network security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Security Configuration Assessment (SCA)  is critical to an organization's cybersecurity strategy. SCA aims to discover vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that malicious actors exploit to gain unauthorized access to systems and data. Regular  security configuration assessments  are essential in maintaining a secure and compliant environment, as this minimizes the risk of cyber attacks. The assessment provides insight into your current security posture by performing configuration baseline checks on services and applications running on critical systems. How SCA works  SCA is performed by checking the configurations of your IT assets against known benchmarks such as the Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmark and compliance standards such as NIST, GDPR, and HIPPA. Regulatory standards provide a global benchmark for best practices to help organizations enhance their IT hygiene and improve customer trust. The CIS benchmark provides a guideline for best practices for security c

How To Use This Report Enhance situational awareness of techniques used by threat actors Identify potential attacks targeting your industry Gain insights to help improve and accelerate your organization's threat response Summary of Findings The Network Effect Threat Report offers insights based on unique data from  Fastly's Next-Gen WAF  from Q2 2023 (April 1, 2023 to June 30, 2023). This report looks at traffic originating from IP addresses tagged by Fastly's Network Learning Exchange (NLX), our collective threat intelligence feed that anonymously shares attack source IP addresses across all Next-Gen WAF customer networks. Before diving deeper into the attack observations, here are five key takeaways that we found most significant in our research, covering global traffic across multiple industries, including High Tech, Financial Services, Commerce, Education, and Media and entertainment. Multi-customer attacks: 69% of IPs tagged by NLX targeted multiple customers, and 6

VMware has released software updates to correct two security vulnerabilities in Aria Operations for Networks that could be potentially exploited to bypass authentication and gain remote code execution. The most severe of the flaws is CVE-2023-34039 (CVSS score: 9.8), which relates to a case of authentication bypass arising as a result of a lack of unique cryptographic key generation. "A malicious actor with network access to Aria Operations for Networks could bypass SSH authentication to gain access to the Aria Operations for Networks CLI," the company  said  in an advisory. ProjectDiscovery researchers Harsh Jaiswal and Rahul Maini have been credited with discovering and reporting the issue. The second weakness, CVE-2023-20890 (CVSS score: 7.2), is an arbitrary file write vulnerability impacting Aria Operations for Networks that could be abused by an adversary with administrative access to write files to arbitrary locations and achieve remote code execution. Credited

Software services provider Ivanti is  warning  of a new critical zero-day flaw impacting Ivanti Sentry (formerly MobileIron Sentry) that it said is being actively exploited in the wild, marking an escalation of its security woes. Tracked as  CVE-2023-38035  (CVSS score: 9.8), the issue has been described as a case of authentication bypass impacting versions 9.18 and prior due to what it called an due to an insufficiently restrictive Apache HTTPD configuration. "If exploited, this vulnerability enables an unauthenticated actor to access some sensitive APIs that are used to configure the Ivanti Sentry on the administrator portal (port 8443, commonly MICS)," the company  said . "While the issue has a high CVSS score, there is a low risk of exploitation for customers who do not expose port 8443 to the internet." Successful exploitation of the bug could allow an attacker to change configuration, run system commands, or write files onto the system. It's recommen

Changes in the way we work have had significant implications for cybersecurity, not least in network monitoring. Workers no longer sit safely side-by-side on a corporate network, dev teams constantly spin up and tear down systems, exposing services to the internet. Keeping track of these users, changes and services is difficult – internet-facing attack surfaces rarely stay the same for long. But a secure working network is the backbone of every modern business, and with so many different attack vectors and entry points, relying on firewalls and point-in-time scanning is no longer enough. You need to understand how your firewalls are being changed in real-time, with real-world validation of how they're configured. You need continuous network monitoring. What needs protecting in your network? There is so much sprawl in today's corporate networks with remote working, cloud computing and third-party integrations, that it's no longer just the devices or systems that you have in your off

Google has announced plans to add support for quantum-resistant encryption algorithms in its Chrome browser, starting with version 116. "Chrome will begin supporting  X25519Kyber768  for establishing symmetric secrets in  TLS , starting in Chrome 116, and available behind a flag in Chrome 115," Devon O'Brien  said  in a post published Thursday. Kyber was  chosen  by the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as the candidate for general encryption in a bid to tackle future cyber attacks posed by the advent of quantum computing.  Kyber-768  is roughly the security equivalent of  AES-192 . The encryption algorithm has already been adopted by  Cloudflare ,  Amazon Web Services , and IBM. X25519Kyber768 is a hybrid algorithm that combines the output of  X25519 , an elliptic curve algorithm widely used for key agreement in TLS, and Kyber-768 to create a strong session key to encrypt TLS connections. "Hybrid mechanism

Google has introduced a new security feature in Android 14 that allows IT administrators to disable support for 2G cellular networks in their managed device fleet. The search giant said it's introducing a second user setting to turn off support, at the model level, for  null-ciphered cellular connections . "The Android Security Model assumes that all networks are hostile to keep users safe from network packet injection, tampering, or eavesdropping on user traffic," Roger Piqueras Jover, Yomna Nasser, and Sudhi Herle  said . "Android does not rely on link-layer encryption to address this threat model. Instead, Android establishes that all network traffic should be end-to-end encrypted (E2EE)." 2G networks, in particular, employ weak encryption and lack mutual authentication,  rendering  them  susceptible  to over-the-air interception and traffic decryption attacks by impersonating a real 2G tower. The  threat posed by rogue cellular base stations  means th

New research has revealed that threat actors are abusing Cloudflare Tunnels to establish covert communication channels from compromised hosts and retain persistent access. "Cloudflared is functionally very similar to ngrok," Nic Finn, a senior threat intelligence analyst at GuidePoint Security, said . "However, Cloudflared differs from ngrok in that it provides a lot more usability for free, including the ability to host TCP connectivity over cloudflared." A command-line tool for Cloudflare Tunnel, cloudflared allows users to create secure connections between an origin web server and Cloudflare's nearest data center so as to hide the web server IP addresses as well as block volumetric distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and brute-force login attacks. For a threat actor with elevated access on an infected host, this feature presents a lucrative approach to set up a foothold by generating a token required to establish the tunnel from the victim machine.

More details have emerged about a botnet called  AVRecon , which has been observed making use of compromised small office/home office (SOHO) routers as part of a multi-year campaign active since at least May 2021. AVRecon was  first disclosed  by Lumen Black Lotus Labs earlier this month as malware capable of executing additional commands and stealing victim's bandwidth for what appears to be an illegal proxy service made available for other actors. It has also surpassed QakBot in terms of scale, having infiltrated over 41,000 nodes located across 20 countries worldwide. "The malware has been used to create residential proxy services to shroud malicious activity such as password spraying, web-traffic proxying, and ad fraud," the researchers said in the report. This has been corroborated by new findings from KrebsOnSecurity and Spur.us, which last week  revealed  that "AVrecon is the malware engine behind a 12-year-old service called SocksEscort, which rents hacke

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday disclosed details of a "novel persistent backdoor" called  SUBMARINE  deployed by threat actors in connection with the hack on Barracuda Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliances. "SUBMARINE comprises multiple artifacts — including a SQL trigger, shell scripts, and a loaded library for a Linux daemon — that together enable execution with root privileges, persistence, command and control, and cleanup," the agency  said . The findings come from an analysis of malware samples obtained from an unnamed organization that had been compromised by threat actors exploiting a critical flaw in ESG devices,  CVE-2023-2868  (CVSS score: 9.8), which allows for remote command injection. Evidence gathered so far shows that the attackers behind the activity, a suspected China nexus-actor tracked by Mandiant as  UNC4841 , leveraged the flaw as a zero-day in October 2022 to gain initial access to victim envir

A new malware strain has been found covertly targeting small office/home office (SOHO) routers for more than two years, infiltrating over 70,000 devices and creating a botnet with 40,000 nodes spanning 20 countries. Lumen Black Lotus Labs has dubbed the malware  AVrecon , making it the third such strain to focus on SOHO routers after  ZuoRAT  and  HiatusRAT  over the past year. "This makes AVrecon one of the largest SOHO router-targeting botnets ever seen," the company  said . "The purpose of the campaign appears to be the creation of a covert network to quietly enable a range of criminal activities from password spraying to digital advertising fraud." A majority of the infections are located in the U.K. and the U.S., followed by Argentina, Nigeria, Brazil, Italy, Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, Russia, and South Africa, among others. AVrecon was  first highlighted  by Kaspersky senior security researcher Ye (Seth) Jin in May 2021, indicating that the malware has

SonicWall on Wednesday urged customers of Global Management System (GMS) firewall management and Analytics network reporting engine software to apply the latest fixes to secure against a set of 15 security flaws that could be exploited by a threat actor to circumvent authentication and access sensitive information. Of the 15 shortcomings (tracked from CVE-2023-34123 through CVE-2023-34137), four are rated Critical, four are rated High, and seven are rated Medium in severity. The vulnerabilities were disclosed by NCC Group. The flaws impact on-premise versions of GMS 9.3.2-SP1 and before and Analytics 2.5.0.4-R7 and before. Fixes are available in versions GMS 9.3.3 and Analytics 2.5.2. "The suite of vulnerabilities allows an attacker to view data that they are not normally able to retrieve," SonicWall  said . "This might include data belonging to other users, or any other data that the application itself is able to access. In many cases, an attacker can modify or dele

No less than 330,000 FortiGate firewalls are still unpatched and vulnerable to CVE-2023-27997, a critical security flaw affecting Fortinet devices that has come under active exploitation in the wild. Cybersecurity firm Bishop Fox, in a  report  published last week, said that out of nearly 490,000 Fortinet SSL-VPN interfaces exposed on the internet, about 69 percent remain unpatched. CVE-2023-27997  (CVSS score: 9.8), also called XORtigate, is a critical vulnerability impacting Fortinet FortiOS and FortiProxy SSL-VPN appliances that could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code or commands via specifically crafted requests. Patches were released by Fortinet last month in versions 6.0.17, 6.2.15, 6.4.13, 7.0.12, and 7.2.5, although the company  acknowledged  that the flaw may have been "exploited in a limited number of cases" in attacks targeting government, manufacturing, and critical infrastructure sectors. Bishop Fox's analysis further found that 153,414

Taiwanese company ASUS on Monday  released firmware updates  to address, among other issues, nine security bugs impacting a wide range of router models. Of the nine security flaws, two are rated Critical and six are rated High in severity. One vulnerability is currently awaiting analysis. The list of impacted products are GT6, GT-AXE16000, GT-AX11000 PRO, GT-AXE11000, GT-AX6000, GT-AX11000, GS-AX5400, GS-AX3000, XT9, XT8, XT8 V2, RT-AX86U PRO, RT-AX86U, RT-AX86S, RT-AX82U, RT-AX58U, RT-AX3000, TUF-AX6000, and TUF-AX5400. Topping the list of fixes are  CVE-2018-1160  and  CVE-2022-26376 , both of which are rated 9.8 out of a maximum of 10 on the CVSS scoring system. CVE-2018-1160 concerns a nearly five-year-old out-of-bounds write bug in Netatalk versions before 3.1.12 that could allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to achieve arbitrary code execution. CVE-2022-26376 has been described as a memory corruption vulnerability in the Asuswrt firmware that could be triggered by mean

A suspected China-nexus threat actor dubbed UNC4841 has been linked to the exploitation of a recently patched zero-day flaw in Barracuda Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliances since October 2022. "UNC4841 is an espionage actor behind this wide-ranging campaign in support of the People's Republic of China," Google-owned Mandiant said in a new report published today, describing the group as "aggressive and skilled." The flaw in question is CVE-2023-2868 (CVSS score: 9.8), which relates to a remote code injection affecting versions 5.1.3.001 through 9.2.0.006 that arises as a result of an incomplete validation of attachments contained within incoming emails. Barracuda addressed the problem on May 20 and 21, 2023, but the company has since urged affected customers to immediately replace the devices "regardless of patch version level." Now according to the incident response and threat intelligence firm, which was appointed to probe the hack, UNC