FISA

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...

In yet another sign that developers continue to be targets of software supply chain attacks, a number of malicious packages have been discovered on the Rust programming language's crate registry. The libraries, uploaded between August 14 and 16, 2023, were published by a user named "amaperf," Phylum said in a report published last week. The names of the packages, now taken down, are as follows: postgress, if-cfg, xrvrv, serd, oncecell, lazystatic, and envlogger. It's not clear what the end goal of the campaign was, but the suspicious modules were found to harbor functionalities to capture the operating system information (i.e., Windows, Linux, macOS, or Unknown) and transmit the data to a hard-coded Telegram channel via the messaging platform's API. This suggests that the campaign may have been in its early stages and that the threat actor may have been casting a wide net to compromise as many developer machines as possible to deliver rogue updates with improved d...

  Diicot, previously known as Mexals, is a relatively new threat group that possesses extensive technical knowledge and has a broad range of objectives. Diicot shares its new name with the Romanian anti-terrorism policing unit and uses the same style of messaging and imagery. Researchers from Cado Labs reported that an emerging Romanian threat actor called Diicot is utilizing unique TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) and an interesting attack pattern to target victims. The researchers noted that the group has been using brute-force malware whose payloads have neither been publicly reported nor appeared in common repositories. About Diicot Threat Group Diicot, previously known as Mexals, is a relatively new threat group that possesses extensive technical knowledge and has a broad range of objectives. Diicot shares its new name with the Romanian anti-terrorism policing unit and uses the same style of messaging and imagery. Previous research by Akamai and Bitdefender reveals ...