FISA

A new malware campaign is leveraging a high-severity security flaw in the Popup Builder plugin for WordPress to inject malicious JavaScript code. According to Sucuri, the campaign has  infected more than 3,900 sites  over the past three weeks. "These attacks are orchestrated from domains less than a month old, with registrations dating back to February 12th, 2024," security researcher Puja Srivastava  said  in a report dated March 7. Infection sequences involve the exploitation of CVE-2023-6000, a security vulnerability in Popup Builder that could be exploited to create rogue admin users and install arbitrary plugins. The shortcoming was exploited as part of a  Balada Injector campaign  earlier this January, compromising no less than 7,000 sites. The latest set of attacks lead to the injection of malicious code, which comes in two different variants and is designed to redirect site visitors to other sites such as phishing and scam pages. WordPress site owne...

In January 2024, cybersecurity faced a remarkable surge in threats, with a focus on exploiting vulnerabilities in technologies from leading vendors. This spike in cyber attacks highlighted the urgent necessity for robust security posture and swift responses to mitigate these vulnerabilities.  Below is an in-depth analysis of the most critical vulnerabilities targeted during January. CVE-2023-46805 and CVE-2024-21887:   CISA Warns Against Ivanti Zero-Day Vulnerabilities On January 19, 2024, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an alert regarding two critical zero-day vulnerabilities discovered in Ivanti products:  CVE-2023-46805 and  CVE-2024-21887.  Assigned CVSS scores of 8.2 (High) and 9.1 (Critical), these vulnerabilities underscore a significant risk to cybersecurity, marked by their capability for arbitrary command execution. This prompted an emergency directive for immediate mitigation within federal agencies, highlighting the...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added two security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog due to active exploitation, while removing five bugs from the list due to lack of adequate evidence. The vulnerabilities newly added are below - CVE-2023-42793  (CVSS score: 9.8) - JetBrains TeamCity Authentication Bypass Vulnerability CVE-2023-28229  (CVSS score: 7.0) - Microsoft Windows CNG Key Isolation Service Privilege Escalation Vulnerability CVE-2023-42793 relates to a critical authentication bypass vulnerability that allows for remote code execution on TeamCity Server. Data gathered by GreyNoise has revealed exploitation attempts targeting the flaw from 74 unique IP addresses to date. On the other hand, CVE-2023-28229 is a high-severity flaw in the Microsoft Windows Cryptographic Next Generation (CNG) Key Isolation Service that allows an attacker to gain specific limited SYS...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday warned that multiple nation-state actors are exploiting security flaws in Fortinet FortiOS SSL-VPN and Zoho ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus to gain unauthorized access and establish persistence on compromised systems. "Nation-state advanced persistent threat (APT) actors exploited CVE-2022-47966 to gain unauthorized access to a public-facing application (Zoho ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus), establish persistence, and move laterally through the network," according to a joint alert published by the agency, alongside Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF). The identities of the threat groups behind the attacks have not been disclosed, although the U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) hinted at the involvement of Iranian nation-state crews. The findings are based on an incident response engagement conducted by CISA at nn unnamed aeronautical sector organization f...

An unknown threat actor has been observed weaponizing high-severity security flaws in the MinIO high-performance object storage system to achieve unauthorized code execution on affected servers. Cybersecurity and incident response firm Security Joes said the intrusion leveraged a publicly available exploit chain to backdoor the MinIO instance. The comprises  CVE-2023-28432  (CVSS score: 7.5) and  CVE-2023-28434  (CVSS score: 8.8), the former of which was added to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's (CISA) Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog on April 21, 2023. The two vulnerabilities "possess the potential to expose sensitive information present within the compromised installation and facilitate remote code execution (RCE) on the host where the MinIO application is operational," Security Joes said in a report shared with The Hacker News. In the attack chain investigated by the company, the flaws are said to have be...

Proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code has been made available for a recently disclosed and patched critical flaw impacting VMware Aria Operations for Networks (formerly vRealize Network Insight). The flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-34039, is rated 9.8 out of a maximum of 10 for severity and has been described as a case of authentication bypass due to 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," VMware said earlier this week. Summoning Team's Sina Kheirkhah, who published the PoC following an analysis of the patch released by VMware, said the root cause can be traced back to a bash script containing a method named refresh_ssh_keys(), which is responsible for overwriting the current SSH keys for the support and ubuntu users in the authorized_keys file. "There is SSH authentication in place; however, VMware forgot to r...

  The Cuba ransomware gang was observed in attacks targeting critical infrastructure organizations in the United States and IT firms in Latin America, using a combination of old and new tools. BlackBerry's Threat Research and Intelligence team, which spotted the latest campaign in early June 2023, reports that Cuba now leverages CVE-2023-27532 to steal credentials from configuration files. The particular flaw impacts Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) products, and an exploit for it has been available since March 2023. Previously, WithSecure reported that FIN7, a group with multiple confirmed affiliations with various ransomware operations, was actively exploiting CVE-2023-27532. Cuba attack details BlackBerry reports that Cuba's initial access vector appears to be compromised admin credentials via RDP, not involving brute forcing. Next, Cuba's signature custom downloader 'BugHatch' establishes communication with the C2 server and downloads DLL ...

A new, financially motivated operation dubbed   LABRAT   has been observed weaponizing a now-patched critical flaw in GitLab as part of a cryptojacking and proxyjacking campaign. "The attacker utilized undetected signature-based tools, sophisticated and stealthy cross-platform malware, command-and-control (C2) tools which bypassed firewalls, and kernel-based rootkits to hide their presence," Sysdig said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Furthermore, the attacker abused a legitimate service, TryCloudflare, to obfuscate their C2 network." Proxyjacking allows the attacker to rent the compromised host out to a proxy network, making it possible to monetize the unused bandwidth. Cryptojacking, on the other hand, refers to the abuse of the system resources to mine cryptocurrency. A notable aspect of the campaign is the use of compiled binaries written in Go and .NET to fly under the radar, with LABRAT also providing backdoor access to the infected systems....