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:

  • Patch Tuesday – September 2025

    September 10, 2025

    Microsoft is addressing 176 vulnerabilities today, which seems like a lot, and it is. Curiously, Microsoft’s own Security Update Guide (SUG) for September 2025 Patch Tuesday only lists 86 vulns, and that’s because the SUG doesn’t include a large number of open source software (OSS) fixes published today as part of updates for Azure Linux ...

  • CMS Sitecore patches critical zero-day flaw

    September 5, 2025

    Popular CMS platform Sitecore has patched a critical zero-day vulnerability found to be being abused in cyberattacks. Security researchers from Mandiant observed threat actors exploiting a zero-day flaw to deploy malware, as well as other legitimate software. The flaw stemmed from the use of sample ASP.NET machine keys published in old deployment guides (pre-2017), and is ...

  • Palo Alto Networks becomes the latest to confirm it was hit by Salesloft Drift attack

    September 3, 2025

    The Salesloft Drift incident is quickly turning into the next MOVEit MFT fiasco, as yet another company confirms losing sensitive data in the third-party attack. This time around, it is the American multinational cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks that confirmed losing customer data and support cases information in the breach. It all began with the sales ...

  • Google warns Gmail users to change passwords after data breach

    September 3, 2025

    Google is warning about 2.5 billion Gmail users to change their passwords or install a passkey following a data breach that has led to a surge in “phishing” email attacks. The data breach that prompted the warning reportedly happened at a Salesforce database that Google uses internally. The compromised information included basic business contact information such ...

  • Model Namespace Reuse: An AI Supply-Chain Attack Exploiting Model Name Trust

    September 3, 2025

    Palo Alto Unit 42 research uncovered a fundamental flaw in the AI supply chain that allows attackers to gain Remote Code Execution (RCE) and additional capabilities on major platforms like Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry, Google’s Vertex AI and thousands of open-source projects. We refer to this issue as Model Namespace Reuse. Hugging Face is a platform ...

  • Hackers are now hiding malware in the images served up by LLMs

    August 31, 2025

    As AI tools become more integrated into daily work, the security risks attached to them are also evolving in new directions. Researchers at Trail of Bits have demonstrated a method where malicious prompts are hidden inside images and then revealed during processing by large language models. The technique takes advantage of how AI platforms downscale images ...