Intelligence Gathering | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as Kimsuky has been linked to a new set of attacks targeting university staff, researchers, and professors for intelligence gathering purposes. Cybersecurity firm Resilience said it identified the activity in late July 2024 after it observed an operation security (OPSEC) error made by the hackers. Kimsuky, also known by the names APT43, ARCHIPELAGO, Black Banshee, Emerald Sleet, Springtail, and Velvet Chollima, is just one of the myriad offensive cyber teams operating under the direction of the North Korean government and military. It's also very active, often leveraging spear-phishing campaigns as a starting point to deliver an ever-expanding set of custom tools to conduct reconnaissance, pilfer data, and establish persistent remote access to infected hosts. The attacks are also characterized by the use of compromised hosts as staging infrastructure to deploy an obfuscated version of the Green Dinosaur web shell, which is then used...

A likely China-linked state-sponsored threat actor has been linked to a cyber espionage campaign targeting government, academic, technology, and diplomatic organizations in Taiwan between November 2023 and April 2024. Recorded Future's Insikt Group is tracking the activity under the name RedJuliett , describing it as a cluster that operates from Fuzhou, China, to support Beijing's intelligence collection goals related to the East Asian country. It's also tracked under the names Flax Typhoon and Ethereal Panda . Among other countries targeted by the adversarial collective include Djibouti, Hong Kong, Kenya, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Rwanda, South Korea, and the U.S. In all, as many as 24 victim organizations have been observed communicating with the threat actor infrastructure, including government agencies in Taiwan, Laos, Kenya, and Rwanda. It's also estimated to have targeted at least 75 Taiwanese entities for broader reconnaissance and follow-on exploita...

Are you using the cloud or thinking about transitioning? Undoubtedly, multi-cloud and hybrid environments offer numerous benefits for organizations. However, the cloud's flexibility, scalability, and efficiency come with significant risk — an expanded attack surface. The decentralization that comes with utilizing multi-cloud environments can also lead to limited visibility into user activity and poor access management.  Privileged accounts with access to your critical systems and sensitive data are among the most vulnerable elements in cloud setups. When mismanaged, these accounts open the doors to unauthorized access, potential malicious activity, and data breaches. That's why strong privileged access management (PAM) is indispensable. PAM plays an essential role in addressing the security challenges of complex infrastructures by enforcing strict access controls and managing the life cycle of privileged accounts. By employing PAM in hybrid and cloud environments, you're not...

Indian government entities and the defense sector have been targeted by a phishing campaign that's engineered to drop Rust-based malware for intelligence gathering. The activity, first detected in October 2023, has been codenamed  Operation RusticWeb  by enterprise security firm SEQRITE. "New Rust-based payloads and encrypted PowerShell commands have been utilized to exfiltrate confidential documents to a web-based service engine, instead of a dedicated command-and-control (C2) server," security researcher Sathwik Ram Prakki  said . Tactical overlaps have been uncovered between the cluster and those widely tracked under the monikers  Transparent Tribe  and SideCopy, both of which are assessed to be linked to Pakistan. SideCopy is also a suspected subordinate element within Transparent Tribe. Last month, SEQRITE  detailed  multiple campaigns undertaken by the threat actor targeting Indian government bodies to deliver numerous trojans such as AllaKo...