Raccoon Stealer | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Users searching for popular software are being targeted by a new malvertising campaign that abuses Google Ads to serve trojanized variants that deploy malware, such as Raccoon Stealer and Vidar. The activity makes use of seemingly credible websites with typosquatted domain names that are surfaced on top of Google search results in the form of malicious ads by hijacking searches for specific keywords. The ultimate objective of such attacks is to  trick   unsuspecting   users  into downloading malevolent programs or potentially unwanted applications. In one campaign disclosed by Guardio Labs, threat actors have been observed creating a network of benign sites that are promoted on the search engine, which when clicked, redirect the visitors to a phishing page containing a trojanized ZIP archive hosted on Dropbox or OneDrive. "The moment those 'disguised' sites are being visited by targeted visitors (those who actually click on the promoted search result) the serve...

A 26-year-old Ukrainian national has been charged in the U.S. for his alleged role in the  Raccoon Stealer  malware-as-a-service (MaaS) operation. Mark Sokolovsky, who was arrested by Dutch law enforcement after leaving Ukraine on March 4, 2022, in what's said to be a Porsche Cayenne, is currently being held in the Netherlands and awaits extradition to the U.S. "Individuals who deployed Raccoon Infostealer to steal data from victims leased access to the malware for approximately $200 per month, paid for by cryptocurrency," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ)  said . "These individuals used various ruses, such as email phishing, to install the malware onto the computers of unsuspecting victims." Sokolovsky is said to have gone by various online monikers like Photix, raccoonstealer, and black21jack77777 on online cybercrime forums to advertise the service for sale. Raccoon Stealer, mainly distributed under the guise of cracked software, is known to be one o...

In cybersecurity, confidence is a double-edged sword. Organizations often operate under a false sense of security , believing that patched vulnerabilities, up-to-date tools, polished dashboards, and glowing risk scores guarantee safety. The reality is a bit of a different story. In the real world, checking the right boxes doesn't equal being secure. As Sun Tzu warned, "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." Two and a half millennia later, the concept still holds: your organization's cybersecurity defenses must be strategically validated under real-world conditions to ensure your business's very survival. Today, more than ever, you need Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) , the essential strategy that's still missing from most security frameworks. The Danger of False Confidence Conventional wisdom suggests that if you've patched known bugs, deployed a stack of well-regarded security tools, and passed the nec...