Cracked Software | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have found a number of GitHub repositories offering cracked software that are used to deliver an information stealer called RisePro. The campaign, codenamed  gitgub , includes 17 repositories associated with 11 different accounts, according to G DATA. The repositories in question have since been taken down by the Microsoft-owned subsidiary. "The repositories look similar, featuring a README.md file with the promise of free cracked software," the German cybersecurity company  said . "Green and red circles are commonly used on Github to display the status of automatic builds. Gitgub threat actors added four green Unicode circles to their README.md that pretend to display a status alongside a current date and provide a sense of legitimacy and recency." The list of repositories is as follows, with each of them pointing to a download link ("digitalxnetwork[.]com") containing a RAR archive file - andreastanaj/AVAST andreastanaj...

Unauthorized websites distributing trojanized versions of cracked software have been found to infect Apple macOS users with a new  Trojan-Proxy  malware. "Attackers can use this type of malware to gain money by building a proxy server network or to perform criminal acts on behalf of the victim: to launch attacks on websites, companies and individuals, buy guns, drugs, and other illicit goods," Kaspersky security researcher Sergey Puzan  said . The Russian cybersecurity firm said it found evidence indicating that the malware is a cross-platform threat, owing to artifacts unearthed for Windows and Android that piggybacked on pirated tools. The macOS variants propagate under the guise of legitimate multimedia, image editing, data recovery, and productivity tools. This suggests that users searching for pirated software are the targets of the campaign. Unlike their genuine, unaltered counterparts, which are offered as disk image (.DMG) files, the rogue versions are deliv...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

Cybercriminals are continuing to prey on users searching for cracked software by directing them to fraudulent websites hosting weaponized installers that deploy malware called  NullMixer  on compromised systems. "When a user extracts and executes NullMixer, it drops a number of malware files to the compromised machine," cybersecurity firm Kaspersky said in a Monday report. "It drops a wide variety of malicious binaries to infect the machine with, such as backdoors, bankers, downloaders, spyware, and many others." Besides siphoning users' credentials, address, credit card data, cryptocurrencies, and even Facebook and Amazon account session cookies, what makes NullMixer insidious is its ability to download dozens of trojans at once, significantly widening the scale of the infections. Attack chains typically start when a user attempts to download cracked software from one of the sites, which leads to a password-protected archive that contains an executable fil...

An ongoing campaign has been found to leverage a network of websites acting as a "dropper as a service" to deliver a bundle of malware payloads to victims looking for "cracked" versions of popular business and consumer applications. "These malware included an assortment of click fraud bots, other information stealers, and even ransomware," researchers from cybersecurity firm Sophos  said  in a report published last week. The attacks work by taking advantage of a number of bait pages hosted on WordPress that contain "download" links to software packages, which, when clicked, redirect the victims to a different website that delivers potentially unwanted browser plug-ins and malware, such as installers for  Raccoon Stealer , Stop ransomware, the Glupteba backdoor, and a variety of malicious cryptocurrency miners that masquerade as antivirus solutions. "Visitors who arrive on these sites are prompted to allow notifications; If they allow th...