Adversary-in-the-Middle | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

When it comes to access security, one recommendation stands out above the rest: multi-factor authentication (MFA). With passwords alone being simple work for hackers, MFA provides an essential layer of protection against breaches. However, it's important to remember that MFA isn't foolproof. It can be bypassed, and it often is.  If a password is compromised, there are several options available to hackers looking to circumvent the added protection of MFA. We'll explore four social engineering tactics hackers successfully use to breach MFA and emphasize the importance of having a strong password as part of a layered defense.  1. Adversary-in-the-middle (AITM) attacks AITM attacks involve deceiving users into believing they're logging into a genuine network, application, or website. But really, they're giving up their information to a fraudulent lookalike. This lets hackers intercept passwords and manipulate security measures, including MFA prompts. For instance, a spear-phish

A new research has uncovered multiple vulnerabilities that could be exploited to bypass  Windows Hello authentication  on Dell Inspiron 15, Lenovo ThinkPad T14, and Microsoft Surface Pro X laptops. The flaws were discovered by researchers at hardware and software product security and offensive research firm Blackwing Intelligence, who found the weaknesses in the fingerprint sensors from Goodix, Synaptics, and ELAN that are embedded into the devices. A prerequisite for the fingerprint reader exploits is that the users of the targeted laptops have fingerprint authentication already set up. All the three fingerprint sensors are a type of sensor called "match on chip" ( MoC ), which integrates the matching and other biometric management functions directly into the sensor's integrated circuit. "While MoC prevents replaying stored fingerprint data to the host for matching, it does not, in itself, prevent a malicious sensor from spoofing a legitimate sensor's commu

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

Malaysian law enforcement authorities have  announced  the takedown of a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) operation called  BulletProofLink . The Royal Malaysia Police said the effort, which was carried out with assistance from the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on November 6, 2023, was based on information that the threat actors behind the platform were based out of the country. To that end, eight individuals aged between 29 and 56, including the syndicate's mastermind, have been arrested across different locations in Sabah, Selangor, Perak, and Kuala Lumpur, New Straits Times  reported . Along with the arrests, authorities confiscated servers, computers, jewelry, vehicles, and cryptocurrency wallets containing approximately $213,000. BulletProofLink , also called BulletProftLink, is known for offering ready-to-use phishing templates on a subscription basis to other actors for conducting credential harvesting campaigns. These

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 to avoid detection," Malwarebytes' Jérôme Segura  said . While malvertising campaigns are known to set up replica sites advertising widely-used software, the latest activity marks a deviation in that the website mimics WindowsReport[.]com. The goal is to trick unsuspecting users searching for CPU-Z on search engines like Google by serving malicious ads that, when clicked, redirect them to the fake portal (workspace-app[.]online). At the same time, users who are not the intended victims of the campaign are served an innocuous blog with different articles, a technique known a

Senior executives working in U.S.-based organizations are being targeted by a new phishing campaign that leverages a popular adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) phishing toolkit named  EvilProxy  to conduct credential harvesting and account takeover attacks. Menlo Security said the activity started in July 2023, primarily singling out banking and financial services, insurance, property management and real estate, and manufacturing sectors. "The threat actors leveraged an open redirection vulnerability on the job search platform 'indeed.com,'redirecting victims to malicious phishing pages impersonating Microsoft," security researcher Ravisankar Ramprasad  said  in a report published last week. EvilProxy , first documented by Resecurity in September 2022, functions as a reverse proxy that's set up between the target and a legitimate login page to intercept credentials, two-factor authentication (2FA) codes, and session cookies to hijack accounts of interest. The th

Microsoft is warning of an increase in adversary-in-the-middle ( AiTM ) phishing techniques, which are being propagated as part of the phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) cybercrime model. In addition to an uptick in AiTM-capable PhaaS platforms, the tech giant noted that existing phishing services like PerSwaysion are incorporating AiTM capabilities. "This development in the PhaaS ecosystem enables attackers to conduct high-volume phishing campaigns that attempt to circumvent MFA protections at scale," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team  said  in a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter). Phishing kits with AiTM capabilities work in two ways, one of which concerns the use of reverse proxy servers (i.e., the phishing page) to relay traffic to and from the client and legitimate website and stealthily capture user credentials, two-factor authentication codes, and session cookies. A second method involves synchronous relay servers. "In AiTM through synchronous relay s

Threat actors are increasingly using a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) toolkit dubbed EvilProxy to pull off account takeover attacks aimed at high-ranking executives at prominent companies. According to Proofpoint, an ongoing hybrid campaign has leveraged the service to target thousands of Microsoft 365 user accounts, sending approximately 120,000 phishing emails to hundreds of organizations worldwide between March and June 2023. Nearly 39% of the hundreds of compromised users are said to be C-level executives, including CEOs (9%) and CFOs (17%). The attacks have also singled out personnel with access to financial assets or sensitive information. At least 35% of all compromised users had additional account protections enabled. The campaigns are seen as a response to the increased adoption of multi-factor authentication (MFA) in enterprises, prompting threat actors to evolve their tactics to bypass new security layers by incorporating adversary-in-the-middle ( AitM ) phishing kits to

"Dozens" of organizations across the world have been targeted as part of a broad business email compromise ( BEC ) campaign that involved the use of adversary-in-the-middle ( AitM ) techniques to carry out the attacks. "Following a successful phishing attempt, the threat actor gained initial access to one of the victim employee's account and executed an 'adversary-in-the-middle' attack to bypass Office 365 authentication and gain persistence access to that account," Sygnia researchers  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Once gaining persistence, the threat actor exfiltrated data from the compromised account and used his access to spread the phishing attacks against other victim's employees along with several external targeted organizations." The findings come less than a week after Microsoft  detailed  a similar combination of an AitM phishing and a BEC attack aimed at banking and financial services organizations. Sygnia t

Banking and financial services organizations are the targets of a new multi-stage adversary-in-the-middle ( AitM ) phishing and business email compromise (BEC) attack, Microsoft has revealed. "The attack originated from a compromised trusted vendor and transitioned into a series of AiTM attacks and follow-on BEC activity spanning multiple organizations," the tech giant  disclosed  in a Thursday report. Microsoft, which is tracking the cluster under its emerging moniker  Storm-1167 , called out the group's use of indirect proxy to pull off the attack. This enabled the attackers to flexibly tailor the phishing pages to their targets and carry out session cookie theft, underscoring the continued sophistication of AitM attacks. The modus operandi is unlike other AitM campaigns where the decoy pages act as a  reverse proxy  to harvest credentials and time-based one-time passwords (TOTPs) entered by the victims. "The attacker presented targets with a website that mi

The  NuGet  repository is the target of a new "sophisticated and highly-malicious attack" aiming to infect .NET developer systems with cryptocurrency stealer malware. The 13 rogue packages, which were downloaded more than 160,000 times over the past month, have since been taken down. "The packages contained a PowerShell script that would execute upon installation and trigger a download of a 'second stage' payload, which could be remotely executed," JFrog researchers Natan Nehorai and Brian Moussalli  said . While NuGet packages have been in the past found to  contain vulnerabilities  and be abused to  propagate phishing links , the development marks the first-ever discovery of packages with malicious code. Three of the most downloaded packages – Coinbase.Core, Anarchy.Wrapper.Net, and DiscordRichPresence.API – alone accounted for 166,000 downloads, although it's also possible that the threat actors artificially inflated the download counts using bo

The threat actors behind a large-scale adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM)  phishing campaign  targeting enterprise users of Microsoft email services have also set their sights on Google Workspace users. "This campaign specifically targeted chief executives and other senior members of various organizations which use [Google Workspace]," Zscaler researchers Sudeep Singh and Jagadeeswar Ramanukolanu  detailed  in a report published this month. The AiTM phishing attacks are said to have commenced in mid-July 2022, following a similar modus operandi as that of a  social engineering campaign  designed to siphon users' Microsoft credentials and even bypass multi-factor authentication. The low-volume Gmail AiTM phishing campaign also entails using the compromised emails of chief executives to conduct further social engineering, with the attacks also utilizing several compromised domains as an intermediate URL redirector to take the victims to the final landing page. Attack cha

A new, large-scale phishing campaign has been observed using adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) techniques to get around security protections and compromise enterprise email accounts. "It uses an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attack technique capable of bypassing multi-factor authentication," Zscaler researchers Sudeep Singh and Jagadeeswar Ramanukolanu  said  in a Tuesday report. "The campaign is specifically designed to reach end users in enterprises that use Microsoft's email services." Prominent targets include fintech, lending, insurance, energy, manufacturing, and federal credit union verticals located in the U.S., U.K., New Zealand, and Australia. This is not the first time such a phishing attack has come to light. Last month, Microsoft  disclosed  that over 10,000 organizations had been targeted since September 2021 by means of AitM techniques to breach accounts secured with multi-factor authentication (MFA). The ongoing campaign, effective June 2022,