Governments on high alert after CISA snuffs out Firestarter backdoor on fed network


A US federal agency was successfully targeted by a previously unknown backdoor malware called Firestarter, according to CISA cybersnoops and their UK counterparts – neither of which disclosed the agency’s name.

Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies include NASA; Homeland Security itself (cyberworkers at CISA are part of an operational unit in Homeland Security); the FBI; the DoJ; the IRS; the Department of Veteran Affairs; the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS); and more. Described as a backdoor with remote access capabilities, Firestarter was named after Cisco Secure Firewall Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) and Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD), the two products the malware targeted.

Read more…
Source: The Register News


Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox


Related:

  • Atlassian security updates address three high severity vulnerabilities affecting multiple products

    July 24, 2023

    Atlassian has released the July 2023 Security Bulletin that addresses three high severity vulnerabilities in multiple products. CVE-2023-22505 and CVE-2023-22508 are Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities affecting Confluence Server and Confluence Data Center. CVE-2023-22506 is an injection and RCE vulnerability affecting Bamboo Server and Bamboo Data Center. Read more… Source:  NHS Digital  

  • FortiGuard Labs Discovers Multiple Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Message Queuing Service

    July 24, 2023

    Over the last few months, FortiGuard Labs has discovered and reported multiple vulnerabilities found in the Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) service. Microsoft patched these vulnerabilities in the April and July 2023 security updates. These patches are rated as critical/important, and as always, we urge users to install them as soon as possible. Read more… Source: Fortinet Labs  

  • Exploitation of Citrix Zero-Day by Possible Espionage Actors (CVE-2023-3519)

    July 20, 2023

    Security and networking devices are “edge devices,” meaning they are connected to the internet. If an attacker is successful in exploiting a vulnerability on these appliances, they can gain initial access without human interaction, which reduces the chances of detection. As long as the exploit remains undiscovered, the threat actor can reuse it to gain access ...

  • Google says Apple employee found a zero-day but did not report it

    July 20, 2023

    Google fixed a zero-day in Chrome that was found by an Apple employee, according to comments in the official bug report. While the bug itself is not newsworthy, the circumstances of how this bug was found and reported to Google are, to say the least, peculiar. According to a Google employee, the bug was originally found ...

  • A nasty Google Cloud bug could let hackers use it to launch attacks

    July 20, 2023

    Cybersecurity researchers from Orca Security have uncovered a new bug in the Google Cloud Build service which could allow threat actors to gain almost full access to Google Artifact Registry code repositories. The repercussions of the flaw, the researchers are saying in their report, are quite dire. The researchers named the vulnerability Bad.Build, saying it allows ...

  • CISA Releases Cybersecurity Advisory on Threat Actors Exploiting Citrix CVE-2023-3519

    July 20, 2023

    The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA), Threat Actors Exploiting Citrix CVE-2023-3519 to Implant Webshells, to warn organizations about threat actors exploiting CVE-2023-3519, an unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability affecting NetScaler (formerly Citrix) Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and NetScaler Gateway. In June 2023, threat actors exploited this vulnerability as a ...