Initial Access Brokers | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new campaign dubbed SHADOW#REACTOR that employs an evasive multi-stage attack chain to deliver a commercially available remote administration tool called Remcos RAT and establish persistent, covert remote access. "The infection chain follows a tightly orchestrated execution path: an obfuscated VBS launcher executed via wscript.exe invokes a PowerShell downloader, which retrieves fragmented, text-based payloads from a remote host," Securonix researchers Akshay Gaikwad, Shikha Sangwan, and Aaron Beardslee said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "These fragments are reconstructed into encoded loaders, decoded in memory by a .NET Reactor–protected assembly, and used to fetch and apply a remote Remcos configuration. The final stage leverages MSBuild.exe as a living-off-the-land binary (LOLBin) to complete execution, after which the Remcos RAT backdoor is fully deployed and takes control of the comprom...

Threat hunters have discovered a new malware called  Latrodectus  that has been distributed as part of email phishing campaigns since at least late November 2023. "Latrodectus is an up-and-coming downloader with various sandbox evasion functionality," researchers from Proofpoint and Team Cymru  said  in a joint analysis published last week, adding it's designed to retrieve payloads and execute arbitrary commands. There is evidence to suggest that the downloader is likely written by the same threat actors behind the  IcedID malware , with the downloader put to use by initial access brokers (IABs) to facilitate the deployment of other malware. Latrodectus has been primarily linked to two different IABs tracked by Proofpoint under the names  TA577  (aka Water Curupira) and TA578, the former of which has also been linked to the distribution of QakBot and PikaBot. As of mid-January 2024, it's been employed almost exclusively by TA578 in email threat ca...