"The ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) has been a primary and international forum for applied computer scientists, computer engineers and application developers to gather, interact and present their work."
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to security.
Researchers have detailed "AndroxGh0st," a tool used to target Laravel applications and steal sensitive data. It scans and extracts important information from .env files, revealing login information for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Twilio. It is classified as an SMTP cracker, exploiting SMTP through different strategies, including credential exploitation, web shell deployment, and vulnerability scanning. Threat actors have been using AndroxGh0st to access Laravel .env files and steal credentials for cloud-based applications.
Vitaly Simonovich, a threat intelligence researcher at Cato Networks, points out that even a fake data breach can have serious consequences. In February 2024, someone created a fake news story claiming a data breach at the Maine Attorney General's office, which tricked the Attorney General's office into posting it on its website. Epic Games fell victim to a fake data breach by a cybercrime group claiming it had stolen source code and sensitive user data. Simonovich emphasizes how such fabricated attacks cause panic and harm business reputations.
The House of Representatives recently passed new legislation prohibiting data brokers from selling Americans' personal information to foreign adversary countries or entities under their control. The bipartisan bill, known as the Protecting Americans' Data from Foreign Adversaries Act of 2024, was introduced on March 5 and passed by a vote of 414 – 0. Previously, the bill passed out of the Energy and Commerce Committee with a vote of 50-0.
An Iran-linked hacking group claims to have infiltrated a sensitive Israeli nuclear facility's computer network in an incident described by the hackers as a protest against the war in Gaza. The hackers say they stole and released thousands of documents from the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center, including PDFs, emails, and PowerPoint slides. This article continues to discuss the hackers claiming to have breached an Israeli nuclear facility's computer network.
The website security company Sucuri discovered a malware campaign dubbed "Sign1" that has infected more than 39,000 WordPress websites in the last six months, causing visitors to get unwanted redirects and popup ads. Instead of modifying the WordPress files, the threat actors inject the malware into custom HTML widgets and legitimate plugins on WordPress websites to insert the malicious Sign1 scripts. Sucuri researchers discovered the campaign when a client's website randomly displayed popup ads to visitors.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) had a vulnerability that enabled session hijacking with a single click. Tenable Research discovered the vulnerability, dubbed "FlowFixation," last year, which Amazon has since fixed. According to researchers, FlowFixation could have been exploited to gain access to another user's AWS MWAA web panel session by an attacker hosting malicious code on their own AWS domain, such as an Amazon API Gateway REST API instance they control.
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) recently released 15 advisories addressing serious vulnerabilities in industrial control products from Siemens, Mitsubishi Electric, Delta Electronics, and more. One of the vulnerabilities is a critical buffer overflow issue, with a CVSS score of 10.0, in the Sinteso EN and Cerberus PRO EN Fire Protection Systems. The vulnerability stems from the network communication library used in the systems improperly validating the length of X.509 certificate attributes.
Microsoft has recently released a patch for an Xbox vulnerability after initially telling the reporting researcher that it was not a security issue. The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2024-2891, and it impacts Xbox Gaming Services. Microsoft says that it has "important" severity and can easily be exploited by a local attacker with low privileges to escalate permissions to the System.
In "Adversarial Machine Learning: A Taxonomy and Terminology of Attacks and Mitigations," the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines different Adversarial Machine Learning (AML) tactics and cyberattacks, as well as provides guidance on how to mitigate and manage them. AML tactics gather information about how Machine Learning (ML) systems work in order to determine how they can be manipulated.