linux | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Misconfigured and vulnerable Linux servers are the target of an ongoing campaign that delivers a stealthy malware dubbed perfctl with the primary aim of running a cryptocurrency miner and proxyjacking software. "Perfctl is particularly elusive and persistent, employing several sophisticated techniques," Aqua security researchers Assaf Morag and Idan Revivo said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "When a new user logs into the server, it immediately stops all 'noisy' activities, lying dormant until the server is idle again. After execution, it deletes its binary and continues to run quietly in the background as a service." It's worth noting that some aspects of the campaign were disclosed last month by Cado Security, which detailed an activity cluster that targets internet-exposed Selenium Grid instances with both cryptocurrency mining and proxyjacking software. Specifically, the fileless perfctl malware has been found to exploit a security

A new set of security vulnerabilities has been disclosed in the OpenPrinting Common Unix Printing System ( CUPS ) on Linux systems that could permit remote command execution under certain conditions. "A remote unauthenticated attacker can silently replace existing printers' (or install new ones) IPP urls with a malicious one, resulting in arbitrary command execution (on the computer) when a print job is started (from that computer)," security researcher Simone Margaritelli said . CUPS is a standards-based, open-source printing system for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems, including ArchLinux, Debian, Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), ChromeOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, openSUSE, and SUSE Linux. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2024-47176 - cups-browsed <= 2.0.1 binds on UDP INADDR_ANY:631 trusting any packet from any source to trigger a Get-Printer-Attributes IPP request to an attacker-controlled URL CVE-2024-47076 - libcupsfil

For years, securing a company's systems was synonymous with securing its "perimeter." There was what was safe "inside" and the unsafe outside world. We built sturdy firewalls and deployed sophisticated detection systems, confident that keeping the barbarians outside the walls kept our data and systems safe. The problem is that we no longer operate within the confines of physical on-prem installations and controlled networks. Data and applications now reside in distributed cloud environments and data centers, accessed by users and devices connecting from anywhere on the planet. The walls have crumbled, and the perimeter has dissolved, opening the door to a new battlefield: identity . Identity is at the center of what the industry has praised as the new gold standard of enterprise security: "zero trust." In this paradigm, explicit trust becomes mandatory for any interactions between systems, and no implicit trust shall subsist. Every access request, regardless of its origin,

Threat actors with ties to North Korea have been observed using poisoned Python packages as a way to deliver a new malware called PondRAT as part of an ongoing campaign. PondRAT, according to new findings from Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, is assessed to be a lighter version of POOLRAT (aka SIMPLESEA), a known macOS backdoor that has been previously attributed to the Lazarus Group and deployed in attacks related to the 3CX supply chain compromise last year. Some of these attacks are part of a persistent cyber attack campaign dubbed Operation Dream Job , wherein prospective targets are lured with enticing job offers in an attempt to trick them into downloading malware. "The attackers behind this campaign uploaded several poisoned Python packages to PyPI, a popular repository of open-source Python packages," Unit 42 researcher Yoav Zemah said , linking the activity with moderate confidence to a threat actor called Gleaming Pisces. The adversary is also tracked by the wid

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new malware campaign targeting Linux environments to conduct illicit cryptocurrency mining and deliver botnet malware. The activity, which specifically singles out the Oracle Weblogic server, is designed to deliver a malware strain dubbed Hadooken , according to cloud security firm Aqua. "When Hadooken is executed, it drops a Tsunami malware and deploys a crypto miner," security researcher Assaf Moran said . The attack chains exploit known security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, such as weak credentials, to obtain an initial foothold and execute arbitrary code on susceptible instances. This is accomplished by launching two nearly-identical payloads, one written in Python and the other, a shell script, both of which are responsible for retrieving the Hadooken malware from a remote server (" 89.185.85[.]102 " or " 185.174.136[.]204 "). "In addition, the shell script version attempts to iterate ov

A new security flaw has been addressed in the Apache OFBiz open-source enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that, if successfully exploited, could lead to unauthenticated remote code execution on Linux and Windows. The high-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-45195 (CVSS score: 7.5), affects all versions of the software before 18.12.16. "An attacker with no valid credentials exploit missing view authorization checks in the web application to execute arbitrary code on the server," Rapid7 security researcher Ryan Emmons said in a new report. It's worth noting that CVE-2024-45195 is a bypass for a sequence of issues , CVE-2024-32113, CVE-2024-36104, and CVE-2024-38856, which were addressed by the project maintainers over the past few months. Both CVE-2024-32113 and CVE-2024-38856 have since come under active exploitation in the wild, with the former leveraged to deploy the Mirai botnet malware. Rapid7 said all three older shortcomings stem from the &q

Cybersecurity researchers have unpacked the inner workings of a new ransomware variant called Cicada3301 that shares similarities with the now-defunct BlackCat (aka ALPHV) operation. "It appears that Cicada3301 ransomware primarily targets small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), likely through opportunistic attacks that exploit vulnerabilities as the initial access vector," cybersecurity company Morphisec said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. Written in Rust and capable of targeting both Windows and Linux/ESXi hosts, Cicada3301 first emerged in June 2024, inviting potential affiliates to join their ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) platform via an advertisement on the RAMP underground forum. A notable aspect of the ransomware is that the executable embeds the compromised user's credentials, which are then used to run PsExec , a legitimate tool that makes it possible to run programs remotely. Cicada3301's similarities with BlackCat also extend t

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new stealthy piece of Linux malware that leverages an unconventional technique to achieve persistence on infected systems and hide credit card skimmer code. The malware, attributed to a financially motivated threat actor, has been codenamed sedexp by Aon's Stroz Friedberg incident response services team. "This advanced threat, active since 2022, hides in plain sight while providing attackers with reverse shell capabilities and advanced concealment tactics," researchers Zachary Reichert, Daniel Stein, and Joshua Pivirotto said . It's not surprising that malicious actors are constantly improvising and refining their tradecraft, and have turned to novel techniques to evade detection. What makes sedexp noteworthy is its use of udev rules to maintain persistence. Udev, a replacement for the Device File System, offers a mechanism to identify devices based on their properties and configure rules to respond when there is a ch

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]. "Concretely, exploiting the side-channel leakage pushes the success rate to above 99% for frequently used generic caches." Memory safety vulnerabilities impacting the Linux kernel have limited capabilities and are a lot more challenging to exploit owing to security features like Supervisor Mode Access Prevention ( SMAP ), Kernel address space layout randomization ( KASLR ), and kernel control flow integrity ( kCFI ). While software cross-cache attacks have been devised as a way to counter kernel hardening strategies like coarse-grained heap separation, studies have show

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new Linux variant of a ransomware strain known as Play (aka Balloonfly and PlayCrypt) that's designed to target VMware ESXi environments. "This development suggests that the group could be broadening its attacks across the Linux platform, leading to an expanded victim pool and more successful ransom negotiations," Trend Micro researchers said in a report published Friday. Play, which arrived on the scene in June 2022, is known for its double extortion tactics, encrypting systems after exfiltrating sensitive data and demanding payment in exchange for a decryption key. According to estimates released by Australia and the U.S., as many as 300 organizations have been victimized by the ransomware group as of October 2023. Statistics shared by Trend Micro for the first seven months of 2024 show that the U.S. is the country with the highest number of victims, followed by Canada, Germany, the U.K., and the Netherlands. Manufactu

OpenSSH maintainers have released security updates to contain a critical security flaw that could result in unauthenticated remote code execution with root privileges in glibc-based Linux systems. The vulnerability, codenamed regreSSHion, has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2024-6387. It resides in the OpenSSH server component , also known as sshd, which is designed to listen for connections from any of the client applications. "The vulnerability, which is a signal handler race condition in OpenSSH's server (sshd), allows unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) as root on glibc-based Linux systems," Bharat Jogi, senior director of the threat research unit at Qualys, said in a disclosure published today. "This race condition affects sshd in its default configuration." The cybersecurity firm said it identified no less than 14 million potentially vulnerable OpenSSH server instances exposed to the internet, adding it's a regression of an already pa

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new malware campaign that targets publicly exposed Docket API endpoints with the aim of delivering cryptocurrency miners and other payloads. Included among the tools deployed is a remote access tool that's capable of downloading and executing more malicious programs as well as a utility to propagate the malware via SSH, cloud analytics platform Datadog said in a report published last week. Analysis of the campaign has uncovered tactical overlaps with a previous activity dubbed Spinning YARN , which was observed targeting misconfigured Apache Hadoop YARN, Docker, Atlassian Confluence, and Redis services for cryptojacking purposes. The attack commences with the threat actors zeroing in on Docker servers with exposed ports (port number 2375 ) to initiate a series of steps, starting with reconnaissance and privilege escalation before proceeding to the exploitation phase. Payloads are retrieved from adversary-controlled infrastructure by

A previously undocumented cross-platform malware codenamed Noodle RAT has been put to use by Chinese-speaking threat actors either for espionage or cybercrime for years. While this backdoor was previously categorized as a variant of Gh0st RAT and Rekoobe , Trend Micro security researcher Hara Hiroaki said "this backdoor is not merely a variant of existing malware, but is a new type altogether." Noodle RAT, which also goes by the monikers ANGRYREBEL and Nood RAT , comes in both Windows and Linux flavors, and is believed to have been put to use since at least July 2016. The remote access trojan Gh0st RAT first surfaced in 2008 when a China threat group called the C. Rufus Security Team made its source code publicly available. Over the years, the malware – alongside other tools like PlugX and ShadowPad – has become a hallmark of Chinese government hackers, who have used it in numerous campaigns and attacks. The Windows version of Noodle RAT, an in-memory modular backd

Russian organizations are at the receiving end of cyber attacks that have been found to deliver a Windows version of a malware called Decoy Dog . Cybersecurity company Positive Technologies is tracking the activity cluster under the name Operation Lahat, attributing it to an advanced persistent threat (APT) group called HellHounds . "The Hellhounds group compromises organizations they select and gain a foothold on their networks, remaining undetected for years," security researchers Aleksandr Grigorian and Stanislav Pyzhov said . "In doing so, the group leverages primary compromise vectors, from vulnerable web services to trusted relationships." HellHounds was first documented by the firm in late November 2023 following the compromise of an unnamed power company with the Decoy Dog trojan. It's confirmed to have infiltrated 48 victims in Russia to date, including IT companies, governments, space industry firms, and telecom providers. There is evidence indi

Google on Thursday rolled out fixes to address a high-severity security flaw in its Chrome browser that it said has been exploited in the wild. Assigned the CVE identifier  CVE-2024-5274 , the vulnerability relates to a type confusion bug in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine. It was reported by Clément Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group and Brendon Tiszka of Chrome Security on May 20, 2024. Type confusion vulnerabilities  occur when a program attempts to access a resource with an incompatible type. It can have  serious consequences  as it allows threat actors to perform out-of-bounds memory access, cause a crash, and execute arbitrary code. The development marks the fourth zero-day that Google has patched since the start of the month after  CVE-2024-4671 ,  CVE-2024-4761 , and  CVE-2024-4947 . The tech giant did not disclose additional technical details about the flaw, but  acknowledged  that it "is aware that an exploit for CVE-2024-5274 exists in the wild

Popular enterprise services provider Zoom has announced the rollout of post-quantum end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for Zoom Meetings, with support for Zoom Phone and Zoom Rooms coming in the future. "As adversarial threats become more sophisticated, so does the need to safeguard user data," the company  said  in a statement. "With the launch of post-quantum E2EE, we are doubling down on security and providing leading-edge features for users to help protect their data." Zoom's post-quantum E2EE uses  Kyber-768 , which aims at security roughly equivalent to AES-192. Kyber was  chosen  by the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in July 2022 as the quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithm for general encryption. However, for post-quantum E2EE to be enabled by default, it  requires  all meeting participants to be on Zoom desktop or mobile app version 6.0.10 or higher. In the event some of the participants don

The cryptojacking group known as  Kinsing  has demonstrated an ability to continuously evolve and adapt, proving to be a persistent threat by swiftly integrating newly disclosed vulnerabilities to the exploit arsenal and expand its botnet. The  findings  come from cloud security firm Aqua, which described the threat actor as actively orchestrating illicit cryptocurrency mining campaigns since 2019. Kinsing (aka  H2Miner ), a name given to both the malware and the adversary behind it, has consistently expanded its toolkit with new exploits to enroll infected systems in a crypto-mining botnet. It was  first documented  by TrustedSec in January 2020. In recent years, campaigns involving the Golang-based malware have weaponized  various flaws  in  Apache ActiveMQ ,  Apache Log4j ,  Apache NiFi ,  Apache Tomcat ,  Atlassian Confluence ,  Citrix ,  Liferay Portal ,  Linux ,  Openfire ,  Oracle WebLogic Server , and  SaltStack  to breach vulnerable systems. Other methods have also invol