Deadglyph: New Advanced Backdoor with Distinctive Malware Tactics

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a previously undocumented advanced backdoor dubbed Deadglyph employed by a threat actor known as Stealth Falcon as part of a cyber espionage campaign. "Deadglyph's architecture is unusual as it consists of cooperating components – one a native x64 binary, the other a .NET assembly," ESET said in a new report shared with The Hacker News. "This combination

Iranian Hackers Launch Sophisticated Attacks Targeting Israel with PowerLess Backdoor

An Iranian nation-state threat actor has been linked to a new wave of phishing attacks targeting Israel that's designed to deploy an updated version of a Windows backdoor called PowerLess. Cybersecurity firm Check Point is tracking the activity cluster under its mythical creature handle Educated Manticore, which exhibits "strong overlaps" with a hacking crew known as APT35, Charming Kitten,

Operation Soft Cell: Chinese Hackers Breach Middle East Telecom Providers

Telecommunication providers in the Middle East are the subject of new cyber attacks that commenced in the first quarter of 2023. The intrusion set has been attributed to a Chinese cyber espionage actor associated with a long-running campaign dubbed Operation Soft Cell based on tooling overlaps. "The initial attack phase involves infiltrating Internet-facing Microsoft Exchange servers to deploy

Chinese Hackers Targeting European Entities with New MQsTTang Backdoor

The China-aligned Mustang Panda actor has been observed using a hitherto unseen custom backdoor called MQsTTang as part of an ongoing social engineering campaign that commenced in January 2023. "Unlike most of the group's malware, MQsTTang doesn't seem to be based on existing families or publicly available projects," ESET researcher Alexandre Côté Cyr said in a new report. Attack chains

Cyber Attacks Against Middle East Governments Hide Malware in Windows Logo

An espionage-focused threat actor has been observed using a steganographic trick to conceal a previously undocumented backdoor in a Windows logo in its attacks against Middle Eastern governments. Broadcom's Symantec Threat Hunter Team attributed the updated tooling to a hacking group it tracks under the name Witchetty, which is also known as LookingFrog, a subgroup operating under the TA410

Malicious IIS Extensions Gaining Popularity Among Cyber Criminals for Persistent Access

Threat actors are increasingly abusing Internet Information Services (IIS) extensions to backdoor servers as a means of establishing a "durable persistence mechanism." That's according to a new warning from the Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team, which said that "IIS backdoors are also harder to detect since they mostly reside in the same directories as legitimate modules used by target