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:
- Hundreds of Millions of Dell Users at Risk from Kernel-Privilege Bugs
May 5, 2021
Five high-severity security flaws in Dell’s firmware update driver are impacting potentially hundreds of millions of Dell desktops, laptops, notebooks and tablets, researchers said. The bugs have gone undisclosed for 12 years, and could allow the ability to bypass security products, execute code and pivot to other parts of the network for lateral movement, according to ...
- PoC exploit released for Microsoft Exchange bug dicovered by NSA
May 3, 2021
Technical documentation and proof-of-concept exploit (PoC) code is available for a high-severity vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange Server that could let remote attackers execute code on unpatched machines. The flaw is for one of the four that the National Security Agency (NSA) reported to Microsoft and received a fix in April. Read more… Source: Bleeping Computer
- iOS 14.5.1 update includes security fixes for actively exploited bugs
May 3, 2021
Apple on Monday released iOS 14.5.1 and iPadOS 14.5.1 for its iPhone and iPad lineup. The update comes just a week after iOS 14.5 and iPadOS 14.5 were officially released, but there’s a good reason for the back-to-back updates: It includes a fix for two security issues that, according to Apple, are actively being used. According ...
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise Plugs Critical Bug in Edge Platform Tool
May 3, 2021
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is urging customers to patch one of its premier edge application management tools that could allow an attacker to carry out a remote authentication bypass attack and infiltrate a customer’s cloud infrastructure. Rated critical, with a CVSS score of 9.8, the bug impacts all versions of HPE’s Edgeline Infrastructure Manager (EIM) prior ...
- Microsoft finds memory allocation holes in range of IoT and industrial technology
April 30, 2021
The security research group for Azure Defender for IoT, dubbed Section 52, has found a batch of bad memory allocation operations in code used in Internet of Things and operational technology (OT) such as industrial control systems that could lead to malicious code execution. Given the trendy vulnerability name of BadAlloc, the vulnerabilities are related to ...
- Hello Ransomware Uses Updated China Chopper Web Shell, SharePoint Vulnerability
April 27, 2021
In January, Trend Micro researchers encountered a new ransomware using .hello as its extension in one of our cases that possibly arrived via a SharePoint server vulnerability. This appeared to be a new ransomware family dubbed as the Hello ransomware (aka WickrMe), named after the chat application that was used to contact the cybercriminals responsible. Previous ...