DiskCryptor | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Microsoft's threat intelligence division on Wednesday assessed that a subgroup of the Iranian threat actor tracked as  Phosphorus  is conducting ransomware attacks as a "form of moonlighting" for personal gain. The tech giant, which is monitoring the activity cluster under the moniker  DEV-0270  (aka Nemesis Kitten), said it's operated by a company that functions under the public aliases Secnerd and Lifeweb, citing infrastructure overlaps between the group and the two organizations. "DEV-0270 leverages exploits for high-severity vulnerabilities to gain access to devices and is known for the early adoption of newly disclosed vulnerabilities," Microsoft  said . "DEV-0270 also extensively uses living-off-the-land binaries (LOLBINs) throughout the attack chain for discovery and credential access. This extends to its abuse of the built-in BitLocker tool to encrypt files on compromised devices." The use of BitLocker and DiskCryptor by Iranian actor

A ransomware group with an Iranian operational connection has been linked to a string of file-encrypting malware attacks targeting organizations in Israel, the U.S., Europe, and Australia. Cybersecurity firm Secureworks attributed the intrusions to a threat actor it tracks under the moniker Cobalt Mirage, which it said is linked to an Iranian hacking crew dubbed Cobalt Illusion (aka APT35, Charming Kitten, Newscaster, or Phosphorus). "Elements of Cobalt Mirage activity have been  reported  as  Phosphorus  and  TunnelVision ," Secureworks Counter Threat Unit (CTU)  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The threat actor is said to have conducted two different sets of intrusions, one of which relates to opportunistic ransomware attacks involving the use of legitimate tools like  BitLocker  and DiskCryptor for financial gain. The second set of attacks are more targeted, carried out with the primary goal of securing access and gathering intelligence, while also depl

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A politically motivated hacker group tied to a series of espionage and sabotage attacks on Israeli entities in 2021 incorporated a previously undocumented remote access trojan (RAT) that masquerades as the Windows Calculator app as part of a conscious effort to stay under the radar. Cybersecurity company Cybereason, which has been tracking the operations of the Iranian actor known as Moses Staff, dubbed the malware " StrifeWater ." "The StrifeWater RAT appears to be used in the initial stage of the attack and this stealthy RAT has the ability to remove itself from the system to cover the Iranian group's tracks," Tom Fakterman, Cybereason security analyst,  said  in a report. "The RAT possesses other capabilities, such as command execution and screen capturing, as well as the ability to download additional extensions." Moses Staff came to light towards the end of last year when Check Point Research  unmasked  a series of attacks aimed at Israeli or