Phishing Attacks | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The threat actor known as  Winter Vivern  has been observed exploiting a zero-day flaw in Roundcube webmail software on October 11, 2023, to harvest email messages from victims' accounts. "Winter Vivern has stepped up its operations by using a zero-day vulnerability in Roundcube," ESET security researcher Matthieu Faou  said  in a new report published today. Previously, it was using known vulnerabilities in Roundcube and Zimbra, for which proofs-of-concept are available online." Winter Vivern, also known as TA473 and UAC-0114, is an  adversarial collective  whose objectives align with that of Belarus and Russia. Over the past few months, it has been attributed to attacks against Ukraine and Poland, as well as government entities across Europe and India. The group is also assessed to have exploited another flaw Roundcube as recently as August and September (CVE-2020-35730), making it the  second nation-state group after APT28  to target the open-source webmail so

Microsoft is warning of an increase in adversary-in-the-middle ( AiTM ) phishing techniques, which are being propagated as part of the phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) cybercrime model. In addition to an uptick in AiTM-capable PhaaS platforms, the tech giant noted that existing phishing services like PerSwaysion are incorporating AiTM capabilities. "This development in the PhaaS ecosystem enables attackers to conduct high-volume phishing campaigns that attempt to circumvent MFA protections at scale," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team  said  in a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter). Phishing kits with AiTM capabilities work in two ways, one of which concerns the use of reverse proxy servers (i.e., the phishing page) to relay traffic to and from the client and legitimate website and stealthily capture user credentials, two-factor authentication codes, and session cookies. A second method involves synchronous relay servers. "In AiTM through synchronous relay s

Imagine a world where the software that powers your favorite apps, secures your online transactions, and keeps your digital life could be outsmarted and taken over by a cleverly disguised piece of code. This isn't a plot from the latest cyber-thriller; it's actually been a reality for years now. How this will change – in a positive or negative direction – as artificial intelligence (AI) takes on a larger role in software development is one of the big uncertainties related to this brave new world. In an era where AI promises to revolutionize how we live and work, the conversation about its security implications cannot be sidelined. As we increasingly rely on AI for tasks ranging from mundane to mission-critical, the question is no longer just, "Can AI  boost cybersecurity ?" (sure!), but also "Can AI  be hacked? " (yes!), "Can one use AI  to hack? " (of course!), and "Will AI  produce secure software ?" (well…). This thought leadership article is about the latter. Cydrill  (a

The threat actor behind a remote access trojan called RomCom RAT has been observed targeting Ukrainian military institutions as part of a new spear-phishing campaign that commenced on October 21, 2022.  The development marks a shift in the attacker's modus operandi, which has been previously attributed to spoofing legitimate apps like Advanced IP Scanner and pdfFiller to drop backdoors on compromised systems. "The initial 'Advanced IP Scanner' campaign occurred on July 23, 2022," the BlackBerry research and intelligence team  said . "Once the victim installs a Trojanized bundle, it drops RomCom RAT to the system." While previous iterations of the campaign involved the use of trojanized Advanced IP Scanner, the unidentified adversarial collective has since switched to pdfFiller as of October 20, indicating an active attempt on part of the adversary to refine tactics and thwart detection. These lookalike websites host a rogue installer package that r

Phishing incidents are on the rise. A report from IBM shows that phishing was the most popular attack vector in 2021, resulting in one in five employees falling victim to phishing hacking techniques. The Need for Security Awareness Training  Although technical solutions protect against phishing threats, no solution is 100% effective . Consequently, companies have no choice but to involve their employees in the fight against hackers. This is where security awareness training comes into play.  Security awareness training gives companies the confidence that their employees will execute the right response when they discover a phishing message in their inbox. As the saying goes, "knowledge is power," but the effectiveness of knowledge depends heavily on how it is delivered. When it comes to phishing attacks, simulations are among the most effective forms of training because the events in training simulations directly mimic how an employee would react in the event of an actu

A broad range of threat actors, including Fancy Bear, Ghostwriter, and Mustang Panda, have launched phishing campaigns against Ukraine, Poland, and other European entities amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) said it took down two Blogspot domains that were used by the nation-state group FancyBear (aka APT28) – which is attributed to Russia's GRU military intelligence – as a landing page for its social engineering attacks. The disclosure comes close on the heels of an advisory from the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA)  warning  of phishing campaigns targeting Ukr.net users that involve sending messages from compromised accounts containing links to attacker-controlled credential harvesting pages. Another cluster of threat activity concerns webmail users of Ukr.net, Yandex.ru, wp.pl, rambler.ru, meta.ua, and i.ua, who have been at the receiving end of phishing attacks by a Belarusian threat actor tracked as Ghostwrit

Facebook's parent company Meta Platforms on Monday said it has filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. state of California against bad actors who operated more than 39,000 phishing websites that impersonated its digital properties to mislead unsuspecting users into divulging their login credentials. The social engineering scheme involved the creation of rogue webpages that masqueraded as the login pages of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, on which victims were prompted to enter their usernames and passwords that were then harvested by the defendants. The tech giant is also seeking $500,000 from the anonymous actors. The attacks were carried out using a relay service, Ngrok , that redirected internet traffic to the phishing websites in a manner that concealed the true location of the fraudulent infrastructure. Meta said the volume of these phishing attacks ramped up in volume since March 2021 and that it worked with the relay service to suspend thousands of URLs to the