By aekwall 

CISA recently added a second SharePoint flaw, demonstrated last year at a Pwn2Own hacking competition, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) list.  The Star Labs team demonstrated the flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-24955, in March 2023 at Pwn2Own Vancouver alongside CVE-2023-29357.   This two-bug exploit chain, which allows unauthenticated remote code execution on SharePoint servers with elevated privileges, earned the Star Labs team $100,000 at Pwn2Own. Microsoft patched CVE-2023-24955 and CVE-2023-29357 with SharePoint updates released in May and June 2023, respectively.

A new hacking campaign called "ShadowRay" exploits an unpatched vulnerability in Ray, a popular open source Artificial Intelligence (AI) framework, to hijack computing power and leak sensitive data. Oligo reported that these attacks have been ongoing since at least September 5, 2023, with targets including education, cryptocurrency, biopharma, and others. Ray is a framework developed by Anyscale that allows users to scale AI and Python applications across a cluster of machines for distributed computing workloads.

Researchers at ReversingLabs have discovered a suspicious package in the NuGet package manager that is likely aimed at developers using tools developed by a Chinese company specializing in industrial and digital equipment manufacturing. The package, "SqzrFramework480," first published on January 24, 2024, has been downloaded 2,999 times. ReversingLabs believes that the campaign is being used to orchestrate industrial espionage on systems equipped with cameras, machine vision, and robotic arms. This article continues to discuss findings regarding the malicious NuGet package.

Security researchers at Lumen Technologies recently discovered a 40,000-strong botnet packed with end-of-life routers and IoT devices being used in cybercriminal activities.  According to the researchers, a notorious cybercriminal group has been running a multi-year campaign targeting end-of-life small home/small office (SOHO) routers and IoT devices worldwide.  The router botnet, first seen in 2014, has been operating quietly while growing to more than 40,000 bots from 88 countries in January and February 2024.

The US government is trying to close gaps in its sanctions program against Russia by going after blockchain and virtual currency firms, which it says have helped entities circumvent existing controls.

Apple has recently released fresh security updates for iOS and macOS devices to resolve an arbitrary code execution vulnerability.  The issue, tracked as CVE-2024-1580 and described as an integer overflow leading to out-of-bounds write, impacts the CoreMedia and WebRTC components of both iOS and macOS and could be triggered during image processing.  Apple noted that the security defect is not specific to Apple’s products but affects the dav1d open-source AV1 cross-platform decoder, which was resolved in dav1d version 1.4.0 in February.

The Science of Security (SoS) initiative has announced its newest iteration of collaborative academic research, the SoS Virtual Institutes (VIs). The goal of the SoS program is to foster a self-sustaining, open, and public security science research community to discover key cyber principles necessary to support improved security and privacy.

Supply chains are facing SQL injection vulnerabilities, which have prompted a joint warning from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to develop safer software products. CISA and the FBI have announced the new "Secure by Design" guidance as a direct response to the recent widespread exploitation of a SQLi flaw in the MoveIT file transfer application. SQL injection vulnerabilities enable threat actors to inject their own data into SQL commands.

The U.S. government recently announced a fresh round of sanctions against a pair of Chinese hackers, who are said to be responsible for “malicious cyber operations targeting U.S. entities that operate within U.S. critical infrastructure sectors.”  The Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) noted that the sanctions also extend to a Wuhan, China-based technology company serving as a front for multiple malicious cyber operations.  In tandem, the U.S.