Telecom | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A major telecommunications company located in Asia was allegedly breached by Chinese state-sponsored hackers who spent over four years inside its systems, according to a new report from incident response firm Sygnia. The cybersecurity company is tracking the activity under the name Weaver Ant , describing the threat actor as stealthy and highly persistent. The name of the telecom provider was not disclosed. "Using web shells and tunneling, the attackers maintained persistence and facilitated cyber espionage," Sygnia said . "The group behind this intrusion [...] aimed to gain and maintain continuous access to telecommunication providers and facilitate cyber espionage by collecting sensitive information." The attack chain is said to have involved the exploitation of a public-facing application to drop two different web shells, an encrypted variant of China Chopper and a previously undocumented malicious tool dubbed INMemory. It's worth noting that China Choppe...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new malware campaign that leverages fake CAPTCHA verification checks to deliver the infamous Lumma information stealer. "The campaign is global, with Netskope Threat Labs tracking victims targeted in Argentina, Colombia, the United States, the Philippines, and other countries around the world," Leandro Fróes, senior threat research engineer at Netskope Threat Labs, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The campaign also spans multiple industries, including healthcare, banking, and marketing, with the telecom industry having the highest number of organizations targeted." The attack chain begins when a victim visits a compromised website, which directs them to a bogus CAPTCHA page that specifically instructs the site visitor to copy and paste a command into the Run prompt in Windows that uses the native mshta.exe binary to download and execute an HTA file from a remote server. It's worth noting...

The latest Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 Cloud Threat Report found that sensitive data is found in 66% of cloud storage buckets. This data is vulnerable to ransomware attacks. The SANS Institute recently reported that these attacks can be performed by abusing the cloud provider's storage security controls and default settings. "In just the past few months, I have witnessed two different methods for executing a ransomware attack using nothing but legitimate cloud security features," warns Brandon Evans, security consultant and SANS Certified Instructor. Halcyon disclosed an attack campaign that leveraged one of Amazon S3's native encryption mechanisms, SSE-C, to encrypt each of the target buckets. A few months prior, security consultant Chris Farris demonstrated how attackers could perform a similar attack using a different AWS security feature, KMS keys with external key material, using simple scripts generated by ChatGPT. "Clearly, this topic is top-of-mind for both threat actors and ...

U.S. telecom service provider T-Mobile said it recently detected attempts made by bad actors to infiltrate its systems in recent weeks but noted that no sensitive data was accessed. These intrusion attempts "originated from a wireline provider's network that was connected to ours," Jeff Simon, chief security officer at T-Mobile, said in a statement. "We see no instances of prior attempts like this." The company further said its security defenses prevented the threat actors from disrupting its services or obtaining customer information. It has since confirmed that it cut off connectivity to the unnamed provider's network. It did not explicitly attribute the activity to any known threat actor or group, but noted that it has shared its findings with the U.S. government. Speaking to Bloomberg, Simon said the company observed the attackers running discovery-related commands on routers to probe the topography of the network, adding the attacks were containe...

Monitoring evolving DDoS trends is essential for anticipating threats and adapting defensive strategies. The comprehensive Gcore Radar Report for the first half of 2024 provides detailed insights into DDoS attack data, showcasing changes in attack patterns and the broader landscape of cyber threats. Here, we share a selection of findings from the full report. Key Takeaways The number of DDoS attacks in H1 2024 has increased by 46% compared to the same period last year, reaching 445K in Q2 2024. Compared to data for the previous six months (Q3–4 2023), it increased by 34%. Peak attack power increased slightly: The most powerful attack in H1 2024 reached 1.7 Tbps. By comparison, in 2023, it was 1.6 Tbps. Although there has only been an increase of 0.1 Tbps in a year, this still indicates a gain in power that poses a significant danger. To put this into perspective, a terabit per second (Tbps) represents a massive amount of data flooding a network, equivalent to over 212,000 high-d...

A previously unknown Linux remote access trojan called Krasue has been observed targeting telecom companies in Thailand by threat actors to main covert access to victim networks at lease since 2021. Named after a  nocturnal female spirit  of Southeast Asian folklore, the malware is "able to conceal its own presence during the initialization phase," Group-IB  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The exact initial access vector used to deploy Krasue is currently not known, although it's suspected that it could be via vulnerability exploitation, credential brute-force attacks, or downloaded as part of a bogus software package or binary. The malware's core functionalities are realized through a rootkit that masquerades as an unsigned VMware driver and allows it to maintain persistence on the host without attracting any attention. The rootkit is derived from open-source projects such as Diamorphine, Suterusu, and Rooty. This has raised the possibility that...