Watering Hole Attack | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged multiple in-the-wild exploit campaigns that leveraged now-patched flaws in Apple Safari and Google Chrome browsers to infect mobile users with information-stealing malware. "These campaigns delivered n-day exploits for which patches were available, but would still be effective against unpatched devices," Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) researcher Clement Lecigne said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The activity, observed between November 2023 and July 2024, is notable for delivering the exploits by means of a watering hole attack on Mongolian government websites, cabinet.gov[.]mn and mfa.gov[.]mn. A watering hole attack, also called a strategic website compromise attack, is a form of cyber attack that targets groups of users or those within a particular industry by compromising websites that they commonly visit in order to serve them with malware and gain access to their systems. The intrusion set has been attributed wi...

The China-linked threat actor known as  Evasive Panda  orchestrated both watering hole and supply chain attacks targeting Tibetan users at least since September 2023. The end goal of the attacks is to deliver malicious downloaders for Windows and macOS that deploy a known backdoor called MgBot and a previously undocumented Windows implant known as Nightdoor. The findings come from ESET, which said the attackers compromised at least three websites to carry out watering-hole attacks as well as a supply-chain compromise of a Tibetan software company. The operation was discovered in January 2024. Evasive Panda, active since 2012 and also known as Bronze Highland and Daggerfly, was  previously disclosed  by the Slovak cybersecurity firm in April 2023 as having targeted an international non-governmental organization (NGO) in Mainland China with MgBot. Another report from Broadcom-owned Symantec around the same time  implicated  the adversary to a cyber espi...

"A boxer derives the greatest advantage from his sparring partner…" — Epictetus, 50–135 AD Hands up. Chin tucked. Knees bent. The bell rings, and both boxers meet in the center and circle. Red throws out three jabs, feints a fourth, and—BANG—lands a right hand on Blue down the center. This wasn't Blue's first day and despite his solid defense in front of the mirror, he feels the pressure. But something changed in the ring; the variety of punches, the feints, the intensity – it's nothing like his coach's simulations. Is my defense strong enough to withstand this? He wonders, do I even have a defense? His coach reassures him "If it weren't for all your practice, you wouldn't have defended those first jabs. You've got a defense—now you need to calibrate it. And that happens in the ring." Cybersecurity is no different. You can have your hands up—deploying the right architecture, policies, and security measures—but the smallest gap in your defense could let an attacker land a kn...

At least eight websites associated with shipping, logistics, and financial services companies in Israel were targeted as part of a watering hole attack. Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity company ClearSky attributed the attacks with low confidence to an Iranian threat actor tracked as  Tortoiseshell , which is also called Crimson Sandstorm (previously Curium), Imperial Kitten, and TA456. "The infected sites collect preliminary user information through a script," ClearSky  said  in a technical report published Tuesday. Most of the impacted websites have been stripped of the rogue code. Tortoiseshell  is known to be active since at least July 2018, with  early attacks  targeting IT providers in Saudi Arabia. It has also been observed  setting up fake hiring websites  for U.S. military veterans in a bid to trick them into downloading remote access trojans. That said, this is not the first time Iranian activity clusters have set their sights on the Is...

Israeli spyware vendor Candiru, which was  added  to an economic blocklist by the U.S. government this month, is said to have reportedly waged "watering hole" attacks against high-profile entities in the U.K. and the Middle East, new findings reveal. "The victimized websites belong to media outlets in the U.K., Yemen, and Saudi Arabia, as well as to Hezbollah; to government institutions in Iran (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Syria (including the Ministry of Electricity), and Yemen (including the Ministries of Interior and Finance); to internet service providers in Yemen and Syria; and to aerospace/military technology companies in Italy and South Africa," ESET  said  in a new report. "The attackers also created a website mimicking a medical trade fair in Germany." The strategic web compromises are believed to have occurred in two waves, the first commencing as early as March 2020 before ending in August 2020, and the second string of attacks beginning in...

Google researchers on Thursday disclosed that it found a watering hole attack in late August exploiting a now-patched zero-day in macOS operating system and targeting Hong Kong websites related to a media outlet and a prominent pro-democracy labor and political group to deliver a never-before-seen backdoor on compromised machines. "Based on our findings, we believe this threat actor to be a well-resourced group, likely state backed, with access to their own software engineering team based on the quality of the payload code," Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) researcher Erye Hernandez  said  in a report. Tracked as CVE-2021-30869 (CVSS score: 7.8), the security shortcoming concerns a type confusion vulnerability affecting the XNU kernel component that could cause a malicious application to execute arbitrary code with the highest privileges. Apple originally addressed the issue for macOS Big Sur devices as part of a security update shipped on February 1, only to follow...

An adversary known for its  watering hole attacks  against government entities has been linked to a slew of newly detected intrusions targeting various organizations in Central Asia and the Middle East. The malicious activity, collectively named "EmissarySoldier," has been attributed to a threat actor called LuckyMouse, and is said to have happened in 2020 with the goal of obtaining geopolitical insights in the region. The attacks involved deploying a toolkit dubbed SysUpdate (aka Soldier) in a number of breached organizations, including government and diplomatic agencies, telecom providers, a TV media company, and a commercial bank. LuckyMouse , also referred to as APT27 and Emissary Panda, is a sophisticated cyberespionage group that has a history of breaching multiple government networks in Central Asia and the Middle East. The actor has also been linked to cyberattacks aimed at transnational organizations such as the International Civil Aviation Organization ( ICAO )...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details about a new watering hole attack targeting the Korean diaspora that exploits vulnerabilities in web browsers such as Google Chrome and Internet Explorer to deploy malware for espionage purposes. Dubbed " Operation Earth Kitsune " by Trend Micro, the campaign involves the use of SLUB (for SLack and githUB) malware and two new backdoors —  dneSpy and agfSpy  — to exfiltrate system information and gain additional control of the compromised machine. The attacks were observed during the months of March, May, and September, according to the cybersecurity firm. Watering hole attacks allow a bad actor to compromise a targeted business by compromising a carefully selected website by inserting an exploit with an intention to gain access to the victim's device and infect it with malware. Operation Earth Kitsune is said to have deployed the spyware samples on websites associated with North Korea, although access to these websites...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered an espionage campaign that has targeted a national data center of an unnamed central Asian country in order to conduct watering hole attacks. The campaign is believed to be active covertly since fall 2017 but was spotted in March by security researchers from Kaspersky Labs, who have attributed these attacks to a Chinese-speaking threat actor group called LuckyMouse . LuckyMouse, also known as Iron Tiger, EmissaryPanda, APT 27 and Threat Group-3390, is the same group of Chinese hackers who was found targeting Asian countries with Bitcoin mining malware early this year. The group has been active since at least 2010 and was behind many previous attack campaigns resulting in the theft of massive amounts of data from the directors and managers of US-based defense contractors. This time the group chose a national data center as its target from an unnamed country in Central Asia in an attempt to gain "access to a wide range of government ...