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Threat actors have been distributing malicious applications under the guise of seemingly harmless shopping apps to target customers of eight Malaysian banks since at least November 2021. The attacks involved setting up fraudulent but legitimate-looking websites to trick users into downloading the apps, Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The copycat websites impersonated cleaning services such as Maid4u, Grabmaid, Maria's Cleaning, Maid4u, YourMaid, Maideasy and MaidACall and a pet store named PetsMore, all of which are aimed at users in Malaysia. "The threat actors use these fake e-shop applications to phish for banking credentials," ESET  said . "The apps also forward all SMS messages received by the victim to the malware operators in case they contain 2FA codes sent by the bank." The targeted banks include Maybank, Affin Bank, Public Bank Berhad, CIMB bank, BSN, RHB, Bank Islam Malaysia, and Hong Leong Bank. Th

At least three different advanced persistent threat (APT) groups from across the world have launched spear-phishing campaigns in mid-March 2022 using the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war as a lure to distribute malware and steal sensitive information. The campaigns, undertaken by El Machete, Lyceum, and SideWinder, have targeted a variety of sectors, including energy, financial, and governmental sectors in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. "The attackers use decoys ranging from official-looking documents to news articles or even job postings, depending on the targets and region," Check Point Research  said  in a report. "Many of these lure documents utilize malicious macros or template injection to gain an initial foothold into the targeted organizations, and then launch malware attacks." The infection chains of  El Machete , a Spanish-speaking threat actor first documented in August 2014 by Kaspersky, involve the use of macro-laced decoy doc

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

A previously undocumented "sophisticated" information-stealing malware named BlackGuard is being advertised for sale on Russian underground forums for a monthly subscription of $200. "BlackGuard has the capability to steal all types of information related to Crypto wallets, VPN, Messengers, FTP credentials, saved browser credentials, and email clients," Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers Mitesh Wani and Kaivalya Khursale  said  in a report published last week. Also sold for a lifetime price of $700, BlackGuard is designed as a .NET-based malware that's actively under development, boasting of a number of anti-analysis, anti-debugging, and anti-evasion features that allows it to kill processes related to antivirus engines and bypass string-based detection. What's more, it checks the IP address of the infected devices by sending a request to the domain "https://ipwhois[.]app/xml/," and exit itself if the country is one among the Commonwealth of Indep

A variant of the Mirai botnet called Beastmode has been observed adopting newly disclosed vulnerabilities in TOTOLINK routers between February and March 2022 to infect unpatched devices and expand its reach potentially. "The Beastmode (aka B3astmode) Mirai-based DDoS campaign has aggressively updated its arsenal of exploits," Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs Research team  said . "Five new exploits were added within a month, with three targeting various models of TOTOLINK routers." The list of exploited vulnerabilities in TOTOLINK routers is as follows - CVE-2022-26210  (CVSS score: 9.8) - A command injection vulnerability that could be exploited to gain arbitrary code execution CVE-2022-26186  (CVSS score: 9.8) - A command injection vulnerability affecting TOTOLINK N600R and A7100RU routers, and CVE-2022-25075 to CVE-2022-25084  (CVSS scores: 9.8) - A command injection vulnerability impacting multiple TOTOLINK routers, leading to code execution The other e

A Chinese advanced persistent threat tracked as Deep Panda has been observed exploiting the  Log4Shell vulnerability  in VMware Horizon servers to deploy a backdoor and a novel rootkit on infected machines with the goal of stealing sensitive data. "The nature of targeting was opportunistic insofar that multiple infections in several countries and various sectors occurred on the same dates,"  said  Rotem Sde-Or and Eliran Voronovitch, researchers with Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs, in a report released this week. "The victims belong to the financial, academic, cosmetics, and travel industries." Deep Panda , also known by the monikers Shell Crew, KungFu Kittens, and Bronze Firestone, is said to have been active since at least 2010, with recent attacks "targeting legal firms for data exfiltration and technology providers for command-and-control infrastructure building,"  according  to Secureworks. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which assigned the panda

The North Korean state-backed hacking crew, otherwise known as the  Lazarus Group , has been attributed to yet another financially motivated campaign that leverages a trojanized decentralized finance (DeFi) wallet app to distribute a fully-featured backdoor onto compromised Windows systems. The app, which is equipped with functionalities to save and manage a cryptocurrency wallet, is also designed to trigger the launch of the implant that can take control of the infected host. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky  said  it first encountered the rogue application in mid-December 2021. The infection scheme initiated by the app also results in the deployment of the installer for a legitimate application, which gets overwritten with a trojanized version in an effort to cover its tracks. That said, the initial access avenue is unclear, although it's suspected to be a case of social engineering. The spawned malware, which masquerades as Google's Chrome web browser, subsequently

Researchers have disclosed what they say is the first-ever Python-based ransomware strain specifically designed to target exposed Jupyter notebooks, a web-based interactive computing platform that allows editing and running programs via a browser. "The attackers gained initial access via misconfigured environments, then ran a ransomware script that encrypts every file on a given path on the server and deletes itself after execution to conceal the attack," Assaf Morag, a data analyst at Aqua Security,  said  in a report. The new ransomware sample, which the cloud security firm detected after it was trapped in one of its honeypot servers, is said to have been executed after the unnamed adversary gained access to the server and downloaded the necessary tools required to carry out the encryption process by opening a terminal. Aqua Security characterized the attack as "simple and straightforward," unlike other traditional ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) schemes, add

A nascent information stealer called Mars has been observed in campaigns that take advantage of cracked versions of the malware to steal information stored in web browsers and cryptocurrency wallets. "Mars Stealer is being distributed via social engineering techniques, malspam campaigns, malicious software cracks, and keygens," Morphisec malware researcher Arnold Osipov  said  in a report published Tuesday. Based on the  Oski Stealer  and first discovered in June 2021,  Mars Stealer  is said to be constantly under development and available for sale on over 47 underground forums, darknet sites, and Telegram channels, costing only $160 for a lifetime subscription. Information stealers allow adversaries to vacuum personal information from compromised systems, including stored credentials and browser cookies, which are then sold on criminal marketplaces or used as a springboard for launching further attacks. The release of Mars Stealer last year has also been accompanied by

An unidentified threat actor has been observed employing a "complex and powerful" malware loader with the ultimate objective of deploying cryptocurrency miners on compromised systems and potentially facilitating the theft of Discord tokens. "The evidence found on victim networks appears to indicate that the goal of the attacker was to install cryptocurrency mining software on victim machines," researchers from the Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom Software,  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This would appear to be a relatively low-reward goal for the attacker given the level of effort that would have been required to develop this sophisticated malware." This advanced piece of malware, dubbed Verblecon, is said to have been first spotted two months ago in January 2022, with the payload incorporating  polymorphic qualities  to evade signature-based detections by security software. In addition, the loader carries out further a

Cybersecurity researchers have shed more light on a malicious loader that runs as a server and executes received modules in memory, laying bare the structure of an "advanced multi-layered virtual machine" used by the malware to fly under the radar. Wslink, as the malicious loader is called, was first  documented  by Slovak cybersecurity company ESET in October 2021, with very few telemetry hits detected in the past two years spanning Central Europe, North America, and the Middle East. Analysis of the malware samples have yielded little to no clues about the initial compromise vector used, and no code, functionality, or operational similarities have been uncovered to suggest that this is a tool from a previously identified threat actor. Packed with a file compression utility named NsPack, Wslink makes use of what's called a  process virtual machine  (VM), a mechanism to run an application in a platform-independent manner that abstracts the underlying hardware or opera

A threat actor dubbed " RED-LILI " has been linked to an ongoing large-scale supply chain attack campaign targeting the NPM package repository by publishing nearly 800 malicious modules. "Customarily, attackers use an anonymous disposable NPM account from which they launch their attacks," Israeli security company Checkmarx  said . "As it seems this time, the attacker has fully-automated the process of NPM account creation and has opened dedicated accounts, one per package, making his new malicious packages batch harder to spot." The findings build on recent reports from  JFrog  and  Sonatype , both of which detailed hundreds of NPM packages that leverage techniques like  dependency confusion  and typosquatting to target Azure, Uber, and Airbnb developers. According to a detailed analysis of RED-LILI's modus operandi, earliest evidence of anomalous activity is said to have occurred on February 23, 2022, with the cluster of malicious packages publis

A new email phishing campaign has been spotted leveraging the tactic of conversation hijacking to deliver the IcedID info-stealing malware onto infected machines by making use of unpatched and publicly-exposed Microsoft Exchange servers. "The emails use a social engineering technique of conversation hijacking (also known as thread hijacking)," Israeli company Intezer said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "A forged reply to a previous stolen email is being used as a way to convince the recipient to open the attachment. This is notable because it increases the credibility of the phishing email and may cause a high infection rate." The latest wave of attacks, detected in mid-March 2022, is said to have targeted organizations within energy, healthcare, law, and pharmaceutical sectors. IcedID, aka BokBot, like its counterparts TrickBot and  Emotet , is a  banking trojan  that has evolved to become an entry point for more sophisticated threats, including hu

The operators of the  Purple Fox malware  have retooled their malware arsenal with a new variant of a remote access trojan called FatalRAT, while also simultaneously upgrading their evasion mechanisms to bypass security software. "Users' machines are targeted via trojanized software packages masquerading as legitimate application installers," Trend Micro researchers  said  in a report published on March 25, 2022. "The installers are actively distributed online to trick users and increase the overall botnet infrastructure." The findings follow  prior research  from Minerva Labs that shed light on a similar modus operandi of leveraging fraudulent Telegram applications to distribute the backdoor. Other disguised software installers include WhatsApp, Adobe Flash Player, and Google Chrome. These packages act as a first-stage loader, triggering an infection sequence that leads to the deployment of a second-stage payload from a remote server and culminating in the

Muhstik, a botnet infamous for propagating via web application exploits, has been observed targeting Redis servers using a recently disclosed vulnerability in the database system. The vulnerability relates to  CVE-2022-0543 , a  Lua sandbox escape flaw  in the open-source, in-memory, key-value data store that could be abused to achieve remote code execution on the underlying machine. The vulnerability is rated 10 out of 10 for severity. "Due to a packaging issue, a remote attacker with the ability to execute arbitrary Lua scripts could possibly escape the Lua sandbox and execute arbitrary code on the host," Ubuntu noted in an advisory released last month. According to  telemetry data  gathered by Juniper Threat Labs, the attacks leveraging the new flaw are said to have commenced on March 11, 2022, leading to the retrieval of a malicious shell script ("russia.sh") from a remote server, which is then utilized to fetch and execute the botnet binaries from another s

A Chinese-speaking threat actor called Scarab has been linked to a custom backdoor dubbed HeaderTip as part of a campaign targeting Ukraine since Russia embarked on an invasion last month, making it the second China-based hacking group after  Mustang Panda  to capitalize on the conflict. "The malicious activity represents one of the first public examples of a Chinese threat actor targeting Ukraine since the invasion began," SentinelOne researcher Tom Hegel  said  in a report published this week. SentinelOne's analysis follows an advisory from Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) earlier this week  outlining  a spear-phishing campaign that leads to the delivery of a RAR archive file, which comes with an executable that's designed to open a decoy file while stealthily dropping a malicious DLL called HeaderTip in the background. Scarab was  first documented  by the Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom Software, in January 2015, when i

Before hunting malware, every researcher needs to find a system where to analyze it. There are several ways to do it: build your own environment or use third-party solutions. Today we will walk through all the steps of creating a custom malware sandbox where you can perform a proper analysis without infecting your computer. And then compare it with a ready-made service. Why do you need a malware sandbox?  A sandbox allows detecting cyber threats and analyzing them safely. All information remains secure, and a suspicious file can't access the system. You can monitor malware processes, identify their patterns and investigate behavior. Before setting up a sandbox, you should have a clear goal of what you want to achieve through the lab.  There are two ways how to organize your working space for analysis: Custom sandbox.  Made from scratch by an analyst on their own, specifically for their needs. A turnkey solution.  A versatile service with a range of configurations to meet yo

A China-based advanced persistent threat (APT) known as Mustang Panda has been linked to an ongoing cyber espionage campaign using a previously undocumented variant of the  PlugX  remote access trojan on infected machines. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET dubbed the new version Hodur , owing to its resemblance to another PlugX (aka Korplug) variant called  THOR  that came to light in July 2021. "Most victims are located in East and Southeast Asia, but a few are in Europe (Greece, Cyprus, Russia) and Africa (South Africa, South Sudan)," ESET malware researcher Alexandre Côté Cyr  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Known victims include research entities, internet service providers (ISPs), and European diplomatic missions mostly located in East and Southeast Asia." Mustang Panda, also known as TA416, HoneyMyte, RedDelta, or PKPLUG, is a  cyber espionage group  that's primarily known for targeting non-governmental organizations with a specific foc

Researchers have disclosed details of a newly discovered macOS variant of a malware implant developed by a Chinese espionage threat actor known to strike attack organizations across Asia. Attributing the attacks to a group tracked as  Storm Cloud , cybersecurity firm Volexity characterized the new malware, dubbed Gimmick, as a "feature-rich, multi-platform malware family that uses public cloud hosting services (such as Google Drive) for command-and-control (C2) channels." The cybersecurity firm said it recovered the sample through memory analysis of a compromised MacBook Pro running macOS 11.6 (Big Sur) as part of an intrusion campaign that took place in late 2021. "Storm Cloud is an advanced and versatile threat actor, adapting its tool set to match different operating systems used by its targets," Volexity researchers Damien Cash, Steven Adair, and Thomas Lancaster  said  in a report. "They make use of built-in operating system utilities, open-source to

Vulnerable routers from MikroTik have been misused to form what cybersecurity researchers have called one of the largest botnet-as-a-service cybercrime operations seen in recent years.  According to a new piece of research published by Avast, a cryptocurrency mining campaign leveraging the new-disrupted  Glupteba botnet  as well as the infamous TrickBot malware were all distributed using the same command-and-control (C2) server. "The C2 server serves as a botnet-as-a-service controlling nearly 230,000 vulnerable MikroTik routers," Avast's senior malware researcher, Martin Hron,  said  in a write-up, potentially linking it to what's now called the Mēris botnet. The botnet is known to exploit a known vulnerability in the Winbox component of MikroTik routers ( CVE-2018-14847 ), enabling the attackers to gain unauthenticated, remote administrative access to any affected device. Parts of the Mēris botnet were  sinkholed  in late  September 2021 . "The  CVE-2018-

Five new security weaknesses have been disclosed in Dell BIOS that, if successfully exploited, could lead to code execution on vulnerable systems, joining the likes of firmware vulnerabilities recently uncovered in Insyde Software's  InsydeH2O  and HP Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ( UEFI ). Tracked as CVE-2022-24415, CVE-2022-24416, CVE-2022-24419, CVE-2022-24420, and CVE-2022-24421, the high-severity vulnerabilities are rated 8.2 out of 10 on the CVSS scoring system. "The active exploitation of all the discovered vulnerabilities can't be detected by firmware integrity monitoring systems due to limitations of the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) measurement," firmware security company Binarly, which discovered the latter three flaws,  said  in a write-up. "The remote device health attestation solutions will not detect the affected systems due to the design limitations in visibility of the firmware runtime." All the flaws relate to improper input v