botnet | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A decade-old botnet malware that currently controls over 450,000 computers worldwide has recently shifted its operations from infecting machines with ransomware or crypto miners to abusing them for sending out sextortion emails to millions of innocent people. Extortion by email is growing significantly, with a large number of users recently complaining about receiving sextortion emails that attempt to extort money from individuals by blackmailing them into exposing their sexual content. Though until now, it wasn't clear how scammers were sending such massive amounts of emails without getting blacklisted by the email providers, security researchers from CheckPoint finally found the missing block in this puzzle. In its latest report shared with The Hacker News prior to the release, Tel Aviv-based security firm CheckPoint reveals that a botnet, called Phorpiex , has recently been updated to include a spam bot designed to use compromised computers as proxies to send out over 3

Insecure Internet-connected devices have aided different types of cybercrime for years, most common being DDoS and spam campaigns. But cybercriminals have now shifted toward a profitable scheme where botnets do not just launch DDoS or spam—they mine cryptocurrencies as well. Smominru, an infamous cryptocurrency-mining and credential-stealing botnet, has become one of the rapidly spreading computer viruses that is now infecting over 90,000 machines each month around the world. Though the campaigns that are hacking computers with the Smominru botnet have not been designed to go after targets with any specific interest, the latest report from Guardicore Labs researchers shed light on the nature of the victims and the attack infrastructure. According to the researchers, just last month, more than 4,900 networks were infected by the worm without any discrimination, and many of these networks had dozens of internal machines infected. Infected networks include US-based higher-educ

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

The French law enforcement agency, National Gendarmerie, today announced the successful takedown of one of the largest wide-spread RETADUP botnet malware and how it remotely disinfected more than 850,000 computers worldwide with the help of researchers. Earlier this year, security researchers at Avast antivirus firm, who were actively monitoring the activities of RETADUP botnet, discovered a design flaw in the malware's C&C protocol that could have been exploited to remove the malware from victims' computer without executing any extra code. However, to do that, the plan required researchers to have control over the malware's C&C server, which was hosted with a hosting provider located in the Ile-de-France region in north-central France. Therefore, the researchers contacted the Cybercrime Fighting Center (C3N) of the French National Gendarmerie at the end of March this year, shared their findings, and proposed a secret plan to put an end to the RETADUP vir

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

Despite the continual emergence of new cyber attacks because of misconfigured servers and applications, people continue to ignore security warnings. A massive malware campaign designed to target open Redis servers, about which researchers warned almost two months ago, has now grown and already hijacked at least 75% of the total servers running publicly accessible Redis instances. Redis, or REmote DIctionary Server, is an open source, widely popular data structure tool that can be used as an in-memory distributed database, message broker or cache. Since it is designed to be accessed inside trusted environments, it should not be exposed on the Internet. Dubbed RedisWannaMine , a similar malware leveraging same loophole was discovered in late March by data center security vendor Imperva and designed to drop a cryptocurrency mining script on the targeted servers—both database and application. According to Imperva's March blog post , this cryptojacking threat was "more c

Even after being aware of various active cyber attacks against the GPON Wi-Fi routers, if you haven't yet taken them off the Internet, then be careful—because a new botnet has joined the GPON party, which is exploiting an undisclosed zero-day vulnerability in the wild. Security researchers from Qihoo 360 Netlab have warned of at least one botnet operator exploiting a new zero-day vulnerability in the Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Network (GPON) routers, manufactured by South Korea-based DASAN Zhone Solutions. The botnet, dubbed TheMoon, which was first seen in 2014 and has added at least 6 IoT device exploits to its successor versions since 2017, now exploits a newly undisclosed zero-day flaw for Dasan GPON routers. Netlab researchers successfully tested the new attack payload on two different versions of GPON home router, though they didn't disclose details of the payload or release any further details of the new zero-day vulnerability to prevent more attacks. Th

On Wednesday, February 28, 2018, GitHub's code hosting website hit with the largest-ever distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that peaked at record 1.35 Tbps. Interestingly, attackers did not use any botnet network, instead weaponized misconfigured Memcached servers to amplify the DDoS attack. Earlier this week we published a report detailing how attackers could abuse Memcached, popular open-source and easily deployable distributed caching system, to launch over 51,000 times powerful DDoS attack than its original strength. Dubbed Memcrashed , the amplification DDoS attack works by sending a forged request to the targeted Memcrashed server on port 11211 using a spoofed IP address that matches the victim's IP. A few bytes of the request sent to the vulnerable server trigger tens of thousands of times bigger response against the targeted IP address. "This attack was the largest attack seen to date by Akamai, more than twice the size of the September 2016

2017 was the year of high profile data breaches and ransomware attacks, but from the beginning of this year, we are noticing a faster-paced shift in the cyber threat landscape, as cryptocurrency-related malware is becoming a popular and profitable choice of cyber criminals. Several cybersecurity firms are reporting of new cryptocurrency mining viruses that are being spread using EternalBlue —the same NSA exploit that was leaked by the hacking group Shadow Brokers and responsible for the devastating widespread ransomware threat WannaCry . Researchers from Proofpoint discovered a massive global botnet dubbed "Smominru," a.k.a Ismo, that is using EternalBlue SMB exploit (CVE-2017-0144) to infect Windows computers to secretly mine Monero cryptocurrency, worth millions of dollars, for its master. Active since at least May 2017, Smominru botnet has already infected more than 526,000 Windows computers, most of which are believed to be servers running unpatched versions of Wi

Although the original creators of the infamous IoT malware Mirai have already been arrested and sent to jail, the variants of the notorious botnet are still in the game due to the availability of its source code on the Internet. Hackers have widely used the infamous IoT malware to quietly amass an army of unsecured internet-of-things devices , including home and office routers, that could be used at any time by hackers to launch Internet-paralyzing DDoS attacks . Another variant of Mirai has hit once again, propagating rapidly by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in a Huawei home router model. Dubbed Satori (also known as Okiru), the Mirai variant has been targeting Huawei's router model HG532, as Check Point security researchers said they tracked hundreds of thousands of attempts to exploit a vulnerability in the router model in the wild. Identified initially by Check Point researchers late November, Satori was found infecting more than 200,000 IP addresses in just

In a coordinated International cyber operation, Europol with the help of international law enforcement agencies has taken down what it called "one of the longest-running malware families in existence" known as Andromeda. Andromeda , also known as Win32/Gamarue, is an infamous HTTP-based modular botnet that has been around for several years now, and infecting computers with it's malicious intentions ever since. The primary goal of Andromeda bot is to distribute other malware families for mass global malware attacks. The botnet has been associated with at least 80 malware families, and in the last six months, it was detected (or blocked) on an average of more than 1 million machines per month. Last year, law enforcement agencies took down the criminal infrastructure of the infamous Avalanche botnet in a similar massive international cyber operation. Avalanche botnet was used as a delivery platform to spread other malware families, including Andromeda. While in

Mining cryptocurrencies can be a costly investment as it takes a monstrous amount of computing power, and thus hackers have started using malware that steals computing resources of computers it hijacks to make lots of dollars in digital currency. Security researchers at security firm ESET have spotted one such malware that infected hundreds of Windows web servers with a malicious cryptocurrency miner and helped cybercriminals made more than $63,000 worth of Monero (XMR) in just three months. According to a report published by ESET today, cybercriminals only made modifications to legitimate open source Monero mining software and exploited a known vulnerability in Microsoft IIS 6.0 to secretly install the miner on unpatched Windows servers. Although ESET's investigation does not identify the attackers, it reports that the attackers have been infecting unpatched Windows web servers with the cryptocurrency miner since at least May 2017 to mine 'Monero,' a Bitcoin-like

The United States government has released a rare alert about an ongoing, eight-year-long North Korean state-sponsored hacking operation. The joint report from the FBI and U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) provided details on " DeltaCharlie ," a malware variant used by " Hidden Cobra " hacking group to infect hundreds of thousands of computers globally as part of its DDoS botnet network. According to the report, the Hidden Cobra group of hackers are believed to be backed by the North Korean government and are known to launch cyber attacks against global institutions, including media organizations, aerospace and financial sectors, and critical infrastructure. While the US government has labeled the North Korean hacking group Hidden Cobra, it is often known as Lazarus Group and Guardians of Peace – the one allegedly linked to the devastating WannaCry ransomware menace that shut down hospitals and businesses worldwide. DeltaCharlie – DDoS Botnet M

Since the Shadow Brokers released the zero-day software vulnerabilities and hacking tools – allegedly belonged to the NSA's elite hacking team Equation Group – several hacking groups and individual hackers have started using them in their own way. The April's data dump was believed to be the most damaging release by the Shadow Brokers till the date, as it publicly leaked lots of Windows hacking tools , including dangerous Windows SMB exploit. After the outbreak of WannaCry last week, security researchers have identified multiple different campaigns exploiting Windows SMB vulnerability (CVE-2017-0143), called Eternalblue , which has already compromised hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide. I have been even confirmed by multiple sources in hacking and intelligence community that there are lots of groups and individuals who are actively exploiting Eternalblue for different motives. Moreover, the Eternalblue SMB exploit ( MS17-010 ) has now been ported to  Met