Trend Micro | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The threat actors behind  RomCom RAT  are leveraging a network of fake websites advertising rogue versions of popular software at least since July 2022 to infiltrate targets. Cybersecurity firm Trend Micro is tracking the activity cluster under the name Void Rabisu, which is also known as Tropical Scorpius (Unit 42) and UNC2596 (Mandiant). "These lure sites are most likely only meant for a small number of targets, thus making discovery and analysis more difficult," security researchers Feike Hacquebord, Stephen Hilt, Fernando Merces, and Lord Alfred Remorin  said . Some of the impersonated apps spotted so far include AstraChat, Devolutions' Remote Desktop Manager, Gimp, GoTo Meeting, KeePass, OpenAI ChatGPT, Signal, Veeam Backup & Replication, and WinDirStat. RomCom RAT was  first chronicled  by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 in August 2022, linking it to a financially motivated group deploying  Cuba Ransomware  (aka COLDDRAW). It's worth noting that there is no

Cybersecurity researchers are warning about CAPTCHA-breaking services that are being offered for sale to bypass systems designed to distinguish legitimate users from bot traffic. "Because cybercriminals are keen on breaking CAPTCHAs accurately, several services that are primarily geared toward this market demand have been created," Trend Micro  said  in a report published last week. "These CAPTCHA-solving services don't use [optical character recognition] techniques or advanced machine learning methods; instead, they break CAPTCHAs by farming out CAPTCHA-breaking tasks to actual human solvers." CAPTCHA  – short for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart – is a tool for differentiating real human users from automated users with the goal of combating spam and restricting fake account creation. While CAPTCHA mechanisms can be a  disruptive user experience , they are seen as an effective means to counter attacks from bot-ori

A Chinese state-sponsored hacking outfit has resurfaced with a new campaign targeting government, healthcare, technology, and manufacturing entities based in Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, and Fiji after more than six months of no activity. Trend Micro  attributed  the intrusion set to a cyber espionage group it tracks under the name  Earth Longzhi , which is a subgroup within  APT41  (aka HOODOO or Winnti) and shares overlaps with various other clusters known as Earth Baku, SparklingGoblin, and GroupCC. Earth Longzhi was  first documented  by the cybersecurity firm in November 2022, detailing its attacks against various organizations located in East and Southeast Asia as well as Ukraine. Attack chains mounted by the threat actor leverage vulnerable public-facing applications as entry points to deploy the  BEHINDER web shell , and then leverage that access to drop additional payloads, including a new variant of a Cobalt Strike loader called CroxLoader. "This recent campa

A piece of new information-stealing malware called  OpcJacker  has been spotted in the wild since the second half of 2022 as part of a malvertising campaign. "OpcJacker's main functions include keylogging, taking screenshots, stealing sensitive data from browsers, loading additional modules, and replacing cryptocurrency addresses in the clipboard for hijacking purposes," Trend Micro researchers Jaromir Horejsi and Joseph C. Chen  said . The initial vector of the campaign involves a network of fake websites advertising seemingly innocuous software and cryptocurrency-related applications. The February 2023 campaign specifically singled out users in Iran under the pretext of offering a VPN service. The installer files act as a conduit to deploy OpcJacker, which is also capable of delivering next-stage payloads such as  NetSupport RAT  and a hidden virtual network computing ( hVNC ) variant for remote access. OpcJacker is concealed using a  crypter  known as Babadeda an

New research has found that it is possible for threat actors to abuse a legitimate feature in GitHub Codespaces to deliver malware to victim systems. GitHub Codespaces  is a cloud-based configurable development environment that allows users to debug, maintain, and commit changes to a given codebase from a web browser or via an integration in Visual Studio Code. It also comes with a port forwarding feature that makes it possible to access a web application that's running on a particular port within the codespace directly from the browser on a local machine for testing and debugging purposes. "You can also forward a port manually, label forwarded ports, share forwarded ports with members of your organization, share forwarded ports publicly, and add forwarded ports to the codespace configuration," GitHub  explains  in its documentation. It's  important  to note here that any forwarded port that's made public will also permit any party with knowledge of the URL

The  Raspberry Robin  worm has been used in attacks against telecommunications and government office systems across Latin America, Australia, and Europe since at least September 2022. "The main payload itself is packed with more than 10 layers for obfuscation and is capable of delivering a fake payload once it detects sandboxing and security analytics tools," Trend Micro researcher Christopher So  said  in a technical analysis published Tuesday. A majority of the infections have been detected in Argentina, followed by Australia, Mexico, Croatia, Italy, Brazil, France, India, and Colombia. Raspberry Robin, attributed to an activity cluster tracked by Microsoft as  DEV-0856 , is being increasingly  leveraged by multiple threat actors  as an initial access mechanism to deliver payloads such as  LockBit  and  Clop  ransomware. The malware is known for relying on infected USB drives as a distribution vector to download a rogue MSI installer file that deploys the main payload

High-severity security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in different endpoint detection and response (EDR) and antivirus (AV) products that could be exploited to turn them into data wipers. "This wiper runs with the permissions of an unprivileged user yet has the ability to wipe almost any file on a system, including system files, and make a computer completely unbootable," SafeBreach Labs researcher Or Yair  said . "It does all that without implementing code that touches the target files, making it fully undetectable." EDR software, by design, are capable of continually scanning a machine for potentially suspicious and malicious files, and taking appropriate action, such as deleting or quarantining them. The idea, in a nutshell, is to trick vulnerable security products into deleting legitimate files and directories on the system and render the machine inoperable by making use of specially crafted paths. This is achieved by taking advantage of what's ca

Companies based in the U.S. have been at the receiving end of an "aggressive" Qakbot malware campaign that leads to Black Basta ransomware infections on compromised networks. "In this latest campaign, the Black Basta ransomware gang is using QakBot malware to create an initial point of entry and move laterally within an organization's network," Cybereason researchers Joakim Kandefelt and Danielle Frankel  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Black Basta, which emerged in April 2022, follows the tried-and-tested approach of double extortion to steal sensitive data from targeted companies and use it as a leverage to extort cryptocurrency payments by threatening to release the stolen information. This is not the first time the ransomware crew has been observed using Qakbot (aka QBot, QuackBot, or Pinkslipbot). Last month, Trend Micro  disclosed  similar attacks that entailed the use of Qakbot to deliver the  Brute Ratel C4  framework, which, in turn,

The threat actors behind the  Black Basta   ransomware family  have been observed using the Qakbot trojan to deploy the Brute Ratel C4 framework as a second-stage payload in recent attacks. The development marks the first time the  nascent adversary simulation software  is being delivered via a Qakbot infection, cybersecurity firm Trend Micro  said  in a technical analysis released last week. The intrusion, achieved using a phishing email containing a weaponized link pointing to a ZIP archive, further entailed the use of Cobalt Strike for lateral movement. While these legitimate utilities are designed for conducting penetration testing activities, their ability to offer remote access has made them a lucrative tool in the hands of attackers looking to stealthily probe the compromised environment without attracting attention for extended periods of time. This has been compounded by the fact that a  cracked version  of Brute Ratel C4 (BRc4 v1.2.2) began circulating last month across

A now-patched critical security flaw affecting Atlassian Confluence Server that came to light a few months ago is being actively exploited for illicit cryptocurrency mining on unpatched installations. "If left unremedied and successfully exploited, this vulnerability could be used for multiple and more malicious attacks, such as a complete domain takeover of the infrastructure and the deployment information stealers, remote access trojans (RATs), and ransomware," Trend Micro threat researcher Sunil Bharti  said  in a report. The issue, tracked as  CVE-2022-26134  (CVSS score: 9.8), was addressed by the Australian software company in June 2022. In one of the infection chains observed by the cybersecurity company, the flaw was leveraged to download and run a shell script ("ro.sh") on the victim's machine, which, in turn, fetched a second shell script ("ap.sh"). The malicious code is designed to update the  PATH variable  to include additional paths

Malicious actors such as Kinsing are taking advantage of both recently disclosed and older security flaws in Oracle WebLogic Server to deliver cryptocurrency-mining malware. Cybersecurity company Trend Micro said it  found  the financially-motivated group leveraging the vulnerability to drop Python scripts with capabilities to disable operating system (OS) security features such as Security-Enhanced Linux ( SELinux ), and others. The operators behind the  Kinsing malware  have a history of scanning for vulnerable servers to co-opt them into a botnet, including that of  Redis ,  SaltStack ,  Log4Shell ,  Spring4Shell , and the Atlassian Confluence flaw ( CVE-2022-26134 ). The Kinsing actors have also been involved in campaigns against container environments via  misconfigured open Docker Daemon API ports  to launch a crypto miner and subsequently spread the malware to other containers and hosts. The latest wave of attacks entails the actor weaponizing  CVE-2020-14882  (CVSS score:

A vulnerable anti-cheat driver for the Genshin Impact video game has been leveraged by a cybercrime actor to disable antivirus programs to facilitate the deployment of ransomware, according to findings from Trend Micro. The ransomware infection, which was triggered in the last week of July 2022, banked on the fact that the driver in question ("mhyprot2.sys") is signed with a valid certificate, thereby making it possible to circumvent privileges and terminate services associated with endpoint protection applications. Genshin Impact is a popular action role-playing game that was developed and published by Shanghai-based developer miHoYo in September 2020. The driver used in the attack chain is said to have been built in August 2020, with the existence of the flaw in the module  discussed  after the release of the game, and leading to  exploits   demonstrating  the ability to kill any arbitrary process and escalate to kernel mode. The idea, in a nutshell, is to use the leg

A pair of reports from cybersecurity firms  SEKOIA  and  Trend Micro  sheds light on a new campaign undertaken by a Chinese threat actor named Lucky Mouse that involves leveraging a trojanized version of a cross-platform messaging app to backdoor systems. Infection chains leverage a chat application called MiMi, with its installer files compromised to download and install HyperBro samples for the Windows operating system and rshell artifacts for Linux and macOS. As many as 13 different entities located in Taiwan and the Philippines have been at the receiving end of the attacks, eight of whom have been hit with rshell. The first victim of rshell was reported in mid-July 2021. Lucky Mouse, also called  APT27 , Bronze Union, Emissary Panda, and Iron Tiger, is known to be active since 2013 and has a history of gaining access to targeted networks in pursuit of its political and military intelligence-collection objectives aligned with China. The advanced persistent threat actor (APT)

The operators of the Gootkit access-as-a-service ( AaaS ) malware have resurfaced with updated techniques to compromise unsuspecting victims. "In the past, Gootkit used freeware installers to mask malicious files; now it uses legal documents to trick users into downloading these files," Trend Micro researchers Buddy Tancio and Jed Valderama  said  in a write-up last week. The findings build on a previous report from eSentire, which  disclosed  in January of widespread attacks aimed at employees of accounting and law firms to deploy malware on infected systems. Gootkit is part of the proliferating underground ecosystem of access brokers, who are known to provide other malicious actors a pathway into corporate networks for a price, paving the way for actual damaging attacks such as ransomware. The loader utilizes malicious search engine results, a technique called  SEO poisoning , to lure unsuspecting users into visiting compromised websites hosting malware-laced ZIP pac

ASUS routers have emerged as the target of a nascent botnet called Cyclops Blink , almost a month after it was revealed the malware abused WatchGuard firewall appliances as a stepping stone to gain remote access to breached networks. According to a  new report  published by Trend Micro, the botnet's "main purpose is to build an infrastructure for further attacks on high-value targets," given that none of the infected hosts "belong to critical organizations, or those that have an evident value on economic, political, or military espionage." Intelligence agencies from the U.K. and the U.S. have  characterized  Cyclops Blink as a replacement framework for  VPNFilter , another malware that has exploited network devices, primarily small office/home office (SOHO) routers, and network-attached storage (NAS) devices. Both VPNFilter and Cyclops Blink have been attributed to a Russian state-sponsored actor tracked as Sandworm (aka Voodoo Bear), which has also been li

A politically motivated advanced persistent threat (APT) group has expanded its malware arsenal to include a new remote access trojan (RAT) in its espionage attacks aimed at Indian military and diplomatic entities. Called  CapraRAT  by Trend Micro, the implant is an Android RAT that exhibits a high "degree of crossover" with another Windows malware known as CrimsonRAT that's associated with Earth Karkaddan, a threat actor that's also tracked under the monikers APT36, Operation C-Major, PROJECTM, Mythic Leopard, and Transparent Tribe. The first concrete signs of APT36's existence  appeared  in  2016  as the group began distributing information-stealing malware through phishing emails with malicious PDF attachments targeting Indian military and government personnel. The group is believed to be of  Pakistani origin  and operational since at least 2013. The threat actor is also known to be consistent in its modus operandi, with the attacks predominantly banking o