Iranian Hacker | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The Iranian nation-state hacking group known as  OilRig  has continued to target government organizations in the Middle East as part of a cyber espionage campaign that leverages a new backdoor to exfiltrate data. "The campaign abuses legitimate but compromised email accounts to send stolen data to external mail accounts controlled by the attackers," Trend Micro researchers Mohamed Fahmy, Sherif Magdy, and Mahmoud Zohdy  said . While the technique in itself is not unheard of, the development marks the first time OilRig has adopted it in its playbook, indicating the continued evolution of its methods to bypass security protections. The advanced persistent threat (APT) group, also referred to as APT34, Cobalt Gypsy, Europium, and Helix Kitten, has been  documented  for its targeted phishing attacks in the Middle East since at least 2014. Linked to Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), the group is known to use a diverse toolset in its operations, with re

An Iranian geopolitical nexus threat actor has been uncovered deploying two new targeted malware that come with "simple" backdoor functionalities as part of an intrusion against an unnamed Middle East government entity in November 2021. Cybersecurity company Mandiant attributed the attack to an uncategorized cluster it's tracking under the moniker  UNC3313 , which it assesses with "moderate confidence" as associated with the MuddyWater state-sponsored group. "UNC3313 conducts surveillance and collects strategic information to support Iranian interests and decision-making," researchers Ryan Tomcik, Emiel Haeghebaert, and Tufail Ahmed  said . "Targeting patterns and related lures demonstrate a strong focus on targets with a geopolitical nexus." In mid-January 2022, U.S. intelligence agencies  characterized  MuddyWater (aka Static Kitten, Seedworm, TEMP.Zagros, or Mercury) as a subordinate element of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and

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Hackers with suspected ties to Iran are actively targeting academia, government agencies, and tourism entities in the Middle East and neighboring regions as part of an espionage campaign aimed at data theft. Dubbed "Earth Vetala" by Trend Micro, the latest finding expands on previous research  published by Anomali  last month, which found evidence of malicious activity aimed at UAE and Kuwait government agencies by exploiting ScreenConnect remote management tool.  The cybersecurity firm linked the ongoing attacks with moderate confidence to a threat actor widely tracked as  MuddyWater , an Iranian hacker group known for its offensives primarily against Middle Eastern nations. Earth Vetala is said to have leveraged spear-phishing emails containing embedded links to a popular file-sharing service called Onehub to distribute malware that ranged from password dumping utilities to custom backdoors, before initiating communications with a command-and-control (C2) server to exe