PuTTY | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A never-before-seen North Korean threat actor codenamed Moonstone Sleet has been attributed as behind cyber attacks targeting individuals and organizations in the software and information technology, education, and defense industrial base sectors with ransomware and bespoke malware previously associated with the infamous Lazarus Group. "Moonstone Sleet is observed to set up fake companies and job opportunities to engage with potential targets, employ trojanized versions of legitimate tools, create a malicious game, and deliver a new custom ransomware," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a new analysis. It also characterized the threat actor as using a combination of tried-and-true techniques used by other North Korean threat actors and unique attack methodologies to meet its strategic objectives. The adversary, hitherto tracked by Redmond under the emerging cluster moniker Storm-1789, is assessed to be a state-aligned group that originally exhibited strong t...

A new malware campaign has been exploiting the updating mechanism of the eScan antivirus software to distribute backdoors and cryptocurrency miners like XMRig through a long-standing threat codenamed GuptiMiner targeting large corporate networks. Cybersecurity firm Avast said the activity is the work of a threat actor with possible connections to a North Korean hacking group dubbed  Kimsuky , which is also known as Black Banshee, Emerald Sleet, and TA427. "GuptiMiner is a highly sophisticated threat that uses an interesting infection chain along with a couple of techniques that include performing DNS requests to the attacker's DNS servers, performing sideloading, extracting payloads from innocent-looking images, signing its payloads with a custom trusted root anchor certification authority, among others," Avast  said . The intricate and elaborate infection chain, at its core, leverages a security shortcoming in the update mechanism of Indian antivi...

It's time once again to pay our respects to the once-famous cybersecurity solutions whose usefulness died in the past year. The cybercriminal world collectively mourns the loss of these solutions and the easy access they provide to victim organizations. These solutions, though celebrated in their prime, succumbed to the twin forces of time and advancing threats. Much like a tribute to celebrities lost in the past year, this article will look back at a few of cybersecurity's brightest stars that went dark in the past year.  1. Legacy Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Cause of Death: Compromised by sophisticated phishing, man-in-the-middle (MitM), SIM-swapping, and MFA prompt bombing attacks. The superstar of access security for more than twenty years, legacy MFA solutions enjoyed broad adoption followed by almost-universal responsibility for cybersecurity failures leading to successful ransomware attacks. These outdated solutions relied heavily on SMS or email-based codes o...

The maintainers of the  PuTTY Secure Shell (SSH) and Telnet client  are alerting users of a critical vulnerability impacting versions from 0.68 through 0.80 that could be exploited to achieve full recovery of NIST P-521 (ecdsa-sha2-nistp521) private keys. The flaw has been assigned the CVE identifier  CVE-2024-31497 , with the discovery credited to researchers Fabian Bäumer and Marcus Brinkmann from the Ruhr University Bochum. "The effect of the vulnerability is to compromise the private key," the PuTTY project  said  in an advisory. "An attacker in possession of a few dozen signed messages and the public key has enough information to recover the private key, and then forge signatures as if they were from you, allowing them to (for instance) log in to any servers you use that key for." However, in order to obtain the signatures, an attacker will have to compromise the server for which the key is used to authenticate to. In a message posted on the Open Sou...

The  recent wave of cyber attacks  targeting Albanian organizations involved the use of a wiper called  No-Justice . The  findings  come from cybersecurity company ClearSky, which said the Windows-based malware "crashes the operating system in a way that it cannot be rebooted." The intrusions have been attributed to an Iranian "psychological operation group" known as Homeland Justice, which has been active since July 2022, specifically orchestrating destructive attacks against Albania. On December 24, 2023, the adversary resurfaced after a hiatus, stating it's "back to destroy supporters of terrorists," describing its latest campaign as #DestroyDurresMilitaryCamp. The Albanian city of Durrës  currently hosts  the dissident group People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK). Targets of the attack included ONE Albania, Eagle Mobile Albania, Air Albania, and the Albanian parliament. Two of the primary tools deployed during the campaign include an e...

A threat with a North Korea nexus has been found leveraging a "novel spear phish methodology" that involves making use of trojanized versions of the PuTTY SSH and Telnet client. Google-owned threat intelligence firm Mandiant attributed the new campaign to an emerging threat cluster it tracks under the name  UNC4034 . "UNC4034 established communication with the victim over WhatsApp and lured them to download a malicious ISO package regarding a fake job offering that led to the deployment of the AIRDRY.V2 backdoor through a trojanized instance of the PuTTY utility," Mandiant researchers  said . The utilization of fabricated job lures as a pathway for malware distribution is an oft-used tactic by North Korean state-sponsored actors, including the Lazarus Group, as part of an enduring campaign called  Operation Dream Job . The entry point of the attack is an ISO file that masquerades as an Amazon Assessment as part of a potential job opportunity at the tech giant....

The popular SSH client program PuTTY has released the latest version of its software that includes security patches for 8 high-severity security vulnerabilities. PuTTY is one of the most popular and widely used open-source client-side programs that allows users to remotely access computers over SSH, Telnet, and Rlogin network protocols. Almost 20 months after releasing the last version of its software, the developers of PuTTY earlier this week released the latest version 0.71 for Windows and Unix operating systems. According to an advisory available on its website, all previous versions of the PuTTY software have been found vulnerable to multiple security vulnerabilities that could allow a malicious server or a compromised server to hijack client's system in different ways. Here below I have listed all 8 vulnerabilities with brief information that PuTTY 0.71 has patched: 1) Authentication Prompt Spoofing — Since PuTTY doesn't have a way to indicate whether a piec...