Abuse covers the misuse of accounts, services, and systems for fraud, intrusion, harassment, or other harmful cyber activity.
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Abuse in cybersecurity means using systems, networks, or services in unauthorized or harmful ways, such as sending spam, hijacking accounts, or launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. It often exploits weak authentication, misconfigurations, or gaps in policies to gain access or disrupt services. Common abuse techniques include credential stuffing, phishing, and using compromised infrastructure to amplify attacks.
Managing abuse is critical because it can degrade service availability, expose sensitive data, and damage organizational reputation. Security teams focus on detecting unusual activity patterns, enforcing multi-factor authentication, and applying rate limits to reduce automated abuse. Timely abuse reporting and automated detection tools help identify and block malicious behavior, making abuse mitigation a key part of maintaining secure and reliable systems.
A newly discovered local privilege escalation vulnerability dubbed 'CIFSwitch' in the Linux kernel could allow attackers to forge CIFS authentication key descriptions, abuse the kernel's key request mechanism, and gain root privileges. [...]
A dependency confusion campaign leveraged 33 malicious npm packages to collect reconnaissance data from developer and build environments. This report details the attack chain, observed tradecraft, and detection opportunities to help organizations identify and disrupt related activity. The post Malicious npm packages abuse dependency confusion to profile developer environments appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.
The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has issued new guidelines requiring organizations to patch critical security vulnerabilities in internet-exposed systems within 12 hours of being flagged where "feasible" to safeguard against potential threats stemming from threat actors' abuse of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and large language models (LLMs) to automate vulnerability