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Chinese international students in the U.K. have been targeted by persistent Chinese-speaking scammers for over a year as part of an activity dubbed  RedZei  (aka RedThief). "The RedZei fraudsters have chosen their targets carefully, researched them and realized it was a rich victim group that is ripe for exploitation," cybersecurity researcher Will Thomas (@BushidoToken)  said  in a write-up published last week. The most notable aspect about the operation is the steps taken by the threat actors to bypass steps taken by users to prevent scam calls, using a new pay-as-you-go U.K. phone number for each wave so as to render phone number-based blocking ineffective. Thomas, pointing out the meticulous tradecraft employed by the scammers, said the threat actor alternates between SIMs from several mobile carriers such as Three, O2, EE, Tesco Mobile, and Telia. Indications are that the lucrative RedZei campaign may have started as far back as August 2019, with a report from The

The  Zerobot  DDoS botnet has received substantial updates that expand on its ability to target more internet-connected devices and scale its network. Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) is tracking the ongoing threat under the moniker DEV-1061, its designation for unknown, emerging, or developing activity clusters. Zerobot,  first documented  by Fortinet FortiGuard Labs earlier this month, is a Go-based malware that propagates through vulnerabilities in web applications and IoT devices like firewalls, routers, and cameras. "The most recent distribution of Zerobot includes additional capabilities, such as exploiting vulnerabilities in Apache and Apache Spark ( CVE-2021-42013  and  CVE-2022-33891  respectively), and new DDoS attack capabilities," Microsoft researchers  said . Also called ZeroStresser by its operators, the malware is offered as a DDoS-for-hire service to other criminal actors, with the botnet advertised for sale on various social media networks.

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Okta, a company that provides identity and access management services, disclosed on Wednesday that some of its source code repositories were accessed in an unauthorized manner earlier this month. "There is no impact to any customers, including any HIPAA, FedRAMP, or DoD customers," the company  said  in a public statement. "No action is required by customers." The security event, which was  first reported  by Bleeping Computer, involved unidentified threat actors gaining access to the Okta Workforce Identity Cloud ( WIC ) code repositories hosted on GitHub. The access was subsequently abused to copy the source code. The cloud-based identity management platform noted that it was alerted to the incident by Microsoft-owned GitHub in early December 2022. It also emphasized that the breach did not result in unauthorized access to customer data or the Okta service. Upon discovering the lapse, Okta said it placed temporary restrictions on repository access and that i

More zero knowledge attacks, more leaked credentials, more Gen-Z cyber crimes - 2022 trends and 2023 predictions. Cybercrime remains a major threat to individuals, businesses, and governments around the world. Cybercriminals continue to take advantage of the prevalence of digital devices and the internet to perpetrate their crimes. As the internet of things continues to develop, cybercriminals will have access to a greater number of vulnerable devices, allowing them to carry out more sophisticated attacks. Cybercrime is expected to become increasingly profitable as criminals continue to find new and better ways to monetize their attack as entry barriers to cybercrime keep going down.  This article discusses key trends we've noticed in 2022 that will likely continue in 2023, which we'll also elaborate on in the upcoming webinar " The Rise of the Rookie Hacker - a new trend to reckon with " on January 11th. Leaked credentials will continue to be the main attack vect

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) this week  disclosed  that users of the Delta situational awareness program received phishing emails from a compromised email account belonging to the Ministry of Defense. The attacks, which have been attributed to a threat cluster dubbed UAC-0142, aimed to infect systems with two pieces of data-stealing malware referred to as  FateGrab and StealDeal . Delta  is a cloud-based operational situation display system developed by Aerorozvidka that allows real-time monitoring of troops on the battlefield, making it a lucrative target for threat actors. The lure messages, which come with fake warnings to update root certificates in the Delta software, carry PDF documents containing links to archive files hosted on a fraudulent Delta domain, ultimately dropping the malware on compromised systems. While FateGrab is mainly designed to exfiltrate files with specific extensions through File Transfer Protocol ( FTP ), StealDeal single

Threat actors continue to adapt to the latest technologies, practices, and even data privacy laws—and it's up to organizations to stay one step ahead by implementing strong cybersecurity measures and programs.  Here's a look at how cybercrime will evolve in 2023 and what you can do to secure and protect your organization in the year ahead.  Increase in digital supply chain attacks  With the rapid modernization and digitization of supply chains come new security risks. Gartner predicts that  by 2025, 45% of organizations worldwide will have experienced attacks  on their software supply chains—this is a three-fold increase from 2021. Previously, these types of attacks weren't even likely to happen because supply chains weren't connected to the internet. But now that they are, supply chains need to be secured properly.  The introduction of new technology around software supply chains means there are likely security holes that have yet to be identified, but are essenti

Meta Platforms disclosed that it took down no less than 200 covert influence operations since 2017 spanning roughly 70 countries across 42 languages. The social media conglomerate also took steps to disable accounts and block infrastructure operated by spyware vendors, including in China, Russia, Israel, the U.S. and India, that targeted individuals in about 200 countries. "The global surveillance-for-hire industry continues to grow and indiscriminately target people – including journalists, activists, litigants, and political opposition – to collect intelligence, manipulate and compromise their devices and accounts across the internet," the company  noted  in a report published last week. The networks that were found to engage in coordinated inauthentic behavior ( CIB ) originated from 68 countries. More than 100 nations are said to have been targeted by at least one such network, either foreign or domestic. With 34 operations, the U.S. emerged as the most frequently ta

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Wednesday announced the seizure of 48 domains that offered services to conduct distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on behalf of other threat actors, effectively lowering the barrier to entry for malicious activity. It also charged six suspects – Jeremiah Sam Evans Miller (23), Angel Manuel Colon Jr. (37), Shamar Shattock (19), Cory Anthony Palmer (22), John M. Dobbs (32), and Joshua Laing (32) – for their alleged ownership in the operation. The websites "allowed paying users to launch powerful distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks that flood targeted computers with information and prevent them from being able to access the internet," the DoJ said in a press statement. The six defendants have been charged with running various booter (or stresser) services, including RoyalStresser[.]com, SecurityTeam[.]io, Astrostress[.]com, Booter[.]sx, IPStresser[.]com, and TrueSecurityServices[.]io. They have also been accused

A persistent intrusion campaign has set its eyes on telecommunications and business process outsourcing (BPO) companies at lease since June 2022. "The end objective of this campaign appears to be to gain access to mobile carrier networks and, as evidenced in two investigations, perform  SIM swapping  activity," CrowdStrike researcher Tim Parisi  said  in an analysis published last week. The financially motivated attacks have been attributed by the cybersecurity company to an actor tracked as Scattered Spider. Initial access to the target environment is said to be undertaken through a variety of methods ranging from social engineering using phone calls and messages sent via Telegram to impersonate IT personnel. This technique is leveraged to direct victims to a credential harvesting site or trick them into installing commercial remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools like Zoho Assist and Getscreen.me. Should the target accounts be secured by two-factor authenticati

A new data wiper malware called  CryWiper  has been found targeting Russian government agencies, including mayor's offices and courts. "Although it disguises itself as a ransomware and extorts money from the victim for 'decrypting' data, [it] does not actually encrypt, but purposefully destroys data in the affected system," Kaspersky researchers Fedor Sinitsyn and Janis Zinchenko  said  in a write-up. Additional details of the attacks were shared by the Russian-language news publication  Izvestia . The intrusions have not been attributed to a specific adversarial group so far. A C++-based malware, CryWiper is configured to establish persistence via a scheduled task and communicate with a command-and-control (C2) server to initiate the malicious activity. Besides terminating processes related to database and email servers, the malware is equipped with capabilities to delete shadow copies of files and modify the Windows Registry to prevent RDP connections in a

The threat actors behind Cuba (aka COLDDRAW) ransomware have received more than $60 million in ransom payments and compromised over 100 entities across the world as of August 2022. In a new advisory shared by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the agencies  highlighted  a "sharp increase in both the number of compromised U.S. entities and the ransom amounts." The ransomware crew, also known as  Tropical Scorpius , has been observed targeting financial services, government facilities, healthcare, critical manufacturing, and IT sectors, while simultaneously expanding its tactics to gain initial access and interact with breached networks. It's worth noting that despite the name "Cuba," there is no evidence to suggest that the actors have any connection or affiliation with the island country. The entry point for the attacks involves the exploitation of known security flaws, phishing,

Medibank on Thursday confirmed that the threat actors behind the  devastating cyber attack  have posted another dump of data stolen from its systems on the dark web after its refusal to pay a ransom. "We are in the process of analyzing the data, but the data released appears to be the data we believed the criminal stole," the Australian health insurer  said . "While our investigation continues there are currently no signs that financial or banking data has been taken. And the personal data stolen, in itself, is not sufficient to enable identity and financial fraud. The raw data we have analyzed today so far is incomplete and hard to understand." The leak comes almost a month after the company acknowledged that personal data belonging to  around 9.7 million  of its current and former customers were accessed following a ransomware incident in October 2022. This includes 5.1 million Medibank customers, 2.8 million ahm customers, and 1.8 million international cust

The cybercrime group called Daixin Team has leaked sample data belonging to AirAsia, a Malaysian low-cost airline, on its data leak portal. The development comes a little over a week after the company fell victim to a ransomware attack on November 11 and 12, per  DataBreaches.net . The threat actors allegedly claim to have obtained the personal data associated with five million unique passengers and all of its employees. The samples uploaded to the leak site reveal passenger information and the booking IDs as well as personal data related to the company's staff. A spokesperson for the threat actor told DataBreaches.net that further attacks were not pursued owing to AirAsia's poor security measures and "the chaotic organization of the network." It's a rare case of a threat actor stopping its attacks against a company as a result of bad security practices. Daixin Team was recently the subject of an  advisory  from the U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence ag

A notorious advanced persistent threat actor known as  Mustang Panda  has been linked to a spate of spear-phishing attacks targeting government, education, and research sectors across the world. The primary targets of the intrusions from May to October 2022 included counties in the Asia Pacific region such as Myanmar, Australia, the Philippines, Japan, and Taiwan, cybersecurity firm Trend Micro  said  in a Friday report.  Mustang Panda, also called Bronze President, Earth Preta, HoneyMyte, and Red Lich, is a China-based espionage actor believed to be active since at least July 2018. The group is known for its use of malware such as China Chopper and PlugX to collect data from compromised environments. Activities of the group chronicled by  ESET ,  Google, Proofpoint ,  Cisco Talos , and  Secureworks  this year have revealed the threat actor's pattern of using PlugX (and its variant called Hodur) to infect a wide range of entities in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Ameri

The threat actors behind the Hive ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) scheme have launched attacks against over 1,300 companies across the world, netting the gang $100 million in illicit payments as of November 2022. "Hive ransomware has targeted a wide range of businesses and critical infrastructure sectors, including government facilities, communications, critical manufacturing, information technology, and — especially — Healthcare and Public Health (HPH)," U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence authorities  said  in an alert. Active since June 2021, Hive's RaaS operation involves a mix of developers, who create and manage the malware, and affiliates, who are responsible for conducting the attacks on target networks by often purchasing initial access from initial access brokers (IABs). In most cases, gaining a foothold involves the exploitation of  ProxyShell flaws  in Microsoft Exchange Server, followed by taking steps to terminate processes associated with antivirus engi

Hackers tied to the North Korean government have been observed using an updated version of a backdoor known as Dtrack targeting a wide range of industries in Germany, Brazil, India, Italy, Mexico, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the U.S. "Dtrack allows criminals to upload, download, start or delete files on the victim host," Kaspersky researchers Konstantin Zykov and Jornt van der Wiel  said  in a report. The victimology patterns indicate an expansion to Europe and Latin America. Sectors targeted by the malware are education, chemical manufacturing, governmental research centers and policy institutes, IT service providers, utility providers, and telecommunication firms. Dtrack, also called Valefor and Preft, is the handiwork of Andariel, a subgroup of the  Lazarus nation-state threat actor  that's publicly tracked by the broader cybersecurity community using the monikers Operation Troy, Silent Chollima, and Stonefly. Discovered in September 2019, the malware

The Russia-linked APT29 nation-state actor has been found leveraging a "lesser-known" Windows feature called Credential Roaming following a successful phishing attack against an unnamed European diplomatic entity. "The diplomatic-centric targeting is consistent with Russian strategic priorities as well as historic APT29 targeting," Mandiant researcher Thibault Van Geluwe de Berlaere  said  in a technical write-up. APT29, a Russian espionage group also called Cozy Bear, Iron Hemlock, and The Dukes, is  known  for its intrusions aimed at collecting intelligence that align with the country's strategic objectives. It's believed to be sponsored by the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). Some of the adversarial collective's cyber activities are tracked publicly under the moniker  Nobelium , a threat cluster responsible for the widespread supply chain compromise through SolarWinds software in December 2020. The Google-owned threat intelligence and inciden

A number of phishing campaigns are leveraging the decentralized InterPlanetary Filesystem (IPFS) network to host malware, phishing kit infrastructure, and facilitate other attacks. "Multiple malware families are currently being hosted within IPFS and retrieved during the initial stages of malware attacks," Cisco Talos researcher Edmund Brumaghin said in an analysis shared with The Hacker News. The research mirrors similar findings from Trustwave SpiderLabs in July 2022, which  found  more than 3,000 emails containing IPFS phishing URLs as an attack vector, calling IPFS the new "hotbed" for hosting phishing sites. IPFS as a technology is both resilient to censorship and takedowns, making it a double-edged sword. Underlying it is a peer-to-peer (P2P) network which replicates content across all participating nodes so that even if a file is removed from one machine, requests for the resource can still be served via other systems. This also makes it ripe for abuse

The Chinese state-sponsored threat actor known as Stone Panda has been observed employing a new stealthy infection chain in its attacks aimed at Japanese entities. Targets include media, diplomatic, governmental and public sector organizations, and think-tanks in Japan, according to  twin   reports  published by Kaspersky. Stone Panda , also called  APT10 , Bronze Riverside, Cicada, and Potassium, is a cyber  espionage group  known for its intrusions against organizations identified as strategically significant to China. The threat actor is believed to have been active since at least 2009. The group has also been linked to attacks using malware families like SigLoader, SodaMaster , and a web shell called Jackpot against multiple Japanese domestic organizations since April 2021, per cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, which is tracking the group under the name Earth Tengshe . The latest set of attacks, observed between March and June 2022, involve the use of a bogus Microsoft Word fi