Author: Chris H

A large-scale extortion campaign has compromised various organizations by taking advantage of publicly accessible environment variable files (.env) that contain credentials associated with cloud and social media applications.
“Multiple security missteps were present in the course of this campaign, including the following: Exposing environment variables, using long-lived credentials, and absence

Brain Cipher made a loud entry to the ransomware scene, but it doesn’t seem to be quite as sophisticated as its accomplishment would suggest.

An ongoing social engineering campaign with alleged links to the Black Basta ransomware group has been linked to “multiple intrusion attempts” with the goal of conducting credential theft and deploying a malware dropper called SystemBC.
“The initial lure being utilized by the threat actors remains the same: an email bomb followed by an attempt to call impacted users and offer a fake solution,”

At Black Hat USA, security researcher Michael Bargury released a “LOLCopilot” ethical hacking module to demonstrate how attackers can exploit Microsoft Copilot — and offered advice for defensive tooling.

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as Kimsuky has been linked to a new set of attacks targeting university staff, researchers, and professors for intelligence gathering purposes.
Cybersecurity firm Resilience said it identified the activity in late July 2024 after it observed an operation security (OPSEC) error made by the hackers.
Kimsuky, also known by the names APT43, ARCHIPELAGO,

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a novel Linux kernel exploitation technique dubbed SLUBStick that could be exploited to elevate a limited heap vulnerability to an arbitrary memory read-and-write primitive.
“Initially, it exploits a timing side-channel of the allocator to perform a cross-cache attack reliably,” a group of academics from the Graz University of Technology said [PDF]. “

The runaway success of an upstart ransomware outfit called “Dark Angels” may well influence the cyberattack landscape for years to come.

A Taiwanese government-affiliated research institute that specializes in computing and associated technologies was breached by nation-state threat actors with ties to China, according to new findings from Cisco Talos.
The unnamed organization was targeted as early as mid-July 2023 to deliver a variety of backdoors and post-compromise tools like ShadowPad and Cobalt Strike. It has been attributed

Cybersecurity company Acronis is warning that a now-patched critical security flaw impacting its Cyber Infrastructure (ACI) product has been exploited in the wild.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-45249 (CVSS score: 9.8), concerns a case of remote code execution that stems from the use of default passwords.
The flaw impacts the following versions of Acronis Cyber Infrastructure (ACI) –

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Phishing and fraud surges during any national news story. This time though, the activity is both more voluminous and more targeted.