Golang | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Government entities in the Middle East have been targeted as part of a previously undocumented campaign to deliver a new backdoor dubbed CR4T. Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky said it discovered the activity in February 2024, with evidence suggesting that it may have been active since at least a year prior. The campaign has been codenamed  DuneQuixote . "The group behind the campaign took steps to prevent collection and analysis of its implants and implemented practical and well-designed evasion methods both in network communications and in the malware code," Kaspersky  said . The starting point of the attack is a dropper, which comes in two variants -- a regular dropper that's either implemented as an executable or a DLL file and a tampered installer file for a legitimate tool named  Total Commander . Regardless of the method used, the primary function of the dropper is to extract an embedded command-and-control (C2) address that's decrypted using a nove

A new phishing campaign has set its eyes on the Latin American region to deliver malicious payloads to Windows systems. "The phishing email contained a ZIP file attachment that when extracted reveals an HTML file that leads to a malicious file download posing as an invoice," Trustwave SpiderLabs researcher Karla Agregado  said . The email message, the company said, originates from an email address format that uses the domain "temporary[.]link" and has Roundcube Webmail listed as the User-Agent string. The HTML file points containing a link ("facturasmex[.]cloud") that displays an error message saying "this account has been suspended," but when visited from an IP address geolocated to Mexico, loads a CAPTCHA verification page that uses Cloudflare Turnstile. This step paves the way for a redirect to another domain from where a malicious RAR file is downloaded. The RAR archive comes with a PowerShell script that gathers system metadata as well

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

Several malicious Android apps that turn mobile devices running the operating system into residential proxies (RESIPs) for other threat actors have been observed on the Google Play Store. The findings come from HUMAN's Satori Threat Intelligence team, which said the cluster of VPN apps came fitted with a Golang library that transformed the user's device into a proxy node without their knowledge. The operation has been codenamed  PROXYLIB  by the company. The 29 apps in question have since been removed by Google. Residential proxies are a network of proxy servers sourced from real IP addresses provided by internet service providers (ISPs), helping users hide their actual IP addresses by routing their internet traffic through an intermediary server. The anonymity benefits aside, they are ripe for abuse by threat actors to not only obfuscate their origins, but also to conduct a wide range of attacks. "When a threat actor uses a residential proxy, the traffic from these

Chinese users looking for legitimate software such as Notepad++ and VNote on search engines like Baidu are being targeted with malicious ads and bogus links to distribute trojanized versions of the software and ultimately deploy  Geacon , a Golang-based implementation of Cobalt Strike. "The malicious site found in the notepad++ search is distributed through an advertisement block," Kaspersky researcher Sergey Puzan  said . "Opening it, an attentive user will immediately notice an amusing inconsistency: the website address contains the line vnote, the title offers a download of Notepad‐‐ (an analog of Notepad++, also distributed as open-source software), while the image proudly shows Notepad++. In fact, the packages downloaded from here contain Notepad‐‐." The website, named vnote.fuwenkeji[.]cn, contains download links to Windows, Linux, and macOS versions of the software, with the link to the Windows variant pointing to the official  Gitee repository  containing the Notepad-- ins

The North Korea-linked nation-state actor known as Kimsuky is suspected of using a previously undocumented Golang-based information stealer called  Troll Stealer . The malware steals "SSH, FileZilla, C drive files/directories, browsers, system information, [and] screen captures" from infected systems, South Korean cybersecurity company S2W  said  in a new technical report. Troll Stealer's links to Kimsuky stem from its similarities to known malware families, such as AppleSeed and AlphaSeed malware that have been attributed to the group. Kimsuky, also tracked under the names APT43, ARCHIPELAGO, Black Banshee, Emerald Sleet (previously Thallium), Nickel Kimball, and Velvet Chollima, is well known for its propensity to steal sensitive, confidential information in offensive cyber operations. In late November 2023, the threat actors were  sanctioned  by the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) for gathering intelligence to further North

The threat actor behind a peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet known as  FritzFrog  has made a return with a new variant that leverages the  Log4Shell vulnerability  to propagate internally within an already compromised network. "The vulnerability is exploited in a brute-force manner that attempts to target as many vulnerable Java applications as possible," web infrastructure and security company Akamai said in a report shared with The Hacker News. FritzFrog,  first documented  by Guardicore (now part of Akamai) in August 2020, is a Golang-based malware that primarily targets internet-facing servers with weak SSH credentials. It's known to be active since January 2020. It has  since evolved  to strike healthcare, education, and government sectors as well as improved its capabilities to ultimately deploy cryptocurrency miners on infected hosts, claiming more than 1,500 victims over the years. What's novel about the latest version is the use of the Log4Shell vulnerability a

The Iranian nation-state actor known as  MuddyWater  has leveraged a newly discovered command-and-control (C2) framework called MuddyC2Go in its attacks on the telecommunications sector in Egypt, Sudan, and Tanzania. The Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom, is  tracking  the activity under the name Seedworm, which is also tracked under the monikers Boggy Serpens, Cobalt Ulster, Earth Vetala, ITG17, Mango Sandstorm (formerly Mercury), Static Kitten, TEMP.Zagros, and Yellow Nix. Active since at least 2017,  MuddyWater  is assessed to be affiliated with Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), primarily singling out entities in the Middle East. The cyber espionage group's use of  MuddyC2Go  was first highlighted by Deep Instinct last month, describing it as a Golang-based replacement for  PhonyC2 , itself a successor to MuddyC3. However, there is evidence to suggest that it may have been employed as early as 2020. While the full extent of MuddyC2Go'

The Pakistan-linked threat actor known as  SideCopy  has been observed leveraging the recent WinRAR security vulnerability in its attacks targeting Indian government entities to deliver various remote access trojans such as AllaKore RAT, Ares RAT, and DRat. Enterprise security firm SEQRITE described the campaign as multi-platform, with the attacks also designed to infiltrate Linux systems with a compatible version of Ares RAT. SideCopy, active since at least 2019, is  known  for its  attacks  on Indian and Afghanistan entities. It's suspected to be a sub-group of the Transparent Tribe (aka APT36) actor. "Both SideCopy and APT36 share infrastructure and code to aggressively target India," SEQRITE researcher Sathwik Ram Prakki  said  in a Monday report. Earlier this May, the group was  linked  to a phishing campaign that took advantage of lures related to India's Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO) to deliver information-stealing malware. Since

The threat actors behind the  DDoSia  attack tool have come up with a new version that incorporates a new mechanism to retrieve the list of targets to be bombarded with junk HTTP requests in an attempt to bring them down. The updated variant, written in Golang, "implements an additional security mechanism to conceal the list of targets, which is transmitted from the [command-and-control] to the users," cybersecurity company Sekoia  said  in a technical write-up. DDoSia is attributed to a pro-Russian hacker group called  NoName(057)16 . Launched in 2022 and a successor of the  Bobik botnet , the attack tool is  designed  for staging distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against targets primarily located in Europe as well as Australia, Canada, and Japan. Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, Italy, Czechia, Denmark, Latvia, France, the U.K., and Switzerland have emerged as the most targeted countries over a period ranging from May 8 to June 26, 2023. A total of 486 different w

A highly targeted cyber attack against an East Asian IT company involved the deployment of a custom malware written in Golang called  RDStealer . "The operation was active for more than a year with the end goal of compromising credentials and data exfiltration," Bitdefender security researcher Victor Vrabie  said  in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. Evidence gathered by the Romanian cybersecurity firm shows that the campaign – dubbed RedClouds – started in early 2022. The targeting aligns with the interest of China-based threat actors. In the early phases, the operation relied on readily available remote access and post-exploitation tools like AsyncRAT and Cobalt Strike, before transitioning to bespoke malware in late 2021 or early 2022 in a bid to thwart detection. A primary evasion tactic concerns the use of Microsoft Windows folders that are likely to be excluded from scanning by security software (e.g., System32 and Program Files) to store the backdoor

A new Golang-based information stealer called  Skuld  has compromised Windows systems across Europe, Southeast Asia, and the U.S. "This new malware strain tries to steal sensitive information from its victims," Trellix researcher Ernesto Fernández Provecho  said  in a Tuesday analysis. "To accomplish this task, it searches for data stored in applications such as Discord and web browsers; information from the system and files stored in the victim's folders." Skuld, which shares overlaps with publicly available stealers like  Creal Stealer ,  Luna Grabber , and  BlackCap Grabber , is the handiwork of a developer who goes by the online alias Deathined on various social media platforms like GitHub, Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr. Also spotted by Trellix is a Telegram group named deathinews, indicating that these online avenues could be used to promote the offering in the future as a service for other threat actors. The malware, upon execution, checks if it's

Linux routers in Japan are the target of a new Golang remote access trojan (RAT) called  GobRAT . "Initially, the attacker targets a router whose WEBUI is open to the public, executes scripts possibly by using vulnerabilities, and finally infects the GobRAT," the JPCERT Coordination Center (JPCERT/CC)  said  in a report published today. The compromise of an internet-exposed router is followed by the deployment of a loader script that acts as a conduit for delivering GobRAT, which, when launched, masquerades as the Apache daemon process (apached) to evade detection. The loader is also equipped to disable firewalls, establish persistence using the cron job scheduler, and register an SSH public key in the  .ssh/authorized_keys file  for remote access. GobRAT, for its part, communicates with a remote server via the Transport Layer Security ( TLS ) protocol to receive as many as 22 different encrypted commands for execution. Some of the major commands are as follows - Obt

A Golang implementation of Cobalt Strike called Geacon is likely to garner the attention of threat actors looking to target Apple macOS systems. That's according to findings from SentinelOne, which observed an increase in the number of Geacon payloads appearing on VirusTotal in recent months. "While some of these are likely red-team operations, others bear the characteristics of genuine malicious attacks," security researchers Phil Stokes and Dinesh Devadoss  said  in a report. Cobalt Strike  is a well-known red teaming and adversary simulation tool developed by Fortra. Owing to its myriad capabilities, illegally cracked versions of the software have been abused by threat actors over the years. While post-exploitation activity associated with Cobalt Strike has primarily singled out Windows, such attacks against macOS are something of a rarity. In May 2022, software supply chain firm Sonatype  disclosed  details of a rogue Python package called " pymafka "

A new Golang-based botnet dubbed  HinataBot  has been observed to leverage known flaws to compromise routers and servers and use them to stage distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. "The malware binaries appear to have been named by the malware author after a character from the popular anime series, Naruto, with file name structures such as 'Hinata-<OS>-<Architecture>,'" Akamai  said  in a technical report. Among the methods used to distribute the malware are the exploitation of exposed Hadoop YARN servers and security flaws in Realtek SDK devices ( CVE-2014-8361 )and Huawei HG532 routers ( CVE-2017-17215 , CVSS score: 8.8). Unpatched vulnerabilities and weak credentials have been a low-hanging fruit for attackers, representing an easy, well-documented entry point that does not require sophisticated social engineering tactics or other methods. The threat actors behind HinataBot are said to have been active since at least December 2022, with the

A new Golang-based information stealer malware dubbed  Titan Stealer  is being advertised by threat actors through their Telegram channel. "The stealer is capable of stealing a variety of information from infected Windows machines, including credential data from browsers and crypto wallets, FTP client details, screenshots, system information, and grabbed files," Uptycs security researchers Karthickkumar Kathiresan and Shilpesh Trivedi  said  in a recent report. Details of the malware were  first documented  by cybersecurity researcher Will Thomas (@BushidoToken) in November 2022 by querying the IoT search engine Shodan. Titan is offered as a builder, enabling customers to customize the malware binary to include specific functionalities and the kind of information to be exfiltrated from a victim's machine. The malware, upon execution, employs a technique known as  process hollowing  to inject the malicious payload into the memory of a legitimate process known as AppLa

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

Organizations in East Asia are being targeted by a likely Chinese-speaking actor dubbed DragonSpark while employing uncommon tactics to go past security layers. "The attacks are characterized by the use of the little known open source SparkRAT and malware that attempts to evade detection through Golang source code interpretation," SentinelOne  said  in an analysis published today. A striking aspect of the intrusions is the consistent use of SparkRAT to conduct a variety of activities, including stealing information, obtaining control of an infected host, or running additional PowerShell instructions. The threat actor's end goals remain unknown as yet, although espionage or cybercrime is likely to be the motive. DragonSpark's ties to China stem from the use of the  China Chopper  web shell to deploy malware – a widely used attack pathway among Chinese threat actors. Furthermore, not only do the open source tools used in the cyber assaults originate from develope