Palo Alto Networks has shared remediation guidance for a recently disclosed critical security flaw impacting PAN-OS that has come under active exploitation.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-3400 (CVSS score: 10.0), could be weaponized to obtain unauthenticated remote shell command execution on susceptible devices. It has been addressed in

Palo Alto Networks Outlines Remediation for Critical PAN-OS Flaw Under Attack

Mattermost versions 9.6.0, 9.5.x before 9.5.3, and 8.1.x before 8.1.12 fail to fully validate role changes, which allows an attacker authenticated as a team admin to promote guests to team admins via crafted HTTP requests.



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1.  GitHub Advisory Database
2.  GitHub Reviewed
3.  CVE-2024-4195

**Mattermost allows team admins to promote guests to team admins**

Low severity GitHub Reviewed Published Apr 26, 2024 to the GitHub Advisory Database • Updated Apr 26, 2024

**Package**

gomod github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server (Go)

**Affected versions**

\>= 9.5.0, <= 9.5.2

\>= 8.1.0, <= 8.1.11

**Patched versions**

9.5.3

8.1.12

**Description**

Published to the GitHub Advisory Database

Apr 26, 2024

Last updated

Apr 26, 2024

GHSA-5fh7-7mw7-mmx5: Mattermost allows team admins to promote guests to team admins

Mattermost versions 9.6.0, 9.5.x before 9.5.3, 9.4.x before 9.4.5, and 8.1.x before 8.1.12 fail to handle JSON parsing errors in custom status values, which allows an authenticated attacker to crash other users' web clients via a malformed custom status.



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1.  GitHub Advisory Database
2.  GitHub Reviewed
3.  CVE-2024-4182

**Mattermost crashes web clients via a malformed custom status**

Moderate severity GitHub Reviewed Published Apr 26, 2024 to the GitHub Advisory Database • Updated Apr 26, 2024

**Package**

gomod github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server (Go)

**Affected versions**

\>= 8.1.0, <= 8.1.11

\>= 9.4.0, <= 9.4.4

\>= 9.5.0, <= 9.5.2

\>= 9.6.0-rc1, <= 9.6.0

**Patched versions**

8.1.12

9.4.5

9.5.3

9.6.1

**Description**

Published to the GitHub Advisory Database

Apr 26, 2024

Last updated

Apr 26, 2024

GHSA-8f99-g2pj-x8w3: Mattermost crashes web clients via a malformed custom status

Mattermost versions 8.1.x before 8.1.12, 9.6.x before 9.6.1, 9.5.x before 9.5.3, 9.4.x before 9.4.5 fail to limit the number of active sessions, which allows an authenticated attacker to crash the server via repeated requests to the getSessions API after flooding the sessions table.



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1.  GitHub Advisory Database
2.  GitHub Reviewed
3.  CVE-2024-4183

**Mattermost fails to limit the number of active sessions**

Moderate severity GitHub Reviewed Published Apr 26, 2024 to the GitHub Advisory Database • Updated Apr 26, 2024

**Package**

gomod github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server (Go)

**Affected versions**

\>= 9.6.0-rc1, <= 9.6.0

\>= 9.5.0, <= 9.5.2

\>= 9.4.0, <= 9.4.4

\>= 8.1.0, <= 8.1.11

**Patched versions**

9.6.1

9.5.3

9.4.5

8.1.12

**Description**

Published to the GitHub Advisory Database

Apr 26, 2024

Last updated

Apr 26, 2024

GHSA-wj37-mpq9-xrcm: Mattermost fails to limit the number of active sessions

Mattermost versions 9.6.0, 9.5.x before 9.5.3, and 8.1.x before 8.1.12 fail to fully validate role changes which allows an attacker authenticated as team admin to demote users to guest via crafted HTTP requests.



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1.  GitHub Advisory Database
2.  GitHub Reviewed
3.  CVE-2024-4198

**Mattermost fails to fully validate role changes**

Low severity GitHub Reviewed Published Apr 26, 2024 to the GitHub Advisory Database • Updated Apr 26, 2024

**Package**

gomod github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server (Go)

**Affected versions**

\>= 9.6.0-rc1, <= 9.6.0

\>= 9.5.0, <= 9.5.2

\>= 8.1.0, <= 8.1.11

**Patched versions**

9.6.1

9.5.3

8.1.12

**Description**

Published to the GitHub Advisory Database

Apr 26, 2024

Last updated

Apr 26, 2024

GHSA-5qx9-9ffj-5r8f: Mattermost fails to fully validate role changes

The payment card industry pushes for more security in financial transactions to help combat increasing fraud in the region.

Source: Brian Jackson via Alamy Stock Photo

The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council plans to extend its role to the Middle East, as the volume of card-based payments continues to climb in the region and, along with it, payment-card fraud.

In April, the PCI SSC assigned a regional director to the Middle East to work with regulators, banking and financial institutions, and service providers on initiatives to improve the security of card transactions. The move comes as the volume of global card fraud is expected to hit $36 billion in 2024, up from $28 billion in 2020, although the share of fraud compared to transaction volume will shrink slightly, to 6.5 cents per $100, according to the annual "Nilson Report" released in December.

The PCI SSC plans to work closely with any organization that handles payments within the Middle East payment ecosystem, with a focus on security, says Nitin Bhatnagar, PCI Security Standards Council regional director for India and South Asia, who will now also oversee efforts in the Middle East.

"Cyberattacks and data breaches on payment infrastructure are a global problem," he says. "Threats such as malware, ransomware, and phishing attempts continue to increase the risk of security breaches. Overall, there is a need for a mindset change."

The push comes as the payment industry itself faces significant changes, with alternatives to traditional payment cards taking off, and as financial fraud has grown in the Middle East. 

Through 2027, the payments industry will likely grow at an annual rate of 6.2% — a healthy pace, albeit lower than the 8.3% growth rate of the past five years, according to a September 2023 report published by the Boston Consulting Group. While card-based financial transactions continue to dominate, accounting for more than $30 trillion in point-of-sale and e-commerce transactions in 2023, alternate payment methods are taking off, totaling more than $11 trillion in 2023 and growing at twice the rate of card-based payments, according to BCG's Global Payments Model.

Currently, there are more than 5,000 fintechs globally that account for $100 billion in revenue, a number set to grow to $520 billion by 2030, according to BCG.

**Digital Wallets, Not Plastic Cards**

The Middle East is one region where the changes are most pronounced. Middle East consumers prefer digital wallets to cards, 60% to 27%, as their most preferred method of payment, while consumers in the Asia-Pacific region slightly prefer cards, 43% to 38%, according to an August 2021 report by consultancy McKinsey & Company.

Cybercriminals follow these shifts as well, and that worries businesses in the region. Seven out of every 10 businesses executives in the United Arab Emirates, for example, believe financial crimes risks will worsen in the next 12 months, essentially the same as US executives, according to the "2023 Fraud and Financial Crime Report" published by consultancy Kroll.

The PCI Security Standards Council plans to adapt to the digital landscape, and in November 2022 introduced a mobile payments standard, PCI Mobile Payments on COTS (MPoC), which provides a standard for development of mobile-app-based payments.

"Emerging technologies and innovation are reshaping our industry, along with the rise in popularity of mobile payments and contactless transactions," Bhatnagar says. "Organizations need to become aware of security risks and take them seriously, because the criminals take it seriously — their sole objective is to break into an organization and steal data and monetize it."

**Cybersecurity Education & Technology**

Preventing payments fraud has become a priority in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region, as efforts to improve financial inclusion have led to more mobile payment and digital bank accounts.

The open source Tazama Project, for example, is building an antifraud platform for banks and governments to allow them to use data on account holders and transactions to detect likely fraud. Meanwhile, Network International, a digital commerce platform in the Middle East and Africa, adopted Mastercard's AI-powered fraud-prevention solution to reduce fraud in digital transactions.

"Organizations should start prioritizing data security as an important element in their day-to-day business activities," Bhatnagar says. "Investing in cybersecurity is equally important. Getting employees trained and improving on cyber hygiene will help organizations take steps in the right direction."

Technologies like generative AI could both help and hurt payment security. While cybercriminals are increasingly using the technology to part consumers from their cash, businesses are able to use the technology to catch more fraud schemes. Currently, two-thirds of executives (64%) plan to invest in antifraud technology and more than half (56%) plan to increase their cybersecurity budget to deal with the risk, according to consultancy Kroll.

**About the Author(s)**

Veteran technology journalist of more than 20 years. Former research engineer. Written for more than two dozen publications, including CNET News.com, Dark Reading, MIT's Technology Review, Popular Science, and Wired News. Five awards for journalism, including Best Deadline Journalism (Online) in 2003 for coverage of the Blaster worm. Crunches numbers on various trends using Python and R. Recent reports include analyses of the shortage in cybersecurity workers and annual vulnerability trends.

PCI Launches Payment Card Cybersecurity Effort in the Middle East

Eight out of nine apps that people use to input Chinese characters into mobile devices have weakness that allow a passive eavesdropper to collect keystroke data.

Source: badboydt7 via Shutterstock

Nearly all keyboard apps that allow users to enter Chinese characters into their Android, iOS, or other mobile devices are vulnerable to attacks that allow an adversary to capture the entirety of their keystrokes.

This includes data such as login credentials, financial information, and messages that would otherwise be end-to-end encrypted, a new study by Toronto University's Citizen Lab has uncovered.

**Ubiquitous Problem**

For the study, researchers at the lab considered cloud-based Pinyin apps (which render Chinese characters into words spelled with roman letters) from nine vendors selling to users in China: Baidu, Samsung, Huawei, Tencent, Xiaomi, Vivo, OPPO, iFlytek, and Honor. Their investigation showed all but the app from Huawei to be transmitting keystroke data to the cloud in a manner that enabled a passive eavesdropper to read the contents in clear text and with little difficulty. Citizen Lab researchers, who have earned a reputation over the years for exposing multiple cyber espionage, surveillance, and other threats targeted at mobile users and civil society, said each of them contain at least one exploitable vulnerability in how they handle transmissions of user keystrokes to the cloud.

The scope of vulnerabilities should not be underestimated, Citizen Lab researchers Jeffrey Knockel, Mona Wang and Zoe Reichert wrote in a report summarizing their findings this week: The researchers from Citizen Lab found that 76% of keyboard app users in mainland China, in fact, use a Pinyin keyboard to input Chinese characters.

"All of the vulnerabilities that we covered in this report can be exploited entirely passively without sending any additional network traffic," the researchers said. And to boot, the vulnerabilities were easy to discover and do not require any technological sophistication to exploit, they noted.  "As such, we might wonder, are these vulnerabilities actively under mass exploitation?"

Each of the vulnerable Pinyin keyboard apps that Citizen Lab examined had both a local, on-device component and a cloud-based prediction service for handling long strings of syllables and particularly complex characters. Of the nine apps they looked at, three were from mobile software developers — Tencent, Baidu, and iFlytek. The remaining five were apps that Samsung, Xiaomi, OPPO, Vivo, and Honor — all mobile device manufacturers — had either developed on their own or had integrated into their devices from a third-party developer.

**Exploitable via Active & Passive Methods**

Methods of exploitation differ for each app. Tencent's QQ Pinyin app for Android and Windows for instance had a vulnerability that allowed the researchers to create a working exploit for decrypting keystrokes via active eavesdropping methods. Baidu's IME for Windows contained a similar vulnerability, for which Citizen Lab created a working exploit for decrypting keystroke data via both active and passive eavesdropping methods.

The researchers found other encrypted related privacy and security weaknesses in the Baidu's iOS and Android versions but did not develop exploits for them. iFlytek's app for Android had a vulnerability that allowed a passive eavesdropper to recover in plaintext keyboard transmissions because of insufficient mobile encryption.

On the hardware vendor side, Samsung's homegrown keyboard app offered no encryption at all and instead sent keystroke transmissions in the clear. Samsung also offers users the option of either using Tencent's Sogou app or an app from Baidu on their devices. Of the two apps, Citizen Lab identified Baidu's keyboard app as being vulnerable to attack.

The researchers were unable to identify any issue with Vivo's internally developed Pinyin keyboard app but had a working exploit for a vulnerability they discovered in a Tencent app that is also available on Vivo's devices.

The third-party Pinyin apps (from Baidu, Tencent, and iFlytek) that are available with devices from the other mobile device makers all had exploitable vulnerabilities as well.

These are not uncommon issues, it turns out. Last year, Citizen Labs had conducted a separate investigation in Tencent's Sogou — used by some 450 million people in China — and found vulnerabilities that exposed keystrokes to eavesdropping attacks.

"Combining the vulnerabilities discovered in this and our previous report analyzing Sogou's keyboard apps, we estimate that up to one billion users are affected by these vulnerabilities," Citizen Lab said.

The vulnerabilities could enable mass surveillance of Chinese mobile device users — including by signals intelligence services belonging to the so-called Five Eyes nations — US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — Citizen Lab said; the vulnerabilities in the keyboard apps that Citizen Lab discovered in its new research are very similar to vulnerabilities in the China-developed UC browser that intelligence agencies from these countries exploited for surveillance purposes, the report noted.

**About the Author(s)**

Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld, where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the publication. Over the course of his 20-year career at Computerworld, Jai also covered a variety of other technology topics, including big data, Hadoop, Internet of Things, e-voting, and data analytics. Prior to Computerworld, Jai covered technology issues for The Economic Times in Bangalore, India. Jai has a Master's degree in Statistics and lives in Naperville, Ill.

Chinese Keyboard Apps Open 1B People to Eavesdropping

The refunds will be made to individual affected customers through thousands of PayPal payments, available to be redeemed for a limited time.

Source: Len Holsborg via Alamy Stock Photo

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is refunding over $5.6 million to Ring customers after a 2023 privacy settlement.

Last year the FTC filed complaints against Ring, the home security company owned by Amazon, after accusations arose that employees were spying on female customers in bedrooms and bathrooms. Not only this, but the company failed to notify and obtain consent from customers regarding use of security video footage for training purposes until 2018.

The FTC asserted that Ring had failed to restrict access to its videos, failed to gain user consent, and failed to implement security safeguards leading to "egregious violations of users' privacy."

The FTC will be making the refunds through 117,044 PayPal payments to customers, depending on the type of Ring device used during the period when unauthorized users could have accessed Ring video footage.

**About the Author(s)**

FTC Issues $5.6M in Refunds to Customers After Ring Privacy Settlement

Recent trends in breaches and attack methods offer a valuable road map to cybersecurity professionals tasked with detecting and preventing the next big thing.

Source: YAY Media AS via Alamy Stock Photo

Cybersecurity is constantly evolving and, as such, requires regular vigilance.

Microsoft analyzes more than 78 trillion security signals every day to better understand the latest attack vectors and techniques. Since last year, we noticed a shift in how threat actors are scaling and leveraging nation-state support. It's clear that organizations continue to experience more attacks than ever before, and attack chains are growing more complex. Dwell times have shortened and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) have evolved to become nimbler and more evasive in nature. 

Informed by these insights, here are five attack trends end-user organizations should be monitoring regularly.

**Achieving Stealth By Avoiding Custom Tools and Malware**

Some threat actor groups are prioritizing stealth by leveraging tools and processes that already exist on their victims' devices. This allows adversaries to slip under the radar and go undetected by obscuring their actions alongside other threat actors that are using similar methods to launch attacks. 

An example of this trend can be seen with Volt Typhoon, a Chinese state-sponsored actor that made headlines for targeting US critical infrastructure with living-off-the-land techniques.

**Combining Cyber and Influence Operations for Greater Impact**

Nation-state actors have also created a new category of tactics that combines cyber operations and influence operations (IO) methods. Known as "cyber-enabled influence operations," this hybrid combines cyber methods — such as data theft, defacement, distributed denial-of-service, and ransomware — with influence methods — like data leaks, sockpuppets, victim impersonation, misleading social media posts, and malicious SMS/email communication — to boost, exaggerate, or compensate for shortcomings in adversaries' network access or cyberattack capabilities. 

For example, Microsoft has observed multiple Iranian actors attempting to use bulk SMS messaging to enhance the amplification and psychological effects of their cyber-influence operations. We're also seeing more cyber-enabled influence operations attempt to impersonate purported victim organizations or leading figures in those organizations to add credibility to the effects of the cyberattack or compromise.

**Creating Covert Networks By Targeting SOHO Network Edge Devices**

Particularly relevant for distributed or remote employees is the rising abuse of small-office/home-office (SOHO) network edge devices. More and more, we're seeing threat actors use target SOHO devices — such as the router in a local coffee shop — to assemble covert networks. Some adversaries will even use programs to locate vulnerable endpoints around the world and identify jumping-off points for their next attack. This technique complicates attribution, making attacks appear from virtually anywhere.

**Rapidly Adopting Publicly Disclosed POCs for Initial Access and Persistence **

Microsoft has increasingly observed certain nation-state subgroups adopting publicly disclosed proof-of-concept (POC) code shortly after it is released to exploit vulnerabilities in Internet-facing applications.

This trend can be seen in threat groups like Mint Sandstorm, an Iranian nation-state actor that rapidly weaponized N-day vulnerabilities in common enterprise applications and conducted highly targeted phishing campaigns to quickly and successfully access environments of interest.

**Prioritizing Specialization Within the Ransomware Economy**

We've been observing a continued move toward ransomware specialization. Rather than carry out an end-to-end ransomware operation, threat actors are choosing to focus on a small range of capabilities and services. 

This specialization has a splintering effect, spreading components of a ransomware attack across multiple providers in a complex underground economy. No longer can companies think of ransomware attacks as just coming from an individual threat actor or group. Instead, they may be combating the entire ransomware-as-a-service economy. In response, Microsoft Threat Intelligence now tracks ransomware providers individually, noting which groups traffic in initial access and which offer other services.

As cyber defenders look for more effective ways to harden their security posture, it's important to reference and learn from significant trends and breaches in years past. By analyzing these incidents and understanding different adversaries' motives and favored TTPs, we can better prevent similar breaches from happening in the future.

— Read more Partner Perspectives from Microsoft Security

**About the Author(s)**

Microsoft

Protect it all with Microsoft Security.

Microsoft offers simplified, comprehensive protection and expertise that eliminates security gaps so you can innovate and grow in a changing world. Our integrated security, compliance, and identity solutions work across platforms and cloud environments, providing protection without compromising productivity.

We help customers simplify the complex by prioritizing risks with unified management tools and strategic guidance created to maximize the human expertise inside your company. Our unparalleled AI is informed by trillions of signals so you can detect threats quickly, respond effectively, and fortify your security posture to stay ahead of ever-evolving threats.

5 Attack Trends Organizations of All Sizes Should Be Monitoring

Hackers can influence voters with media and breach campaigns, or try tampering with votes. Or they can combine these tactics to even greater effect.

Source: Lennart Worthmann via Alamy Stock Photo

If history has anything to tell us, the most significant cyber threat to this year's elections won't be a leak, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, or a fake news video. Instead, it will be some combination of these or more.

In cyberspace's salad days, hackers caused all kinds of fuss using simple, direct methods: hiding viruses in advertisements, hacking websites with easily guessed passwords, and so on. While that still happens, attackers often have to get more creative by chaining multiple tactics together in order to achieve their goals, thanks to greater cybersecurity awareness and protections.

So too with elections. In 2006, aides to Joe Lieberman's presidential campaign had to resort to their personal emails when a DoS attack froze their IT systems. A decade later, famously, came the Podesta email leak. Now, according to Mandiant, part of Google Cloud, the most potent threats to the democratic process are chained attacks.

"In the most significant cyber incidents targeting elections that Mandiant has tracked, threat actors have deliberately layered multiple tactics in hybrid operations in such a way that the effect of each component magnifies the others," the firm wrote in a new report.

**Combination Election Attacks**

One case study Mandiant pointed to occurred in 2014 when Ukraine's presidential elections were interrupted by a Russian cyber onslaught, following the ouster of its pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovich, and Russia's invasion of Crimea.

A week before election day, Russian actors hiding behind the hacktivist moniker "Cyber Berkut" struck websites relating to NATO and Ukrainian media outlets with DDoS attacks. That set the stage for when, with four days to go, the same fake hacktivist group broke into the country's central election computers and deleted files and rendered the vote tallying system inoperable.

A day later, they added to the chaos by breaking more election infrastructure, then leaking the emails and documents stored there to the wider Internet. Lastly, just 40 minutes before election results were to be broadcast to the public, the country's Central Election Commission reportedly removed some kind of virus that was designed to present fake results in favor of the far-right, ultra-nationalist candidate.

This extreme brand of combination cyber warfare might have only happened in a country experiencing such upheaval, but other chained cyberattacks have struck more-stable democracies since.

In 2020, two 20-something Iranian nationals carried out a campaign against multiple US states' voting-related websites. They managed to obtain confidential voter information from at least one of them, which they used to send intimidating and misleading emails, including by spreading a video with disinformation about election infrastructure vulnerabilities. They also breached one media company, which, as the Department of Justice noted, could have provided them another channel through which to disseminate their false claims.

"Leaks are particularly powerful. Potentially more powerful when boosted through the compromise of legitimate media," says John Hultquist, chief analyst with Mandiant Intelligence at Google Cloud.

The breach/fake news ploy is a potent concoction. "These disinformation efforts are often orchestrated by state-backed entities from nations such as China, Russia, and Iran," warns Madison Horn, herself a 2024 candidate running for a congressional seat in Oklahoma's 5th district. "Their impact is undeniable, as seen in instances like Russia’s involvement in the 2016 US election and China’s ongoing global influence operations, which starkly demonstrate their capacity to sway public opinion and disrupt electoral integrity."

**The Threat From Cybercrime**

It's not only state-sponsored actors that pose a threat to the democratic process, Mandiant noted. Insiders, hacktivists, and cybercriminals all muddy the waters in their own ways.

In most cases, "The avenues for these campaigns are popular social media platforms — X, Telegram, Facebook — and YouTube, making the digital battlefield as accessible as it is dangerous," Horn warns.

From January 2023 to March 2024, the cybersecurity firm BrandShield tracked suspicious new social media accounts and web domains relating to Joe Biden's and Donald Trump's presidential campaigns. It found hundreds of imposter accounts across social media sites, as well as 2,335 suspect websites claiming some sort of affiliation with the president and 9,639 for the former president (helped by a 197% boost following his arrest in August).

Fake Trump site. Source: BrandShield

Fake sites and accounts are useful for spreading scams or malware and for stealing funds that voters intended to go to candidates, or they can be used in concert with other tactics to achieve greater ends.

"They can be used to get people's information, and maybe try to influence their views by distributing fake news," says BrandShield CEO Yoav Keren, formerly an adviser in the Israeli Knesset. "I would even think that they can use these platforms to interact with real people from the campaigns, to infiltrate their systems. These impersonations can be used in a lot of different ways."

"I don't want to give too many good ideas to the bad guys," he says, "but they usually come up with them before I do."

**About the Author(s)**

Nate Nelson is a freelance writer based in New York City. Formerly a reporter at Threatpost, he contributes to a number of cybersecurity blogs and podcasts. He writes "Malicious Life" -- an award-winning Top 20 tech podcast on Apple and Spotify -- and hosts every other episode, featuring interviews with leading voices in security. He also co-hosts "The Industrial Security Podcast," the most popular show in its field.

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