Malware

China-based cyberespionage actor DEV-0147 has been observed compromising diplomatic targets in South America, according to Microsoft’s Security Intelligence team.  The initiative is “a notable expansion of the group’s data exfiltration operations that traditionally targeted gov’t agencies and think tanks in Asia and Europe,” the team tweeted on Monday.  DEV-0147’s attacks in South America included post-exploitation activity involving the abuse of on-premises identity infrastructure for reconnaissance and lateral movement, and the use of Cobalt Strike — a penetration…

Israel-based startup Oligo Security is exiting stealth mode with the public launch of its namesake software, offering a new wrinkle in library-based application security monitoring, observability, and remediation. Utilizing a technology called extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF), it is able to provide agentless security coverage for open source code. Given the prevalence of open source code in modern software — Oligo contends that it accounts for something like 80% or 90% — there is a…

As business processes become more complex, companies are turning to third parties to boost their ability to provide critical services from cloud storage to data management to security. It’s often more efficient and less expensive to contract out work that would otherwise require significant effort and potentially drain in-house resources to those who can do it for you. The use of third-party services can also come with significant—often unforeseen—risks. Third parties can be a gateway…

Descope has launched its first product, a platform designed to help developers add authentication and user management capabilities to their business-to-consumer and business-to-business applications. The software as a service is available now. Developers can access the product free of charge for up to 7,500 monthly active uses for B2C applications and up to 50 tenants for B2B apps. Beyond these there is a US$0.10 per user and US$20 per tenant. The Descope platform aims to…

Not too long ago, guarding access to the network was the focal point of defense for security teams. Powerful firewalls ensured that attackers were blocked on the outside while on the inside things might get “squishy,” allowing users fairly free rein within. Those firewalls were the ultimate defense—no one undesirable got access. Until they did. With the advent of cloud computing, the edge of a network is no longer protected by a firewall. In fact,…

The last year saw a rise in the sophistication and number of attacks targeting industrial infrastructure, including the discovery of a modular malware toolkit that’s capable of targeting tens of thousands of industrial control systems (ICS) across different industry verticals. At the same time, incident response engagements by industrial cybersecurity firm Dragos showed that 80% of impacted environments lacked visibility into ICS traffic and half had network segmentation issues and uncontrolled external connections into their…