CyberSecurity Updates

15 Dec

F5 expands security portfolio with App Infrastructure Protection

Data Breaches, Malware, Social Engineering

F5 on Thursday announced the launch of F5 Distributed Cloud Services App Infrastructure Protection (AIP), expanding its SaaS-based security portfolio. The new release is a cloud workload protection solution that will provide application observability and protection to cloud-native infrastructures.  AIP is built using technology acquired with Threat Stack and will be a part of the F5 Distributed Cloud Services portfolio, launched earlier this year.  AIP will complement F5’s API Security F5 already has a service…

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15 Dec

Dozens of cybersecurity efforts included in this year’s US NDAA

Data Breaches, Malware, Social Engineering

Last week, members of the US House of Representatives and Senate reconciled their versions of the annual must-pass National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Each year the NDAA contains a wealth of primarily military cybersecurity provisions, delivering hundreds of millions, if not billions, in new cybersecurity funding to the federal government. This year’s bill is no exception. Titled the James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, the legislation clocks in at over…

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15 Dec

Microsoft’s EU data boundary plan to take effect Jan. 1

Data Breaches, Malware, Social Engineering

Microsoft on Thursday said it will begin rolling out the first phase of its European Union data boundary plan from January 1, 2023 that’ll allow customers to store and process their customer data within the EU. The move comes two days after the EU commission said it had officially begun the process of approving the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. Under the first phase of the plan, companies that use Microsoft products and services will be…

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15 Dec

Microsoft Exchange ProxyNotShell vulnerability explained and how to mitigate it

Data Breaches, Malware, Social Engineering

Last year, two high severity, easily exploitable Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities dubbed ProxyLogon and ProxyShell made waves in the infosec sphere. Nearly a year later, Exchange Server admins are met with another threat: ProxyNotShell, which in fact is a vulnerability chain comprising two actively exploited flaws: CVE-2022-41040 is a server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability that an authenticated attacker can exploit for privilege escalation. This vulnerability occurs because the root cause of ProxyShell’s path confusion flaw remains,…

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15 Dec

GAO warns government agencies: focus on IoT and OT within critical infrastructure

Data Breaches, Malware, Social Engineering

The US Government Accounting Office (GAO) continues to highlight shortcomings in the cybersecurity posture of government entities responsible for the protection of United States infrastructure when it comes to internet of things (IoT) and operational technology (OT) devices and systems. In a recent report, the GAO shone a light on the Departments of Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and Transportation. How each of these entities reacted and responded to its recommendations was telling.…

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14 Dec

Cuba ransomware group used Microsoft developer accounts to sign malicious drivers

Data Breaches, Malware, Social Engineering

Microsoft suspended several accounts on its hardware developer program that signed malicious drivers used by a ransomware group called Cuba to disable endpoint security tools. The driver certificates have been revoked and the drivers will be added to a blocklist that Windows users can optionally deploy. “In most ransomware incidents, attackers kill the target’s security software in an essential precursor step before deploying the ransomware itself,” researchers from security firm Sophos said in a new…

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14 Dec

Six Charged in Mass Takedown of DDoS-for-Hire Sites

Information, Insights

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) today seized four-dozen domains that sold “booter” or “stresser” services — businesses that make it easy and cheap for even non-technical users to launch powerful Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks designed knock targets offline. The DOJ also charged six U.S. men with computer crimes related to their alleged ownership of the popular DDoS-for-hire services. The booter service OrphicSecurityTeam[.]com was one of the 48 DDoS-for-hire domains seized by the…

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14 Dec

Go-based Botnet GoTrim Targeting WordPress Sites

Attacks, Malware

GoTrim employs several anti-bot checks to avoid some of the less complex botnet mitigations. It uses a Mozilla Firefox user-agent with the same gzip, deflate, and Brotil content encoding algorithms. The malware also attempts to detect CAPTCHA security plugins and has the capability of solving the challenges for some of them. If it cannot bypass a security plugin, the botnet is globally updated with a “skip” for that domain. Interestingly, any website containing “1gb.ru” in…

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14 Dec

Apple Security Update Fixes New iOS Zero-Day

Attacks, Malware

Even though this zero-day flaw was likely used in highly-targeted attacks, it is still suggested to install the security updates as soon as possible. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/apple/apple-security-update-fixes-new-ios-zero-day-used-to-hack-iphones/

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14 Dec

Open-Source Repositories Flooded by +144,000 Phishing Packages

Attacks, Malware

This campaign highlights two problems for the cybersecurity space – the increase in the frequency and sophistication of phishing as well as the increase in automated attacks. As time has gone on, the sophistication of phishing campaigns has increased significantly, with the interactive chat dialogue being an example from this campaign. This sophistication has allowed phishing campaigns to be much more successful, and in turn has led to an increase in the frequency of phishing…

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