Malware researchers warn about a stealthy backdoor program that has been used by a Chinese threat actor to compromise Linux servers at government and private organizations around the world. While the backdoor is not new and variants have been in use for the past five years, it has managed to fly under the radar and have very low detection rates. One reason for its success is that it leverages a feature called the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) on Unix-based systems to hide malicious traffic.

BPFdoor was named by researchers from PwC Threat Intelligence who attribute it to a Chinese group they call Red Menshen. The PwC team found the threat while investigating several intrusions throughout Asia last year and included a short section about it in their annual threat report released late last month

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Researchers at cybersecurity vendor Proofpoint have analyzed a new remote access Trojan (RAT) malware campaign using sophisticated evasion techniques and leveraging COVID-19 themed messaging to target global organizations. The malware, dubbed “Nerbian RAT” and written in the Go programming language, uses significant anti-analysis and anti-reversing capabilities and open-source Go libraries to conduct malicious activities, the researchers stated.

The campaign was first analyzed by Proofpoint in late April and disproportionately impacts entities in Italy, Spain and the UK. In a statement, Proofpoint Vice President Threat Research and Detection Sherrod DeGrippo said the research demonstrates how malware authors continue to operate at the intersection of open-source capability and criminal opportunity.

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Infrastructure software provider Progress has announced the launch of Progress Chef Cloud Security to extend DevSecOps with compliance support for native cloud assets, enabling end-to-end management of on premise, cloud, and native cloud resources. In a press release, the company stated that the offering is complemented by new capabilities across the Chef portfolio targeting DevOps success in enterprise deployments to deliver a unified and scalable platform that accelerates the delivery of secure and compliant application releases in mixed computing environments.

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A predominantly Black college, based in Illinois, USA, is closing its doors after 157 years – citing the challenges it faced due to the Coronavirus pandemic, and the aftermath of a ransomware attack.

Read more in my article on the Hot for Security blog.

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Service Could help minimize spoofing and privacy risks

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It’s that time that I fill out the annual cyber insurance policy application. Each year it gives me an insight into what insurance vendors are using to rate the risks and threats to our business and what they are stressing I should have as best practices. Not having them in place could affect insurance rates and whether I qualify for cyber insurance at all.

This year was interesting because it asked for specific ransomware prevention techniques and protections. Here are the questions that stood out.

Is two-factor authentication in place?

My insurance vendor asked if I had two factor authentication (2FA) in place protecting remote network access. They are reacting to the reality that both virtual private networks (VPNs) and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) provide effective access for attackers as well as users. We sometimes leave behind remote access to get into physical and virtual servers, but attackers target these remote access tools to gain network access.

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As the fallout from the Apache Log4J vulnerabilities earlier this year shows, the biggest risks in enterprise software today are not necessarily with insecure code written directly by in-house software development teams. The flaws of the components, libraries and other open-source code that makes up the bulk of today’s software code bases are the underwater part of the insecurity iceberg.

The truth is that so much of the enterprise software and custom applications produced by DevOps teams and software engineering groups is not actually coded by their developers. Modern software today is modular. Developers use what is called a microservices architecture to make new applications by constructing them a lot like a Lego house—using blocks that are made of premade code. Rather than reinventing the wheel every time they need their application to perform a common function, developers root around in their proverbial box of blocks to find just the right one that will do what they need without a lot of fuss.

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Report reveals big variety in affiliate groups

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Some 73 vulnerabilities have been resolved this month

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Microsoft today released updates to fix at least 74 separate security problems in its Windows operating systems and related software. This month’s patch batch includes fixes for seven “critical” flaws, as well as a zero-day vulnerability that affects all supported versions of Windows.

By all accounts, the most urgent bug Microsoft addressed this month is CVE-2022-26925, a weakness in a central component of Windows security (the “Local Security Authority” process within Windows). CVE-2022-26925 was publicly disclosed prior to today, and Microsoft says it is now actively being exploited in the wild. The flaw affects Windows 7 through 10 and Windows Server 2008 through 2022.

Greg Wiseman, product manager for Rapid7, said Microsoft has rated this vulnerability as important and assigned it a CVSS (danger) score of 8.1 (10 being the worst), although Microsoft notes that the CVSS score can be as high as 9.8 in certain situations.

“This allows attackers to perform a man-in-the-middle attack to force domain controllers to authenticate to the attacker using NTLM authentication,” Wiseman said. “This is very bad news when used in conjunction with an NTLM relay attack, potentially leading to remote code execution. This bug affects all supported versions of Windows, but Domain Controllers should be patched on a priority basis before updating other servers.”

Wiseman said the most recent time Microsoft patched a similar vulnerability — last August in CVE-2021-36942 — it was also being exploited in the wild under the name “PetitPotam.”

“CVE-2021-36942 was so bad it made CISA’s catalog of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities,” Wiseman said.

Seven of the flaws fixed today earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” label, which it assigns to vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malware or miscreants to remotely compromise a vulnerable Windows system without any help from the user.

Among those is CVE-2022-26937, which carries a CVSS score of 9.8, and affects services using the Windows Network File System (NFS). Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative notes that this bug could allow remote, unauthenticated attackers to execute code in the context of the Network File System (NFS) service on affected systems.

“NFS isn’t on by default, but it’s prevalent in environment where Windows systems are mixed with other OSes such as Linux or Unix,” ZDI’s Dustin Childs wrote. “If this describes your environment, you should definitely test and deploy this patch quickly.”

Once again, this month’s Patch Tuesday is sponsored by Windows Print Spooler, a core Windows service that keeps spooling out the security hits. May’s patches include four fixes for Print Spooler, including two information disclosure and two elevation of privilege flaws.

“All of the flaws are rated as important, and two of the three are considered more likely to be exploited,” said Satnam Narang, staff research engineer at Tenable. “Windows Print Spooler continues to remain a valuable target for attackers since PrintNightmare was disclosed nearly a year ago. Elevation of Privilege flaws in particular should be carefully prioritized, as we’ve seen ransomware groups like Conti favor them as part of its playbook.”

Other Windows components that received patches this month include .NET and Visual Studio, Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based), Microsoft Exchange Server, Office, Windows Hyper-V, Windows Authentication Methods, BitLocker, Remote Desktop Client, and Windows Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol.

Also today, Adobe issued five security bulletins to address at least 18 flaws in Adobe CloudFusion, Framemaker, InCopy, InDesign, and Adobe Character Animator. Adobe said it is not aware of any exploits in the wild for any of the issues addressed in today’s updates.

For a more granular look at the patches released by Microsoft today and indexed by severity and other metrics, check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the skinny on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.

As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these patches, please drop a note about it here in the comments.

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