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A previously undocumented cyber espionage-focused threat actor named LilacSquid has been linked to targeted attacks spanning various sectors in the United States (U.S.), Europe, and Asia as part of a data theft campaign since at least 2021. "The campaign is geared toward establishing long-term access to compromised victim organizations to enable LilacSquid to siphon data of interest to attacker-controlled servers," Cisco Talos researcher Asheer Malhotra said in a new technical report published today. Targets include information technology organizations building software for the research and industrial sectors in the U.S, energy companies in Europe, and the pharmaceutical sector in Asia, indicating a broad victimology footprint. Attack chains are known to exploit either publicly known vulnerabilities to breach internet-facing application servers or make use of compromised remote desktop protocol (RDP) credentials to deliver a mix of open-source tools and custom malware.

The China-linked threat actor known as Sharp Panda has expanded their targeting to include governmental organizations in Africa and the Caribbean as part of an ongoing cyber espionage campaign. "The campaign adopts Cobalt Strike Beacon as the payload, enabling backdoor functionalities like C2 communication and command execution while minimizing the exposure of their custom tools," Check Point said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This refined approach suggests a deeper understanding of their targets." The Israeli cybersecurity firm is tracking the activity under a new name  Sharp Dragon , describing the adversary as careful in its targeting, while at the same time broadening its reconnaissance efforts. The adversary  first came to light  in June 2021, when it was detected targeting a Southeast Asian government to deploy a backdoor on Windows systems dubbed VictoryDLL. Subsequent attacks mounted by Sharp Dragon have set their sights on high-profile gov

Shadow apps, a segment of Shadow IT, are SaaS applications purchased without the knowledge of the security team. While these applications may be legitimate, they operate within the blind spots of the corporate security team and expose the company to attackers.  Shadow apps may include instances of software that the company is already using. For example, a dev team may onboard their own instance of GitHub to keep their work separate from other developers. They might justify the purchase by noting that GitHub is an approved application, as it is already in use by other teams. However, since the new instance is used outside of the security team's view, it lacks governance. It may store sensitive corporate data and not have essential protections like MFA enabled, SSO enforced, or it could suffer from weak access controls. These misconfigurations can easily lead to risks like stolen source code and other issues. Types of Shadow Apps  Shadow apps can be categorized based on their interac

Governmental entities in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia are the target of a Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) group as part of an ongoing cyber espionage campaign dubbed  Operation Diplomatic Specter  since at least late 2022. "An analysis of this threat actor's activity reveals long-term espionage operations against at least seven governmental entities," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers Lior Rochberger and Daniel Frank  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The threat actor performed intelligence collection efforts at a large scale, leveraging rare email exfiltration techniques against compromised servers." The cybersecurity firm, which previously tracked the activity cluster under the name CL-STA-0043, said it's graduating it to a temporary actor group codenamed TGR-STA-0043 owing to its assessment that the intrusion set is the work of a single actor operating on behalf of Chinese state-aligned interests. Targets of the attacks i

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new information stealer targeting Apple macOS systems that's designed to set up persistence on the infected hosts and act as a spyware. Dubbed  Cuckoo  by Kandji, the malware is a universal Mach-O binary that's capable of running on both Intel- and Arm-based Macs. The exact distribution vector is currently unclear, although there are indications that the binary is hosted on sites like dumpmedia[.]com, tunesolo[.]com, fonedog[.]com, tunesfun[.]com, and tunefab[.]com that claim to offer free and paid versions of applications dedicated to ripping music from streaming services and converting it into the MP3 format. The disk image file downloaded from the websites is responsible for spawning a bash shell to gather host information and ensuring that the compromised machine is not located in Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine. The malicious binary is executed only if the locale check is successful. It also establishes persist

A former employee of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has been sentenced to nearly 22 years (262 months) in prison for attempting to transfer classified documents to Russia. "This sentence should serve as a stark warning to all those entrusted with protecting national defense information that there are consequences to betraying that trust,"  said  FBI Director Christopher Wray. Jareh Sebastian Dalke, 32, of Colorado Springs was employed as an Information Systems Security Designer between June 6 to July 1, 2022, during which time he had access to sensitive information. Despite his short tenure at the intelligence agency, Dalke is said to have made contact with a person he thought was a Russian agent sometime between August and September of that year. In reality, the person was an undercover agent working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). To demonstrate his "legitimate access and willingness to share," he then emailed the purported Russian ag

When you read reports about cyber-attacks affecting operational technology (OT), it's easy to get caught up in the hype and assume every single one is sophisticated. But are OT environments all over the world really besieged by a constant barrage of complex cyber-attacks? Answering that would require breaking down the different types of OT cyber-attacks and then looking back on all the historical attacks to see how those types compare.  The Types of OT Cyber-Attacks Over the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the need for improved cybersecurity practices in IT's lesser-known counterpart, OT. In fact, the lines of what constitutes a cyber-attack on OT have never been well defined, and if anything, they have further blurred over time. Therefore, we'd like to begin this post with a discussion around the ways in which cyber-attacks can either target or just simply impact OT, and why it might be important for us to make the distinction going forward. Figure 1 The Pu

A new phishing campaign is targeting U.S. organizations with the intent to deploy a remote access trojan called NetSupport RAT. Israeli cybersecurity company Perception Point is tracking the activity under the moniker  Operation PhantomBlu . "The PhantomBlu operation introduces a nuanced exploitation method, diverging from NetSupport RAT's typical delivery mechanism by leveraging OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) template manipulation, exploiting Microsoft Office document templates to execute malicious code while evading detection," security researcher Ariel Davidpur  said . NetSupport RAT is a  malicious offshoot  of a legitimate remote desktop tool known as NetSupport Manager, allowing threat actors to conduct a spectrum of data gathering actions on a compromised endpoint. The starting point is a salary-themed phishing email that purports to be from the accounting department and urges recipients to open the attached Microsoft Word document to view the "monthly

Fortra has released details of a now-patched critical security flaw impacting its  FileCatalyst  file transfer solution that could allow unauthenticated attackers to gain remote code execution on susceptible servers. Tracked as CVE-2024-25153, the shortcoming carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10. "A directory traversal within the 'ftpservlet' of the FileCatalyst Workflow Web Portal allows files to be uploaded outside of the intended 'uploadtemp' directory with a specially crafted POST request," the company  said  in an advisory last week. "In situations where a file is successfully uploaded to web portal's DocumentRoot, specially crafted JSP files could be used to execute code, including web shells." The vulnerability, the company said, was first reported on August 9, 2023, and addressed two days later in FileCatalyst Workflow version 5.1.6 Build 114 without a CVE identifier. Fortra was  authorized  as a CVE Numbering Authorit

Fortinet has warned of a critical security flaw impacting its FortiClientEMS software that could allow attackers to achieve code execution on affected systems. "An improper neutralization of special elements used in an SQL Command ('SQL Injection') vulnerability [CWE-89] in FortiClientEMS may allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute unauthorized code or commands via specifically crafted requests," the company  said  in an advisory. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-48788, carries a CVSS rating of 9.3 out of a maximum of 10. It impacts the following versions - FortiClientEMS 7.2.0 through 7.2.2 (Upgrade to 7.2.3 or above) FortiClientEMS 7.0.1 through 7.0.10 (Upgrade to 7.0.11 or above) Horizon3.ai, which  plans  to release additional technical details and a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit next week, said the shortcoming could be exploited to obtain remote code execution as SYSTEM on the server. Fortinet has credited Thiago Santana from the Forticlient

Microsoft on Tuesday released its monthly security update,  addressing 61 different security flaws  spanning its software, including two critical issues impacting Windows Hyper-V that could lead to denial-of-service (DoS) and remote code execution. Of the 61 vulnerabilities, two are rated Critical, 58 are rated Important, and one is rated Low in severity. None of the flaws are listed as publicly known or under active attack at the time of the release, but six of them have been tagged with an "Exploitation More Likely" assessment. The fixes are in addition to  17 security flaws  that have been patched in the company's Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of the  February 2024 Patch Tuesday updates . Topping the list of critical shortcomings are  CVE-2024-21407  and  CVE-2024-21408 , which affect Hyper-V and could result in remote code execution and a DoS condition, respectively. Microsoft's update also addresses privilege escalation flaws in the Azure Kub

Microsoft on Friday revealed that the Kremlin-backed threat actor known as  Midnight Blizzard  (aka APT29 or Cozy Bear) managed to gain access to some of its source code repositories and internal systems following a  hack that came to light  in January 2024. "In recent weeks, we have seen evidence that Midnight Blizzard is using information initially exfiltrated from our corporate email systems to gain, or attempt to gain, unauthorized access," the tech giant  said . "This has included access to some of the company's source code repositories and internal systems. To date we have found no evidence that Microsoft-hosted customer-facing systems have been compromised." Redmond, which is continuing to investigate the extent of the breach, said the Russian state-sponsored threat actor is attempting to leverage the different types of secrets it found, including those that were shared between customers and Microsoft in email. It, however, did not disclose what the

Mexican users have been targeted with tax-themed phishing lures at least since November 2023 to distribute a previously undocumented Windows malware called  TimbreStealer . Cisco Talos, which  discovered  the activity, described the authors as skilled and that the "threat actor has previously used similar tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) to distribute a banking trojan known as  Mispadu  in September 2023. Besides employing sophisticated obfuscation techniques to sidestep detection and ensure persistence, the phishing campaign makes use of geofencing to single out users in Mexico, returning an innocuous blank PDF file instead of the malicious one if the payload sites are contacted from other locations. Some of the notable evasive maneuvers include leveraging custom loaders and direct system calls to bypass conventional API monitoring, in addition to utilizing Heaven's Gate to execute 64-bit code within a 32-bit process, an approach that was also recently adopted by