Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

In December 2024, Arctic Wolf Labs observed a mass exploitation campaign involving Cleo Managed File Transfer (MFT) products for initial access. The execution chain involved an obfuscated PowerShell stager, a Java loader, and ultimately a Java-based backdoor, which we will refer to as Cleopatra. In this article we will provide insight into the execution chain in this campaign, obfuscated malicious payloads deployed, and surrounding threat intelligence context around these activities.

On December 11, 2024, Cleo released patches addressing the zero-day vulnerability recently observed in attacks targeting Cleo Managed File Transfer (MFT) products. This vulnerability allowed unauthenticated threat actors to import and execute arbitrary shell commands on Windows and Linux on affected devices by exploiting default settings of the Autorun directory. The fix is included in version 5.8.0.24, and is now available for Cleo Harmony, VLTrader, and Lexicom.

Did you know that 59% of organizations have been hit by ransomware, with Active Directory (AD) often being the primary target for attackers seeking credential theft and privilege escalation? With AD being basically the heart of enterprise IT from the permissions management and granting view, these ransomware threats automatically go against it and hence protecting them is pretty much important so to keep the organization safe.

For decades, we have all been warned to be appropriately skeptical of internet search engine results. Sadly, most people are not. Most people think that what Google, Bing, or Duck Duck Go brings back is heaven sent and can be trusted. It cannot. Results often include malicious links from search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning, where the attacker has been able to trick the search engine into returning its URL when a user searches for something.

Learn essential strategies for effective compliance management to ensure adherence to regulations and standards while mitigating risks and enhancing security.

In a co-ordinated international effort, the law enforcement agencies of 15 countries have made the holiday season a little less stressful for companies and consumers - by seizing control of some of the internet's most popular DDoS-for-hire services. Operation PowerOFF has disrupted what was anticipated to be a surge of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks over the Christmas period by taking over two dozen "booter" or "stresser" websites offline.

This is a continuation of our series on web application security. If you haven't already read through parts 1 and 2, this is a good time to go back. If not, let's move on and answer the question left hanging during our last installment: what are request methods, including the POST request method, and how does logging out of a website work when it comes to cookies and session IDs? Let's also tackle the more important issue of how to combat cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks.

Securing operations in the cloud can seem daunting. To protect your organization, you need to have the proper preventative and reactive safeguards in place at every step of the software development cycle. But it doesn’t have to be as complex as it sounds. This blog outlines how to secure the entire software development lifecycle, emphasizing the “shift left” approach, which aims to catch vulnerabilities and issues early in the development process to reduce both risks and costs.

While working on Amazon Bedrock APIs and developing detection mechanisms for Sysdig customers, the Sysdig Threat Research Team (TRT) discovered an unusual behavior in the way some of these APIs were logged in CloudTrail. Specifically, failed Bedrock API calls were logged in the same manner as successful calls, without providing any specific error codes. The lack of error information in API responses may hinder detection efforts by generating false positives in CloudTrail logs.

In 2019, only 1 of the top 20 blockchains by market capitalization was a Proof of Stake blockchain (Tezos), with a total value staked of around $50 million. Today, 16 of the top 20 blockchains are Proof of Stake (excl. Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Bitcoin Classic, and Litecoin), with a total market cap of around $850 billion; representing about 22% of the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies. Without BTC, PoS would represent 50%.