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Google on Tuesday announced the ability for all users to set up passkeys by default, five months after it  rolled out support  for the FIDO Alliance-backed passwordless standard for Google Accounts on all platforms. "This means the next time you sign in to your account, you'll start seeing prompts to create and use passkeys, simplifying your future sign-ins," Google's Sriram Karra and Christiaan Brand  said . "It also means you'll see the ' skip password when possible ' option toggled on in your Google Account settings." Passkeys are a new form of authentication that entirely eliminate the need for usernames and passwords, or even provide any additional authentication factor. In other words, it's a passwordless login mechanism that leverages public-key cryptography to authenticate users' access to websites and apps, with the private key saved securely in the device and the public key stored in the server. Each passkey is unique and

Certain online risks to children are on the rise, according to a recent report from Thorn , a technology nonprofit whose mission is to build technology to defend children from sexual abuse. Research shared in the  Emerging Online Trends in Child Sexual Abuse 2023 report , indicates that minors are increasingly taking and sharing sexual images of themselves. This activity may occur consensually or coercively, as youth also report an increase in risky online interactions with adults. "In our digitally connected world, child sexual abuse material is easily and increasingly shared on the platforms we use in our daily lives," said John Starr, VP of Strategic Impact at Thorn. "Harmful interactions between youth and adults are not isolated to the dark corners of the web. As fast as the digital community builds innovative platforms, predators are co-opting these spaces to exploit children and share this egregious content." These trends and others shared in the Emerging O

A previously undocumented threat actor of unknown provenance has been linked to a number of attacks targeting organizations in the manufacturing, IT, and biomedical sectors in Taiwan. The Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom, attributed the attacks to an advanced persistent threat (APT) it tracks under the name  Grayling . Evidence shows that the campaign began in February 2023 and continued until at least May 2023. Also likely targeted as part of the activity is a government agency located in the Pacific Islands, as well as entities in Vietnam and the U.S. "This activity stood out due to the use by Grayling of a distinctive DLL side-loading technique that uses a custom decryptor to deploy payloads," the company  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The motivation driving this activity appears to be intelligence gathering." The initial foothold to victim environments is said to have been achieved by exploiting public-facing infrastructure,

A sophisticated  Magecart  campaign has been observed manipulating websites' default 404 error page to conceal malicious code in what's been described as the latest evolution of the attacks. The activity, per Akamai, targets Magento and WooCommerce websites, with some of the victims belonging to large organizations in the food and retail industries. "In this campaign, all the victim websites we detected were directly exploited, as the malicious code snippet was injected into one of their first-party resources," Akamai security researcher Roman Lvovsky  said  in a Monday analysis. This involves inserting the code directly into the HTML pages or within one of the first-party scripts that were loaded as part of the website. The attacks are realized through a multi-stage chain, in which the loader code retrieves the main payload during runtime in order to capture the sensitive information entered by visitors on checkout pages and exfiltrate it to a remote server. &

A new security flaw has been disclosed in the libcue library impacting GNOME Linux systems that could be exploited to achieve remote code execution (RCE) on affected hosts. Tracked as  CVE-2023-43641  (CVSS score: 8.8), the  issue  is described as a case of memory corruption in libcue, a library designed for parsing  cue sheet files . It impacts versions 2.2.1 and prior. libcue is incorporated into Tracker Miners , a search engine tool that's included by default in GNOME and indexes files in the system for easy access. The problem is rooted in an out-of-bounds array access in the track_set_index function that allows for achieving code execution on the machine simply by tricking a victim into clicking a malicious link and downloading a .cue file. "A user of the GNOME desktop environment can be exploited by downloading a cue sheet from a malicious webpage," according to a  description  of the vulnerability in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). "Because t

A recently disclosed critical flaw in Citrix NetScaler ADC and Gateway devices is being exploited by threat actors to conduct a credential harvesting campaign. IBM X-Force, which uncovered the activity last month,  said  adversaries exploited "CVE-2023-3519 to attack unpatched NetScaler Gateways to insert a malicious script into the HTML content of the authentication web page to capture user credentials." CVE-2023-3519  (CVSS score: 9.8), addressed by Citrix in July 2023, is a critical code injection vulnerability that could lead to unauthenticated remote code execution. Over the past few months, it has been  heavily   exploited  to  infiltrate vulnerable devices  and gain persistent access for follow-on attacks. In the latest attack chain discovered by IBM X-Force, the operators sent a specially crafted web request to trigger the exploitation of CVE-2023-3519 and deploy a PHP-based web shell. The access afforded by the web shell is subsequently leveraged to append cust

An ad fraud botnet dubbed  PEACHPIT  leveraged an army of hundreds of thousands of Android and iOS devices to generate illicit profits for the threat actors behind the scheme. The botnet is part of a larger China-based operation codenamed  BADBOX , which also entails selling off-brand mobile and connected TV (CTV) devices on popular online retailers and resale sites that are backdoored with an  Android malware strain  called  Triada . "The PEACHPIT botnet's conglomerate of associated apps were found in 227 countries and territories, with an estimated peak of 121,000 devices a day on Android and 159,000 devices a day on iOS," HUMAN  said . The infections are said to have been realized through a collection of 39 apps that were installed more than 15 million times. Devices fitted with the BADBOX malware allowed the operators to steal sensitive data, create residential proxy exit peers, and commit ad fraud through the bogus apps. It's currently not clear how the And

Senior executives working in U.S.-based organizations are being targeted by a new phishing campaign that leverages a popular adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) phishing toolkit named  EvilProxy  to conduct credential harvesting and account takeover attacks. Menlo Security said the activity started in July 2023, primarily singling out banking and financial services, insurance, property management and real estate, and manufacturing sectors. "The threat actors leveraged an open redirection vulnerability on the job search platform 'indeed.com,'redirecting victims to malicious phishing pages impersonating Microsoft," security researcher Ravisankar Ramprasad  said  in a report published last week. EvilProxy , first documented by Resecurity in September 2022, functions as a reverse proxy that's set up between the target and a legitimate login page to intercept credentials, two-factor authentication (2FA) codes, and session cookies to hijack accounts of interest. The th

In today's rapidly evolving technological landscape, the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) has become ubiquitous across various industries. This wave of innovation promises improved efficiency and performance, but lurking beneath the surface are complex vulnerabilities and unforeseen risks that demand immediate attention from cybersecurity professionals. As the average small and medium-sized business leader or end-user is often unaware of these growing threats, it falls upon cybersecurity service providers – MSPs, MSSPs, consultants and especially vCISOs - to take a proactive stance in protecting their clients. At Cynomi, we experience the risks associated with generative AI daily, as we use these technologies internally and work with MSP and MSSP partners to enhance the services they provide to small and medium businesses. Being committed to staying ahead of the curve and empowering virtual vCISOs to swiftly implement cutting-edge secur

"Of course, here's an example of simple code in the Python programming language that can be associated with the keywords "MyHotKeyHandler," "Keylogger," and "macOS," this is a message from ChatGPT followed by a piece of malicious code and a brief remark not to use it for illegal purposes. Initially published by  Moonlock Lab , the screenshots of ChatGPT writing code for a keylogger malware is yet another example of trivial ways to hack large language models and exploit them against their policy of use. In the case of Moonlock Lab, their malware research engineer told ChatGPT about a dream where an attacker was writing code. In the dream, he could only see the three words: "MyHotKeyHandler," "Keylogger," and "macOS." The engineer asked ChatGPT to completely recreate the malicious code and help him stop the attack. After a brief conversation, the AI finally provided the answer. "At times, the code generated isn&

Multiple high-severity security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in ConnectedIO's ER2000 edge routers and the cloud-based management platform that could be exploited by malicious actors to execute malicious code and access sensitive data. "An attacker could have leveraged these flaws to fully compromise the cloud infrastructure, remotely execute code, and leak all customer and device information," Claroty's Noam Moshe  said  in an analysis published last week. Vulnerabilities in 3G/4G routers could expose thousands of internal networks to severe threats, enabling bad actors to seize control, intercept traffic, and even infiltrate Extended Internet of Things (XIoT) things. The shortcomings impacting the ConnectedIO platform versions v2.1.0 and prior, primarily the 4G ER2000 edge router and cloud services, could be chained, permitting attackers to execute arbitrary code on the cloud-based devices without requiring direct access to them. Flaws have also been unea

The maintainers of the  Curl library  have released an advisory warning of two security vulnerabilities that are expected to be addressed as part of an forthcoming update set for release on October 11, 2023. This  includes  a high-severity and a low-severity flaw tracked under the identifiers CVE-2023-38545 and CVE-2023-38546, respectively. Additional details about the issues and the exact version ranges impacted have been withheld owing to the possibility that the information could be used to "help identify the problem (area) with a very high accuracy." That said, the "last several years" of versions of the library are said to be affected.  "Sure, there is a minuscule risk that someone can find this (again) before we ship the patch, but this issue has stayed undetected for years for a reason," Daniel Stenberg, the lead developer behind the project, said in a message posted on GitHub. Curl, powered by libcurl, is a  popular command-line tool  for tra

A Gaza-based threat actor has been linked to a series of cyber attacks aimed at Israeli private-sector energy, defense, and telecommunications organizations. Microsoft, which revealed details of the activity in its fourth annual  Digital Defense Report , is tracking the campaign under the name  Storm-1133 . "We assess this group works to further the interests of Hamas, a Sunni militant group that is the de facto governing authority in the Gaza Strip, as activity attributed to it has largely affected organizations perceived as hostile to Hamas," the company said. Targets of the campaign included organizations in the Israeli energy and defense sectors and entities loyal to Fatah, a Palestinian nationalist and social democratic political party headquartered in the West Bank region. Attack chains entail a mix of social engineering and fake profiles on LinkedIn that masquerade as Israeli human resources managers, project coordinators, and software developers to contact and s

As much as $7 billion in cryptocurrency has been illicitly laundered through cross-chain crime, with the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group linked to the theft of roughly $900 million of those proceeds between July 2022 and July of this year. "As traditional entities such as  mixers  continue to be subject to seizures and sanctions scrutiny, the crypto crime displacement to chain- or asset-hopping typologies is also on the rise," blockchain analytics firm Elliptic  said  in a new report published this week. Cross-chain crime refers to the conversion of crypto assets from one token or blockchain to another, often in rapid succession, in an attempt to obfuscate their origin, making it a lucrative method for money laundering for crypto thefts and an alternative to traditional approaches like mixers. According to data gathered by Elliptic, the Lazarus Group's use of cross-chain bridges contributed to a majority of the 111% increase in the proportion of funds sent via such s

Threat actors have been observed targeting semiconductor companies in East Asia with lures masquerading as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) that are designed to deliver Cobalt Strike beacons. The intrusion set, per  EclecticIQ , leverages a backdoor called HyperBro, which is then used as a conduit to deploy the commercial attack simulation software and post-exploitation toolkit. An alternate attack sequence is said to have utilized a previously undocumented malware downloader to deploy Cobalt Strike, indicating that the threat actors devised multiple approaches to infiltrate targets of interest. The Dutch cybersecurity firm attributed the campaign to a China-linked threat actor owing to the use of HyperBro, which has been almost exclusively put to use by a threat actor known as  Lucky Mouse  (aka APT27, Budworm, and Emissary Panda). Tactical overlaps have also been unearthed between the adversary behind the attacks and another cluster tracked by RecordedFuture un

Ensuring sensitive data remains confidential, protected from unauthorized access, and compliant with data privacy regulations is paramount. Data breaches result in financial and reputational damage but also lead to legal consequences. Therefore, robust data access security measures are essential to safeguard an organization's assets, maintain customer trust, and meet regulatory requirements.  A comprehensive  Data Security Platform  is essential for full visibility and control of sensitive data. One example is Satori's Universal Data Permissions Scanner (UDPS), an open-source authorization analysis tool.   UDPS , available on GitHub, enables universal visibility into data access permissions across various data stores. With this tool, it's easier to identify who has the potential to access sensitive data, which can help organizations take a proactive approach to enhancing their security posture, streamline compliance, and ensure well-governed data access. Understanding the Need for U

GitHub has  announced  an improvement to its secret scanning feature that extends validity checks to popular services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google, and Slack. Validity checks,  introduced  by the Microsoft subsidiary earlier this year, alert users whether exposed tokens found by  secret scanning  are active, thereby allowing for effective remediation measures. It was first enabled for GitHub tokens. The cloud-based code hosting and version control service said it intends to support more tokens in the future. To toggle the setting, enterprise or organization owners and repository administrators can head to Settings > Code security and analysis > Secret scanning and check the option "Automatically verify if a secret is valid by sending it to the relevant partner." Earlier this year, GitHub also  expanded  secret scanning alerts for all public repositories and announced the  availability of push protection  to help developers and maintainers pr