APT42 | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Iranian state-sponsored threat actors have been observed orchestrating spear-phishing campaigns targeting a prominent Jewish figure starting in late July 2024 with the goal of delivering a new intelligence-gathering tool called AnvilEcho. Enterprise security company Proofpoint is tracking the activity under the name TA453, which overlaps with activity tracked by the broader cybersecurity community under the monikers APT42 (Mandiant), Charming Kitten (CrowdStrike), Damselfly (Symantec), Mint Sandstorm (Microsoft), and Yellow Garuda (PwC). "The initial interaction attempted to lure the target to engage with a benign email to build conversation and trust to then subsequently click on a follow-up malicious link," security researchers Joshua Miller, Georgi Mladenov, Andrew Northern, and Greg Lesnewich said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The attack chain attempted to deliver a new malware toolkit called BlackSmith, which delivered a PowerShell trojan dubbed Anv...

The Iranian state-backed hacking outfit called  APT42  is making use of enhanced social engineering schemes to infiltrate target networks and cloud environments. Targets of the attack include Western and Middle Eastern NGOs, media organizations, academia, legal services and activists, Google Cloud subsidiary Mandiant said in a report published last week. "APT42 was observed  posing as journalists  and event organizers to build trust with their victims through ongoing correspondence, and to deliver invitations to conferences or legitimate documents," the company  said . "These social engineering schemes enabled APT42 to harvest credentials and use them to gain initial access to cloud environments. Subsequently, the threat actor covertly exfiltrated data of strategic interest to Iran, while relying on built-in features and open-source tools to avoid detection." APT42 (aka Damselfly and UNC788),  first documented  by the company...