Ukrainian Hackers | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A pro-Hamas threat actor known as  Gaza Cyber Gang  is targeting Palestinian entities using an updated version of a backdoor dubbed Pierogi. The findings come from SentinelOne, which has given the malware the name Pierogi++ owing to the fact that it's implemented in the C++ programming language unlike its Delphi- and Pascal-based predecessor. "Recent Gaza Cybergang activities show consistent targeting of Palestinian entities, with no observed significant changes in dynamics since the start of the Israel-Hamas war," security researcher Aleksandar Milenkoski  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Gaza Cyber Gang, believed to be  active since at least  2012, has a history of striking targets throughout the Middle East, particularly Israel and Palestine, often leveraging spear-phishing as a method of initial access. Some of the  notable   malware   families  in its  arsenal   include  BarbWire, DropBook, LastConn, Molerat Loader, Micropsia, NimbleMamba, SharpSt

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has  issued  an alert warning of cyber attacks against state authorities in the country that deploy a legitimate remote access software named Remcos. The mass phishing campaign has been attributed to a threat actor it tracks as  UAC-0050 , with the agency describing the activity as likely motivated by espionage given the toolset employed. The bogus emails that kick-start the infection sequence claim to be from Ukrainian telecom company Ukrtelecom and come bearing a decoy RAR archive. Of the two files present in the file, one is a password-protected RAR archive that's over 600MB and the other is a text file containing the password to open the RAR file. Embedded within the second RAR archive is an executable that leads to the installation of the Remcos remote access software, granting the attacker full access to commandeer compromised computers. Remcos , short for remote control and surveillance software, is offered by B

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Ukraine has come under a fresh onslaught of ransomware attacks that mirror previous intrusions attributed to the Russia-based Sandworm nation-state group. Slovak cybersecurity company ESET, which dubbed the new ransomware strain  RansomBoggs , said the attacks against several Ukrainian entities were first detected on November 21, 2022. "While the malware written in .NET is new, its deployment is similar to previous attacks attributed to Sandworm," the company  said  in a series of tweets Friday. The development comes as the Sandworm actor, tracked by Microsoft as Iridium, was implicated for a set of attacks aimed at transportation and logistics sectors in Ukraine and Poland with another ransomware strain called  Prestige  in October 2022. The RansomBoggs activity is said to employ a PowerShell script to distribute the ransomware, with the former "almost identical" to the one used in the  Industroyer2 malware  attacks that came to light in April. According to

Ukrainian law enforcement authorities on Friday disclosed that it had "neutralized" a hacking group operating from the city of Lviv that it said acted on behalf of Russian interests. The group specialized in the sales of 30 million accounts belonging to citizens from Ukraine and the European Union on the dark web and netted a profit of $372,000 (14 million UAH) through electronic payment systems like YooMoney, Qiwi, and WebMoney that are outlawed in the country. "Their 'wholesale clients' were pro-kremlin propagandists," the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU)  said  in a press release. "It was them who used the received identification data of Ukrainian and foreign citizens to spread fake 'news' from the front and sow panic." The goal behind the campaign was "large-scale destabilization in multiple countries," it stated, adding the hacked accounts were used to propagate false information about the socio-political situation in U

The Cyber Police of Ukraine last week disclosed that it apprehended nine members of a criminal gang that embezzled 100 million hryvnias via hundreds of phishing sites that claimed to offer financial assistance to Ukrainian citizens as part of a campaign aimed at capitalizing on the ongoing conflict. "Criminals created more than 400 phishing links to obtain bank card data of citizens and appropriate money from their accounts," the agency  said  in a press statement last week. "The perpetrators may face up to 15 years behind bars." The law enforcement operation culminated in the seizure of computer equipment, mobile phones, bank cards as well as the criminal proceeds illicitly obtained through the scheme. Some of the rogue domains registered by the actors included ross0.yolasite[.]com, foundationua[.]com, ua-compensation[.]buzz, www.bless12[.]store, help-compensation[.]xyz, newsukraine10.yolasite[.]com, and euro24dopomoga0.yolasite[.]com, among others. The mali

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has  cautioned  of a new set of spear-phishing attacks exploiting the "Follina" flaw in the Windows operating system to deploy password-stealing malware. Attributing the intrusions to a Russian nation-state group tracked as APT28 (aka Fancy Bear or Sofacy), the agency said the attacks commence with a lure document titled "Nuclear Terrorism A Very Real Threat.rtf" that, when opened, exploits the recently disclosed vulnerability to download and execute a malware called CredoMap. Follina ( CVE-2022-30190 , CVSS score: 7.8), which concerns a case of remote code execution affecting the Windows Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT), was addressed by Microsoft on June 14, as part of its Patch Tuesday updates , but not before it was subjected to widespread zero-day exploit activity by numerous threat actors. According to an independent report published by Malwarebytes,  CredoMap  is a variant of the .NET-based credenti

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of phishing attacks that deploy an information-stealing malware called Jester Stealer on compromised systems. The mass email campaign carries the subject line "chemical attack" and contains a link to a macro-laced Microsoft Excel file, opening which leads to computers getting infected with Jester Stealer. The attack, which requires potential victims to enable macros after opening the document, works by downloading and executing an .EXE file that is retrieved from compromised web resources, CERT-UA detailed. Jester Stealer, as documented by Cyble in February 2022, comes with features to steal and transmit login credentials, cookies, and credit card information along with data from passwords managers, chat messengers, email clients, crypto wallets, and gaming apps to the attackers. It's purchasable for $99 per month or $249 for lifetime access. "The hackers get the stolen data via Telegram usi

A  growing number of threat actors  are using the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war as a lure in various phishing and malware campaigns, even as critical infrastructure entities continue to be heavily targeted. "Government-backed actors from China, Iran, North Korea and Russia, as well as various unattributed groups, have used various Ukraine war-related themes in an effort to get targets to open malicious emails or click malicious links," Google Threat Analysis Group's (TAG) Billy Leonard  said  in a report. "Financially motivated and criminal actors are also using current events as a means for targeting users," Leonard added. One notable threat actor is Curious Gorge, which TAG has attributed to China People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force (PLA SSF) and has been observed striking government, military, logistics and manufacturing organizations in Ukraine, Russia and Central Asia. Attacks aimed at Russia have singled out several governmental entiti

A 32-year-old Ukrainian national has been  sentenced to five years in prison  in the U.S. for the individual's criminal work as a "high-level hacker" in the financially motivated group FIN7. Denys Iarmak, who worked as a penetration tester for the cartel from November 2016 through November 2018, had been previously arrested in Bangkok, Thailand in November 2019, before being extradited to the U.S. in May 2020. In November 2021, Iarmak had pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit computer hacking. FIN7 has been attributed to a number of attacks that have led to the theft of more than 20 million customer card records from over 6,500 individual point-of-sale terminals at more than 3,600 separate business locations in the U.S, costing the victims $1 billion in losses. The criminal gang, also known as Carbanak Group and the Navigator Group, has a track record of hitting restaurant, gambling, and hospitality indu

At least three different advanced persistent threat (APT) groups from across the world have launched spear-phishing campaigns in mid-March 2022 using the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war as a lure to distribute malware and steal sensitive information. The campaigns, undertaken by El Machete, Lyceum, and SideWinder, have targeted a variety of sectors, including energy, financial, and governmental sectors in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. "The attackers use decoys ranging from official-looking documents to news articles or even job postings, depending on the targets and region," Check Point Research  said  in a report. "Many of these lure documents utilize malicious macros or template injection to gain an initial foothold into the targeted organizations, and then launch malware attacks." The infection chains of  El Machete , a Spanish-speaking threat actor first documented in August 2014 by Kaspersky, involve the use of macro-laced decoy doc

A Belarusian threat actor known as Ghostwriter (aka UNC1151) has been spotted leveraging the recently disclosed browser-in-the-browser (BitB) technique as part of their credential phishing campaigns exploiting the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian conflict. The method, which  masquerades  as a legitimate domain by simulating a browser window within the browser, makes it possible to mount convincing social engineering campaigns. "Ghostwriter actors have quickly adopted this new technique, combining it with a previously observed technique, hosting credential phishing landing pages on compromised sites," Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG)  said  in a new report, using it to siphon credentials entered by unsuspected victims to a remote server. Among other groups  using the war as a lure  in phishing and malware campaigns to deceive targets into opening fraudulent emails or links include  Mustang Panda  and  Scarab  as well as nation-state actors from Iran, North Korea, and Russia

In what's an act of deliberate sabotage, the developer behind the popular "node-ipc" NPM package shipped a new tampered version to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine, raising concerns about security in the open-source and the  software supply chain . Affecting versions 10.1.1 and 10.1.2 of the library, the alterations introduced by its maintainer RIAEvangelist brought about undesirable behavior by targeting users with IP addresses located either in Russia or Belarus, and wiping arbitrary file contents and replacing them with a heart emoji. Node-ipc is a prominent  node module  used for local and remote inter-process communication ( IPC ) with support for Linux, macOS, and Windows. It has over 1.1 million weekly downloads. "A very clear abuse and a critical supply chain security incident will occur for any system on which this NPM package will be called upon, if that matches a geo-location of either Russia or Belarus," Synk researcher Liran Tal  said  

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said it has detained a "hacker" who offered technical assistance to the invading Russian troops by providing mobile communication services inside the Ukrainian territory. The anonymous suspect is said to have broadcasted text messages to Ukrainian officials, including security officers and civil servants, proposing that they surrender and take the side of Russia. The individual has also been accused of routing phone calls from Russia to the mobile phones of Russian troops in Ukraine. "Up to a thousand calls were made through this hacker in one day. Many of them are from the top leadership of the enemy army," the SBU  alleged , adding it confiscated the equipment that was used to pull off the operation. Besides implicating the hacker for helping Russia make anonymous phone calls to its military forces based in Ukraine, the agency said the hacker passed commands and instructions to different groups of "Russian invaders.&

Two weeks after details emerged about a second data wiper strain delivered in attacks against Ukraine, yet another destructive malware has been detected amid Russia's continuing military invasion of the country. Slovak cybersecurity company ESET dubbed the third wiper " CaddyWiper ," which it said it first observed on March 14 around 9:38 a.m. UTC. Metadata associated with the executable (" caddy.exe ") shows that the malware was compiled at 7:19 a.m. UTC, a little over two hours prior to its deployment. CaddyWiper is notable for the fact that it doesn't share any similarities with previously discovered wipers in Ukraine, including  HermeticWiper  (aka FoxBlade or KillDisk) and  IsaacWiper  (aka Lasainraw), the two of which have been deployed in systems belonging to government and commercial entities. "The ultimate goal of the attackers is the same as with IsaacWiper and HermeticWiper: make the systems unusable by erasing user data and partition i

A broad range of threat actors, including Fancy Bear, Ghostwriter, and Mustang Panda, have launched phishing campaigns against Ukraine, Poland, and other European entities amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) said it took down two Blogspot domains that were used by the nation-state group FancyBear (aka APT28) – which is attributed to Russia's GRU military intelligence – as a landing page for its social engineering attacks. The disclosure comes close on the heels of an advisory from the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA)  warning  of phishing campaigns targeting Ukr.net users that involve sending messages from compromised accounts containing links to attacker-controlled credential harvesting pages. Another cluster of threat activity concerns webmail users of Ukr.net, Yandex.ru, wp.pl, rambler.ru, meta.ua, and i.ua, who have been at the receiving end of phishing attacks by a Belarusian threat actor tracked as Ghostwrit

Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) warned of new phishing attacks aimed at its citizens by leveraging compromised email accounts belonging to three different Indian entities with the goal of compromising their inboxes and stealing sensitive information. The agency  cautioned  that the emails arrive with the subject line "Увага" (meaning "Attention") and claim to be from a domestic email service called Ukr.net, when in actuality, the email address of the sender is "muthuprakash.b@tvsrubber[.]com." The messages purportedly warn the recipients of an unauthorized attempt to log in to their accounts from an IP address based out of the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, further prompting them to click on a link to change their passwords with immediate effect. "After following the link and entering the password, it gets to the attackers," CERT-UA noted in a Facebook post over the weekend. "In this way, they gain access to

Cyber criminals and hacktivist groups are increasingly using the Telegram messaging app to coordinate their activities, leak data, and spread disinformation, as the Russia-Ukraine conflict enters its eighth day. A new analysis by Israeli cybersecurity company Check Point Research has  found  that "user volume grew a hundred folds daily on Telegram related groups, peaking at 200,000 per group." Prominent among the groups are anti-Russian cyber attack groups, including the Ukraine government-backed IT Army, which has urged its more 270,000 members to conduct distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Russian entities. Other hacktivist-oriented Telegram groups used to coordinate the attacks on Russian targets via DDoS, SMS or call-based attacks are Anna_ and Mark_, Check Point researchers noted. That said, there may be more to these attacks than meets the eye. "It seems that many of the hacktivist groups are more focused on building self-reputation and recei

As the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict continues to escalate, the Russian government on Thursday  released  a massive list containing 17,576 IP addresses and 166 domains that it said are behind a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks aimed at its domestic infrastructure. Some of the noticeable domains in the listing released by Russia's National Coordination Center for Computer Incidents (NCCCI) included the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and websites of several media publications such as the USA Today, 24News.ge, megatv.ge, and Ukraine's Korrespondent magazine. As part of its recommendations to counter the DDoS attacks, the agency is urging organizations to ringfence network devices, enable logging, change passwords associated with key infrastructure elements, turn off automatic software updates, disable third-party plugins on websites, enforce data backups, and watch out for phishing attacks. "Use Russ

Details of a new nation-state sponsored phishing campaign have been uncovered setting its sights on European governmental entities in what's seen as an attempt to obtain intelligence on refugee and supply movement in the region. Enterprise security company Proofpoint, which detected the malicious emails for the first time on February 24, 2022, dubbed the social engineering attacks " Asylum Ambuscade ." "The email included a malicious macro attachment which utilized social engineering themes pertaining to the Emergency Meeting of the NATO Security Council held on February 23, 2022," researchers Michael Raggi and Zydeca Cass  said  in a report published Tuesday. "The email also contained a malicious attachment which attempted to download malicious Lua malware named SunSeed and targeted European government personnel tasked with managing transportation and population movement in Europe." The findings build on an  advisory  issued by the State Service