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A previously undocumented threat activity cluster dubbed Earth Minotaur is leveraging the MOONSHINE exploit kit and an unreported Android-cum-Windows backdoor called DarkNimbus to facilitate long-term surveillance operations targeting Tibetans and Uyghurs. "Earth Minotaur uses MOONSHINE to deliver the DarkNimbus backdoor to Android and Windows devices, targeting WeChat, and possibly making it a cross-platform threat," Trend Micro researchers Joseph C Chen and Daniel Lunghi said in an analysis published today. "MOONSHINE exploits multiple known vulnerabilities in Chromium-based browsers and applications, requiring users to update software regularly to prevent attacks." Countries affected by Earth Minotaur's attacks span Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Nepal, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, and the U.S. MOONSHINE first came to light in September 2019 as part of cyber attacks targeting t...

Canada on Monday announced a ban on the use of apps from Tencent and Kaspersky on government mobile devices, citing an "unacceptable level of risk to privacy and security." "The Government of Canada is committed to keeping government information and networks secure," the Canadian government  said . "We regularly monitor potential threats and take immediate action to address risks." To that end, Tencent's WeChat and Kaspersky's suite of applications have been removed from government-issued mobile devices effective October 30, 2023. Going forward, users of these devices will be blocked from downloading the apps. "We are taking a risk-based approach to cyber security by removing access to these applications on government mobile devices," Anita Anand, President of the Treasury Board, said in a statement, adding the apps "provide considerable access to the device's contents." WeChat is a Chinese instant messaging, social med...

A new piece of ransomware is spreading rapidly across China that has already infected more than 100,000 computers in the last four days as a result of a supply-chain attack... and the number of infected users is continuously increasing every hour. What's Interesting? Unlike almost every ransomware malware, the new virus doesn't demand ransom payments in Bitcoin. Instead, the attacker is asking victims to pay 110 yuan (nearly USD 16) in ransom through WeChat Pay—the payment feature offered by China's most popular messaging app. Ransomware + Password Stealer — Unlike WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware outbreaks that caused worldwide chaos last year, the new Chinese ransomware has been targeting only Chinese users. It also includes an additional ability to steal users' account passwords for Alipay, NetEase 163 email service, Baidu Cloud Disk, Jingdong (JD.com), Taobao, Tmall , AliWangWang, and QQ websites. A Supply Chain Attack — According to Chinese cybers...

Not every security vulnerability is high risk on its own - but in the hands of an advanced attacker, even small weaknesses can escalate into major breaches. These five real vulnerabilities, uncovered by Intruder's bug-hunting team, reveal how attackers turn overlooked flaws into serious security incidents. 1. Stealing AWS Credentials with a Redirect Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) is a common vulnerability that can have a significant impact, especially in cloud-hosted applications. If a web application fetches resources from user-supplied URLs, care should be taken to ensure attackers can't manipulate requests to access unintended resources. While assessing a home-moving app running in AWS, our team tested common SSRF bypass techniques. The attack chain was as follows: the app sent a webhook request to the attacker's web server, which responded with a 302 redirect to AWS's metadata service. The app followed the redirect and logged the response, which exposed sensitive metadat...