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The threat actor known as  Asylum Ambuscade  has been observed straddling cybercrime and cyber espionage operations since at least early 2020. "It is a crimeware group that targets bank customers and cryptocurrency traders in various regions, including North America and Europe," ESET  said  in an analysis published Thursday. "Asylum Ambuscade also does espionage against government entities in Europe and Central Asia." Asylum Ambuscade was  first documented  by Proofpoint in March 2022 as a nation-state-sponsored phishing campaign that targeted European governmental entities in an attempt to obtain intelligence on refugee and supply movement in the region. The goal of the attackers, per the Slovak cybersecurity firm, is to siphon confidential information and web email credentials from official government email portals. The attacks start off with a spear-phishing email bearing a malicious Excel spreadsheet attachment that, when opened, either exploits VBA code o

Google has removed a screen recording app named "iRecorder - Screen Recorder" from the Play Store after it was found to sneak in information stealing capabilities nearly a year after the app was published as an innocuous app. The app (APK package name "com.tsoft.app.iscreenrecorder"), which accrued over 50,000 installations, was first uploaded on September 19, 2021. The malicious functionality is believed to have been introduced in version 1.3.8, which was released on August 24, 2022. "It is rare for a developer to upload a legitimate app, wait almost a year, and then update it with malicious code," ESET security researcher Lukáš Štefanko  said  in a technical report. "The malicious code that was added to the clean version of iRecorder is based on the open source  AhMyth  Android RAT (remote access trojan) and has been customized into what we named AhRat." iRecorder was  first flagged  as harboring the AhMyth trojan on October 28, 2022, by

A gambling company in the Philippines was the target of a China-aligned threat actor as part of a campaign that has been ongoing since October 2021. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET is tracking the series of attacks against Southeast Asian gambling companies under the name  Operation ChattyGoblin . "These attacks use a specific tactic: targeting the victim companies' support agents via chat applications – in particular, the Comm100 and LiveHelp100 apps," ESET  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The use of a trojanized Comm100 installer to deliver malware was  first documented  by CrowdStrike in October 2022. The company attributed the supply chain compromise to a threat actor likely with associations to China. The attack chains leverage the aforementioned chat apps to distribute a C# dropper that, in turn, deploys another C# executable, which ultimately serves as a conduit to drop a Cobalt Strike beacon on hacked workstations. Also highlighted in ESET'

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed the tactics of a "rising" cybercriminal gang called "Read The Manual" (RTM) Locker that functions as a private ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) provider and carries out opportunistic attacks to generate illicit profit. "The 'Read The Manual' Locker gang uses affiliates to ransom victims, all of whom are forced to abide by the gang's strict rules," cybersecurity firm Trellix said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The business-like set up of the group, where affiliates are required to remain active or notify the gang of their leave, shows the organizational maturity of the group, as has also been observed in other groups, such as  Conti ." RTM , first documented by ESET in February 2017,  started off  in 2015 as a banking malware targeting businesses in Russia via drive-by downloads, spam, and phishing emails. Attack chains mounted by the group have since  evolved  to deploy a ransomwa

Ukraine has come under a fresh cyber onslaught from Russia that involved the deployment of a previously undocumented Golang-based data wiper dubbed  SwiftSlicer . ESET attributed the attack to Sandworm, a nation-state group linked to Military Unit 74455 of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU). "Once executed it deletes shadow copies, recursively overwrites files located in %CSIDL_SYSTEM%\drivers, %CSIDL_SYSTEM_DRIVE%\Windows\NTDS and other non-system drives and then reboots computer," ESET  disclosed  in a series of tweets. The overwrites are achieved by using randomly generated byte sequences to fill 4,096 byte-length blocks. The intrusion was discovered on January 25, 2023, the Slovak cybersecurity company added. "Attackers deployed the SwiftSlicer wiper using Group Policy of Active Directory," Robert Lipovsky, senior malware researcher for ESET, told The Hacker News. "Once SwiftSlicer

The threat actor known as  BackdoorDiplomacy  has been linked to a new wave of attacks targeting Iranian government entities between July and late December 2022. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, which is tracking the activity under its  constellation-themed  moniker  Playful Taurus , said it observed the government domains attempting to connect to malware infrastructure previously identified as associated with the adversary. Also known by the names APT15, KeChang, NICKEL, and Vixen Panda, the Chinese APT group has a history of cyber espionage campaigns aimed at government and diplomatic entities across North America, South America, Africa, and the Middle East at least since 2010. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET, in June 2021,  unpacked  the intrusions mounted by the hacking crew against diplomatic entities and telecommunication companies in Africa and the Middle East using a custom implant known as Turian. Then in December 2021, Microsoft  announced  the seizure of 42 domains operated

The advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as  StrongPity  has targeted Android users with a trojanized version of the Telegram app through a fake website that impersonates a video chat service called Shagle . "A copycat website, mimicking the Shagle service, is used to distribute StrongPity's mobile backdoor app," ESET malware researcher Lukáš Štefanko  said  in a technical report. "The app is a modified version of the open source Telegram app, repackaged with StrongPity backdoor code." StrongPity , also known by the names APT-C-41 and Promethium, is a cyberespionage group active since at least 2012, with a majority of its operations focused on Syria and Turkey. The existence of the group was first publicly reported by Kaspersky in October 2016. The threat actor's  campaigns  have since expanded to encompass more targets across Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, with the intrusions leveraging watering hole attacks and phishing messages to ac

Travel agencies have emerged as the target of a hack-for-hire group dubbed  Evilnum  as part of a broader campaign aimed at legal and financial investment institutions in the Middle East and Europe. The attacks, which took place during 2020 and 2021 and likely went as far back as 2015, involved a revamped variant of a malware called Janicab that leverages a number of public services like WordPress and YouTube as  dead drop resolvers , Kaspersky  said  in a technical report published this week. Janicab infections comprise a diverse set of victims located in Egypt, Georgia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the U.K. The development marks the first time legal organizations in Saudi Arabia have been targeted by this group. Also tracked as DeathStalker, the threat actor is known to deploy  backdoors  like Janicab, Evilnum, Powersing, and PowerPepper to exfiltrate confidential corporate information. "Their interest in gathering sensitive business information leads us to believe that Deat

An Iranian advanced persistent threat (APT) actor known as  Agrius  has been attributed as behind a set of data wiper attacks aimed at diamond industries in South Africa, Israel, and Hong Kong. The wiper, referred to as Fantasy by ESET, is believed to have been delivered via a supply-chain attack targeting an Israeli software suite developer as part of a campaign that began in February 2022. Victims include HR firms, IT consulting companies, and a diamond wholesaler in Israel; a South African entity working in the diamond industry; and a jeweler based in Hong Kong. "The Fantasy wiper is built on the foundations of the previously reported Apostle wiper but does not attempt to masquerade as ransomware, as Apostle originally did," ESET researcher Adam Burgher  disclosed  in a Wednesday analysis. "Instead, it goes right to work wiping data." Apostle was  first documented  by SentinelOne in May 2021 as a wiper-turned-ransomware that was deployed in destructive attac

The North Korea-linked  ScarCruft  group has been attributed to a previously undocumented backdoor called Dolphin that the threat actor has used against targets located in its southern counterpart. "The backdoor [...] has a wide range of spying capabilities, including monitoring drives and portable devices and exfiltrating files of interest, keylogging and taking screenshots, and stealing credentials from browsers," ESET researcher Filip Jurčacko  said  in a new report published today. Dolphin is said to be selectively deployed, with the malware using cloud services like Google Drive for data exfiltration as well as command-and-control. The Slovak cybersecurity company said it found the implant deployed as a final-stage payload as part of a watering hole attack in early 2021 directed against a South Korean digital newspaper. The campaign, first uncovered by  Kaspersky  and  Volexity  last year,  entailed  the weaponization of two Internet Explorer flaws ( CVE-2020-1380

Ukraine has come under a fresh onslaught of ransomware attacks that mirror previous intrusions attributed to the Russia-based Sandworm nation-state group. Slovak cybersecurity company ESET, which dubbed the new ransomware strain  RansomBoggs , said the attacks against several Ukrainian entities were first detected on November 21, 2022. "While the malware written in .NET is new, its deployment is similar to previous attacks attributed to Sandworm," the company  said  in a series of tweets Friday. The development comes as the Sandworm actor, tracked by Microsoft as Iridium, was implicated for a set of attacks aimed at transportation and logistics sectors in Ukraine and Poland with another ransomware strain called  Prestige  in October 2022. The RansomBoggs activity is said to employ a PowerShell script to distribute the ransomware, with the former "almost identical" to the one used in the  Industroyer2 malware  attacks that came to light in April. According to

The notorious Emotet malware has returned with renewed vigor as part of a high-volume malspam campaign designed to drop payloads like  IcedID  and  Bumblebee . "Hundreds of thousands of emails per day" have been sent since early November 2022, enterprise security company Proofpoint  said  last week, adding, "the new activity suggests Emotet is returning to its full functionality acting as a delivery network for major malware families." Among the primary countries targeted are the U.S., the U.K., Japan, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Mexico, and Brazil. The Emotet-related activity was last observed in July 2022, although  sporadic   infections  have been  reported  since then. In mid-October, ESET  revealed  that Emotet may be readying for a new wave of attacks, pointing out updates to its "systeminfo" module. The malware, which is attributed to a threat actor known as Mummy Spider (aka Gold Crestwood or TA542), staged a revival of sorts late last yea

A recently discovered cyber espionage group dubbed  Worok  has been found hiding malware in seemingly innocuous image files, corroborating a crucial link in the threat actor's infection chain. Czech cybersecurity firm Avast said the purpose of the PNG files is to conceal a payload that's used to facilitate information theft. "What is noteworthy is data collection from victims' machines using Dropbox repository, as well as attackers using Dropbox API for communication with the final stage," the company  said . The development comes a little over two months after ESET disclosed details of attacks carried out by  Worok  against high-profile companies and local governments located in Asia and Africa. Worok is believed to share tactical overlaps with a Chinese threat actor tracked as  TA428 . The Slovak cybersecurity company also documented Worok's compromise sequence, which makes use of a C++-based loader called CLRLoad to pave the way for an unknown PowerS

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PC maker Lenovo has addressed yet another set of three shortcomings in the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) firmware affecting several Yoga, IdeaPad, and ThinkBook devices. "The vulnerabilities allow disabling UEFI Secure Boot or restoring factory default Secure Boot databases (incl. dbx): all simply from an OS," Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET  explained  in a series of tweets. UEFI refers to software that acts as an interface between the operating system and the firmware embedded in the device's hardware. Because UEFI is  responsible  for launching the operating system when a device is powered on, it has made the technology an attractive option for threat actors looking to  drop malware  that's difficult to detect and remove. Viewed in that light, the flaws, tracked as CVE-2022-3430, CVE-2022-3431, and CVE-2022-3432, could be abused by an adversary to turn off Secure Boot, a security mechanism that's designed to prevent malicious programs from lo

A threat actor tracked as Polonium has been linked to over a dozen highly targeted attacks aimed at Israelian entities with seven different custom backdoors since at least September 2021. The intrusions were aimed at organizations in various verticals, such as engineering, information technology, law, communications, branding and marketing, media, insurance, and social services, cybersecurity firm ESET said. Polonium  is the chemical element-themed moniker given by Microsoft to a sophisticated operational group that's believed to be based in Lebanon and is known to exclusively strike Israeli targets. Activities undertaken by the group first came to light earlier this June when the Windows maker disclosed it suspended more than 20 malicious OneDrive accounts created by the adversary for command-and-control (C2) purposes. Core to the attacks has been the use of implants coined CreepyDrive and CreepyBox for their ability to exfiltrate sensitive data to actor-controlled OneDrive