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The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday became the latest government agency in the country to admit its internal network was compromised as part of the SolarWinds supply chain attack. "On December 24, 2020, the Department of Justice's Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) learned of previously unknown malicious activity linked to the global SolarWinds incident that has affected multiple federal agencies and technology contractors, among others," DoJ spokesperson Marc Raimondi said in a short statement. "This activity involved access to the Department's Microsoft Office 365 email environment." Calling it a "major incident," the DoJ said the threat actors who spied on government networks through SolarWinds software potentially accessed about 3% of the Justice Department's email accounts, but added there's no indication they accessed classified systems. The disclosure comes a day after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FB

Cybesecurity researchers today revealed a new malspam campaign that distributes a remote access Trojan (RAT) by purporting to contain a sex scandal video of U.S. President Donald Trump. The emails, which carry with the subject line "GOOD LOAN OFFER!!," come attached with a Java archive (JAR) file called "TRUMP_SEX_SCANDAL_VIDEO.jar," which, when downloaded, installs Qua or Quaverse RAT ( QRAT ) onto the infiltrated system. "We suspect that the bad guys are attempting to ride the frenzy brought about by the recently concluded Presidential elections since the filename they used on the attachment is totally unrelated to the email's theme," Trustwave's Senior Security Researcher Diana Lopera said in a write-up published today. The latest campaign is a variant of the Windows-based QRAT downloader Trustwave researchers  discovered  in August. The infection chain starts with a spam message containing an embedded attachment or a link pointing to a m

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The U.S. government on Tuesday formally pointed fingers at the Russian government for orchestrating the massive  SolarWinds supply chain attack  that came to light early last month. "This work indicates that an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor, likely Russian in origin, is responsible for most or all of the recently discovered, ongoing cyber compromises of both government and non-governmental networks," the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and the National Security Agency (NSA)  said  in a joint statement. Russia, however,  denied  any involvement in the operation on December 13, stating it "does not conduct offensive operations in the cyber domain." The FBI, CISA, ODNI, and NSA are members of the Cyber Unified Coordination Group (UCG), a newly-formed task force put in place by the White House National Security Council to investig

Cyberattacks targeting healthcare organizations have spiked by 45% since November 2020 as COVID-19 cases continue to increase globally. According to a new report published by Check Point Research today and shared with The Hacker News, this increase has made the sector the most targeted industry by cybercriminals when compared to an overall 22% increase in cyberattacks across all industry sectors worldwide seen during the same time period. The average number of weekly attacks in the healthcare sector reached 626 per organization in November as opposed to 430 the previous month, with attack vectors ranging from ransomware, botnets, remote code execution, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Ransomware attacks against hospitals also marked their biggest jump, with  Ryuk  and Sodinokibi emerging as the primary ransomware variants employed by various criminal groups. "The usage of Ryuk emphasizes the trend of having more targeted and tailored ransomware attacks rath

Ticketmaster has agreed to pay a $10 million fine after being charged with illegally accessing computer systems of a competitor repeatedly between 2013 and 2015 in an attempt to "cut [the company] off at the knees." A subsidiary of Live Nation, the California-based ticket sales and distribution company used the stolen information to gain an advantage over CrowdSurge — which merged with Songkick in 2015 and later acquired by Warner Music Group (WMG) in 2017 — by hiring a former employee to break into its tools and gain insight into the firm's operations. "Ticketmaster employees repeatedly – and illegally – accessed a competitor's computers without authorization using stolen passwords to unlawfully collect business intelligence,"  said  Acting U.S. Attorney Seth DuCharme. "Further, Ticketmaster's employees brazenly held a division-wide 'summit' at which the stolen passwords were used to access the victim company's computers, as if th

Microsoft on Thursday revealed that the threat actors behind the SolarWinds supply chain attack were able to gain access to a small number of internal accounts and escalate access inside its internal network. The "very sophisticated nation-state actor" used the unauthorized access to view, but not modify, the source code present in its repositories, the company said. "We detected unusual activity with a small number of internal accounts and upon review, we discovered one account had been used to view source code in a number of source code repositories," the Windows maker  disclosed  in an update. "The account did not have permissions to modify any code or engineering systems and our investigation further confirmed no changes were made. These accounts were investigated and remediated." The development is the latest in the far-reaching  espionage saga  that came to light earlier in December following revelations by cybersecurity firm FireEye that attac

Threat actors have been discovered distributing a new credential stealer written in AutoHotkey (AHK) scripting language as part of an ongoing campaign that started early 2020. Customers of financial institutions in the US and Canada are among the primary targets for credential exfiltration, with a specific focus on banks such as Scotiabank, Royal Bank of Canada, HSBC, Alterna Bank, Capital One, Manulife, and EQ Bank. Also included in the list is an Indian banking firm ICICI Bank. AutoHotkey  is an open-source custom scripting language for Microsoft Windows aimed at providing easy hotkeys for macro-creation and software automation that allows users to automate repetitive tasks in any Windows application. The multi-stage infection chain commences with a malware-laced Excel file that's embedded with a Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)  AutoOpen  macro, which is subsequently used to drop and execute the downloader client script ("adb.ahk") via a legitimate portable AHK

An authentication bypass vulnerability in the SolarWinds Orion software may have been leveraged by adversaries as a zero-day to deploy the SUPERNOVA malware in target environments. According to an  advisory  published yesterday by the CERT Coordination Center, the SolarWinds Orion API that's used to interface with all other Orion system monitoring and management products suffers from a security flaw (CVE-2020-10148) that could allow a remote attacker to execute unauthenticated API commands, thus resulting in a compromise of the SolarWinds instance. "The authentication of the API can be bypassed by including specific parameters in the  Request.PathInfo  portion of a URI request to the API, which could allow an attacker to execute unauthenticated API commands," the advisory states. "In particular, if an attacker appends a PathInfo parameter of 'WebResource.adx,' 'ScriptResource.adx,' 'i18n.ashx,' or 'Skipi18n' to a request to a Solar

New evidence amidst the ongoing probe into the  espionage campaign  targeting SolarWinds has uncovered an unsuccessful attempt to compromise cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike and access the company's email. The hacking endeavor was reported to the company by Microsoft's Threat Intelligence Center on December 15, which identified a third-party reseller's Microsoft Azure account to be making "abnormal calls" to Microsoft cloud APIs during a 17-hour period several months ago. The undisclosed affected reseller's Azure account handles Microsoft Office licensing for its Azure customers, including CrowdStrike. Although there was an attempt by unidentified threat actors to read the emails, it was ultimately foiled as the firm does not use Microsoft's Office 365 email service, CrowdStrike  said . The incident comes in the wake of the  supply chain attack  of SolarWinds revealed earlier this month, resulting in the deployment of a covert backdoor (aka "Sunbu

Citrix has issued an emergency advisory warning its customers of a security issue affecting its NetScaler application delivery controller (ADC) devices that attackers are abusing to launch amplified distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against several targets . "An attacker or bots can overwhelm the Citrix ADC [Datagram Transport Layer Security] network throughput, potentially leading to outbound bandwidth exhaustion," the company  noted . "The effect of this attack appears to be more prominent on connections with limited bandwidth." ADCs are purpose-built  networking appliances  whose function is to improve the performance, security, and availability of applications delivered over the web to end-users. The desktop virtualization and networking service provider said it's monitoring the incident and is continuing to investigate its impact on Citrix ADC, adding "the attack is limited to a small number of customers around the world." The iss

As the probe into the  SolarWinds supply chain attack  continues, new digital forensic evidence has brought to light that a separate threat actor may have been abusing the IT infrastructure provider's Orion software to drop a similar persistent backdoor on target systems. "The investigation of the whole SolarWinds compromise led to the discovery of an additional malware that also affects the SolarWinds Orion product but has been determined to be likely unrelated to this compromise and used by a different threat actor," Microsoft 365 research team  said  on Friday in a post detailing the Sunburst malware. What makes the newly revealed malware, dubbed "Supernova," different is that unlike the Sunburst DLL,  Supernova  ("app_web_logoimagehandler.ashx.b6031896.dll") is not signed with a legitimate SolarWinds digital certificate, signaling that the compromise may be unrelated to the previously disclosed supply chain attack. In a  standalone write-up ,

The massive state-sponsored  espionage campaign  that compromised software maker SolarWinds also targeted Microsoft, as the unfolding investigation into the hacking spree reveals the incident may have been far more wider in scope, sophistication, and impact than previously thought. News of Microsoft's compromise was first reported by Reuters , which also said the company's own products were then used to strike other victims by leveraging its cloud offerings, citing people familiar with the matter. The Windows maker, however, denied the threat actor had infiltrated its production systems to stage further attacks against its customers. In a statement to The Hacker News via email, the company said — "Like other SolarWinds customers, we have been actively looking for indicators of this actor and can confirm that we detected malicious SolarWinds binaries in our environment, which we isolated and removed. We have not found evidence of access to production services or custom

Cybersecurity researchers today disclosed a new supply-chain attack targeting the Vietnam Government Certification Authority (VGCA) that compromised the agency's digital signature toolkit to install a backdoor on victim systems. Uncovered by Slovak internet security company ESET early this month, the "SignSight" attack involved modifying software installers hosted on the CA's  website  ("ca.gov.vn") to insert a spyware tool called  PhantomNet  or Smanager. According to ESET's telemetry, the breach happened from at least July 23 to August 16, 2020, with the  two installers  in question — "gca01-client-v2-x32-8.3.msi" and "gca01-client-v2-x64-8.3.msi" for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows systems — tampered to include the backdoor. "The compromise of a certification authority website is a good opportunity for APT groups, since visitors are likely to have a high level of trust in a state organization responsible for digital signatures

The investigation into how the attackers managed to compromise SolarWinds' internal network and poison the company's software updates is still underway, but we may be one step closer to understanding what appears to be a very meticulously planned and highly-sophisticated supply chain attack. A new report published by ReversingLabs today and shared in advance with The Hacker News has revealed that the operators behind the  espionage campaign  likely managed to compromise the software build and code signing infrastructure of SolarWinds Orion platform as early as October 2019 to deliver the malicious backdoor through its software release process. "The source code of the affected library was directly modified to include malicious backdoor code, which was compiled, signed, and delivered through the existing software patch release management system," ReversingLabs' Tomislav Pericin said. Cybersecurity firm FireEye earlier this week  detailed  how multiple SolarWin

SolarWinds, the enterprise monitoring software provider which found itself at the epicenter of the most  consequential supply chain attacks , said as many as 18,000 of its high-profile customers might have installed a tainted version of its Orion products. The acknowledgment comes as part of a new filing made by the company to the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. The Texas-based company serves more than 300,000 customers worldwide, including every branch of the US military and four-fifths of the Fortune 500 companies. The "incident was likely the result of a highly sophisticated, targeted and manual supply chain attack by an outside nation state," SolarWinds said in the  regulatory disclosure , adding it "currently believes the actual number of customers that may have had an installation of the Orion products that contained this vulnerability to be fewer than 18,000." The company also reiterated in its  security advisory  that besides 2019.4 HF

A security researcher has demonstrated that sensitive data could be exfiltrated from air-gapped computers via a novel technique that leverages Wi-Fi signals as a covert channel—surprisingly, without requiring the presence of Wi-Fi hardware on the targeted systems. Dubbed " AIR-FI ," the attack hinges on deploying a specially designed malware in a compromised system that exploits "DDR SDRAM buses to generate electromagnetic emissions in the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi bands" and transmitting information atop these frequencies that can then be intercepted and decoded by nearby Wi-Fi capable devices such as smartphones, laptops, and IoT devices before sending the data to remote servers controlled by an attacker. The findings were published today in a paper titled "AIR-FI: Generating Covert Wi-Fi Signals from Air-Gapped Computers" by Dr. Mordechai Guri , the head of R&D at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev's Cyber-Security Research Center, Israel. "The AI