Cyber warfare | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Monday unsealed indictments against seven Chinese nationals for their involvement in a hacking group that targeted U.S. and foreign critics, journalists, businesses, and political officials for about 14 years. The defendants include Ni Gaobin (倪高彬), Weng Ming (翁明), Cheng Feng (程锋), Peng Yaowen (彭耀文), Sun Xiaohui (孙小辉), Xiong Wang (熊旺), and Zhao Guangzong (赵光宗).  The suspected cyber spies have been charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusions and conspiracy to commit wire fraud in connection with a state-sponsored threat group tracked as  APT31 , which is also known as Altaire,  Bronze Vinewood , Judgement Panda, and Violet Typhoon (formerly Zirconium). The hacking collective has been  active since at least 2010 . Specifically, their responsibilities entail testing and exploiting the malware used to conduct the intrusions, managing the attack infrastructure, and conducting surveillance of specific U.S. entities, federal prosecutors no

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

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

The data wiping malware called  AcidPour  may have been deployed in attacks targeting four telecom providers in Ukraine, new findings from SentinelOne show. The cybersecurity firm also confirmed connections between the malware and AcidRain, tying it to threat activity clusters associated with Russian military intelligence. "AcidPour's expanded capabilities would enable it to better disable embedded devices including networking, IoT, large storage (RAIDs), and possibly ICS devices running Linux x86 distributions," security researchers Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade and Tom Hegel  said . AcidPour is a variant of  AcidRain , a wiper that was used to render Viasat KA-SAT modems operable at the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian war in early 2022 and cripple Ukraine's military communications. It also builds upon the latter's features, while targeting Linux systems running on x86 architecture. AcidRain, on the other hand, is compiled for MIPS architecture. Where AcidRain w

The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Wednesday announced sanctions against two 46-year-old Russian nationals and the respective companies they own for engaging in cyber influence operations. Ilya Andreevich Gambashidze (Gambashidze), the founder of the Moscow-based company Social Design Agency (SDA), and Nikolai Aleksandrovich Tupikin (Tupikin), the CEO and current owner of Russia-based Company Group Structura LLC (Structura), have been accused of providing services to the Russian government in connection to a "foreign malign influence campaign." The disinformation campaign is tracked by the broader cybersecurity community under the name  Doppelganger , which is known to target audiences in Europe and the U.S. using inauthentic news sites and social media accounts. "SDA and Structura have been identified as key actors of the campaign, responsible for providing [the Government of the Russian Federation] with a variety of servic

A new variant of a data wiping malware called AcidRain has been detected in the wild that's specifically designed for targeting Linux x86 devices. The malware, dubbed AcidPour, is compiled for Linux x86 devices, SentinelOne's Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade said in a series of posts on X. "The new variant [...] is an ELF binary compiled for x86 (not MIPS) and while it refers to similar devices/strings, it's a largely different codebase," Guerrero-Saade  noted . AcidRain  first came to light  in the early days of the Russo-Ukrainian war, with the malware deployed against KA-SAT modems from U.S. satellite company Viasat. An ELF binary compiled for MIPS architectures, it is capable of wiping the filesystem and different known storage device files by recursively iterating over common directories for most Linux distributions. The cyber attack was  subsequently attributed  to Russia by the Five Eyes nations, along with Ukraine and the European Union. AcidPour, as the