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Cryptocurrency users are being targeted with a new clipper malware strain dubbed  Laplas  by means of another malware known as SmokeLoader. SmokeLoader, which is delivered by means of weaponized documents sent through spear-phishing emails, further acts as a conduit for other  commodity trojans  like  SystemBC  and  Raccoon Stealer 2.0 , according to an  analysis  from Cyble. Observed in the wild since circa 2013,  SmokeLoader  functions as a generic loader capable of distributing additional payloads onto compromised systems, such as information-stealing malware and other implants. In July 2022, it was found to deploy a backdoor called  Amadey . Cyble said it discovered over 180 samples of the Laplas since October 24, 2022, suggesting a wide deployment. Clippers, also called ClipBankers, fall under a category of malware that Microsoft calls  cryware , which are designed to steal crypto by keeping close tabs on a victim's clipboard activity and swapping the original wallet ad

A new cryptojacking campaign has been uncovered targeting vulnerable Docker and Kubernetes infrastructures as part of opportunistic attacks designed to illicitly mine cryptocurrency. Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike dubbed the activity  Kiss-a-dog , with its command-and-control infrastructure overlapping with those associated with other groups like  TeamTNT , which are known to  strike   misconfigured  Docker and Kubernetes instances. The intrusions, spotted in September 2022, get their name from a domain named "kiss.a-dog[.]top" that's used to trigger a shell script payload on the compromised container using a Base64-encoded Python command. "The URL used in the payload is obscured with backslashes to defeat automated decoding and regex matching to retrieve the malicious domain," CrowdStrike researcher Manoj Ahuje  said  in a technical analysis. The attack chain subsequently attempts to escape the container and move laterally into the breached network, wh

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The notorious  Emotet botnet  has been linked to a new wave of malspam campaigns that take advantage of password-protected archive files to drop CoinMiner and Quasar RAT on compromised systems. In an  attack chain  detected by Trustwave SpiderLabs researchers, an invoice-themed ZIP file lure was found to contain a nested self-extracting (SFX) archive, the first archive acting as a conduit to launch the second. While phishing attacks like these traditionally require persuading the target into opening the attachment, the cybersecurity company said the campaign sidesteps this hurdle by making use of a batch file to automatically supply the password to unlock the payload. The first SFX archive file further makes use of either a PDF or Excel icon to make it appear legitimate, when, in reality, it contains three components: the password-protected second SFX RAR file, the aforementioned batch script which launches the archive, and a decoy PDF or image. "The execution of the batch f

A now-patched vulnerability in VMware Workspace ONE Access has been observed being exploited to deliver both cryptocurrency miners and ransomware on affected machines. "The attacker intends to utilize a victim's resources as much as possible, not only to install RAR1Ransom for extortion, but also to spread GuardMiner to collect cryptocurrency," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin  said  in a Thursday report. The issue, tracked as CVE-2022-22954 (CVSS score: 9.8), concerns a remote code execution vulnerability that stems from a case of server-side template injection. Although the shortcoming was addressed by the virtualization services provider in April 2022, it has since come under active exploitation in the wild. Fortinet said it observed in August 2022 attacks that sought to weaponize the flaw to deploy the  Mirai botnet  on Linux devices as well as the RAR1Ransom and  GuardMiner , a variant of the XMRig Monero miner. The Mirai sample is retrieved fr

BNB Chain, a blockchain linked to the Binance cryptocurrency exchange, disclosed an exploit on a cross-chain bridge that drained around $100 million in digital assets. "There was an exploit affecting the native cross-chain bridge between BNB Beacon Chain (BEP2) and BNB Smart Chain (BEP20 or BSC), known as 'BSC Token Hub,'" it  said  last week. "The exploit was through a sophisticated forging of the low level proof into one common library." According to Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, the exploit on the cross-chain bridge " resulted in extra BNB ," prompting a  temporary suspension  of the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). "BNB, which stands for 'Build and Build' (formerly called Binance Coin), is the blockchain gas token that 'fuels' transactions on BNB Chain," Binance  noted  earlier this February. No user funds are said to have been impacted, since the vulnerability in the BSC Token Hub bridge enabled the unknown threat actor

An unknown attacker targeted tens of thousands of unauthenticated Redis servers exposed on the internet in an attempt to  install a cryptocurrency miner . It's not immediately known if all of these hosts were successfully compromised. Nonetheless, it was made possible by means of a "lesser-known technique" designed to trick the servers into writing data to arbitrary files – a case of  unauthorized access  that was first documented in September 2018. "The general idea behind this exploitation technique is to configure Redis to write its file-based database to a directory containing some method to authorize a user (like adding a key to '.ssh/authorized_keys'), or start a process (like adding a script to '/etc/cron.d')," Censys  said  in a new write-up. The attack surface management platform said it uncovered evidence (i.e., Redis commands) indicating efforts on part of the attacker to store malicious  crontab entries  into the file "/var/

Malicious actors such as Kinsing are taking advantage of both recently disclosed and older security flaws in Oracle WebLogic Server to deliver cryptocurrency-mining malware. Cybersecurity company Trend Micro said it  found  the financially-motivated group leveraging the vulnerability to drop Python scripts with capabilities to disable operating system (OS) security features such as Security-Enhanced Linux ( SELinux ), and others. The operators behind the  Kinsing malware  have a history of scanning for vulnerable servers to co-opt them into a botnet, including that of  Redis ,  SaltStack ,  Log4Shell ,  Spring4Shell , and the Atlassian Confluence flaw ( CVE-2022-26134 ). The Kinsing actors have also been involved in campaigns against container environments via  misconfigured open Docker Daemon API ports  to launch a crypto miner and subsequently spread the malware to other containers and hosts. The latest wave of attacks entails the actor weaponizing  CVE-2020-14882  (CVSS score:

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

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