Korean Hackers | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

An ongoing cyber attack campaign has set its sights on Korean-speaking individuals by employing U.S. Military-themed document lures to trick them into running malware on compromised systems. Cybersecurity firm Securonix is tracking the activity under the name STARK#MULE . The scale of the attacks is currently not known, and it's not clear if any of these attack attempts turned out to be successful. "Based on the source and likely targets, these types of attacks are on par with past attacks stemming from typical North Korean groups such as APT37 as South Korea has historically been a primary target of the group, especially its government officials," security researchers Den Iuzvyk, Tim Peck, and Oleg Kolesnikov said in a report shared with The Hacker News. APT37, also known by the names Nickel Foxcroft, Reaper, Ricochet Chollima, and ScarCruft, is a  North Korean nation-state actor  that's known to exclusively focus on targets in its southern counterpart, specific...

Numerous Windows machines located in South Korea have been targeted by a botnet tracked as PseudoManuscrypt since at least May 2021 by employing the same delivery tactics of another malware called CryptBot . "PseudoManuscrypt is disguised as an installer that is similar to a form of  CryptBot , and is being distributed," South Korean cybersecurity company AhnLab Security Emergency Response Center (ASEC)  said  in a report published today. "Not only is its file form similar to CryptBot, but it is also distributed via malicious sites exposed on the top search page when users search commercial software-related illegal programs such as Crack and Keygen," it added. According to ASEC, around 30 computers in the country are being consistently infected on a daily basis on average. PseudoManuscrypt was first documented by Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky in December 2021, when it  disclosed  details of a "mass-scale spyware attack campaign" infecting mo...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

An IRC  (Internet Relay Chat) bot strain programmed in GoLang is being used to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeting users in Korea. "The malware is being distributed under the guise of adult games," researchers from AhnLab's Security Emergency-response Center (ASEC)  said  in a new report published on Wednesday. "Additionally, the DDoS malware was installed via downloader and  UDP RAT  was used." The attack works by uploading the malware-laced games to webhards — which refers to a web hard drive or a remote file hosting service — in the form of compressed ZIP archives that, when opened, includes an executable ("Game_Open.exe") that's orchestrated to run a malware payload aside from launching the actual game. This payload, a GoLang-based downloader, establishes connections with a remote command-and-control (C&C) server to retrieve additional malware, including an IRC bot that can perform DDoS attacks. "It is...