Cyber Defense Advisors

News

Hackers Deploy Stealth Backdoor in WordPress Mu-Plugins to Maintain Admin Access

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new stealthy backdoor concealed within the “mu-plugins” directory in WordPress sites to grant threat actors persistent access and allow them to perform arbitrary actions. Must-use plugins (aka mu-plugins) are special plugins that are automatically activated on all WordPress sites in the installation. They are located in the “wp-content/mu-plugins” 

Cyber News

Smashing Security podcast #427: When 2G attacks, and a romantic road trip goes wrong

In this episode, Graham warns why it is high time we said goodbye to 2G – the outdated mobile network being exploited by cybercriminals with suitcase-sized SMS blasters. From New Zealand to London, scammers are driving around cities like dodgy Uber drivers, spewing phishing texts to thousands at once. Meanwhile, Carole unpacks a painfully awkward […]

Cyber News

CMMC Wake-Up Call

CMMC Wake-Up Call DOJ Cracks Down on Cybersecurity Misrepresentation  Since launching its Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative in 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice has made one thing painfully clear: contractors who misrepresent their cybersecurity posture will pay — and often, dearly.  In just a few short years, the DOJ has already reached nine settlements against companies […]

Cyber Thoughts

Threat Actor Mimo Targets Magento and Docker to Deploy Crypto Miners and Proxyware

The threat actor behind the exploitation of vulnerable Craft Content Management System (CMS) instances has shifted its tactics to target Magento CMS and misconfigured Docker instances. The activity has been attributed to a threat actor tracked as Mimo (aka Hezb), which has a long history of leveraging N-day security flaws in various web applications to […]

Cyber News

UK to ban public sector from paying ransomware demands

Ransomware, considered by British authorities to be the UK’s greatest cybercrime threat, costing the nation billions of pounds and with the capbility to bring essential services to a standstill, is in the gunsights of government. The Home Office has confirmed that it is seeking to legally ban public bodies from paying ransom demands to cybercriminals. […]

Cyber News

New Coyote Malware Variant Exploits Windows UI Automation to Steal Banking Credentials

The Windows banking trojan known as Coyote has become the first known malware strain to exploit the Windows accessibility framework called UI Automation (UIA) to harvest sensitive information. “The new Coyote variant is targeting Brazilian users, and uses UIA to extract credentials linked to 75 banking institutes’ web addresses and cryptocurrency exchanges,” Akamai security researcher […]

Cyber News

Google Sues the Badbox Botnet Operators

It will be interesting to watch what will come of this private lawsuit: Google on Thursday announced filing a lawsuit against the operators of the Badbox 2.0 botnet, which has ensnared more than 10 million devices running Android open source software. These devices lack Google’s security protections, and the perpetrators pre-installed the Badbox 2.0 malware […]

Cyber News

Kerberoasting Detections: A New Approach to a Decade-Old Challenge

Security experts have been talking about Kerberoasting for over a decade, yet this attack continues to evade typical defense methods. Why? It’s because existing detections rely on brittle heuristics and static rules, which don’t hold up for detecting potential attack patterns in highly variable Kerberos traffic. They frequently generate false positives or miss “low-and-slow” attacks […]

Cyber News

Google Launches OSS Rebuild to Expose Malicious Code in Widely Used Open-Source Packages

Google has announced the launch of a new initiative called OSS Rebuild to bolster the security of the open-source package ecosystems and prevent software supply chain attacks. “As supply chain attacks continue to target widely-used dependencies, OSS Rebuild gives security teams powerful data to avoid compromise without burden on upstream maintainers,” Matthew Suozzo, Google Open […]

Cyber News