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A Ukrainian national has been sentenced to more than 13 years in prison and ordered to pay $16 million in restitution for carrying out thousands of ransomware attacks and extorting victims. Yaroslav Vasinskyi (aka Rabotnik), 24, along with his co-conspirators part of the  REvil ransomware group  orchestrated more than 2,500 ransomware attacks and demanded ransom payments in cryptocurrency totaling more than $700 million. "The co-conspirators demanded ransom payments in cryptocurrency and used cryptocurrency exchangers and mixing services to hide their ill-gotten gains," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ)  said . "To drive their ransom demands higher, Sodinokibi/REvil co-conspirators also publicly exposed their victims' data when victims would not pay ransom demands." Vasinskyi was  extradited  to the U.S. in March 2022 following his arrest in Poland in October 2021. REvil, prior to formally going offline in late 2021, was responsible for a series of high

A never-before-seen botnet called  Goldoon  has been observed targeting D-Link routers with a nearly decade-old critical security flaw with the goal of using the compromised devices for further attacks. The vulnerability in question is  CVE-2015-2051  (CVSS score: 9.8), which affects D-Link DIR-645 routers and allows remote attackers to  execute arbitrary commands  by means of specially crafted HTTP requests. "If a targeted device is compromised, attackers can gain complete control, enabling them to extract system information, establish communication with a C2 server, and then use these devices to launch further attacks, such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researchers Cara Lin and Vincent Li  said . Telemetry data from the network security company points to a spike in the botnet activity around April 9, 2024. It all starts with the exploitation of CVE-2015-2051 to retrieve a dropper script from a remote server, which is responsible for

In today's digital world, where connectivity is rules all, endpoints serve as the gateway to a business's digital kingdom. And because of this, endpoints are one of hackers' favorite targets.  According to the IDC,  70% of successful breaches start at the endpoint . Unprotected endpoints provide vulnerable entry points to launch devastating cyberattacks. With IT teams needing to protect more endpoints—and more kinds of endpoints—than ever before, that perimeter has become more challenging to defend. You need to improve your endpoint security, but where do you start? That's where this guide comes in.  We've curated the top 10 must-know endpoint security tips that every IT and security professional should have in their arsenal. From identifying entry points to implementing EDR solutions, we'll dive into the insights you need to defend your endpoints with confidence.  1. Know Thy Endpoints: Identifying and Understanding Your Entry Points Understanding your network's

The U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is calling on manufacturers of smart devices to comply with new legislation that prohibits them from using default passwords, effective April 29, 2024. "The law, known as the  Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure act  (or PSTI act), will help consumers to choose smart devices that have been designed to provide ongoing protection against cyber attacks," the NCSC  said . To that end, manufacturers are required to not supply devices that use guessable default passwords, provide a point of contact to report security issues, and state the duration for which their devices are expected to receive important security updates. Default passwords can not only be easily found online, they also act as a vector for threat actors to log in to devices for follow-on exploitation. That said, a unique default password is permissible under the law. The law, which aims to enforce a set of minimum security standards across the b

Identity and access management (IAM) services provider Okta has warned of a spike in the "frequency and scale" of credential stuffing attacks aimed at online services. These unprecedented attacks, observed over the last month, are said to be facilitated by "the broad availability of residential proxy services, lists of previously stolen credentials ('combo lists'), and scripting tools," the company  said  in an alert published Saturday. The findings build on a  recent advisory  from Cisco, which cautioned of a global surge in brute-force attacks targeting various devices, including Virtual Private Network (VPN) services, web application authentication interfaces, and SSH services, since at least March 18, 2024. "These attacks all appear to be originating from TOR exit nodes and a range of other anonymizing tunnels and proxies," Talos noted at the time, adding targets of the attacks comprise VPN appliances from Cisco, Check Point, Fortinet, Soni

Cisco is warning about a global surge in brute-force attacks targeting various devices, including Virtual Private Network (VPN) services, web application authentication interfaces, and SSH services, since at least March 18, 2024. "These attacks all appear to be originating from TOR exit nodes and a range of other anonymizing tunnels and proxies," Cisco Talos  said . Successful attacks could pave the way for unauthorized network access, account lockouts, or denial-of-service conditions, the cybersecurity company added. The attacks, said to be broad and opportunistic, have been observed targeting the below devices - Cisco Secure Firewall VPN  Check Point VPN Fortinet VPN SonicWall VPN RD Web Services  MikroTik  Draytek  Ubiquiti  Cisco Talos described the brute-forcing attempts as using both generic and valid usernames for specific organizations, with the attacks indiscriminately targeting a wide range of sectors across geographies. The source IP addresses for

A threat group of suspected Romanian origin called  RUBYCARP  has been observed maintaining a long-running botnet for carrying out crypto mining, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), and phishing attacks. The group, believed to be active for at least 10 years, employs the botnet for financial gain, Sysdig said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Its primary method of operation leverages a botnet deployed using a variety of public exploits and brute-force attacks," the cloud security firm said . "This group communicates via public and private IRC networks." Evidence  gathered  so far suggests that RUBYCARP may have crossover with another threat cluster tracked by Albanian cybersecurity firm Alphatechs under the moniker Outlaw , which has a history of conducting crypto mining and brute-force attacks and has since pivoted to phishing and spear-phishing campaigns to cast a wide net. "These phishing emails often lure victims into revealing sensitive i

Threat actors are actively scanning and exploiting a pair of security flaws that are said to affect as many as 92,000 internet-exposed D-Link network-attached storage (NAS) devices. Tracked as  CVE-2024-3272  (CVSS score: 9.8) and  CVE-2024-3273  (CVSS score: 7.3), the vulnerabilities impact  legacy D-Link products  that have reached end-of-life (EoL) status. D-Link, in an  advisory , said it does not plan to ship a patch and instead urges customers to replace them. "The vulnerability lies within the nas_sharing.cgi uri, which is vulnerable due to two main issues: a backdoor facilitated by hard-coded credentials, and a command injection vulnerability via the system parameter," security researcher who goes by the name netsecfish  said  in late March 2024. Successful exploitation of the flaws could lead to arbitrary command execution on the affected D-Link NAS devices, granting threat actors the ability to access sensitive information, alter system configurations, or even

Threat hunters have discovered a new malware called  Latrodectus  that has been distributed as part of email phishing campaigns since at least late November 2023. "Latrodectus is an up-and-coming downloader with various sandbox evasion functionality," researchers from Proofpoint and Team Cymru  said  in a joint analysis published last week, adding it's designed to retrieve payloads and execute arbitrary commands. There is evidence to suggest that the downloader is likely written by the same threat actors behind the  IcedID malware , with the downloader put to use by initial access brokers (IABs) to facilitate the deployment of other malware. Latrodectus has been primarily linked to two different IABs tracked by Proofpoint under the names  TA577  (aka Water Curupira) and TA578, the former of which has also been linked to the distribution of QakBot and PikaBot. As of mid-January 2024, it's been employed almost exclusively by TA578 in email threat campaigns, in some

Several malicious Android apps that turn mobile devices running the operating system into residential proxies (RESIPs) for other threat actors have been observed on the Google Play Store. The findings come from HUMAN's Satori Threat Intelligence team, which said the cluster of VPN apps came fitted with a Golang library that transformed the user's device into a proxy node without their knowledge. The operation has been codenamed  PROXYLIB  by the company. The 29 apps in question have since been removed by Google. Residential proxies are a network of proxy servers sourced from real IP addresses provided by internet service providers (ISPs), helping users hide their actual IP addresses by routing their internet traffic through an intermediary server. The anonymity benefits aside, they are ripe for abuse by threat actors to not only obfuscate their origins, but also to conduct a wide range of attacks. "When a threat actor uses a residential proxy, the traffic from these

A botnet previously considered to be rendered inert has been observed enslaving end-of-life (EoL) small home/small office (SOHO) routers and IoT devices to fuel a criminal proxy service called Faceless. " TheMoon , which  emerged  in  2014 , has been operating quietly while growing to over 40,000 bots from 88 countries in January and February of 2024," the Black Lotus Labs team at Lumen Technologies  said . Faceless,  detailed  by security journalist Brian Krebs in April 2023, is a malicious residential proxy service that's offered its anonymity services to other threat actors for a negligible fee that costs less than a dollar per day. In doing so, it allows the customers to route their malicious traffic through tens of thousands of compromised systems advertised on the service, effectively concealing their true origins. The Faceless-backed infrastructure has been assessed to be used by operators of malware such as  SolarMarker  and  IcedID  to connect to their comm

Minecraft, with over 500 million registered users and 166 million monthly players, faces significant risks from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, threatening server functionality, player experience, and the game's reputation. Despite the prevalence of DDoS attacks on the game, the majority of incidents go unreported, leaving a gap in awareness and protection. This article explains what happens to a Minecraft server during a DDoS attack and how to protect against such attacks. For an in-depth version of the article,  check out this white paper . When Creepers Breach: What Happens When an Attack Is Successful When a Minecraft server is hit with a DDoS attack, players may have problems with logging in to servers, loading worlds, navigating biomes, using tools, and chatting. They can also experience general lags, disconnections, timeouts, or server crashes. These in-game disruptions can ruin the gaming experience for players while causing financial and reputational losses to

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a tool referred to as  AndroxGh0st  that's used to target Laravel applications and steal sensitive data. "It works by scanning and taking out important information from .env files, revealing login details linked to AWS and Twilio," Juniper Threat Labs researcher Kashinath T Pattan  said . "Classified as an SMTP cracker, it exploits SMTP using various strategies such as credential exploitation, web shell deployment, and vulnerability scanning." AndroxGh0st has been detected in the wild since at least 2022, with threat actors leveraging it to access Laravel environment files and steal credentials for various cloud-based applications like Amazon Web Services (AWS), SendGrid, and Twilio. Attack chains involving the Python malware are known to exploit known security flaws in Apache HTTP Server, Laravel Framework, and PHPUnit to gain initial access and for privilege escalation and persistence. Earlier this January, U

The Russia-linked threat actor known as  APT28  has been linked to multiple ongoing phishing campaigns that employ lure documents imitating government and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Europe, the South Caucasus, Central Asia, and North and South America. "The uncovered lures include a mixture of internal and publicly available documents, as well as possible actor-generated documents associated with finance, critical infrastructure, executive engagements, cyber security, maritime security, healthcare, business, and defense industrial production," IBM X-Force  said  in a report published last week. The tech company is tracking the activity under the moniker  ITG05 , which is also known as Blue Athena, BlueDelta, Fancy Bear, Fighting Ursa, Forest Blizzard (formerly Strontium), FROZENLAKE, Iron Twilight, Pawn Storm, Sednit, Sofacy, TA422, and UAC-028. The disclosure comes more than three months after the adversary was spotted using decoys related to the ongoing I

In a new joint advisory, cybersecurity and intelligence agencies from the U.S. and other countries are urging users of Ubiquiti EdgeRouter to take protective measures, weeks after a botnet comprising infected routers was  felled by law enforcement  as part of an operation codenamed Dying Ember. The botnet, named MooBot, is said to have been used by a Russia-linked threat actor known as APT28 to facilitate covert cyber operations and drop custom malware for follow-on exploitation. APT28, affiliated with Russia's Main Directorate of the General Staff (GRU), is known to be active since at least 2007. APT28 actors have "used compromised EdgeRouters globally to harvest credentials, collect NTLMv2 digests, proxy network traffic, and host spear-phishing landing pages and custom tools," the authorities  said  [PDF]. The adversary's use of EdgeRouters dates back to 2022, with the attacks targeting aerospace and defense, education, energy and utilities, governments, hospita

In the past 2 years, we have observed a significant surge in hacktivism activity due to ongoing wars and geopolitical conflicts in various regions. Since the war against Ukraine began, we have witnessed a notable mobilization of non-state and state-backed actors alike, forming new groups or joining existing hacker collectives.  We understand hacktivism as a form of computer hacking that is done to further the goals of political or social  activism 1 . While  activism  describes a normal, non-disruptive use of the Internet in order to support a specific cause (online petitions, fundraising, coordinating activities),  hacktivism  includes operations that use hacking techniques with the intent to disrupt but not to cause serious harm (e.g., data theft, website defacements, redirects, Denial-of-Service attacks). Cyber operations that inherit a willingness or intent to cause harm to physical property, severe economic damage or loss of life would be referred to as  cyberterrorism, 2, 3  Th