Newsletters

Written content from the Risky Business Media team

Risky Biz News: FTA hacking spree continues with CrushFTP zero-day

Presented by

Catalin Cimpanu
Catalin Cimpanu

News Editor

An unidentified threat actor is exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in CrushFTP, an enterprise file-transfer software solution.

CrushFTP released a patch on Friday, hours after it learned of the attacks from the Airbus CERT team. CrowdStrike also confirmed the zero-day later in the day and described the attacks as "targeted."

The zero-day was assigned CVE-2024-4040.

Risky Biz News: Authorities take down LabHost, one of the world’s largest phishing platforms

Presented by

Catalin Cimpanu
Catalin Cimpanu

News Editor

Law enforcement agencies from 19 countries have collaborated to take down a cybercrime service named LabHost that provided tools to easily set up and run phishing pages.

The service launched in late 2021 and was what you would call a PhaaS, or Phishing-as-a-Service platform.

For prices of $179/month and higher, it allowed threat actors to use templates and set up phishing sites imitating a legitimate service.

Corporate Freeloading Makes Open Source Vulnerable

Presented by

Tom Uren
Tom Uren

Policy & Intelligence

The foundations for open source software security (OpenSSF) and for the promotion of JavaScript (OpenJS) have jointly warned the takeover of the XZ Utils project (a likely state-backed multi-year effort to subvert an open source project by gaining the trust of the package's maintainer) was probably not an isolated incident. 

The foundations said that several 'credible takeover attempts' had been unsuccessfully launched against JavaScript-related projects.

Their post provides a list of "suspicious patterns" of behaviour that could indicate an attempted social engineering attack. The list isn't wrong, but to some degree it misses the point.

Risky Biz News: PuTTY crypto bug exposes private keys, may lead to supply chain attacks

Presented by

Catalin Cimpanu
Catalin Cimpanu

News Editor

A team of German academics has discovered a crypto vulnerability in PuTTY, an extremely popular SSH and Telnet client for Windows users.

The vulnerability allows attackers who run malicious SSH servers to observe cryptographic signatures and recover a user's private key. This allows attackers to connect to systems where the private keys are being used for authentication.

But the vulnerability main impact is on source code repositories if they've been managed via a client that embeds PuTTY.

Risky Biz News: Palo Alto Networks scrambles to push zero-day patch

Presented by

Catalin Cimpanu
Catalin Cimpanu

News Editor

Palo Alto Networks has scrambled over the weekend to release a software patch for its firewall devices. The patch is intended to fix a zero-day (CVE-2024-3400) in the GlobalProtect VPN feature of PAN-OS, the firmware that runs on Palo Alto's firewalls.

Security firm Volexity discovered the attacks, which the company attributed to a group it tracks as UTA0218. Palo Alto tracks this as Operation MidnightEclipse.

Volexity described the group as a state-backed threat actor but did not link the group to any country.

Risky Biz News: Sisense breach has CISA and everyone else panicking

Presented by

Catalin Cimpanu
Catalin Cimpanu

News Editor

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has urged customers of business analytics company Sisense to rotate all credentials and access tokens linked to the company's tools and services.

The agency said it was responding to a security breach discovered at Sisense by "independent security researchers."

At the time of writing, details about the hack and what exactly happened remain shrouded in mystery, but infosec peeps in the know seem to be treating it as a DEFCON 1 incident.

Norms? What Norms? Honeypots, Harassment On the Up

Presented by

Tom Uren
Tom Uren

Policy & Intelligence

Multiple recent incidents show state actors violating what Five Eyes countries consider to be acceptable norms of online behaviour. 

Politico reports politicians, officials and journalists working in the UK parliament were subjected to honeypot-style phishing campaigns. Politico's investigation identified six men who were targeted with unsolicited WhatsApp messages.  

And further on in the article:

Risky Biz News: Multi-party approval comes to Google Workspace

Presented by

Catalin Cimpanu
Catalin Cimpanu

News Editor

Google has added a new feature for its Workspace enterprise platform that will require multiple administrators to approve changes to an organization's sensitive settings.

The new Multi-Party Approval feature will roll out in the next two weeks and will be available to any Google Workspace customer with two or more super admin accounts.

Once enabled, all super admins will be required to approve changes made to sensitive Workspace environments, such as changing MFA settings, account recovery steps, and login and session controls. The full list of Workspace settings that will trigger a multi-party approval challenge is available below.

Risky Biz News: Backdoor found in 92k D-Link NAS devices

Presented by

Catalin Cimpanu
Catalin Cimpanu

News Editor

A security researcher going online by the pseudonym of NetSecFish (NetworkSecurityFish) has discovered a backdoor in D-Link network-attached storage (NAS) devices.

D-Link has declined to patch the issue as all the devices reached End-of-Service four years ago, in June 2020.

The list of affected products includes NAS models DNS-320L, DNS-325, DNS-327L, and DNS-340L.

Risky Biz News: Ukraine wants Sandworm hackers tried at The Hague

Presented by

Catalin Cimpanu
Catalin Cimpanu

News Editor

The Ukrainian government is gathering evidence and intends to file a war crimes case against Russian military hackers at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

The case will center around the December 2023 cyberattack against Kyivstar, Ukraine's largest mobile operator.

Russia hackers breached the company in May of last year, gathered data, and then wiped thousands of servers on December 12.