A financially motivated threat actor is actively scouring the internet for unprotected Apache NiFi instances to covertly install a cryptocurrency miner and facilitate lateral movement.

The findings come from the SANS Internet Storm Center (ISC), which detected a spike in HTTP requests for “/nifi” on May 19, 2023.

“Persistence is achieved via timed processors or entries to cron,” said Dr. Johannes Ullrich, dean of research for SANS Technology Institute. “The attack script is not saved to the system. The attack scripts are kept in memory only.”

A honeypot setup allowed the ISC to determine that the initial foothold is weaponized to drop a shell script that removes the “/var/log/syslog” file, disables the firewall, and terminates competing crypto-mining tools, before downloading and launching the Kinsing malware from a remote server.

images from Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have found “backdoor-like behavior” within Gigabyte systems, which they say enables the UEFI firmware of the devices to drop a Windows executable and retrieve updates in an unsecure format.

Firmware security firm Eclypsium said it first detected the anomaly in April 2023. Gigabyte has since acknowledged and addressed the issue.

“Most Gigabyte firmware includes a Windows Native Binary executable embedded inside of the UEFI firmware,” John Loucaides, senior vice president of strategy at Eclypsium, told The Hacker News.

“The detected Windows executable is dropped to disk and executed as part of the Windows startup process, similar to the LoJack double agent attack. This executable then downloads and runs additional binaries via insecure methods.”

images from Hacker News

Improperly deactivated and abandoned Salesforce Sites and Communities (aka Experience Cloud) could pose severe risks to organizations, leading to unauthorized access to sensitive data.

Data security firm Varonis dubbed the abandoned, unprotected, and unmonitored resources “ghost sites.”

“When these Communities are no longer needed, though, they are often set aside but not deactivated,” Varonis Threat Labs researchers said in a new report shared with The Hacker News.

images from Hacker News

Microsoft has shared details of a now-patched flaw in Apple macOS that could be abused by threat actors with root access to bypass security enforcements and perform arbitrary actions on affected devices.

Specifically, the flaw – dubbed Migraine and tracked as CVE-2023-32369 – could be abused to get around a key security measure called System Integrity Protection (SIP), or “rootless,” which limits the actions the root user can perform on protected files and folders.

“The most straight-forward implication of a SIP bypass is that […] an attacker can create files that are protected by SIP and therefore undeletable by ordinary means,” Microsoft researchers Jonathan Bar Or, Michael Pearse, and Anurag Bohra said.

Even worse, it could be exploited to gain arbitrary kernel code execution and even access sensitive data by replacing databases that manage Transparency, Consent, and Control (TCC) policies.

images from Hacker News

Finding threat actors before they find you is key to beefing up your cyber defenses. How to do that efficiently and effectively is no small task – but with a small investment of time, you can master threat hunting and save your organization millions of dollars.

Consider this staggering statistic. Cybersecurity Ventures estimates that cybercrime will take a $10.5 trillion toll on the global economy by 2025. Measuring this amount as a country, the cost of cybercrime equals the world’s third-largest economy after the U.S. and China. But with effective threat hunting, you can keep bad actors from wreaking havoc on your organization.

This article offers a detailed explanation of threat hunting – what it is, how to do it thoroughly and effectively, and how cyber threat intelligence (CTI) can bolster your threat-hunting efforts.

images from Hacker News