Edge Browser | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Microsoft has shut down a long-running malicious extension operation on the Edge Add-ons store that hid its payloads inside ordinary image and font files, then woke up days after install to steal credentials and run ad fraud. The company calls it  StegoAd , a mash-up of steganography and adware, and ties 119 extensions to a single threat actor it says has been active since at least 2021. The extensions were the kind people install without a second thought: ad blockers, VPNs, translators, video downloaders. Each one did its job and earned reviews. The malicious code stayed dormant until the extension cleared a stack of evasion checks, which is how it sat in the store for years. Combined, the 119 extensions had an install base of up to 2.6 million users. Microsoft is clear that this is a ceiling, not a victim count. A multi-day delay, server-side validation, and a 10% execution gate on some variants meant the payload never fired for many installs. How many people were actual...

Microsoft has released patches to address a total of 143 security flaws as part of its monthly security updates, two of which have come under active exploitation in the wild. Five out of the 143 flaws are rated Critical, 136 are rated Important, and four are rated Moderate in severity. The fixes are in addition to 33 vulnerabilities that have been addressed in the Chromium-based Edge browser over the past month. The two security shortcomings that have come under exploitation are below - CVE-2024-38080 (CVSS score: 7.8) - Windows Hyper-V Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2024-38112 (CVSS score: 7.5) - Windows MSHTML Platform Spoofing Vulnerability "Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an attacker to take additional actions prior to exploitation to prepare the target environment," Microsoft said of CVE-2024-38112. "An attacker would have to send the victim a malicious file that the victim would have to execute." Check Point securi...

Microsoft on Thursday took the wraps off an ongoing campaign impacting popular web browsers that stealthily injects malware-infested ads into search results to earn money via affiliate advertising. "Adrozek," as it's called by the Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team, employs an "expansive, dynamic attacker infrastructure" consisting of 159 unique domains, each of which hosts an average of 17,300 unique URLs, which in turn host more than 15,300 unique malware samples. The campaign — which impacts Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Yandex Browser, and Mozilla Firefox browsers on Windows — aims to insert additional, unauthorized ads on top of legitimate ads displayed on search engine results pages, leading users to click on these ads inadvertently. Microsoft said the persistent browser modifier malware has been observed since May this year, with over 30,000 devices affected every day at its peak in August. "Cybercriminals abusing affiliate programs is not ...