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Multiple state-sponsored hacking groups from Iran, North Korea, and Russia have been found leveraging the increasingly popular ClickFix social engineering tactic to deploy malware over a three-month period from late 2024 through the beginning of 2025. The phishing campaigns adopting the strategy have been attributed to clusters tracked as TA427 (aka Kimsuky), TA450 (aka MuddyWater), UNK_RemoteRogue, and TA422 (aka APT28). ClickFix has been an initial access technique primarily affiliated with cybercrime groups, although the effectiveness of the approach has led to it also being adopted by nation-state groups. "The incorporation of ClickFix is not revolutionizing the campaigns carried out by TA427, TA450, UNK_RemoteRogue, and TA422 but instead is replacing the installation and execution stages in existing infection chains," enterprise security firm Proofpoint said in a report published today. ClickFix , in a nutshell, refers to a sneaky technique that tricks users int...

Threat hunters are calling attention to a new highly-targeted phishing campaign that singled out "fewer than five" entities in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) to deliver a previously undocumented Golang backdoor dubbed Sosano. The malicious activity was specifically directed against aviation and satellite communications organizations, according to Proofpoint, which detected it in late October 2024. The enterprise security firm is tracking the emerging cluster under the moniker UNK_CraftyCamel . A noteworthy aspect of the attack chain is the fact that the adversary took advantage of its access to a compromised email account belonging to the Indian electronics company INDIC Electronics to send phishing messages. The entity is said to have been in a trusted business relationship with all the targets, with the lures tailored to each of them. "UNK_CraftyCamel leveraged a compromised Indian electronics company to target fewer than five organizations in the United Arab E...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a novel malware campaign that leverages Google Sheets as a command-and-control (C2) mechanism. The activity, detected by Proofpoint starting August 5, 2024, impersonates tax authorities from governments in Europe, Asia, and the U.S., with the goal of targeting over 70 organizations worldwide by means of a bespoke tool called Voldemort that's equipped to gather information and deliver additional payloads. Targeted sectors include insurance, aerospace, transportation, academia, finance, technology, industrial, healthcare, automotive, hospitality, energy, government, media, manufacturing, telecom, and social benefit organizations.  The suspected cyber espionage campaign has not been attributed to a specific named threat actor. As many as 20,000 email messages have been sent as part of the attacks. These emails claim to be from tax authorities in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, India, and Japan, alerting recipients about chan...

The U.S. government on Thursday published a new cybersecurity advisory warning of North Korean threat actors' attempts to send emails in a manner that makes them appear like they are from legitimate and trusted parties. The joint bulletin was published by the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of State. "The DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] leverages these spear-phishing campaigns to collect intelligence on geopolitical events, adversary foreign policy strategies, and any information affecting DPRK interests by gaining illicit access to targets' private documents, research, and communications," the NSA  said . The technique specifically concerns exploiting improperly configured DNS Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance ( DMARC ) record policies to conceal social engineering attempts. In doing so, the threat actors can send spoofed emails as if...

Organizations in Italy are the target of a new phishing campaign that leverages a new strain of malware called  WikiLoader  with an ultimate aim to install a banking trojan, stealer, and spyware referred to as  Ursnif  (aka Gozi). "It is a sophisticated downloader with the objective of installing a second malware payload," Proofpoint  said  in a technical report. "The malware uses multiple mechanisms to evade detection and was likely developed as a malware that can be rented out to select cybercriminal threat actors." WikiLoader is so named due to the malware making a request to Wikipedia and checking that the response has the string "The Free." The enterprise security firm said it first detected the malware in the wild on December 27, 2022, in connection with an intrusion set mounted by a threat actor it tracks as  TA544 , which is also known as Bamboo Spider and Zeus Panda. The campaigns are centered around the use of emails containing either M...

The advanced persistent threat (APT) actor known as Winter Vivern is now targeting officials in Europe and the U.S. as part of an ongoing cyber espionage campaign. "TA473 since at least February 2023 has continuously leveraged an unpatched Zimbra vulnerability in publicly facing webmail portals that allows them to gain access to the email mailboxes of government entities in Europe," Proofpoint  said  in a new report. The enterprise security firm is tracking the activity under its own moniker  TA473  (aka UAC-0114), describing it as an adversarial crew whose operations align with that of Russian and Belarussian geopolitical objectives. What it lacks in sophistication, it makes up for in persistence. In recent months, the group has been linked to attacks targeting  state authorities of Ukraine and Poland  as well as  government officials in India, Lithuania, Slovakia, and the Vatican . The NATO-related intrusion wave entails the exploitation of CVE...

Travel agencies have emerged as the target of a hack-for-hire group dubbed  Evilnum  as part of a broader campaign aimed at legal and financial investment institutions in the Middle East and Europe. The attacks, which took place during 2020 and 2021 and likely went as far back as 2015, involved a revamped variant of a malware called Janicab that leverages a number of public services like WordPress and YouTube as  dead drop resolvers , Kaspersky  said  in a technical report published this week. Janicab infections comprise a diverse set of victims located in Egypt, Georgia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the U.K. The development marks the first time legal organizations in Saudi Arabia have been targeted by this group. Also tracked as DeathStalker, the threat actor is known to deploy  backdoors  like Janicab, Evilnum, Powersing, and PowerPepper to exfiltrate confidential corporate information. "Their interest in gathering sensitive business information ...

A state-sponsored hacking group with links to Russia has been linked to attack infrastructure that spoofs the Microsoft login page of Global Ordnance, a legitimate U.S.-based military weapons and hardware supplier. Recorded Future attributed the new infrastructure to a threat activity group it tracks under the name  TAG-53 , and is broadly known by the cybersecurity community as Blue Callisto , Callisto, COLDRIVER, SEABORGIUM, and TA446. "Based on historical public reporting on overlapping TAG-53 campaigns, it is likely that this credential harvesting activity is enabled in part through phishing," Recorded Future's Insikt Group  said  in a report published this week. The cybersecurity firm said it discovered 38 domains, nine of which contained references to companies like UMO Poland, Sangrail LTD, DTGruelle, Blue Sky Network, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), and the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs. It's suspected that the t...

A nascent and legitimate penetration testing framework known as Nighthawk is likely to gain threat actors' attention for its Cobalt Strike-like capabilities. Enterprise security firm Proofpoint said it detected the use of the software in mid-September 2022 by a red team with a number of test emails sent using generic subject lines such as "Just checking in" and "Hope this works2." However, there are no indications that a leaked or cracked version of Nighthawk is being weaponized by threat actors in the wild, Proofpoint researcher Alexander Rausch  said  in a write-up. Nighthawk, launched in December 2021 by a company called MDSec, is analogous to its counterparts  Cobalt Strike ,  Sliver , and  Brute Ratel , offering a red team toolset for adversary threat simulation. It's licensed for £7,500 (or $10,000) per user for a year. "Nighthawk is the most advanced and evasive command-and-control framework available on the market," MDSec  notes . ...

A "dangerous piece of functionality" has been discovered in Microsoft 365 suite that could be potentially abused by a malicious actor to mount attacks on cloud infrastructure and ransom files stored on SharePoint and OneDrive. The cloud ransomware attack makes it possible to launch file-encrypting malware to "encrypt files stored on SharePoint and OneDrive in a way that makes them unrecoverable without dedicated backups or a decryption key from the attacker," Proofpoint  said  in a report published today. The infection sequence can be carried out using a combination of Microsoft APIs, command-line interface (CLI) scripts, and PowerShell scripts, the enterprise security firm added. The attack, at its core, hinges on a Microsoft 365 feature called AutoSave that creates copies of older file versions as and when users make edits to a file stored on OneDrive or SharePoint Online. It commences with gaining unauthorized access to a target user's SharePoint Online...

A sophisticated social engineering attack undertaken by an Iranian-state aligned actor targeted think tanks, journalists, and professors with an aim to solicit sensitive information by masquerading as scholars with the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Enterprise security firm Proofpoint attributed the campaign — called " Operation SpoofedScholars " — to the advanced persistent threat tracked as  TA453 , which is also known by the aliases APT35 (FireEye), Charming Kitten (ClearSky), and Phosphorous (Microsoft). The government cyber warfare group is suspected to carry out intelligence efforts on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). "Identified targets included experts in Middle Eastern affairs from think tanks, senior professors from well-known academic institutions, and journalists specializing in Middle Eastern coverage," the researchers said in a technical write-up shared with The Hacker News. "T...