SideCopy | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Indian government entities and the defense sector have been targeted by a phishing campaign that's engineered to drop Rust-based malware for intelligence gathering. The activity, first detected in October 2023, has been codenamed  Operation RusticWeb  by enterprise security firm SEQRITE. "New Rust-based payloads and encrypted PowerShell commands have been utilized to exfiltrate confidential documents to a web-based service engine, instead of a dedicated command-and-control (C2) server," security researcher Sathwik Ram Prakki  said . Tactical overlaps have been uncovered between the cluster and those widely tracked under the monikers  Transparent Tribe  and SideCopy, both of which are assessed to be linked to Pakistan. SideCopy is also a suspected subordinate element within Transparent Tribe. Last month, SEQRITE  detailed  multiple campaigns undertaken by the threat actor targeting Indian government bodies to deliver numerous trojans such as AllaKore RAT, Ares RAT, an

The suspected Pakistan-aligned threat actor known as  SideCopy  has been observed leveraging themes related to the Indian military research organization as part of an ongoing phishing campaign. This involves using a ZIP archive lure pertaining to India's Defence Research and Development Organization ( DRDO ) to deliver a malicious payload capable of harvesting sensitive information, Fortinet FortiGuard Labs  said  in a new report. The cyber espionage group, with  activity  dating back to at least 2019, targets entities that align with Pakistan government interests. It's believed to share overlaps with another Pakistani hacking crew called  Transparent Tribe . SideCopy's use of DRDO-related decoys for malware distribution was previously flagged by  Cyble  and Chinese cybersecurity firm  QiAnXin  in March 2023, and again by  Team Cymru  last month. Interestingly, the same attack chains have been observed to load and execute Action RAT as well as an open source remote ac

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

A Pakistani threat actor successfully socially engineered a number of ministries in Afghanistan and a shared government computer in India to steal sensitive Google, Twitter, and Facebook credentials from its targets and stealthily obtain access to government portals. Malwarebytes' latest findings go into detail about the new tactics and tools adopted by the APT group known as  SideCopy , which is so-called because of its attempts to mimic the infection chains associated with another group tracked as  SideWinder  and mislead attribution. "The lures used by SideCopy APT are usually archive files that have embedded one of these files: LNK, Microsoft Publisher or Trojanized Applications," Malwarebytes researcher Hossein Jazi  said , adding the embedded files are tailored to target government and military officials based in Afghanistan and India. The revelation comes close on the heels of  disclosures  that Meta took steps to block malicious activities carried out by the