APT group | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The threat actor known as Mysterious Elephant has been observed using an advanced version of malware called Asyncshell. The attack campaign is said to have used Hajj -themed lures to trick victims into executing a malicious payload under the guise of a Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) file, the Knownsec 404 team said in an analysis published today. Mysterious Elephant, which is also known as APT-K-47, is a threat actor of South Asian origin that has been active since at least 2022, primarily targeting Pakistani entities. The group's tactics and tooling have been found to share similarities with those of other threat actors operating in the regions, such as SideWinder, Confucius, and Bitter. In October 2023, the group was linked to a spear-phishing campaign that delivered a backdoor called ORPCBackdoor as part of attacks directed against Pakistan and other countries. The exact initial access vector employed by Mysterious Elephant in the latest campaign is not known, but ...

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has sought assistance from the public in connection with an investigation involving the breach of edge devices and computer networks belonging to companies and government entities. "An Advanced Persistent Threat group allegedly created and deployed malware (CVE-2020-12271) as part of a widespread series of indiscriminate computer intrusions designed to exfiltrate sensitive data from firewalls worldwide," the agency said . "The FBI is seeking information regarding the identities of the individuals responsible for these cyber intrusions." The development comes in the aftermath of a series of reports published by cybersecurity vendor Sophos chronicling a set of campaigns between 2018 and 2023 that exploited its edge infrastructure appliances to deploy custom malware or repurpose them as proxies to fly under the radar. The malicious activity, codenamed Pacific Rim and designed to conduct surveillance, sabotage, and c...

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The Colombian insurance sector is the target of a threat actor tracked as Blind Eagle with the end goal of delivering a customized version of a known commodity remote access trojan (RAT) referred to as Quasar RAT since June 2024. "Attacks have originated with phishing emails impersonating the Colombian tax authority," Zscaler ThreatLabz researcher Gaetano Pellegrino said in a new analysis published last week. The advanced persistent threat (APT), also known as AguilaCiega, APT-C-36, and APT-Q-98, has a track record of focusing on organizations and individuals in South America, particularly related to the government and finance sectors in Colombia and Ecuador. The attack chains, as recently documented by Kaspersky, originate with phishing emails that entice recipients into clicking on malicious links that serve as the launchpad for the infection process. The links, either embedded within a PDF attachment or directly in the email body, point to ZIP archives hosted on ...

The China-linked advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as Mustang Panda has been observed weaponizing Visual Studio Code software as part of espionage operations targeting government entities in Southeast Asia. "This threat actor used Visual Studio Code's embedded reverse shell feature to gain a foothold in target networks," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researcher Tom Fakterman said in a report, describing it as a "relatively new technique" that was first demonstrated in September 2023 by Truvis Thornton. The campaign is assessed to be a continuation of a previously documented attack activity aimed at an unnamed Southeast Asian government entity in late September 2023. Mustang Panda , also known by the names BASIN, Bronze President, Camaro Dragon, Earth Preta, HoneyMyte, RedDelta, Red Lich, and Stately Taurus, has been operational since 2012, routinely conducting cyber espionage campaigns targeting government and religious entities across Europe an...

Unnamed government entities in the Middle East and Malaysia are the target of a persistent cyber campaign orchestrated by a threat actor known as Tropic Trooper since June 2023. "Sighting this group's [Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures] in critical governmental entities in the Middle East, particularly those related to human rights studies, marks a new strategic move for them," Kaspersky security researcher Sherif Magdy said . The Russian cybersecurity vendor said it detected the activity in June 2024 upon discovering a new version of the China Chopper web Shell, a tool shared by many Chinese-speaking threat actors for remote access to compromised servers, on a public web server hosting an open-source content management system (CMS) called Umbraco. The attack chain is designed to deliver a malware implant named Crowdoor , a variant of the SparrowDoor backdoor documented by ESET back in September 2021. The efforts were ultimately unsuccessful. Tropic Trooper, also...

A non-profit supporting Vietnamese human rights has been the target of a multi-year campaign designed to deliver a variety of malware on compromised hosts. Cybersecurity company Huntress attributed the activity to a threat cluster tracked as APT32, a Vietnamese-aligned hacking crew that's also known as APT-C-00, Canvas Cyclone (formerly Bismuth), Cobalt Kitty, and OceanLotus. The intrusion is believed to have been ongoing for at least four years. "This intrusion has a number of overlaps with known techniques used by the threat actor APT32/OceanLotus, and a known target demographic which aligns with APT32/OceanLotus targets," security researchers Jai Minton and Craig Sweeney said . OceanLotus , active since at least 2012, has a history of targeting company and government networks in East-Asian countries, particularly Vietnam, the Philippines, Laos, and Cambodia with the end goal of cyber espionage and intellectual property theft. Attack chains typically make use of...

A South Korea-aligned cyber espionage has been linked to the zero-day exploitation of a now-patched critical remote code execution flaw in Kingsoft WPS Office to deploy a bespoke backdoor dubbed SpyGlace. The activity has been attributed to a threat actor dubbed APT-C-60 , according to cybersecurity firms ESET and DBAPPSecurity. The attacks have been found to infect Chinese and East Asian users with malware. The security flaw in question is CVE-2024-7262 (CVSS score: 9.3), which stems from a lack of proper validation of user-provided file paths. This loophole essentially allows an adversary to upload an arbitrary Windows library and achieve remote code execution. The bug "allows code execution via hijacking the control flow of the WPS Office plugin component promecefpluginhost.exe," ESET said , adding it found another way to achieve the same effect. The second vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2024-7263 (CVSS score: 9.3). The attack conceived by APT-C-60 weaponizes the...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has alerted of a spear-phishing campaign that targeted a scientific research institution in the country with malware known as HATVIBE and CHERRYSPY. The agency attributed the attack to a threat actor it tracks under the name UAC-0063 , which was previously observed targeting various government entities to gather sensitive information using keyloggers and backdoors. The attack is characterized by the use of a compromised email account belonging to an employee of the organization to send phishing messages to "dozens" of recipients containing a macro-laced Microsoft Word (DOCX) attachment. Opening the document and enabling macros results in the execution of an encoded HTML Application (HTA) named HATVIBE, which sets up persistence on the host using a scheduled task and paves the way for a Python backdoor codenamed CHERRYSPY, which is capable of running commands issued by a remote server. CERT-UA said it detected ...

The North Korea-linked  Kimsuky hacking group  has been attributed to a new social engineering attack that employs fictitious Facebook accounts to targets via Messenger and ultimately delivers malware. "The threat actor created a Facebook account with a fake identity disguised as a public official working in the North Korean human rights field," South Korean cybersecurity company Genians  said  in a report published last week. The multi-stage attack campaign, which impersonates a legitimate individual, is designed to target activists in the North Korean human rights and anti-North Korea sectors, it noted. The approach is a departure from the typical email-based spear-phishing strategy in that it leverages the social media platform to approach targets through Facebook Messenger and trick them into opening seemingly private documents written by the persona. The decoy documents, hosted on OneDrive, is a Microsoft Common Console document that masquerades ...

Details have emerged about a previously undocumented malware campaign undertaken by the Iranian MuddyWater advanced persistent threat (APT) group targeting Turkish private organizations and governmental institutions. "This campaign utilizes malicious PDFs, XLS files and Windows executables to deploy malicious PowerShell-based downloaders acting as initial footholds into the target's enterprise," Cisco Talos researchers Asheer Malhotra and Vitor Ventura  said  in a newly published report. The  development  comes as the U.S. Cyber Command, earlier this month,  linked the APT  to the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). The intrusions, which are believed to have been orchestrated as recently as November 2021, were directed against Turkish government entities, including the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey ( TÜBİTAK ), using weaponized Excel documents and PDF files hosted on attacker-controlled or media-sharing websit...

Cybersecurity researchers today took the wraps off a previously undocumented backdoor and document stealer that has been deployed against specific targets from 2015 to early 2020. Codenamed " Crutch " by ESET researchers, the malware has been attributed to  Turla  (aka Venomous Bear or Snake), a Russia-based advanced hacker group known for its extensive attacks against governments, embassies, and military organizations through various watering hole and spear-phishing campaigns. "These tools were designed to exfiltrate sensitive documents and other files to Dropbox accounts controlled by Turla operators," the cybersecurity firm said in an analysis shared with The Hacker News. The backdoor implants were secretly installed on several machines belonging to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in an unnamed country of the European Union. Besides identifying strong links between a Crutch sample from 2016 and Turla's yet another second-stage backdoor called  Gazer , t...

Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday uncovered a new espionage campaign targeting media, construction, engineering, electronics, and finance sectors in Japan, Taiwan, the U.S., and China. Linking the attacks to Palmerworm (aka BlackTech) — likely a  China-based  advanced persistent threat (APT) — Symantec's Threat Hunter Team  said  the first wave of activity associated with this campaign began last year in August 2019, although their ultimate motivations still remain unclear. "While we cannot see what Palmerworm is exfiltrating from these victims, the group is considered an espionage group and its likely motivation is considered to be stealing information from targeted companies," the cybersecurity firm said. Among the multiple victims infected by Palmerworm, the media, electronics, and finance companies were all based in Taiwan, while an engineering company in Japan and a construction firm in China were also targeted. In addition to using custom malware to com...

An advanced group of Chinese hackers has recently been spotted to be behind a sustained cyber espionage campaign targeting government entities in Australia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, and Brunei—which went undetected for at least five years and is still an ongoing threat. The group, named 'Naikon APT,' once known as one of the most active APTs in Asia until 2015, carried out a string of cyberattacks in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region in search of geopolitical intelligence. According to the latest investigation report Check Point researchers shared with The Hacker News, the Naikon APT group had not gone silent for the last 5 years, as initially suspected; instead, it was using a new backdoor, called " Aria-body ," to operate stealthily. "Given the characteristics of the victims and capabilities presented by the group, it is evident that the group's purpose is to gather intelligence and spy on the countries whose governments it ...

Security researchers from Check Point Threat Intelligence Team have discovered the comeback of an APT (advanced persistent threat) surveillance group targeting institutions across the Middle East, specifically the Palestinian Authority. The attack, dubbed "Big Bang," begins with a phishing email sent to targeted victims that includes an attachment of a self-extracting archive containing two files—a Word document and a malicious executable. Posing to be from the Palestinian Political and National Guidance Commission, the Word document serves as a decoy to distract victims while the malware is installed in the background. The malicious executable, which runs in the background, act as the first stage info-stealer malware designed for intelligence gathering to identify potential victims (on the basis of what is unclear as of now), and then it accordingly downloads the second stage malware designed for espionage. "While the analysis...discloses the capabilities of ...

A years ago when the mysterious hacking group ' The Shadow Brokers ' dumped a massive trove of sensitive data stolen from the US intelligence agency NSA, everyone started looking for secret hacking tools and zero-day exploits . A group of Hungarian security researchers from CrySyS Lab and Ukatemi has now revealed that the NSA dump doesn't just contain zero-day exploits used to take control of targeted systems , but also include a collection of scripts and scanning tools the agency uses to track operations of hackers from other countries. According to a report published today by the Intercept, NSA's specialized team known as Territorial Dispute (TeDi) developed some scripts and scanning tools that help the agency to detect other nation-state hackers on the targeted machines it infects. NSA hackers used these tools to scan targeted systems for 'indicators of compromise' (IoC) in order to protect its own operations from getting exposed, as well as to fin...

Over the past few years, Internet users globally have grown increasingly aware of online privacy and security issues due to mass monitoring and surveillance by government agencies, making them adopt encryption software and services. But it turns out that hackers are taking advantage of this opportunity by creating and distributing fake versions of encryption tools in order to infect as many victims as possible. Kaspersky Lab has revealed an advanced persistent threat (APT) group, nicknamed StrongPity , which has put a lot of efforts in targeting users of software designed for encrypting data and communications. The StrongPity APT group has been using watering-hole attacks, infected installers, and malware for many years to target users of encryption software by compromising legitimate sites or setting up their own malicious copycat sites. Watering hole attacks are designed to lure specific groups of users to their interest-based sites that typically house malicious files or...

The malicious Russian Tor exit node , which was claimed to be patching binary files, is actually distributing a malware program to launch cyber-espionage attacks against European government agencies. The group behind the rogue Tor exit node had likely been infecting files for more than a year, causing victims to download and install a backdoor file that gave hackers full control of their systems. Last month Josh Pitts of Leviathan Security Group uncovered a malicious Tor exit node that wraps Windows executable files inside a second, malicious Windows executable. But when Artturi Lehtiö of F-Secure carried out an in-depth research, he found that the exit node was actually linked to the notorious Russian APT family MiniDuke . " MiniDuke " previously infected government agencies and organizations in more than 20 countries via a modified Adobe PDF email attachment . MiniDuke malware is written in assembly language with its tiny file size (20KB), and uses hijacke...