Russian APT Used Zero-Click Outlook Exploit

N. Korea's Kimsuky Targeting South Korean Research Institutes with Backdoor Attacks

The North Korean threat actor known as Kimsuky has been observed targeting research institutes in South Korea as part of a spear-phishing campaign with the ultimate goal of distributing backdoors on compromised systems. "The threat actor ultimately uses a backdoor to steal information and execute commands," the AhnLab Security Emergency Response Center (ASEC) said in an

Microsoft Warns of COLDRIVER's Evolving Evasion and Credential-Stealing Tactics

The threat actor known as COLDRIVER has continued to engage in credential theft activities against entities that are of strategic interests to Russia while simultaneously improving its detection evasion capabilities. The Microsoft Threat Intelligence team is tracking under the cluster as Star Blizzard (formerly SEABORGIUM). It's also called Blue Callisto, BlueCharlie (or TAG-53),

New Stealthy 'Krasue' Linux Trojan Targeting Telecom Firms in Thailand

A previously unknown Linux remote access trojan called Krasue has been observed targeting telecom companies in Thailand by threat actors to main covert access to victim networks at lease since 2021. Named after a nocturnal female spirit of Southeast Asian folklore, the malware is "able to conceal its own presence during the initialization phase," Group-IB said in a report

The Binance Crackdown Will Be an 'Unprecedented' Bonanza for Crypto Surveillance

Binance’s settlement requires it to offer years of transaction data to US regulators and cops, exposing the company—and its customers—to a “24/7, 365-days-a-year financial colonoscopy.”

Inside The Secret Complex Making High-Tech Gadgets For UK Spies

Microsoft Blames Russia For Ongoing Hacks Of 9 Month Old Exchange Bug

Alert: Threat Actors Can Leverage AWS STS to Infiltrate Cloud Accounts

Threat actors can take advantage of Amazon Web Services Security Token Service (AWS STS) as a way to infiltrate cloud accounts and conduct follow-on attacks. The service enables threat actors to impersonate user identities and roles in cloud environments, Red Canary researchers Thomas Gardner and Cody Betsworth said in a Tuesday analysis. AWS STS is a web service that enables

Russia's AI-Powered Disinformation Operation Targeting Ukraine, U.S., and Germany

The Russia-linked influence operation called Doppelganger has targeted Ukrainian, U.S., and German audiences through a combination of inauthentic news sites and social media accounts. These campaigns are designed to amplify content designed to undermine Ukraine as well as propagate anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment, U.S. military competence, and Germany's economic and social issues, according to a new

Generative AI Security: Preventing Microsoft Copilot Data Exposure

Microsoft Copilot has been called one of the most powerful productivity tools on the planet. Copilot is an AI assistant that lives inside each of your Microsoft 365 apps — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, Outlook, and so on. Microsoft's dream is to take the drudgery out of daily work and let humans focus on being creative problem-solvers. What makes Copilot a different beast than ChatGPT and

15,000 Go Module Repositories on GitHub Vulnerable to Repojacking Attack

New research has found that over 15,000 Go module repositories on GitHub are vulnerable to an attack called repojacking. "More than 9,000 repositories are vulnerable to repojacking due to GitHub username changes," Jacob Baines, chief technology officer at VulnCheck, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "More than 6,000 repositories were vulnerable to repojacking due to account

New Threat Actor 'AeroBlade' Emerges in Espionage Attack on U.S. Aerospace

A previously undocumented threat actor has been linked to a cyber attack targeting an aerospace organization in the U.S. as part of what's suspected to be a cyber espionage mission. The BlackBerry Threat Research and Intelligence team is tracking the activity cluster as AeroBlade. Its origin is currently unknown and it's not clear if the attack was successful. "The actor used spear-phishing

Microsoft Warns of Kremlin-Backed APT28 Exploiting Critical Outlook Vulnerability

Microsoft on Monday said it detected Kremlin-backed nation-state activity exploiting a now-patched critical security flaw in its Outlook email service to gain unauthorized access to victims' accounts within Exchange servers. The tech giant attributed the intrusions to a threat actor it called Forest Blizzard (formerly Strontium), which is also widely tracked under the

Google Unveils RETVec - Gmail's New Defense Against Spam and Malicious Emails

Google has revealed a new multilingual text vectorizer called RETVec (short for Resilient and Efficient Text Vectorizer) to help detect potentially harmful content such as spam and malicious emails in Gmail. "RETVec is trained to be resilient against character-level manipulations including insertion, deletion, typos, homoglyphs, LEET substitution, and more," according to the&

Film To Tell Story Of Gary McKinnon's Fight Against US Extradition

North Korea's Lazarus Group Rakes in $3 Billion from Cryptocurrency Hacks

Threat actors from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) are increasingly targeting the cryptocurrency sector as a major revenue generation mechanism since at least 2017 to get around sanctions imposed against the country. "Even though movement in and out of and within the country is heavily restricted, and its general population is isolated from the rest of the world, the

7 Uses for Generative AI to Enhance Security Operations

Welcome to a world where Generative AI revolutionizes the field of cybersecurity. Generative AI refers to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to generate or create new data, such as images, text, or sounds. It has gained significant attention in recent years due to its ability to generate realistic and diverse outputs. When it comes to security operations, Generative AI can

U.S. Treasury Sanctions Sinbad Cryptocurrency Mixer Used by North Korean Hackers

The U.S. Treasury Department on Wednesday imposed sanctions against Sinbad, a virtual currency mixer that has been put to use by the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group to launder ill-gotten proceeds. "Sinbad has processed millions of dollars' worth of virtual currency from Lazarus Group heists, including the Horizon Bridge and Axie Infinity heists," the department said. "Sinbad is

Ransomware Hackers Wreaking Havoc Arrested In Ukraine

4 Key Takeaways From New Global AI Security Guidelines

N. Korean Hackers 'Mixing' macOS Malware Tactics to Evade Detection

The North Korean threat actors behind macOS malware strains such as RustBucket and KANDYKORN have been observed "mixing and matching" different elements of the two disparate attack chains, leveraging RustBucket droppers to deliver KANDYKORN. The findings come from cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, which also tied a third macOS-specific malware called ObjCShellz to the RustBucket campaign

U.S., U.K., and Global Partners Release Secure AI System Development Guidelines

The U.K. and U.S., along with international partners from 16 other countries, have released new guidelines for the development of secure artificial intelligence (AI) systems. "The approach prioritizes ownership of security outcomes for customers, embraces radical transparency and accountability, and establishes organizational structures where secure design is a top priority," the U.S.

Kubernetes Secrets of Fortune 500 Companies Exposed in Public Repositories

Cybersecurity researchers are warning of publicly exposed Kubernetes configuration secrets that could put organizations at risk of supply chain attacks. “These encoded Kubernetes configuration secrets were uploaded to public repositories,” Aqua security researchers Yakir Kadkoda and Assaf Morag said in a new research published earlier this week. Some of those impacted include two top blockchain

Alert: New WailingCrab Malware Loader Spreading via Shipping-Themed Emails

Delivery- and shipping-themed email messages are being used to deliver a sophisticated malware loader known as WailingCrab. "The malware itself is split into multiple components, including a loader, injector, downloader and backdoor, and successful requests to C2-controlled servers are often necessary to retrieve the next stage," IBM X-Force researchers Charlotte Hammond, Ole Villadsen, and Kat

6 Steps to Accelerate Cybersecurity Incident Response

Modern security tools continue to improve in their ability to defend organizations’ networks and endpoints against cybercriminals. But the bad actors still occasionally find a way in. Security teams must be able to stop threats and restore normal operations as quickly as possible. That’s why it’s essential that these teams not only have the right tools but also understand how to effectively

Mirai-based Botnet Exploiting Zero-Day Bugs in Routers and NVRs for Massive DDoS Attacks

An active malware campaign is leveraging two zero-day vulnerabilities with remote code execution (RCE) functionality to rope routers and video recorders into a Mirai-based distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet. “The payload targets routers and network video recorder (NVR) devices with default admin credentials and installs Mirai variants when successful,” Akamai said in an advisory

N. Korean Hackers Distribute Trojanized CyberLink Software in Supply Chain Attack

A North Korean state-sponsored threat actor tracked as Diamond Sleet is distributing a trojanized version of a legitimate application developed by a Taiwanese multimedia software developer called CyberLink to target downstream customers via a supply chain attack. "This malicious file is a legitimate CyberLink application installer that has been modified to include malicious code that downloads,

North Korean Hackers Pose as Job Recruiters and Seekers in Malware Campaigns

North Korean threat actors have been linked to two campaigns in which they masquerade as both job recruiters and seekers to distribute malware and obtain unauthorized employment with organizations based in the U.S. and other parts of the world. The activity clusters have been codenamed Contagious Interview and Wagemole, respectively, by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42. While the first set of attacks

AI Solutions Are the New Shadow IT

Ambitious Employees Tout New AI Tools, Ignore Serious SaaS Security RisksLike the SaaS shadow IT of the past, AI is placing CISOs and cybersecurity teams in a tough but familiar spot.  Employees are covertly using AI with little regard for established IT and cybersecurity review procedures. Considering ChatGPT’s meteoric rise to 100 million users within 60 days of launch, especially with little

DOJ Charges Binance With Vast Money-Laundering Scheme and Sanctions Violations

From Russia to Iran, the feds have charged Binance with conducting well over $1 billion in transactions with sanctioned countries and criminal actors.

Rhysida Ransomware Gang Attacked The British Library

Randstorm Exploit: Bitcoin Wallets Created b/w 2011-2015 Vulnerable to Hacking

Bitcoin wallets created between 2011 and 2015 are susceptible to a new kind of exploit called Randstorm that makes it possible to recover passwords and gain unauthorized access to a multitude of wallets spanning several blockchain platforms. "Randstorm() is a term we coined to describe a collection of bugs, design decisions, and API changes that, when brought in contact with each other, combine

Zimbra Zero-Day Exploited To Hack Government Emails

Discover 2023's Cloud Security Strategies in Our Upcoming Webinar - Secure Your Spot

In 2023, the cloud isn't just a technology—it's a battleground. Zenbleed, Kubernetes attacks, and sophisticated APTs are just the tip of the iceberg in the cloud security warzone. In collaboration with the esteemed experts from Lacework Labs, The Hacker News proudly presents an exclusive webinar: 'Navigating the Cloud Attack Landscape: 2023 Trends, Techniques, and Tactics.' Join us for an

27 Malicious PyPI Packages with Thousands of Downloads Found Targeting IT Experts

An unknown threat actor has been observed publishing typosquat packages to the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository for nearly six months with an aim to deliver malware capable of gaining persistence, stealing sensitive data, and accessing cryptocurrency wallets for financial gain. The 27 packages, which masqueraded as popular legitimate Python libraries, attracted thousands of downloads,

Zero-Day Flaw in Zimbra Email Software Exploited by Four Hacker Groups

A zero-day flaw in the Zimbra Collaboration email software was exploited by four different groups in real-world attacks to pilfer email data, user credentials, and authentication tokens. "Most of this activity occurred after the initial fix became public on GitHub," Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-37580 (CVSS score:

Royal Mail's Recovery From Ransomware Attack Will Cost Business At Least $12M

Domain Name Industry Brief Quarterly Report: DNIB.com Announces 359.3 Million Domain Name Registrations in the Third Quarter of 2023

Today, the latest issue of The Domain Name Industry Brief Quarterly Report was released by DNIB.com, showing the third quarter of 2023 closed with 359.3 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains (TLDs), an increase of 2.7 million domain name registrations, or 0.8%, compared to the second quarter of 2023. Domain name registrations also increased by 8.5 million, or 2.4%, year over year.

Check out the latest issue of The Domain Name Industry Brief Quarterly Report to see domain name stats from the third quarter of 2023, including:

• Top 10 largest TLDs by number of reported domain names
• Top 10 largest ccTLDs by number of reported domain names
• ngTLDs as percentage of total TLDs
• Geographical ngTLDs as percentage of total corresponding geographical TLDs

DNIB.com and The Domain Name Industry Brief Quarterly Report are sponsored by Verisign. To see past issues of the quarterly report, interactive dashboards, and learn about DNIB.com’s statistical methodology, please visit DNIB.com.

The post Domain Name Industry Brief Quarterly Report: DNIB.com Announces 359.3 Million Domain Name Registrations in the Third Quarter of 2023 appeared first on Verisign Blog.

Vietnamese Hackers Using New Delphi-Powered Malware to Target Indian Marketers

The Vietnamese threat actors behind the Ducktail stealer malware have been linked to a new campaign that ran between March and early October 2023, targeting marketing professionals in India with an aim to hijack Facebook business accounts. "An important feature that sets it apart is that, unlike previous campaigns, which relied on .NET applications, this one used Delphi as the programming

Russian Hackers Sandworm Cause Power Outage in Ukraine Amidst Missile Strikes

The notorious Russian hackers known as Sandworm targeted an electrical substation in Ukraine last year, causing a brief power outage in October 2022. The findings come from Google's Mandiant, which described the hack as a "multi-event cyber attack" leveraging a novel technique for impacting industrial control systems (ICS). "The actor first used OT-level living-off-the-land (LotL) techniques to

New Malvertising Campaign Uses Fake Windows News Portal to Distribute Malicious Installers

A new malvertising campaign has been found to employ fake sites that masquerade as legitimate Windows news portal to propagate a malicious installer for a popular system profiling tool called CPU-Z. "This incident is a part of a larger malvertising campaign that targets other utilities like Notepad++, Citrix, and VNC Viewer as seen in its infrastructure (domain names) and cloaking templates used

Confidence in File Upload Security is Alarmingly Low. Why?

Numerous industries—including technology, financial services, energy, healthcare, and government—are rushing to incorporate cloud-based and containerized web applications.  The benefits are undeniable; however, this shift presents new security challenges.  OPSWAT's 2023 Web Application Security report reveals: 75% of organizations have modernized their infrastructure this year. 78% have

Offensive and Defensive AI: Let’s Chat(GPT) About It

ChatGPT: Productivity tool, great for writing poems, and… a security risk?! In this article, we show how threat actors can exploit ChatGPT, but also how defenders can use it for leveling up their game. ChatGPT is the most swiftly growing consumer application to date. The extremely popular generative AI chatbot has the ability to generate human-like, coherent and contextually relevant responses.

Intensified Israeli Surveillance Has Put the West Bank on Lockdown

The West Bank was Israel’s surveillance laboratory. Since the Israel-Hamas war began, Palestinian residents have been locked in for days at a time.

Who’s Behind the SWAT USA Reshipping Service?

Last week, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that one of the largest cybercrime services for laundering stolen merchandise was hacked recently, exposing its internal operations, finances and organizational structure. In today’s Part II, we’ll examine clues about the real-life identity of “Fearlless,” the nickname chosen by the proprietor of the SWAT USA Drops service.

Based in Russia, SWAT USA recruits people in the United States to reship packages containing pricey electronics that are purchased with stolen credit cards. As detailed in this Nov. 2 story, SWAT currently employs more than 1,200 U.S. residents, all of whom will be cut loose without a promised payday at the end of their first month reshipping stolen goods.

The current co-owner of SWAT, a cybercriminal who uses the nickname “Fearlless,” operates primarily on the cybercrime forum Verified. This Russian-language forum has tens of thousands of members, and it has suffered several hacks that exposed more than a decade’s worth of user data and direct messages.

January 2021 posts on Verified show that Fearlless and his partner Universalo purchased the SWAT reshipping business from a Verified member named SWAT, who’d been operating the service for years. SWAT agreed to transfer the business in exchange for 30 percent of the net profit over the ensuing six months.

Cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 says Fearlless first registered on Verified in February 2013. The email address Fearlless used on Verified leads nowhere, but a review of Fearlless’ direct messages on Verified indicates this user originally registered on Verified a year earlier as a reshipping vendor, under the alias “Apathyp.”

There are two clues supporting the conclusion that Apathyp and Fearlless are the same person. First, the Verified administrators warned Apathyp he had violated the forum’s rules barring the use of multiple accounts by the same person, and that Verified’s automated systems had detected that Apathyp and Fearlless were logging in from the same device.  Second, in his earliest private messages on Verified, Fearlless told others to contact him on an instant messenger address that Apathyp had claimed as his.

Intel 471 says Apathyp registered on Verified using the email address triploo@mail.ru. A search on that email address at the breach intelligence service Constella Intelligence found that a password commonly associated with it was “niceone.” But the triploo@mail.ru account isn’t connected to much else that’s interesting except a now-deleted account at Vkontakte, the Russian answer to Facebook.

However, in Sept. 2020, Apathyp sent a private message on Verified to the owner of a stolen credit card shop, saying his credentials no longer worked. Apathyp told the proprietor that his chosen password on the service was “12Apathy.”

A search on that password at Constella reveals it was used by just four different email addresses, two of which are particularly interesting: gezze@yandex.ru and gezze@mail.ru. Constella discovered that both of these addresses were previously associated with the same password as triploo@mail.ru — “niceone,” or some variation thereof.

Constella found that years ago gezze@mail.ru was used to create a Vkontakte account under the name Ivan Sherban (former password: “12niceone“) from Magnitogorsk, an industrial city in the southern region of Russia. That same email address is now tied to a Vkontakte account for an Ivan Sherban who lists his home as Saint Petersburg, Russia. Sherban’s profile photo shows a heavily tattooed, muscular and recently married individual with his beautiful new bride getting ready to drive off in a convertible sports car.

A pivotal clue for validating the research into Apathyp/Fearlless came from the identity intelligence firm myNetWatchman, which found that gezze@mail.ru at one time used the passwords “геззи1991” (gezze1991) and “gezze18081991.”

Care to place a wager on when Vkontakte says is Mr. Sherban’s birthday? Ten points if you answered August 18 (18081991).

Mr. Sherban did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Predictive AI in Cybersecurity: Outcomes Demonstrate All AI is Not Created Equally

Here is what matters most when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) in cybersecurity: Outcomes.  As the threat landscape evolves and generative AI is added to the toolsets available to defenders and attackers alike, evaluating the relative effectiveness of various AI-based security offerings is increasingly important — and difficult. Asking the right questions can help you spot solutions

48 Malicious npm Packages Found Deploying Reverse Shells on Developer Systems

A new set of 48 malicious npm packages have been discovered in the npm repository with capabilities to deploy a reverse shell on compromised systems. "These packages, deceptively named to appear legitimate, contained obfuscated JavaScript designed to initiate a reverse shell on package install," software supply chain security firm Phylum said. All the counterfeit packages have been published by

Mysterious Kill Switch Disrupts Mozi IoT Botnet Operations

The unexpected drop in malicious activity connected with the Mozi botnet in August 2023 was due to a kill switch that was distributed to the bots. "First, the drop manifested in India on August 8," ESET said in an analysis published this week. "A week later, on August 16, the same thing happened in China. While the mysterious control payload – aka kill switch – stripped Mozi bots of most

Malicious NuGet Packages Caught Distributing SeroXen RAT Malware

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new set of malicious packages published to the NuGet package manager using a lesser-known method for malware deployment. Software supply chain security firm ReversingLabs described the campaign as coordinated and ongoing since August 1, 2023, while linking it to a host of rogue NuGet packages that were observed delivering a remote access trojan called

Britain To Push Ahead With Rules For Cryptoassets

N. Korean Lazarus Group Targets Software Vendor Using Known Flaws

The North Korea-aligned Lazarus Group has been attributed as behind a new campaign in which an unnamed software vendor was compromised through the exploitation of known security flaws in another high-profile software. The attack sequences, according to Kaspersky, culminated in the deployment of malware families such as SIGNBT and LPEClient, a known hacking tool used by the threat actor for

Google Expands Its Bug Bounty Program to Tackle Artificial Intelligence Threats

Google has announced that it's expanding its Vulnerability Rewards Program (VRP) to compensate researchers for finding attack scenarios tailored to generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems in an effort to bolster AI safety and security. "Generative AI raises new and different concerns than traditional digital security, such as the potential for unfair bias, model manipulation or

Pro-Russian Hackers Target XSS In Roundcube

Microsoft Warns as Scattered Spider Expands from SIM Swaps to Ransomware

The prolific threat actor known as Scattered Spider has been observed impersonating newly hired employees in targeted firms as a ploy to blend into normal on-hire processes and takeover accounts and breach organizations across the world. Microsoft, which disclosed the activities of the financially motivated hacking crew, described the adversary as "one of the most dangerous financial criminal

Record-Breaking 100 Million RPS DDoS Attack Exploits HTTP/2 Rapid Reset Flaw

Cloudflare on Thursday said it mitigated thousands of hyper-volumetric HTTP distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that exploited a recently disclosed flaw called HTTP/2 Rapid Reset, 89 of which exceeded 100 million requests per second (RPS). "The campaign contributed to an overall increase of 65% in HTTP DDoS attack traffic in Q3 compared to the previous quarter," the web infrastructure

Nation State Hackers Exploiting Zero-Day in Roundcube Webmail Software

The threat actor known as Winter Vivern has been observed exploiting a zero-day flaw in Roundcube webmail software on October 11, 2023, to harvest email messages from victims' accounts. "Winter Vivern has stepped up its operations by using a zero-day vulnerability in Roundcube," ESET security researcher Matthieu Faou said in a new report published today. Previously, it was using known

The Rise of S3 Ransomware: How to Identify and Combat It

In today's digital landscape, around 60% of corporate data now resides in the cloud, with Amazon S3 standing as the backbone of data storage for many major corporations.  Despite S3 being a secure service from a reputable provider, its pivotal role in handling vast amounts of sensitive data (customer personal information, financial data, intellectual property, etc.), provides a juicy target for

34 Cybercriminals Arrested in Spain for Multi-Million Dollar Online Scams

Spanish law enforcement officials have announced the arrest of 34 members of a criminal group that carried out various online scams, netting the gang about €3 million ($3.2 million) in illegal profits. Authorities conducted searches across 16 locations Madrid, Malaga, Huelva, Alicante, and Murcia, seizing two simulated firearms, a katana sword, a baseball bat, €80,000 in cash, four high-end

They Cracked the Code to a Locked USB Drive Worth $235 Million in Bitcoin. Then It Got Weird

Stefan Thomas lost the password to an encrypted USB drive holding 7,002 bitcoins. One team of hackers believes they can unlock it—if they can get Thomas to let them.

Who's Experimenting with AI Tools in Your Organization?

With the record-setting growth of consumer-focused AI productivity tools like ChatGPT, artificial intelligence—formerly the realm of data science and engineering teams—has become a resource available to every employee.  From a productivity perspective, that’s fantastic. Unfortunately for IT and security teams, it also means you may have hundreds of people in your organization using a new tool in