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Hackers Exploit Google Tag Manager to Deploy Credit Card Skimmers on Magento Stores

Hackers Exploit Google Tag Manager to Deploy Credit Card Skimmers on Magento Stores

Feb 10, 2025 Malware / Payment Security
Threat actors have been observed leveraging Google Tag Manager (GTM) to deliver credit card skimmer malware targeting Magento-based e-commerce websites. Website security company Sucuri said the code, while appearing to be a typical GTM and Google Analytics script used for website analytics and advertising purposes, contains an obfuscated backdoor capable of providing attackers with persistent access. As of writing, as many as three sites have been found to be infected with the GTM identifier (GTM-MLHK2N68) in question, down from six reported by Sucuri. GTM identifier refers to a container that includes the various tracking codes (e.g., Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel) and rules to be triggered when certain conditions are met. Further analysis has revealed that the malware is being loaded from the Magento database table "cms_block.content," with the GTM tag containing an encoded JavaScript payload that acts as a credit card skimmer. "This script was designed to ...
Cross-Platform JavaScript Stealer Targets Crypto Wallets in New Lazarus Group Campaign

Cross-Platform JavaScript Stealer Targets Crypto Wallets in New Lazarus Group Campaign

Feb 05, 2025 Cryptocurrency / Data Breach
The North Korea-linked Lazarus Group has been linked to an active campaign that leverages fake LinkedIn job offers in the cryptocurrency and travel sectors to deliver malware capable of infecting Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems. According to cybersecurity company Bitdefender, the scam begins with a message sent on a professional social media network, enticing them with the promise of remote work, part-time flexibility, and good pay. "Once the target expresses interest, the 'hiring process' unfolds, with the scammer requesting a CV or even a personal GitHub repository link," the Romanian firm said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Although seemingly innocent, these requests can serve nefarious purposes, such as harvesting personal data or lending a veneer of legitimacy to the interaction." Once the requested details are obtained, the attack moves to the next stage where the threat actor, under the guise of a recruiter, shares a lin...
The Evolving Role of PAM in Cybersecurity Leadership Agendas for 2025

The Evolving Role of PAM in Cybersecurity Leadership Agendas for 2025

Feb 06, 2025AI Security / Cybersecurity
Privileged Access Management (PAM) has emerged as a cornerstone of modern cybersecurity strategies, shifting from a technical necessity to a critical pillar in leadership agendas. With the PAM market projected to reach $42.96 billion by 2037 (according to Research Nester), organizations invest heavily in PAM solutions. Why is PAM climbing the ranks of leadership priorities? While Gartner highlights key reasons such as enhanced security, regulatory compliance readiness, and insurance requirements, the impact of PAM extends across multiple strategic areas. PAM can help organizations enhance their overall operational efficiency and tackle many challenges they face today. To explore more about PAM's transformative impact on businesses, read The Cyber Guardian: PAM's Role in Shaping Leadership Agendas for 2025 by a renowned cybersecurity expert and former Gartner lead analyst Jonathan Care.  What cybersecurity challenges may organizations face in 2025? The cybersecurity landsca...
North Korean Hackers Deploy FERRET Malware via Fake Job Interviews on macOS

North Korean Hackers Deploy FERRET Malware via Fake Job Interviews on macOS

Feb 04, 2025 Malware / Cryptocurrency
The North Korean threat actors behind the Contagious Interview campaign have been observed delivering a collection of Apple macOS malware strains dubbed FERRET as part of a supposed job interview process. "Targets are typically asked to communicate with an interviewer through a link that throws an error message and a request to install or update some required piece of software such as VCam or CameraAccess for virtual meetings," SentinelOne researchers Phil Stokes and Tom Hegel said in a new report. Contagious Interview, first uncovered in late 2023, is a persistent effort undertaken by the hacking crew to deliver malware to prospective targets through bogus npm packages and native apps masquerading as videoconferencing software. It's also tracked as DeceptiveDevelopment and DEV#POPPER. These attack chains are designed to drop a JavaScript-based malware known as BeaverTail, which, besides harvesting sensitive data from web browsers and crypto wallets, is capable of d...
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Lightning AI Studio Vulnerability Could've Allowed RCE via Hidden URL Parameter

Lightning AI Studio Vulnerability Could've Allowed RCE via Hidden URL Parameter

Jan 30, 2025 Vulnerability / Cloud Security
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical security flaw in the Lightning AI Studio development platform that, if successfully exploited, could have allowed for remote code execution. The vulnerability, rated a CVSS score of 9.4, enables "attackers to potentially execute arbitrary commands with root privileges" by exploiting a hidden URL parameter, application security firm Noma said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This level of access could hypothetically be leveraged for a range of malicious activities, including the extraction of sensitive keys from targeted accounts," researchers Sasi Levi, Alon Tron, and Gal Moyal said. The issue is embedded in a piece of JavaScript code that could facilitate unfettered access to a victim's development environment, as well as run arbitrary commands on an authenticated target in a privileged context. Noma said it found a hidden parameter called "command" in user-specific URLs – e.g., ...
CISA Adds Five-Year-Old jQuery XSS Flaw to Exploited Vulnerabilities List

CISA Adds Five-Year-Old jQuery XSS Flaw to Exploited Vulnerabilities List

Jan 24, 2025 Vulnerability / JavaScript
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday placed a now-patched security flaw impacting the popular jQuery JavaScript library to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The medium-severity vulnerability is CVE-2020-11023 (CVSS score: 6.1/6.9), a nearly five-year-old cross-site scripting (XSS) bug that could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution. "Passing HTML containing <option> elements from untrusted sources - even after sanitizing them - to one of jQuery's DOM manipulation methods (i.e. .html(), .append(), and others) may execute untrusted code," according to a GitHub advisory released for the flaw. The problem was addressed in jQuery version 3.5.0 released in April 2020. A workaround for CVE-2020-11023 involves using DOMPurify with the SAFE_FOR_JQUERY flag set to sanitize the HTML string before passing it to a jQuery method. As is typically the case, t...
WordPress Skimmers Evade Detection by Injecting Themselves into Database Tables

WordPress Skimmers Evade Detection by Injecting Themselves into Database Tables

Jan 13, 2025 Payment Security / Web Security
Cybersecurity researchers are warning of a new stealthy credit card skimmer campaign that targets WordPress e-commerce checkout pages by inserting malicious JavaScript code into a database table associated with the content management system (CMS). "This credit card skimmer malware targeting WordPress websites silently injects malicious JavaScript into database entries to steal sensitive payment details," Sucuri researcher Puja Srivastava said in a new analysis. "The malware activates specifically on checkout pages, either by hijacking existing payment fields or injecting a fake credit card form." The GoDaddy-owned website security company said it discovered the malware embedded into the WordPress wp_options table with the option "widget_block," thus allowing it to avoid detection by scanning tools and persist on compromised sites without attracting attention. In doing so, the idea is to insert the malicious JavaScript into an HTML block widget thr...
New "DoubleClickjacking" Exploit Bypasses Clickjacking Protections on Major Websites

New "DoubleClickjacking" Exploit Bypasses Clickjacking Protections on Major Websites

Jan 01, 2025 Web Security / Vulnerability
Threat hunters have disclosed a new "widespread timing-based vulnerability class" that leverages a double-click sequence to facilitate clickjacking attacks and account takeovers in almost all major websites. The technique has been codenamed DoubleClickjacking by security researcher Paulos Yibelo. "Instead of relying on a single click, it takes advantage of a double-click sequence," Yibelo said . "While it might sound like a small change, it opens the door to new UI manipulation attacks that bypass all known clickjacking protections, including the X-Frame-Options header or a SameSite: Lax/Strict cookie." Clickjacking , also called UI redressing, refers to an attack technique in which users are tricked into clicking on a seemingly innocuous web page element (e.g., a button), leading to the deployment of malware or exfiltration of sensitive data. DoubleClickjacking is a variation of this theme that exploits the gap between the start of a click and the...
North Korean Hackers Deploy OtterCookie Malware in Contagious Interview Campaign

North Korean Hackers Deploy OtterCookie Malware in Contagious Interview Campaign

Dec 27, 2024 Cryptocurrency / Cyber Espionage
North Korean threat actors behind the ongoing Contagious Interview campaign have been observed dropping a new JavaScript malware called OtterCookie . Contagious Interview (aka DeceptiveDevelopment ) refers to a persistent attack campaign that employs social engineering lures, with the hacking crew often posing as recruiters to trick individuals looking for potential job opportunities into downloading malware under the guise of an interview process. This involves distributing malware-laced videoconferencing apps or npm packages either hosted on GitHub or the official package registry, paving the way for the deployment of malware such as BeaverTail and InvisibleFerret. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, which first exposed the activity in November 2023, is tracking the cluster under the moniker CL-STA-0240. It's also referred to as Famous Chollima and Tenacious Pungsan. In September 2024, Singaporean cybersecurity company Group-IB documented the first major revision to the attack c...
AI Could Generate 10,000 Malware Variants, Evading Detection in 88% of Case

AI Could Generate 10,000 Malware Variants, Evading Detection in 88% of Case

Dec 23, 2024 Machine Learning / Threat Analysis
Cybersecurity researchers have found that it's possible to use large language models (LLMs) to generate new variants of malicious JavaScript code at scale in a manner that can better evade detection. "Although LLMs struggle to create malware from scratch, criminals can easily use them to rewrite or obfuscate existing malware, making it harder to detect," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers said in a new analysis. "Criminals can prompt LLMs to perform transformations that are much more natural-looking, which makes detecting this malware more challenging." With enough transformations over time, the approach could have the advantage of degrading the performance of malware classification systems, tricking them into believing that a piece of nefarious code is actually benign. While LLM providers have increasingly enforced security guardrails to prevent them from going off the rails and producing unintended output, bad actors have advertised tools like WormGPT...
Thousands Download Malicious npm Libraries Impersonating Legitimate Tools

Thousands Download Malicious npm Libraries Impersonating Legitimate Tools

Dec 19, 2024 Supply Chain / Software Security
Threat actors have been observed uploading malicious typosquats of legitimate npm packages such as typescript-eslint and @types/node that have racked up thousands of downloads on the package registry. The counterfeit versions, named @typescript_eslinter/eslint and types-node , are engineered to download a trojan and retrieve second-stage payloads, respectively. "While typosquatting attacks are hardly new, the effort spent by nefarious actors on these two libraries to pass them off as legitimate is noteworthy," Sonatype's Ax Sharma said in an analysis published Wednesday. "Furthermore, the high download counts for packages like "types-node" are signs that point to both some developers possibly falling for these typosquats, and threat actors artificially inflating these counts to boost the trustworthiness of their malicious components." The npm listing for @typescript_eslinter/eslint, Sonatype's analysis revealed, points to a phony GitHub repo...
Hackers Use Microsoft MSC Files to Deploy Obfuscated Backdoor in Pakistan Attacks

Hackers Use Microsoft MSC Files to Deploy Obfuscated Backdoor in Pakistan Attacks

Dec 17, 2024 Cyber Attack / Malware
A new phishing campaign has been observed employing tax-themed lures to deliver a stealthy backdoor payload as part of attacks targeting Pakistan. Cybersecurity company Securonix, which is tracking the activity under the name FLUX#CONSOLE , said it likely starts with a phishing email link or attachment, although it said it couldn't obtain the original email used to launch the attack. "One of the more notable aspects of the campaign is how the threat actors leverage MSC (Microsoft Common Console Document) files to deploy a dual-purpose loader and dropper to deliver further malicious payloads," security researchers Den Iuzvyk and Tim Peck said . It's worth noting that the abuse of specially crafted management saved console (MSC) files to execute malicious code has been codenamed GrimResource by Elastic Security Labs. The starting point is a file with double extensions (.pdf.msc) that masquerades as a PDF file (if the setting to display file extensions is disabled)...
Researchers Uncover Backdoor in Solana's Popular Web3.js npm Library

Researchers Uncover Backdoor in Solana's Popular Web3.js npm Library

Dec 04, 2024 Supply Chain Attack
Cybersecurity researchers are alerting to a software supply chain attack targeting the popular @solana/web3.js npm library that involved pushing two malicious versions capable of harvesting users' private keys with an aim to drain their cryptocurrency wallets. The attack has been detected in versions 1.95.6 and 1.95.7. Both these versions are no longer available for download from the npm registry. The package is widely used, attracting over 400,000 weekly downloads. "These compromised versions contain injected malicious code that is designed to steal private keys from unsuspecting developers and users, potentially enabling attackers to drain cryptocurrency wallets," Socket said in a report. @solana/web3.js is an npm package that can be used to interact with the Solana JavaScript software development kit (SDK) for building Node.js and web apps. According to Datadog security researcher Christophe Tafani-Dereeper , "the backdoor inserted in v1.95.7 adds an ...
Horns&Hooves Campaign Delivers RATs via Fake Emails and JavaScript Payloads

Horns&Hooves Campaign Delivers RATs via Fake Emails and JavaScript Payloads

Dec 03, 2024 Malware / Phishing Attack
A newly discovered malware campaign has been found to target private users, retailers, and service businesses mainly located in Russia to deliver NetSupport RAT and BurnsRAT. The campaign, dubbed Horns&Hooves by Kaspersky, has hit more than 1,000 victims since it began around March 2023. The end goal of these attacks is to leverage the access afforded by these trojans to install stealer malware such as Rhadamanthys and Meduza . "Recent months have seen a surge in mailings with lookalike email attachments in the form of a ZIP archive containing JScript scripts," security researcher Artem Ushkov said in a Monday analysis. "The script files [are] disguised as requests and bids from potential customers or partners." The threat actors behind the operations have demonstrated their active development of the JavaScript payload, making significant changes during the course of the campaign. In some instances, the ZIP archive has been found to contain other docum...
XML-RPC npm Library Turns Malicious, Steals Data, Deploys Crypto Miner

XML-RPC npm Library Turns Malicious, Steals Data, Deploys Crypto Miner

Nov 28, 2024 Software Security / Data Breach
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a software supply chain attack that has remained active for over a year on the npm package registry by starting off as an innocuous library and later adding malicious code to steal sensitive data and mine cryptocurrency on infected systems. The package, named @0xengine/xmlrpc , was originally published on October 2, 2023 as a JavaScript-based XML-RPC server and client for Node.js. It has been downloaded 1,790 times to date and remains available for download from the repository. Checkmarx , which discovered the package, said the malicious code was strategically introduced in version 1.3.4 a day later, harboring functionality to harvest valuable information such as SSH keys, bash history, system metadata, and environment variables every 12 hours, and exfiltrate it via services like Dropbox and file.io. "The attack achieved distribution through multiple vectors: direct npm installation and as a hidden dependency in a legitimate-looking ...
Malicious NPM Packages Target Roblox Users with Data-Stealing Malware

Malicious NPM Packages Target Roblox Users with Data-Stealing Malware

Nov 08, 2024 Open Source / Malware
A new campaign has targeted the npm package repository with malicious JavaScript libraries that are designed to infect Roblox users with open-source stealer malware such as Skuld and Blank-Grabber . "This incident highlights the alarming ease with which threat actors can launch supply chain attacks by exploiting trust and human error within the open source ecosystem, and using readily available commodity malware, public platforms like GitHub for hosting malicious executables, and communication channels like Discord and Telegram for C2 operations to bypass traditional security measures," Socket security researcher Kirill Boychenko said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The list of malicious packages is as follows - node-dlls (77 downloads) ro.dll (74 downloads) autoadv (66 downloads) rolimons-api (107 downloads) It's worth pointing out that "node-dlls" is an attempt on part of the threat actor to masquerade as the legitimate node-dll packa...
BeaverTail Malware Resurfaces in Malicious npm Packages Targeting Developers

BeaverTail Malware Resurfaces in Malicious npm Packages Targeting Developers

Oct 28, 2024 Malware / Threat Intelligence
Three malicious packages published to the npm registry in September 2024 have been found to contain a known malware called BeaverTail, a JavaScript downloader and information stealer linked to an ongoing North Korean campaign tracked as Contagious Interview. The Datadog Security Research team is monitoring the activity under the name Tenacious Pungsan , which is also known by the monikers CL-STA-0240 and Famous Chollima. The names of the malicious packages, which are no longer available for download from the package registry, are listed below - passports-js, a backdoored copy of the passport (118 downloads) bcrypts-js, a backdoored copy of bcryptjs (81 downloads) blockscan-api, a backdoored copy of etherscan-api (124 downloads) Contagious Interview refers to a yearlong-campaign undertaken by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) that involves tricking developers into downloading malicious packages or seemingly innocuous video conferencing applications as part...
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