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:
- FBI: APTs Actively Exploiting Fortinet VPN Security Holes
April 3, 2021
The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are warning that advanced persistent threat (APT) nation-state actors are actively exploiting known security vulnerabilities in the Fortinet FortiOS cybersecurity operating system, affecting the company’s SSL VPN products. According to an alert issued Friday by the FBI and CISA, cyberattackers are scanning devices on ports 4443, 8443 ...
- VMware patches critical vRealize Operations platform vulnerabilities
March 31, 2021
VMware has patched a pair of severe vulnerabilities that could lead to the theft of administrator credentials in vRealize. vRealize Operations is described as an artificial intelligence (AI)-based platform that provides “self-driving IT operations management for private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.” On Tuesday, the software vendor published a security advisory for the security flaws which impact VMware ...
- APT10: sophisticated multi-layered loader Ecipekac discovered in A41APT campaign
March 30, 2021
In 2019, we observed an APT campaign targeting multiple industries, including the Japanese manufacturing industry and its overseas operations, that was designed to steal information. We named the campaign A41APT (not APT41) which is derived from the host name “DESKTOP-A41UVJV” from the attacker’s system used in the initial infection. The actor leveraged vulnerabilities in Pulse ...
- Newly-Discovered Vulnerabilities Could Allow for Bypass of Spectre Mitigations in Linux
March 29, 2021
Two new vulnerabilities have been patched in the Linux kernel which, if exploited, could bypass existing mitigations for the Spectre vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities were discovered by Piotr Krysiuk, a researcher on Symantec’s Threat Hunter team, who reported them to the Linux kernel security team. If left unpatched, the vulnerabilities mean that existing Spectre protections will ...
- Critical netmask networking bug impacts thousands of applications
March 28, 2021
Popular npm library netmask has a critical networking vulnerability. Netmask is frequently used by hundreds of thousands of applications to parse IPv4 addresses and CIDR blocks or compare them. The component gets over 3 million weekly downloads, and as of today, has scored over 238 million total downloads over its lifetime. Further, about 278,000 GitHub repositories depend ...
- Apple releases emergency update for iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watch
March 27, 2021
Apple has released an emergency update to patch a serious vulnerability (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212258) found in iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS. The patches are iOS 14.4.2, iPadOS 14.4.2, and watchOS 7.3.3, respectively. The vulnerability, discovered by Google’s Threat Analysis Group, affects Apple’s WebKit browser engine, and what makes this an urgent update is the fact that the Apple claims that ...