The Hacker News — Cyber Security and Hacking News Website: botnet

Security researchers have discovered an ongoing sophisticated botnet campaign that is currently brute-forcing more than 1.5 million publicly accessible Windows RDP servers on the Internet. Dubbed GoldBrute , the botnet scheme has been designed in a way to escalate gradually by adding every new cracked system to its network, forcing them to further find new available RDP servers and then brute force them. To fly under the radar of security tools and malware analysts, attackers behind this campaign command each infected machine to target millions of servers with a unique set of username and password combination so that a targeted server receives brute force attempts from different IP addresses. The campaign, discovered  by Renato Marinho at Morphus Labs, works as shown in the illustrated image, and its modus operandi has been explained in the following steps: Step 1 — After successfully brute-forcing an RDP server, the attacker installs a JAVA-based GoldBrute botnet malware

The United States Department of Justice (DoJ) announced Wednesday its effort to "map and further disrupt" a botnet tied to North Korea that has infected numerous Microsoft Windows computers across the globe over the last decade. Dubbed Joanap , the botnet is believed to be part of " Hidden Cobra "—an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actors' group often known as Lazarus Group and Guardians of Peace and backed by the North Korean government. Hidden Cobra is the same hacking group that has been allegedly associated with the WannaCry ransomware menace in 2016, the SWIFT Banking attack in 2016, as well as Sony Motion Pictures hack in 2014. Dates back to 2009, Joanap is a remote access tool (RAT) that lands on a victim's system with the help an SMB worm called Brambul , which crawls from one computer to another by brute-forcing Windows Server Message Block (SMB) file-sharing services using a list of common passwords. Once there, Brambul downloads Jo

Ukrainian Police have this week busted out two separate groups of hackers involved in carrying out DDoS attacks against news agencies and stealing money from Ukrainian citizens, respectively. According to the authorities, the four suspected hackers they arrested last week , all aged from 26 to 30 years, stole more than 5 million Hryvnia (around 178,380 USD) from the bank accounts of Ukrainian citizens by hacking into their computers. The suspects carried out their attacks by scanning vulnerable computers on the Internet and infecting them with a custom Trojan malware to take full remote control of the systems. The group then apparently enabled key-logging on the infected computers in an attempt to capture banking credentials of victims when the owners of those infected computers fill in that information on any banking site or their digital currency wallet. Once getting a hold on the victims banking and financial data, the attackers logged into their online banking accounts

Windows and Linux users need to beware, as an all-in-one, destructive malware strain has been discovered in the wild that features multiple malware capabilities including ransomware, cryptocurrency miner, botnet, and self-propagating worm targeting Linux and Windows systems. Dubbed XBash, the new malware, believed to be tied to the Iron Group, a.k.a. Rocke—the Chinese speaking APT threat actors group known for previous cyber attacks involving ransomware and cryptocurrency miners . According to the researchers from security vendor Palo Alto Networks, who uncovered the malware, XBash is an all-in-one malware that features ransomware and cryptocurrency mining capabilities, as well as worm-like ability similar to WannaCry or Petya/ NotPetya . In addition to self-propagating capabilities, XBash also contains a functionality, which is not yet implemented, that could allow the malware to spread quickly within an organization's network. Developed in Python, XBash hunts for vul

After the discovery of massive VPNFilter malware botnet , security researchers have now uncovered another giant botnet that has already compromised more than 40,000 servers, modems and internet-connected devices belonging to a wide number of organizations across the world. Dubbed Operation Prowli , the campaign has been spreading malware and injecting malicious code to take over servers and websites around the world using various attack techniques including use of exploits, password brute-forcing and abusing weak configurations. Discovered by researchers at the GuardiCore security team, Operation Prowli has already hit more than 40,000 victim machines from over 9,000 businesses in various domains, including finance, education and government organisations. Here's the list devices and services infected by the Prowli malware: Drupal and WordPress CMS servers hosting popular websites Joomla! servers running the K2 extension Backup servers running HP Data Protector softw