers. The two flaws, uncovered by Patrick Wardle, principle security researcher with Jamf, emerge as Zoom comes under increased scrutiny over its security measures, particularly with more employees working from home over the past few weeks due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Cybersecurity researchers with Qihoo 360's NetLab today unveiled details of two recently spotted zero-day cyberattack campaigns in the wild targeting enterprise-grade networking devices manufactured by Taiwan-based DrayTek. According to the report, at least two separate groups of hackers exploited two critical remote command injection vulnerabilities affecting DrayTek Vigor enterprise switches, load-balancers, routers and VPN gateway devices to eavesdrop on network traffic and install backdoors.
Windows users under attack via two new RCE zero-daysAttackers are exploiting two new zero-days in the Windows Adobe Type Manager Library to achieve remote code execution on targeted Windows systems. Widely available ICS attack tools lower the barrier for attackersThe general availability of ICS-specific intrusion and attack tools is widening the pool of attackers capable of targeting operational technology networks and industrial control systems.
While we wait for Microsoft to provide fixes for the two new Windows RCE zero-days that are being exploited in "Limited targeted Windows 7 based attacks," ACROS Security has released micropatches that can prevent remote attackers from exploiting the flaws. In a blog post published on Thursday, ACROS Security CEO Mitja Kolsek explained which attack vectors can be used to exploit the vulnerabilities and why Windows 10 users are at a lower risk of attack.