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A new piece of stealthy Linux malware called Shikitega has been uncovered adopting a multi-stage infection chain to compromise endpoints and IoT devices and deposit additional payloads. "An attacker can gain full control of the system, in addition to the cryptocurrency miner that will be executed and set to persist," AT&T Alien Labs  said  in a new report published Tuesday. The findings add to a growing list of Linux malware that has been found in the wild in recent months, including  BPFDoor ,  Symbiote ,  Syslogk ,  OrBit , and  Lightning Framework . Once deployed on a targeted host, the attack chain downloads and executes the Metasploit's " Mettle " meterpreter to maximize control, exploits vulnerabilities to elevate its privileges, adds persistence on the host via crontab, and ultimately launches a cryptocurrency miner on infected devices. The exact method by which the initial compromise is achieved remains unknown as yet, but what makes Shikitega

As many as three disparate but related campaigns between March and Jun 2022 have been found to deliver a variety of malware, including ModernLoader, RedLine Stealer, and cryptocurrency miners onto compromised systems. "The actors use PowerShell, .NET assemblies, and HTA and VBS files to spread across a targeted network, eventually dropping other pieces of malware, such as the  SystemBC  trojan and  DCRat , to enable various stages of their operations," Cisco Talos researcher Vanja Svajcer said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The malicious implant in question, ModernLoader , is designed to provide attackers with remote control over the victim's machine, which enables the adversaries to deploy additional malware, steal sensitive information, or even ensnare the computer in a botnet. Cisco Talos attributed the infections to a previously undocumented but Russian-speaking threat actor, citing the use of off-the-shelf tools. Potential targets included Eastern Eur

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The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Monday warned of cyber criminals increasingly exploiting flaws in decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms to plunder cryptocurrency. "The FBI has observed cyber criminals exploiting vulnerabilities in the smart contracts governing DeFi platforms to steal investors' cryptocurrency," the agency  said  in a notification. Attackers are said to have used different methods to hack and steal cryptocurrency from DeFi platforms, including initiating flash loans that trigger exploits in the platforms' smart contracts and exploiting signature verification flaws in their token bridge to withdraw all investments. The agency has also observed criminals defrauding the platforms by manipulating cryptocurrency price pairs – assets that can be traded for each other on an exchange – by exploiting a series of vulnerabilities to bypass  slippage checks  and steal roughly $35 million in digital funds. It further said that the threat ac

Threat actors have begun to use the Tox peer-to-peer instant messaging service as a command-and-control method, marking a shift from its earlier role as a contact method for ransomware negotiations. The findings from Uptycs, which analyzed an Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) artifact (" 72client ") that functions as a bot and can run scripts on the compromised host using the Tox protocol. Tox is a  serverless protocol  for online communications that offers end-to-end encryption (E2EE) protections by making use of the Networking and Cryptography library ( NaCl , pronounced "salt") for encryption and authentication. "The binary found in the wild is a stripped but dynamic executable, making decompilation easier," researchers Siddharth Sharma and Nischay Hedge  said . "The entire binary appears to be written in C, and has only  statically linked  the c-toxcore library." It's worth noting that c-toxcore is a  reference implementation  of

Bitcoin ATM manufacturer General Bytes confirmed that it was a victim of a cyberattack that exploited a previously unknown flaw in its software to plunder cryptocurrency from its users. "The attacker was able to create an admin user remotely via CAS administrative interface via a URL call on the page that is used for the default installation on the server and creating the first administration user," the company  said  in an advisory last week. "This vulnerability has been present in CAS software since version 2020-12-08." It's not immediately clear how many servers were breached using this flaw and how much cryptocurrency was stolen. CAS is short for  Crypto Application Server , a self-hosted product from General Bytes that enables companies to manage Bitcoin ATM ( BATM ) machines from a central location via a web browser on a desktop or a mobile device. The zero-day flaw, which concerned a bug in the CAS admin interface, has been mitigated in two server p

The SOVA Android banking trojan is continuing to be actively developed with upgraded capabilities to target no less than 200 mobile applications, including banking apps and crypto exchanges and wallets, up from 90 apps when it started out. That's according to the latest findings from Italian cybersecurity firm Cleafy, which found newer versions of the malware sporting functionality to intercept two-factor authentication (2FA) codes, steal cookies, and expand its targeting to cover Australia, Brazil, China, India, the Philippines, and the U.K. SOVA, meaning Owl in Russian, came to light in  September 2021  when it was observed striking financial and shopping apps from the U.S. and Spain for harvesting credentials through overlay attacks by taking advantage of Android's Accessibility services. In less than a year, the trojan has also acted as a foundation for another Android malware called  MaliBot  that's designed to target online banking and cryptocurrency wallet custo

A now-removed rogue package pushed to the official third-party software repository for Python has been found to deploy cryptominers on Linux systems. The module, named " secretslib " and  downloaded 93 times  prior to its deletion, was released to the Python Package Index (PyPI) on August 6, 2022 and is described as "secrets matching and verification made easy." "On a closer inspection though, the package covertly runs cryptominers on your Linux machine in-memory (directly from your RAM), a technique largely employed by fileless malware and crypters," Sonatype researcher Ax Sharma  disclosed  in a report last week. It achieves this by executing a Linux executable file retrieved from a remote server post installation, whose main task is to drop an  ELF  file (" memfd ") directly in memory that functions as a Monero cryptominer, after which it gets deleted by the "secretslib" package. "The malicious activity leaves little to n

Dutch authorities on Friday announced the arrest of a software developer in Amsterdam who is alleged to be working for Tornado Cash, days after the U.S. sanctioned the decentralized crypto mixing service. The 29-year-old individual is "suspected of involvement in concealing criminal financial flows and facilitating money laundering" through the service, the Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD)  said  in a statement. Although FIOD didn't reveal the name of the Tornado Cash engineer, The Block  identified  him as Alexey Pertsev, citing confirmation from his wife. "My husband didn't do anything illegal," she was quoted as saying. FIOD also alleged that "Tornado Cash has been used to conceal large-scale criminal money flows, including from (online) thefts of cryptocurrencies (so-called crypto hacks and scams)." The agency, which initiated an investigation into Tornado Cash in June 2022, further hinted it may make more arrests

The U.S. Treasury Department on Monday placed sanctions against crypto mixing service Tornado Cash, citing its use by the North Korea-backed Lazarus Group in the high-profile hacks of Ethereum bridges to launder and cash out the ill-gotten money. Tornado Cash, which allows users to move cryptocurrency assets between accounts by obfuscating their origin and destination, is estimated to have been used to launder more than $7.6 billion worth of virtual assets since its creation in 2019, the department said. Thefts, hacks, and fraud account for $1.54 billion of the total assets sent through the mixer, according to blockchain analytics firm  Elliptic . Crypto mixing is akin to shuffling digital currencies through a black box, blending a certain quantity of cryptocurrency in private pools before transferring it to its designated receivers for a fee. The aim is to make transactions anonymous and difficult to trace. "Despite public assurances otherwise, Tornado Cash has repeatedly f

The U.S. State Department has announced rewards of up to $10 million for any information that could help disrupt North Korea's cryptocurrency theft, cyber-espionage, and other illicit state-backed activities. "If you have information on any individuals associated with the North Korean government-linked malicious cyber groups (such as Andariel, APT38, Bluenoroff, Guardians of Peace, Kimsuky, or Lazarus Group) and who are involved in targeting U.S. critical infrastructure in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, you may be eligible for a reward," the department  said  in a tweet. The amount is double the bounty the agency  publicized  in March 2022 for specifics regarding the financial mechanisms employed by state-sponsored actors working on behalf of the North Korean government. The development comes a week after the Justice Department  disclosed  the seizure of $500,000 worth of Bitcoin from North Korean hackers who extorted digital payments by using a new r

As many as 207 websites have been infected with malicious code designed to launch a cryptocurrency miner by leveraging WebAssembly (Wasm) on the browser. Web security company Sucuri, which published details of the campaign, said it launched an investigation after one of its clients had their computer slowed down significantly every time upon navigating to their own WordPress portal. This uncovered a compromise of a theme file to inject malicious JavaScript code from a remote server -- hxxps://wm.bmwebm[.]org/auto.js -- that's loaded whenever the website's page is accessed. "Once decoded, the contents of auto.js immediately reveal the functionality of a cryptominer which starts mining when a visitor lands on the compromised site," Sucuri malware researcher Cesar Anjos  said . What's more, the deobfuscated auto.js code makes use of WebAssembly to run low-level binary code directly on the browser. WebAssembly , which is supported by all major browsers, is a  b

The advanced persistent threat (APT) actor tracked as Evilnum is once again exhibiting signs of renewed activity aimed at European financial and investment entities. "Evilnum is a backdoor that can be used for data theft or to load additional payloads," enterprise security firm Proofpoint  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The malware includes multiple interesting components to evade detection and modify infection paths based on identified antivirus software." Targets include organizations with operations supporting foreign exchanges, cryptocurrency, and decentralized finance (DeFi). The latest spate of attacks are said to have commenced in late 2021. The findings also dovetail with a report from Zscaler last month that  detailed  low-volume targeted attack campaigns launched against companies in Europe and the U.K. Active since 2018,  Evilnum  is tracked by the wider cybersecurity community using the names TA4563 and DeathStalker, with infection

The 8220 cryptomining group has expanded in size to encompass as many as 30,000 infected hosts, up from 2,000 hosts globally in mid-2021. "8220 Gang is one of the many low-skill crimeware gangs we continually observe infecting cloud hosts and operating a botnet and cryptocurrency miners through known vulnerabilities and remote access brute forcing infection vectors," Tom Hegel of SentinelOne  said  in a Monday report. The growth is said to have been fueled through the use of Linux and common cloud application vulnerabilities and poorly secured configurations for services such as Docker, Apache WebLogic, and Redis. Active since early 2017, the Chinese-speaking, Monero-mining threat actor was most recently  seen  targeting i686 and x86_64 Linux systems by means of weaponizing a newly disclosed remote code execution exploit for Atlassian Confluence Server (CVE-2022-26134) to drop the PwnRig miner payload. "Victims are not targeted geographically, but simply identifie

GitHub Actions and Azure virtual machines (VMs) are being leveraged for cloud-based cryptocurrency mining, indicating sustained attempts on the part of malicious actors to target cloud resources for illicit purposes. "Attackers can abuse the  runners  or servers provided by GitHub to run an organization's pipelines and automation by maliciously downloading and installing their own cryptocurrency miners to gain profit easily," Trend Micro researcher Magno Logan  said  in a report last week. GitHub Actions ( GHAs ) is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that allows users to automate the software build, test, and deployment pipeline. Developers can leverage the feature to create workflows that build and test every pull request to a code repository, or deploy merged pull requests to production. Both Linux and Windows runners are hosted on  Standard_DS2_v2  virtual machines on Azure and come with two vCPUs and 7GB of memory. The Japanese com

The $540 million hack of Axie Infinity's  Ronin Bridge  in late March 2022 was the consequence of one of its former employees getting tricked by a fraudulent job offer on LinkedIn, it has emerged.  According to a report from  The Block  published last week citing two people familiar with the matter, a senior engineer at the company was duped into applying for a job at a non-existent company, causing the individual to download a fake offer document disguised as a PDF. "After what one source described as multiple rounds of interviews, a Sky Mavis engineer was offered a job with an extremely generous compensation package," the Block reported. The offer document subsequently acted as a conduit to deploy malware designed to breach Ronin's network, ultimately facilitating one of the crypto sector's biggest hacks to date. "Sky Mavis employees are under constant advanced spear-phishing attacks on various social channels and one employee was compromised," t

Researchers have disclosed what they say could be an attempt to kick-off a new large-scale cryptocurrency mining campaign targeting the NPM JavaScript package repository. The malicious activity, attributed to a software supply chain threat actor dubbed  CuteBoi , involves an array of 1,283 rogue modules that were published in an automated fashion from over 1,000 different user accounts. "This was done using automation which includes the ability to pass the NPM 2FA challenge," Israeli application security testing company Checkmarx  said . "This cluster of packages seems to be a part of an attacker experimenting at this point." All the released packages in question are said to harbor near-identical source code from an already existing package named eazyminer that's used to mine Monero by means of utilizing unused resources on web servers. One notable modification entails the URL to which the mined cryptocurrency should be sent, although installing the rogue

A cloud threat actor group tracked as 8220 has updated its malware toolset to breach Linux servers with the goal of installing crypto miners as part of a long-running campaign. "The updates include the deployment of new versions of a crypto miner and an IRC bot," Microsoft Security Intelligence said in a series of tweets on Thursday. "The group has actively updated its techniques and payloads over the last year." 8220, active since early 2017 , is a Chinese-speaking, Monero-mining threat actor so named for its preference to communicate with command-and-control (C2) servers over port 8220. It's also the developer of a tool called whatMiner, which has been co-opted by the Rocke cybercrime group in their attacks. In July 2019, the Alibaba Cloud Security Team uncovered an extra shift in the adversary's tactics, noting its use of rootkits to hide the mining program. Two years later, the gang resurfaced with Tsunami IRC botnet variants and a custom "

The notorious North Korea-backed hacking collective Lazarus Group is suspected to be behind the recent $100 million altcoin theft from Harmony Horizon Bridge, citing similarities to the  Ronin bridge attack  in March 2022. The finding comes as Harmony  confirmed  that its Horizon Bridge, a  platform  that allows users to move cryptocurrency across different blockchains, had been breached last week. The incident involved the exploiter carrying out multiple transactions on June 23 that extracted tokens stored in the bridge and subsequently making away with about $100 million in cryptocurrency. "The stolen crypto assets included Ether (ETH), Tether (USDT), Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) and BNB," blockchain analytics company Elliptic  said  in a new report. "The thief immediately used Uniswap – a decentralized exchange (DEX) – to convert much of these assets into a total of 85,837 ETH." Days later, on June 27, the culprit is said to have begun moving funds amounting to $

A recently patched  critical security flaw  in Atlassian Confluence Server and Data Center products is being actively weaponized in real-world attacks to drop cryptocurrency miners and ransomware payloads. In at least two of the Windows-related incidents observed by cybersecurity vendor Sophos, adversaries exploited the vulnerability to deliver Cerber ransomware and a  crypto miner  called z0miner on victim networks. The bug ( CVE-2022-26134 , CVSS score: 9.8), which was  patched  by Atlassian on June 3, 2022, enables an unauthenticated actor to inject malicious code that paves the way of remote code execution (RCE) on affected installations of the collaboration suite. All supported versions of Confluence Server and Data Center are affected. Other notable malware pushed as part of disparate instances of attack activity include Mirai and Kinsing bot variants, a rogue package called  pwnkit , and Cobalt Strike by way of a web shell deployed after gaining an initial foothold into the