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Nation State

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Asia-based cyberespionage campaign breaches governments worldwide and expands reconnaissance
technology26 days ago

Asia-based cyberespionage campaign breaches governments worldwide and expands reconnaissance

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 reports an Asia-based cyberespionage group compromised at least 70 institutions across 37 governments and conducted reconnaissance in 155 countries. The attackers used phishing to drop a Cobalt Strike payload and a mix of exploits to gain footholds, with some victims accessed for months (including a parliament and key ministries). The operation is described as potentially the most widespread state-sponsored government breach since SolarWinds, with the group adapting to different targets and events and attribution to a specific country not determined.

Long-standing vulnerability leads to multiple hacker groups breaching US federal agency.
cybersecurity3 years ago

Long-standing vulnerability leads to multiple hacker groups breaching US federal agency.

Multiple threat actors, including one working for a nation-state, gained access to a US federal agency's network by exploiting a four-year-old vulnerability that remained unpatched. Both groups exploited a code-execution vulnerability tracked as CVE-2019-18935 in a developer tool known as the Telerik user interface (UI) for ASP.NET AJAX. The vulnerability was not detected for four years, and the agency's vulnerability scanner failed to detect it due to the Telerik UI software being installed in a file path it does not typically scan. The breach is the result of someone in the unnamed agency failing to install a patch that had been available for years.