Sandbox Evasion | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A new sophisticated cyber attack has been observed targeting endpoints geolocated to Ukraine with an aim to deploy Cobalt Strike and seize control of the compromised hosts. The attack chain, per Fortinet FortiGuard Labs, involves a Microsoft Excel file that carries an embedded VBA macro to initiate the infection, "The attacker uses a multi-stage malware strategy to deliver the notorious 'Cobalt Strike' payload and establish communication with a command-and-control (C2) server," security researcher Cara Lin said in a Monday report. "This attack employs various evasion techniques to ensure successful payload delivery." Cobalt Strike , developed and maintained by Fortra, is a legitimate adversary simulation toolkit used for red teaming operations. However, over the years, cracked versions of the software have been extensively exploited by threat actors for malicious purposes. The starting point of the attack is the Excel document that, when launched, dis...

The threat actors behind the Windows-based  Grandoreiro  banking trojan have returned in a global campaign since March 2024 following a law enforcement takedown in January. The large-scale phishing attacks, likely facilitated by other cybercriminals via a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model, target over 1,500 banks across the world, spanning more than 60 countries in Central and South America, Africa, Europe, and the Indo-Pacific, IBM X-Force said. While  Grandoreiro  is known primarily for its focus in Latin America, Spain, and Portugal, the expansion is likely a shift in strategy after attempts to  shut down its infrastructure  by Brazilian authorities. Going hand-in-hand with the broader targeting footprint are significant improvements to the malware itself, which indicates active development. "Analysis of the malware revealed major updates within the string decryption and domain generating algorithm (DGA), as well as the ability to use Mic...

The stealer malware known as  LummaC2  (aka Lumma Stealer) now features a new anti-sandbox technique that leverages the mathematical principle of trigonometry to evade detection and exfiltrate valuable information from infected hosts. The method is designed to "delay detonation of the sample until human mouse activity is detected," Outpost24 security researcher Alberto Marín  said  in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. Written in the C programming language, LummaC2 has been sold in underground forums since December 2022. The malware has since  received   iterative updates  that make it harder to analyze via control flow flattening and even allow it to deliver additional payloads. The current version of LummaC2 (v4.0) also requires its customers to use a  crypter  as an added concealing mechanism, not to mention prevent it from being leaked in its raw form. Another noteworthy update is the reliance on trigonometry to detect ...

Artificial intelligence is driving a massive shift in enterprise productivity, from GitHub Copilot's code completions to chatbots that mine internal knowledge bases for instant answers. Each new agent must authenticate to other services, quietly swelling the population of non‑human identities (NHIs) across corporate clouds. That population is already overwhelming the enterprise: many companies now juggle at least 45 machine identities for every human user . Service accounts, CI/CD bots, containers, and AI agents all need secrets, most commonly in the form of API keys, tokens, or certificates, to connect securely to other systems to do their work. GitGuardian's State of Secrets Sprawl 2025 report reveals the cost of this sprawl: over 23.7 million secrets surfaced on public GitHub in 2024 alone. And instead of making the situation better, repositories with Copilot enabled the leak of secrets 40 percent more often .  NHIs Are Not People Unlike human beings logging into systems, ...