SocGholish | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

An updated version of a malware loader known as BLISTER is being used as part of SocGholish infection chains to distribute an open-source command-and-control (C2) framework called  Mythic . "New BLISTER update includes keying feature that allows for precise targeting of victim networks and lowers exposure within VM/sandbox environments," Elastic Security Labs researchers Salim Bitam and Daniel Stepanic  said  in a technical report published late last month. BLISTER was  first uncovered  by the company in December 2021 acting as a conduit to distribute Cobalt Strike and BitRAT payloads on compromised systems. The use of the malware alongside  SocGholish  (aka FakeUpdates), a JavaScript-based downloader malware, to deliver Mythic was  previously disclosed  by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 in July 2023. In these attacks, BLISTER is embedded within a legitimate VLC Media Player library in an attempt to get around security software and infiltrat...

A new analysis of Raspberry Robin's attack infrastructure has  revealed  that it's possible for other threat actors to repurpose the infections for their own malicious activities, making it an even more potent threat. Raspberry Robin (aka QNAP worm), attributed to a threat actor dubbed DEV-0856, is a malware that has  increasingly   come under the radar  for being used in attacks aimed at finance, government, insurance, and telecom entities. Given its use by multiple threat actors to drop a wide range of payloads such as SocGholish , Bumblebee ,  TrueBot ,  IcedID , and  LockBit  ransomware, it's believed to be a pay-per-install (PPI) botnet capable of serving next-stage malware. Raspberry Robin, notably, employs infected USB drives as a propagation mechanism and leverages breached QNAP network-attached storage (NAS) devices as first-level command-and-control (C2). Cybersecurity firm SEKOIA said it was able to identify at least eight vi...