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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 in September 2022, is an Iranian st

The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Monday sanctioned two firms and four individuals for their involvement in malicious cyber activities on behalf of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Cyber Electronic Command (IRGC-CEC) from at least 2016 to April 2021. This includes the front companies Mehrsam Andisheh Saz Nik (MASN) and Dadeh Afzar Arman (DAA), as well as the Iranian nationals Alireza Shafie Nasab, Reza Kazemifar Rahman, Hossein Mohammad Harooni, and Komeil Baradaran Salmani. "These actors targeted more than a dozen U.S. companies and government entities through cyber operations, including spear-phishing and malware attacks," the Treasury Department  said . Concurrent with the sanctions, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ)  unsealed  an indictment against the four individuals for orchestrating cyber attacks targeting the U.S. government and private entities. Furthermore, a  reward of up to $10 million  has been an

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

A new ongoing malware campaign has been observed distributing three different stealers, such as  CryptBot ,  LummaC2 , and  Rhadamanthys  hosted on Content Delivery Network (CDN) cache domains since at least February 2024. Cisco Talos has attributed the activity with moderate confidence to a threat actor tracked as  CoralRaider , a suspected Vietnamese-origin group that came to light earlier this month. This assessment is based on "several overlaps in tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of CoralRaider's Rotbot campaign, including the initial attack vector of the Windows Shortcut file, intermediate PowerShell decryptor and payload download scripts, the FoDHelper technique used to bypass User Access Controls (UAC) of the victim machine," the company said. Targets of the campaign span various business verticals across geographies, including the U.S., Nigeria, Pakistan, Ecuador, Germany, Egypt, the U.K., Poland, the Philippines, Norway, Japan, Syria, and Turkey.

In the high-stakes world of cybersecurity, the battleground has shifted. Supply chain attacks have emerged as a potent threat, exploiting the intricate web of interconnected systems and third-party dependencies to breach even the most formidable defenses. But what if you could turn the tables and proactively hunt these threats before they wreak havoc? We invite you to join us for an exclusive webinar that will equip you with the knowledge and strategies to stay ahead of the curve: " Supply Chain Under Siege: Unveiling Hidden Threats ." This comprehensive session, led by industry experts Rhys Arkins (VP of Product) and Jeffrey Martin (VP of Product Marketing), promises an in-depth exploration of the supply chain threat landscape. Brace yourself for a revelatory journey through: The Anatomy of Supply Chain Threats:  Gain a deep understanding of these insidious attacks, their far-reaching consequences, and the vulnerabilities they exploit. Proactive Threat Hunting Methodol

Cybersecurity breaches can be devastating for both individuals and businesses alike. While many people tend to focus on understanding how and why they were targeted by such breaches, there's a larger, more pressing question: What is the true financial impact of a cyberattack? According to research by Cybersecurity Ventures, the global cost of cybercrime is projected to reach an astonishing 10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025, which marks a dramatic increase from the 3 trillion USD reported in 2015. This sharp rise highlights a concerning trend: cybercriminals have significantly improved their methods for conducting sophisticated and successful cyberattacks over the years. According to research firm Cybersecurity Ventures, the cost of global cybercrime will reach a staggering 10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025, up from the 3 trillion USD that it was in 2015. It's clear, then, that these threat actors have found ways to pull off sophisticated and successful cyberattacks over the yea

The threat actor known as  ToddyCat  has been observed using a wide range of tools to retain access to compromised environments and steal valuable data. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky characterized the adversary as relying on various programs to harvest data on an "industrial scale" from primarily governmental organizations, some of them defense related, located in the Asia-Pacific region. "To collect large volumes of data from many hosts, attackers need to automate the data harvesting process as much as possible, and provide several alternative means to continuously access and monitor systems they attack," security researchers Andrey Gunkin, Alexander Fedotov, and Natalya Shornikova  said . ToddyCat was  first documented  by the company in June 2022 in connection with a series of cyber attacks aimed at government and military entities in Europe and Asia since at least December 2020. These intrusions leveraged a passive backdoor dubbed Samurai that allows 

Between crossovers - Do threat actors play dirty or desperate? In our dataset of over 11,000 victim organizations that have experienced a Cyber Extortion / Ransomware attack, we noticed that some victims re-occur. Consequently, the question arises why we observe a re-victimization and whether or not this is an actual second attack, an affiliate crossover (meaning an affiliate has gone to another Cyber Extortion operation with the same victim) or stolen data that has been travelling and re-(mis-)used. Either way, for the victims neither is good news.  But first thing's first, let's explore the current threat landscape, dive into one of our most recent research focuses on the dynamics of this ecosystem; and then explore our dataset on Law Enforcement activities in this space. Might the re-occurrence that we observe be foul play by threat actors and thus show how desperately they are trying to regain the trust of their co-offenders after disruption efforts by Law Enforcement? Or are th

Select Ukrainian government networks have remained infected with a malware called OfflRouter since 2015. Cisco Talos said its findings are based on an analysis of over 100 confidential documents that were infected with the VBA macro virus and uploaded to the VirusTotal malware scanning platform since 2018. More than 20 such documents have been uploaded since 2022. "The documents contained VBA code to drop and run an executable with the name 'ctrlpanel.exe,'" security researcher Vanja Svajcer  said . "The virus is still active in Ukraine and is causing potentially confidential documents to be uploaded to publicly accessible document repositories." A striking aspect of OfflRouter is its inability to spread via email, necessitating that it be propagated via other means, such as sharing documents and removable media, including USB memory sticks containing the infected documents. "It would require manual user intervention to send an infected document as

A previously undocumented "flexible" backdoor called  Kapeka  has been "sporadically" observed in cyber attacks targeting Eastern Europe, including Estonia and Ukraine, since at least mid-2022. The findings come from Finnish cybersecurity firm WithSecure, which attributed the malware to the Russia-linked advanced persistent threat (APT) group tracked as  Sandworm  (aka APT44 or Seashell Blizzard). Microsoft is tracking the same malware under the name KnuckleTouch. "The malware [...] is a flexible backdoor with all the necessary functionalities to serve as an early-stage toolkit for its operators, and also to provide long-term access to the victim estate," security researcher Mohammad Kazem Hassan Nejad  said . Kapeka comes fitted with a dropper that's designed to launch and execute a backdoor component on the infected host, after which it removes itself. The dropper is also responsible for setting up persistence for the backdoor either as a schedul

Indian government entities and energy companies have been targeted by unknown threat actors with an aim to deliver a modified version of an open-source information stealer malware called HackBrowserData and exfiltrate sensitive information in some cases by using Slack as command-and-control (C2). "The information stealer was delivered via a phishing email, masquerading as an invitation letter from the Indian Air Force," EclecticIQ researcher Arda Büyükkaya  said  in a report published today. "The attacker utilized Slack channels as exfiltration points to upload confidential internal documents, private email messages, and cached web browser data after the malware's execution." The campaign, observed by the Dutch cybersecurity firm beginning March 7, 2024, has been codenamed Operation FlightNight in reference to the Slack channels operated by the adversary. Targets of the malicious activity span multiple government entities in India, counting those related t

A China-linked threat cluster leveraged security flaws in Connectwise ScreenConnect and F5 BIG-IP software to deliver custom malware capable of delivering additional backdoors on compromised Linux hosts as part of an "aggressive" campaign. Google-owned Mandiant is  tracking  the activity under its uncategorized moniker  UNC5174  (aka Uteus or Uetus), describing it as a "former member of Chinese hacktivist collectives that has since shown indications of acting as a contractor for China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) focused on executing access operations." The threat actor is believed to have orchestrated widespread attacks against Southeast Asian and U.S. research and education institutions, Hong Kong businesses, charities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and U.S. and U.K. government organizations between October and November 2023, and again in February 2024 using the ScreenConnect bug. Initial access to target environments is facilitated by t

Threat actors are leveraging digital document publishing (DDP) sites hosted on platforms like FlipSnack, Issuu, Marq, Publuu, RelayTo, and Simplebooklet for carrying out phishing, credential harvesting, and session token theft, once again underscoring how threat actors are  repurposing legitimate services  for malicious ends. "Hosting phishing lures on DDP sites increases the likelihood of a successful phishing attack, since these sites often have a favorable reputation, are unlikely to appear on web filter blocklists, and may instill a false sense of security in users who recognize them as familiar or legitimate," Cisco Talos researcher Craig Jackson  said  last week. While adversaries have used popular cloud-based services such as Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, SharePoint, DocuSign, and Oneflow to host phishing documents in the past, the latest development marks an escalation designed to evade email security controls. DDP services allow users to upload and share PDF

The China-linked threat actor known as  Evasive Panda  orchestrated both watering hole and supply chain attacks targeting Tibetan users at least since September 2023. The end goal of the attacks is to deliver malicious downloaders for Windows and macOS that deploy a known backdoor called MgBot and a previously undocumented Windows implant known as Nightdoor. The findings come from ESET, which said the attackers compromised at least three websites to carry out watering-hole attacks as well as a supply-chain compromise of a Tibetan software company. The operation was discovered in January 2024. Evasive Panda, active since 2012 and also known as Bronze Highland and Daggerfly, was  previously disclosed  by the Slovak cybersecurity firm in April 2023 as having targeted an international non-governmental organization (NGO) in Mainland China with MgBot. Another report from Broadcom-owned Symantec around the same time  implicated  the adversary to a cyber espionage campaign aimed at infil