Chinese Hackers Exploited New Zero-Day in Barracuda's ESG Appliances

Barracuda has revealed that Chinese threat actors exploited a new zero-day in its Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliances to deploy backdoor on a "limited number" of devices.

Tracked as CVE-2023-7102, the issue relates to a case of arbitrary code execution that resides within a third-party and open-source library Spreadsheet::ParseExcel that's used by the Amavis scanner within the gateway.

Hackers Exploiting MS Excel Vulnerability to Spread Agent Tesla Malware

Attackers are weaponizing an old Microsoft Office vulnerability as part of phishing campaigns to distribute a strain of malware called Agent Tesla.

The infection chains leverage decoy Excel documents attached in invoice-themed messages to trick potential targets into opening them and activate the exploitation of CVE-2017-11882 (CVSS score: 7.8), a memory corruption vulnerability in Office's Equation Editor that could result in code execution with the privileges of the user.

Beware: Experts Reveal New Details on Zero-Click Outlook RCE Exploits

Technical details have emerged about two now-patched security flaws in Microsoft Windows that could be chained by threat actors to achieve remote code execution on the Outlook email service sans any user interaction.

"An attacker on the internet can chain the vulnerabilities together to create a full, zero-click remote code execution (RCE) exploit against Outlook clients," Akamai security researcher Ben Barnea, who discovered the vulnerabilities, said in a two-part report shared with The Hacker News. The security issues, which were addressed by Microsoft in August and October 2023, respectively, are listed below -

Microsoft Warns of Hackers Exploiting OAuth for Cryptocurrency Mining and Phishing

Microsoft has warned that adversaries are using OAuth applications as an automation tool to deploy virtual machines (VMs) for cryptocurrency mining and launch phishing attacks.

"Threat actors compromise user accounts to create, modify, and grant high privileges to OAuth applications that they can misuse to hide malicious activity," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in an analysis.

New Bluetooth Flaw Let Hackers Take Over Android, Linux, macOS, and iOS Devices

A critical Bluetooth security flaw could be exploited by threat actors to take control of Android, Linux, macOS and iOS devices.

Tracked as CVE-2023-45866, the issue relates to a case of authentication bypass that enables attackers to connect to susceptible devices and inject keystrokes to achieve code execution as the victim.

Iranian Hackers Exploit PLCs in Attack on Water Authority in U.S.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) revealed that it's responding to a cyber attack that involved the active exploitation of Unitronics programmable logic controllers (PLCs) to target the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa in western Pennsylvania.

The attack has been attributed to an Iranian-backed hacktivist collective known as Cyber Av3ngers.

Hackers Can Exploit 'Forced Authentication' to Steal Windows NTLM Tokens

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a case of "forced authentication" that could be exploited to leak a Windows user's NT LAN Manager (NTLM) tokens by tricking a victim into opening a specially crafted Microsoft Access file.

The attack takes advantage of a legitimate feature in the database management system solution that allows users to link to external data sources, such as a remote SQL Server table.

Randstorm Exploit: Bitcoin Wallets Created b/w 2011-2015 Vulnerable to Hacking

Bitcoin wallets created between 2011 and 2015 are susceptible to a new kind of exploit called Randstorm that makes it possible to recover passwords and gain unauthorized access to a multitude of wallets spanning several blockchain platforms.

"Randstorm() is a term we coined to describe a collection of bugs, design decisions, and API changes that, when brought in contact with each other, combine to dramatically reduce the quality of random numbers produced by web browsers of a certain era (2011-2015)," Unciphered disclosed in a report published last week.

Zero-Day Alert: Lace Tempest Exploits SysAid IT Support Software Vulnerability

The threat actor known as Lace Tempest has been linked to the exploitation of a zero-day flaw in SysAid IT support software in limited attacks, according to new findings from Microsoft.

Lace Tempest, which is known for distributing the Cl0p ransomware, has in the past leveraged zero-day flaws in MOVEit Transfer and PaperCut servers.

CISA Alerts: High-Severity SLP Vulnerability Now Under Active Exploitation

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added a high-severity flaw in the Service Location Protocol (SLP) to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation.

Tracked as CVE-2023-29552 (CVSS score: 7.5), the issue relates to a denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability that could be weaponized to launch massive DoS amplification attacks.

iLeakage: New Safari Exploit Impacts Apple iPhones and Macs with A- and M-Series CPUs

A group of academics has devised a novel side-channel attack dubbed iLeakage that exploits a weakness in the A- and M-series CPUs running on Apple iOS, iPadOS, and macOS devices, enabling the extraction of sensitive information from the Safari web browser.

"An attacker can induce Safari to render an arbitrary webpage, subsequently recovering sensitive information present within it using speculative execution," researchers Jason Kim, Stephan van Schaik, Daniel Genkin, and Yuval Yarom said in a new study.

Nation State Hackers Exploiting Zero-Day in Roundcube Webmail Software

The threat actor known as Winter Vivern has been observed exploiting a zero-day flaw in Roundcube webmail software on October 11, 2023, to harvest email messages from victims' accounts.

"Winter Vivern has stepped up its operations by using a zero-day vulnerability in Roundcube," ESET security researcher Matthieu Faou said in a new report published today. Previously, it was using known vulnerabilities in Roundcube and Zimbra, for which proofs-of-concept are available online."

Cisco Zero-Day Exploited to Implant Malicious Lua Backdoor on Thousands of Devices

Cisco has warned of a new zero-day flaw in IOS XE that has been actively exploited by an unknown threat actor to deploy a malicious Lua-based implant on susceptible devices.

Tracked as CVE-2023-20273 (CVSS score: 7.2), the issue relates to a privilege escalation flaw in the web UI feature and is said to have been used alongside CVE-2023-20198 as part of an exploit chain.

Microsoft Warns of North Korean Attacks Exploiting JetBrains TeamCity Flaw

North Korean threat actors are actively exploiting a critical security flaw in JetBrains TeamCity to opportunistically breach vulnerable servers, according to Microsoft.

The attacks, which entail the exploitation of CVE-2023-42793 (CVSS score: 9.8), have been attributed to Diamond Sleet (aka Labyrinth Chollima) and Onyx Sleet (aka Andariel or Silent Chollima).

Google TAG Detects State-Backed Threat Actors Exploiting WinRAR Flaw

A number of state-back threat actors from Russia and China have been observed exploiting a recent security flaw in the WinRAR archiver tool for Windows as part of their operations.

The vulnerability in question is CVE-2023-38831 (CVSS score: 7.8), which allows attackers to execute arbitrary code when a user attempts to view a benign file within a ZIP archive. The shortcoming has been actively exploited since at least April 2023.

Critical Citrix NetScaler Flaw Exploited to Target from Government, Tech Firms

Citrix is warning of exploitation of a recently disclosed critical security flaw in NetScaler ADC and Gateway appliances that could result in exposure of sensitive information.

Tracked as CVE-2023-4966 (CVSS score: 9.4), the vulnerability impacts the following supported versions

Binance's Smart Chain Exploited in New 'EtherHiding' Malware Campaign

Threat actors have been observed serving malicious code by utilizing Binance's Smart Chain (BSC) contracts in what has been described as the "next level of bulletproof hosting."

The campaign, detected two months ago, has been codenamed EtherHiding by Guardio Labs.

Microsoft Warns of Nation-State Hackers Exploiting Critical Atlassian Confluence Vulnerability

Microsoft has linked the exploitation of a recently disclosed critical flaw in Atlassian Confluence Data Center and Server to a nation-state actor it tracks as Storm-0062 (aka DarkShadow or Oro0lxy).

The tech giant's threat intelligence team said it observed in-the-wild abuse of the vulnerability since September 14, 2023.

Citrix Devices Under Attack: NetScaler Flaw Exploited to Capture User Credentials

A recently disclosed critical flaw in Citrix NetScaler ADC and Gateway devices is being exploited by threat actors to conduct a credential harvesting campaign.

IBM X-Force, which uncovered the activity last month, said adversaries exploited "CVE-2023-3519 to attack unpatched NetScaler Gateways to insert a malicious script into the HTML content of the authentication web page to capture user credentials."

Atlassian Confluence Hit by New Actively Exploited Zero-Day – Patch Now

Atlassian has released fixes to contain an actively exploited critical zero-day flaw impacting publicly accessible Confluence Data Center and Server instances.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-22515, is remotely exploitable and allows external attackers to create unauthorized Confluence administrator accounts and access Confluence servers.

Microsoft Releases Patch for Two New Actively Exploited Zero-Days Flaws

Microsoft has released software fixes to remediate 59 bugs spanning its product portfolio, including two zero-day flaws that have been actively exploited by malicious cyber actors.

Of the 59 vulnerabilities, five are rated Critical, 55 are rated Important, and one is rated Moderate in severity. The update is in addition to 35 flaws patched in the Chromium-based Edge browser since last month's Patch Tuesday edition, which also encompasses a fix for CVE-2023-4863, a critical heap buffer overflow flaw in the WebP image format.

Update Adobe Acrobat and Reader to Patch Actively Exploited Vulnerability

Adobe's Patch Tuesday update for September 2023 comes with a patch for a critical actively exploited security flaw in Acrobat and Reader that could permit an attacker to execute malicious code on susceptible systems.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-26369, is rated 7.8 for severity on the CVSS scoring system and impacts both Windows and macOS versions of Acrobat DC, Acrobat Reader DC, Acrobat 2020, and Acrobat Reader 2020.

Mozilla Rushes to Patch WebP Critical Zero-Day Exploit in Firefox and Thunderbird

Mozilla on Tuesday released security updates to resolve a critical zero-day vulnerability in Firefox and Thunderbird that has been actively exploited in the wild, a day after Google released a fix for the issue in its Chrome browser.

The shortcoming, assigned the identifier CVE-2023-4863, is a heap buffer overflow flaw in the WebP image format that could result in arbitrary code execution when processing a specially crafted image.

Google Rushes to Patch Critical Chrome Vulnerability Exploited in the Wild - Update Now

Google on Monday rolled out out-of-band security patches to address a critical security flaw in its Chrome web browser that it said has been exploited in the wild.

Tracked as CVE-2023-4863, the issue has been described as a case of heap buffer overflow that resides in the WebP image format that could result in arbitrary code execution or a crash.

North Korean Hackers Exploit Zero-Day Bug to Target Cybersecurity Researchers

Threat actors associated with North Korea are continuing to target the cybersecurity community using a zero-day bug in unspecified software over the past several weeks to infiltrate their machines.

The findings come from Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG), which found the adversary setting up fake accounts on social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Mastodon to forge relationships with potential targets and build trust.

CISA Warning: Nation-State Hackers Exploit Fortinet and Zoho Vulnerabilities

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).

Zero-Day Alert: Latest Android Patch Update Includes Fix for Newly Actively Exploited Flaw

Google has rolled out monthly security patches for Android to address a number of flaws, including a zero-day bug that it said may have been exploited in the wild.

Tracked as CVE-2023-35674, the high-severity vulnerability is described as a case of privilege escalation impacting the Android Framework.

PoC Exploit Released for Critical VMware Aria's SSH Auth Bypass Vulnerability

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.

Hackers Can Exploit Windows Container Isolation Framework to Bypass Endpoint Security

New findings show that malicious actors could leverage a sneaky malware detection evasion technique and bypass endpoint security solutions by manipulating the Windows Container Isolation Framework.

The findings were presented by Deep Instinct security researcher Daniel Avinoam at the DEF CON security conference held earlier this month.

Microsoft's container architecture (and by extension, Windows Sandbox) uses what's called a dynamically generated image to separate the file system from each container to the host and at the same time avoid duplication of system files.

Experts Uncover How Cybercriminals Could Exploit Microsoft Entra ID for Elevated Privilege

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a case of privilege escalation associated with a Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) application by taking advantage of an abandoned reply URL.

"An attacker could leverage this abandoned URL to redirect authorization codes to themselves, exchanging the ill-gotten authorization codes for access tokens," Secureworks Counter Threat Unit (CTU) said in a technical report published last week.

"The threat actor could then call Power Platform API via a middle-tier service and obtain elevated privileges."

Researchers Shed Light on APT31's Advanced Backdoors and Data Exfiltration Tactics

The Chinese threat actor known as APT31 (aka Bronze Vinewood, Judgement Panda, or Violet Typhoon) has been linked to a set of advanced backdoors that are capable of exfiltrating harvested sensitive information to Dropbox. The malware is part of a broader collection of more than 15 implants that have been put to use by the adversary in attacks targeting industrial organizations in Eastern Europe in 2022.

"The attackers aimed to establish a permanent channel for data exfiltration, including data stored on air-gapped systems," Kaspersky said in an analysis spotlighting APT31's previously undocumented tradecraft.

Emerging Attacker Exploit: Microsoft Cross-Tenant Synchronization

Attackers continue to target Microsoft identities to gain access to connected Microsoft applications and federated SaaS applications. Additionally, attackers continue to progress their attacks in these environments, not by exploiting vulnerabilities, but by abusing native Microsoft functionality to achieve their objective. The attacker group Nobelium, linked with the SolarWinds attacks, has been documented using native functionality like the creation of Federated Trusts to enable persistent access to a Microsoft tenant.

Major Cybersecurity Agencies Collaborate to Unveil 2022's Most Exploited Vulnerabilities

A four-year-old critical security flaw impacting Fortinet FortiOS SSL has emerged as one of the most routinely and frequently exploited vulnerabilities in 2022.

"In 2022, malicious cyber actors exploited older software vulnerabilities more frequently than recently disclosed vulnerabilities and targeted unpatched, internet-facing systems," cybersecurity and intelligence agencies from the Five Eyes nations, which comprises Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S., said in a joint alert.

Zero-Day Attacks Exploited Critical Vulnerability in Citrix ADC and Gateway

Citrix is alerting users of a critical security flaw in NetScaler Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and Gateway that it said is being actively exploited in the wild.

Tracked as CVE-2023-3519 (CVSS score: 9.8), the issue relates to a case of code injection that could result in unauthenticated remote code execution. It impacts the following versions -

NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway 13.1 before 13.1-49.13

Cybercriminals Exploiting WooCommerce Payments Plugin Flaw to Hijack Websites

Threat actors are actively exploiting a recently disclosed critical security flaw in the WooCommerce Payments WordPress plugin as part of a massive targeted campaign.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-28121 (CVSS score: 9.8), is a case of authentication bypass that enables unauthenticated attackers to impersonate arbitrary users and perform some actions as the impersonated user, including an administrator, potentially leading to site takeover. "Large-scale attacks against the vulnerability, assigned CVE-2023-28121, began on Thursday, July 14, 2023 and continued over the weekend, peaking at 1.3 million attacks against 157,000 sites on Saturday, July 16, 2023," Wordfence security researcher Ram Gall said in a Monday post.

Hackers Exploit WebAPK to Deceive Android Users into Installing Malicious Apps

Threat actors are taking advantage of Android's WebAPK technology to trick unsuspecting users into installing malicious web apps on Android phones that are designed to capture sensitive personal information.

"The attack began with victims receiving SMS messages suggesting the need to update a mobile banking application," researchers from CSIRT KNF said in an analysis released last week. "The link contained in the message led to a site that used WebAPK technology to install a malicious application on the victim's device."

Cybercriminals Exploit Microsoft Word Vulnerabilities to Deploy LokiBot Malware

Microsoft Word documents exploiting known remote code execution flaws are being used as phishing lures to drop malware called LokiBot on compromised systems.

"LokiBot, also known as Loki PWS, has been a well-known information-stealing Trojan active since 2015," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin said. "It primarily targets Windows systems and aims to gather sensitive information from infected machines."

Hackers Exploit Windows Policy Loophole to Forge Kernel-Mode Driver Signatures

A Microsoft Windows policy loophole has been observed being exploited primarily by native Chinese-speaking threat actors to forge signatures on kernel-mode drivers.

"Actors are leveraging multiple open-source tools that alter the signing date of kernel mode drivers to load malicious and unverified drivers signed with expired certificates," Cisco Talos said in an exhaustive two-part report shared with The Hacker News. "This is a major threat, as access to the kernel provides complete access to a system, and therefore total compromise."

Chinese UNC4841 Group Exploits Zero-Day Flaw in Barracuda Email Security Gateway

A suspected China-nexus threat actor dubbed UNC4841 has been linked to the exploitation of a recently patched zero-day flaw in Barracuda Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliances since October 2022.

"UNC4841 is an espionage actor behind this wide-ranging campaign in support of the People's Republic of China," Google-owned Mandiant said in a new report published today, describing the group as "aggressive and skilled."

The flaw in question is CVE-2023-2868 (CVSS score: 9.8), which relates to a remote code injection affecting versions 5.1.3.001 through 9.2.0.006 that arises as a result of an incomplete validation of attachments contained within incoming emails.

New Supply Chain Attack Exploits Abandoned S3 Buckets to Distribute Malicious Binaries

In what's a new kind of software supply chain attack aimed at open source projects, it has emerged that threat actors could seize control of expired Amazon S3 buckets to serve rogue binaries without altering the modules themselves.

"Malicious binaries steal the user IDs, passwords, local machine environment variables, and local host name, and then exfiltrates the stolen data to the hijacked bucket," Checkmarx researcher Guy Nachshon said.

Microsoft: Lace Tempest Hackers Behind Active Exploitation of MOVEit Transfer App

Microsoft has officially linked the ongoing active exploitation of a critical flaw in the Progress Software MOVEit Transfer application to a threat actor it tracks as Lace Tempest.

"Exploitation is often followed by deployment of a web shell with data exfiltration capabilities," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a series of tweets today. "CVE-2023-34362 allows attackers to authenticate as any user."

Alert: Hackers Exploit Barracuda Email Security Gateway 0-Day Flaw for 7 Months

31.5.23  Exploit  The Hacker News
Enterprise security firm Barracuda on Tuesday disclosed that a recently patched zero-day flaw in its Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliances had been abused by threat actors since October 2022 to backdoor the devices.

The latest findings show that the critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-2868 (CVSS score: N/A), has been actively exploited for at least seven months prior to its discovery.

The flaw, which Barracuda identified on May 19, 2023, affects versions 5.1.3.001 through 9.2.0.006 and could allow a remote attacker to achieve code execution on susceptible installations. Patches were released by Barracuda on May 20 and May 21.

Barracuda Warns of Zero-Day Exploited to Breach Email Security Gateway Appliances

Email protection and network security services provider Barracuda is warning users about a zero-day flaw that it said has been exploited to breach the company's Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliances.

The zero-day is being tracked as CVE-2023-2868 and has been described as a remote code injection vulnerability affecting versions 5.1.3.001 through 9.2.0.006.

The California-headquartered firm said the issue is rooted in a component that screens the attachments of incoming emails.

KeePass Exploit Allows Attackers to Recover Master Passwords from Memory

A proof-of-concept (PoC) has been made available for a security flaw impacting the KeePass password manager that could be exploited to recover a victim's master password in cleartext under specific circumstances.

The issue, tracked as CVE-2023-32784, impacts KeePass versions 2.x for Windows, Linux, and macOS, and is expected to be patched in version 2.54, which is likely to be released early next month.

8220 Gang Exploiting Oracle WebLogic Flaw to Hijack Servers and Mine Cryptocurrency

The notorious cryptojacking group tracked as 8220 Gang has been spotted weaponizing a six-year-old security flaw in Oracle WebLogic servers to ensnare vulnerable instances into a botnet and distribute cryptocurrency mining malware.

The flaw in question is CVE-2017-3506 (CVSS score: 7.4), which, when successfully exploited, could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary commands remotely.

China's Mustang Panda Hackers Exploit TP-Link Routers for Persistent Attacks

The Chinese nation-state actor known as Mustang Panda has been linked to a new set of sophisticated and targeted attacks aimed at European foreign affairs entities since January 2023.

An analysis of these intrusions, per Check Point researchers Itay Cohen and Radoslaw Madej, has revealed a custom firmware implant designed explicitly for TP-Link routers.

Microsoft Warns of State-Sponsored Attacks Exploiting Critical PaperCut Vulnerability

Iranian nation-state groups have now joined financially motivated actors in actively exploiting a critical flaw in PaperCut print management software, Microsoft disclosed over the weekend.

The tech giant's threat intelligence team said it observed both Mango Sandstorm (Mercury) and Mint Sandstorm (Phosphorus) weaponizing CVE-2023-27350 in their operations to achieve initial access.

"This activity shows Mint Sandstorm's continued ability to rapidly incorporate [proof-of-concept] exploits into their operations," Microsoft said in a series of tweets.

Researchers Uncover New Exploit for PaperCut Vulnerability That Can Bypass Detection

Cybersecurity researchers have found a way to exploit a recently disclosed critical flaw in PaperCut servers in a manner that bypasses all current detections.

Tracked as CVE-2023-27350 (CVSS score: 9.8), the issue affects PaperCut MF and NG installations that could be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code with SYSTEM privileges.

While the flaw was patched by the Australian company on March 8, 2023, the first signs of active exploitation emerged on April 13, 2023.

Alert: Active Exploitation of TP-Link, Apache, and Oracle Vulnerabilities Detected

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added three flaws to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation.

The security vulnerabilities are as follows -

CVE-2023-1389 (CVSS score: 8.8) - TP-Link Archer AX-21 Command Injection Vulnerability

Hackers Exploit Outdated WordPress Plugin to Backdoor Thousands of WordPress Sites

Threat actors have been observed leveraging a legitimate but outdated WordPress plugin to surreptitiously backdoor websites as part of an ongoing campaign, Sucuri revealed in a report published last week.

The plugin in question is Eval PHP, released by a developer named flashpixx. It allows users to insert PHP code pages and posts of WordPress sites that's then executed every time the posts are opened in a web browser.

While Eval PHP has never received an update in 11 years, statistics gathered by WordPress show that it's installed on over 8,000 websites, with the number of downloads skyrocketing from one or two on average since September 2022 to 6,988 on March 30, 2023.

Fortra Sheds Light on GoAnywhere MFT Zero-Day Exploit Used in Ransomware Attacks

Fortra, the company behind Cobalt Strike, shed light on a zero-day remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in its GoAnywhere MFT tool that has come under active exploitation by ransomware actors to steal sensitive data.

The high-severity flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-0669 (CVSS score: 7.2), concerns a case of pre-authenticated command injection that could be abused to achieve code execution. The issue was patched by the company in version 7.1.2 of the software in February 2023, but not before it was weaponized as a zero-day since January 18. Fortra, which worked with Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, said it was made aware of suspicious activity associated with some of the file transfer instances on January 30, 2023.

Google Releases Urgent Chrome Update to Fix Actively Exploited Zero-Day Vulnerability

Google on Friday released out-of-band updates to resolve an actively exploited zero-day flaw in its Chrome web browser, making it the first such bug to be addressed since the start of the year.

Tracked as CVE-2023-2033, the high-severity vulnerability has been described as a type confusion issue in the V8 JavaScript engine. Clement Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has been credited with reporting the issue on April 11, 2023.

Hackers Exploiting WordPress Elementor Pro Vulnerability: Millions of Sites at Risk!

Unknown threat actors are actively exploiting a recently patched security vulnerability in the Elementor Pro website builder plugin for WordPress.

The flaw, described as a case of broken access control, impacts versions 3.11.6 and earlier. It was addressed by the plugin maintainers in version 3.11.7 released on March 22.

"Improved code security enforcement in WooCommerce components," the Tel Aviv-based company said in its release notes. The premium plugin is estimated to be used on over 12 million sites.

Chinese Hackers Exploit Fortinet Zero-Day Flaw for Cyber Espionage Attack

The zero-day exploitation of a now-patched medium-severity security flaw in the Fortinet FortiOS operating system has been linked to a suspected Chinese hacking group.

American cybersecurity company Mandiant, which made the attribution, said the activity cluster is part of a broader campaign designed to deploy backdoors onto Fortinet and VMware solutions and maintain persistent access to victim environments.

The Google-owned threat intelligence and incident response firm is tracking the malicious operation under its uncategorized moniker UNC3886, describing it as a China-nexus threat actor.

New GoLang-Based HinataBot Exploiting Router and Server Flaws for DDoS Attacks

A new Golang-based botnet dubbed HinataBot has been observed to leverage known flaws to compromise routers and servers and use them to stage distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

"The malware binaries appear to have been named by the malware author after a character from the popular anime series, Naruto, with file name structures such as 'Hinata-<OS>-<Architecture>,'" Akamai said in a technical report.

Among the methods used to distribute the malware are the exploitation of exposed Hadoop YARN servers and security flaws in Realtek SDK devices (CVE-2014-8361), Huawei HG532 routers (CVE-2017-17215, CVSS score: 8.8).

Multiple Hacker Groups Exploit 3-Year-Old Vulnerability to Breach U.S. Federal Agency

Multiple threat actors, including a nation-state group, exploited a critical three-year-old security flaw in Progress Telerik to break into an unnamed federal entity in the U.S.

The disclosure comes from a joint advisory issued by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC).

"Exploitation of this vulnerability allowed malicious actors to successfully execute remote code on a federal civilian executive branch (FCEB) agency's Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) web server," the agencies said.