Winnti Hacking Group | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The China-aligned espionage-focused actor dubbed Winnti has set its sights on government organizations in Hong Kong as part of an ongoing campaign dubbed  Operation CuckooBees . Active since at least 2007,  Winnti  (aka APT41, Barium, Bronze Atlas, and Wicked Panda) is the name designated to a prolific cyber threat group that carries out Chinese state-sponsored espionage activity, predominantly aimed at stealing technology secrets from organizations in developed economies. The threat actor's campaigns have targeted healthcare, telecoms, high-tech, media, agriculture, and education sectors, with infection chains primarily relying on spear-phishing emails with attachments to initially break into the victims' networks. Earlier this May, Cybereason  disclosed  long-running attacks orchestrated by the group since 2019 to siphon intellectual property from technology and manufacturing companies mainly located in East Asia, Western Europe, and North America. The i...

Cybersecurity researchers claim to have discovered a previously undocumented backdoor specifically designed for Microsoft SQL servers that could allow a remote attacker to control an already compromised system stealthily. Dubbed Skip-2.0 , the backdoor malware is a post-exploitation tool that runs in the memory and lets remote attackers connect to any account on the server running MSSQL version 11 and version 12 by using a "magic password." What's more? The malware manages to remain undetected on the victim's MSSQL Server by disabling the compromised machine's logging functions, event publishing, and audit mechanisms every time the "magic password" is used. With these capabilities, an attacker can stealthily copy, modify, or delete the content stored in a database, the impact of which varies from application to application integrated with targeted servers. "This could be used, for example, to manipulate in-game currencies for financial gai...

In cybersecurity, confidence is a double-edged sword. Organizations often operate under a false sense of security , believing that patched vulnerabilities, up-to-date tools, polished dashboards, and glowing risk scores guarantee safety. The reality is a bit of a different story. In the real world, checking the right boxes doesn't equal being secure. As Sun Tzu warned, "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." Two and a half millennia later, the concept still holds: your organization's cybersecurity defenses must be strategically validated under real-world conditions to ensure your business's very survival. Today, more than ever, you need Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) , the essential strategy that's still missing from most security frameworks. The Danger of False Confidence Conventional wisdom suggests that if you've patched known bugs, deployed a stack of well-regarded security tools, and passed the nec...