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Google has revealed that bad actors are leveraging techniques like landing page cloaking to conduct scams by impersonating legitimate sites. "Cloaking is specifically designed to prevent moderation systems and teams from reviewing policy-violating content which enables them to deploy the scam directly to users," Laurie Richardson, VP and Head of Trust and Safety at Google, said . "The landing pages often mimic well-known sites and create a sense of urgency to manipulate users into purchasing counterfeit products or unrealistic products." Cloaking refers to the practice of serving different content to search engines like Google and users with the ultimate goal of manipulating search rankings and deceiving users. The tech giant said it has also observed a cloaking trend wherein users clicking on ads are redirected via tracking templates to scareware sites that claim their devices are compromised with malware and lead them to other phony customer support sites, w...

Threat actors with ties to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK aka North Korea) have been found embedding malware within Flutter applications, marking the first time this tactic has been adopted by the adversary to infect Apple macOS devices. Jamf Threat Labs, which made the discovery based on artifacts uploaded to the VirusTotal platform earlier this month, said the Flutter-built applications are part of a broader activity that includes malware written in Golang and Python. It's currently not known how these samples are distributed to victims, and if it has been used against any targets, or if the attackers are switching to a new delivery method. That said, North Korean threat actors are known to engage in extensive social engineering efforts targeting employees of cryptocurrency and decentralized finance businesses. "We suspect these specific examples are testing," Jaron Bradley, director at Jamf Threat Labs, told The Hacker News. "It's p...

The latest Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 Cloud Threat Report found that sensitive data is found in 66% of cloud storage buckets. This data is vulnerable to ransomware attacks. The SANS Institute recently reported that these attacks can be performed by abusing the cloud provider's storage security controls and default settings. "In just the past few months, I have witnessed two different methods for executing a ransomware attack using nothing but legitimate cloud security features," warns Brandon Evans, security consultant and SANS Certified Instructor. Halcyon disclosed an attack campaign that leveraged one of Amazon S3's native encryption mechanisms, SSE-C, to encrypt each of the target buckets. A few months prior, security consultant Chris Farris demonstrated how attackers could perform a similar attack using a different AWS security feature, KMS keys with external key material, using simple scripts generated by ChatGPT. "Clearly, this topic is top-of-mind for both threat actors and ...

The 36-year-old founder of the Bitcoin Fog cryptocurrency mixer has been sentenced to 12 years and six months in prison for facilitating money laundering activities between 2011 and 2021. Roman Sterlingov, a dual Russian-Swedish national, pleaded guilty to charges of money laundering and operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business earlier this March. The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) described Bitcoin Fog as the darknet's longest-running cryptocurrency mixer , allowing cybercriminals to conceal the source of their cryptocurrency proceeds. "Over the course of its decade-long operation, Bitcoin Fog gained notoriety as a go-to money laundering service for criminals seeking to hide their illicit proceeds from law enforcement and processed transactions involving over 1.2 million bitcoin, valued at approximately $400 million at the time the transactions occurred," the DoJ said . "The bulk of this cryptocurrency came from darknet marketplaces and was tied ...

A threat actor with ties to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has been observed targeting cryptocurrency-related businesses with a multi-stage malware capable of infecting Apple macOS devices . Cybersecurity company SentinelOne, which dubbed the campaign Hidden Risk , attributed it with high confidence to BlueNoroff, which has been previously linked to malware families such as RustBucket , KANDYKORN , ObjCShellz , RustDoor (aka Thiefbucket ), and TodoSwift . The activity "uses emails propagating fake news about cryptocurrency trends to infect targets via a malicious application disguised as a PDF file," researchers Raffaele Sabato, Phil Stokes, and Tom Hegel said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The campaign likely began as early as July 2024 and uses email and PDF lures with fake news headlines or stories about crypto-related topics." As revealed by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in a September 2024 advisory, the...

An ongoing phishing campaign is employing copyright infringement-related themes to trick victims into downloading a newer version of the Rhadamanthys information stealer since July 2024. Cybersecurity firm Check Point is tracking the large-scale campaign under the name CopyRh(ight)adamantys . Targeted regions include the United States, Europe, East Asia, and South America. "The campaign impersonates dozens of companies, while each email is sent to a specific targeted entity from a different Gmail account, adapting the impersonated company and the language per targeted entity," the company said in a technical analysis. "Almost 70% of the impersonated companies are from the Entertainment /Media and Technology/Software sectors." The attacks are notable for the deployment of version 0.7 of the Rhadamanthys stealer, which, as detailed by Recorded Future's Insikt Group early last month, incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) for optical character recognition ...

LottieFiles has revealed that its npm package "lottie-player" was compromised as part of a supply chain attack, prompting it to release an updated version of the library. "On October 30th ~6:20 PM UTC - LottieFiles were notified that our popular open source npm package for the web player @lottiefiles/lottie-player had unauthorized new versions pushed with malicious code," the company said in a statement on X. "This does not impact our dotlottie player and/or SaaS service." LottieFiles is an animation workflow platform that enables designers to create, edit, and share animations in a JSON-based animation file format called Lottie. It's also the developer behind an npm package named lottie-player , which allows for embedding and playing Lottie animations on websites. According to the company, "a large number of users using the library via third-party CDNs without a pinned version were automatically served the compromised version as the latest ...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new malicious Python package that masquerades as a cryptocurrency trading tool but harbors functionality designed to steal sensitive data and drain assets from victims' crypto wallets. The package, named "CryptoAITools," is said to have been distributed via both Python Package Index (PyPI) and bogus GitHub repositories. It was downloaded over 1,300 times before being taken down from PyPI. "The malware activated automatically upon installation, targeting both Windows and macOS operating systems," Checkmarx said in a new report shared with The Hacker News. "A deceptive graphical user interface (GUI) was used to distract vic4ms while the malware performed its malicious ac4vi4es in the background." The package is designed to unleash its malicious behavior immediately after installation through code injected into its "__init__.py" file that first determines if the target system is Windows or macOS ...

The infamous cryptojacking group known as TeamTNT appears to be readying for a new large-scale campaign targeting cloud-native environments for mining cryptocurrencies and renting out breached servers to third-parties. "The group is currently targeting exposed Docker daemons to deploy Sliver malware, a cyber worm, and cryptominers, using compromised servers and Docker Hub as the infrastructure to spread their malware," Assaf Morag, director of threat intelligence at cloud security firm Aqua, said in a report published Friday. The attack activity is once again a testament to the threat actor's persistence and its ability to evolve its tactics and mounting multi-stage assaults with the goal of compromising Docker environments and enlisting them into a Docker Swarm. Besides using Docker Hub to host and distribute their malicious payloads, TeamTNT has been observed offering the victims' computational power to other parties for illicit cryptocurrency mining, thus di...

The North Korean threat actor known as Lazarus Group has been attributed to the zero-day exploitation of a now-patched security flaw in Google Chrome to seize control of infected devices. Cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky said it made the discovery after it came across a novel attack chain in May 2024 that targeted the personal computer of an unnamed Russian national with the Manuscrypt backdoor. This entails triggering the zero-day exploit simply upon visiting a fake game website ("detankzone[.]com") that was aimed at individuals in the cryptocurrency sector. The campaign is estimated to have commenced in February 2024. "On the surface, this website resembled a professionally designed product page for a decentralized finance (DeFi) NFT-based (non-fungible token) multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) tank game, inviting users to download a trial version," Kaspersky researchers Boris Larin and Vasily Berdnikov said . "But that was just a disguise. Under the...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) has announced arrests and charges against several individuals and entities in connection with allegedly manipulating digital asset markets as part of a widespread fraud operation. The law enforcement action – codenamed Operation Token Mirrors – is the result of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) taking the "unprecedented step" of creating its own cryptocurrency token and company called NexFundAI . NexFundAI, as per information on the website, was marketed as redefining the "intersection between finance and artificial intelligence" and that its aim was to "create a cryptocurrency token that not only serves as a secure store of value but also acts as a catalyst for positive change in the world of AI." "Three market makers — ZM Quant, CLS Global, and MyTrade — along with their employees are charged with allegedly wash trading and/or conspiring to wash trade on behalf of NexFundAI, a cryptocurrency co...

The Dutch police have announced the takedown of Bohemia and Cannabia, which has been described as the world's largest and longest-running dark web market for illegal goods, drugs, and cybercrime services. The takedown is the result of a collaborative investigation with Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States that began towards the end of 2022, the Politie said. The marketplace discontinued its operations in late 2023 following reports of service disruptions and exit scams after one of its developers allegedly went rogue in what was characterized by one of the administrators as a "shameful and disgruntled set of events." Bohemia is said to have served 82,000 ads worldwide every day, with about 67,000 transactions taking place each month. In September 2023 alone, the estimated turnover was €12 million. "Some of the sellers in the market advertised shipping from the Netherlands," the Politie said . "An initial analysis shows that at least 14...

A large-scale fraud campaign leveraged fake trading apps published on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, as well as phishing sites, to defraud victims, per findings from Group-IB. The campaign is part of a consumer investment fraud scheme that's also widely known as pig butchering , in which prospective victims are lured into making investments in cryptocurrency or other financial instruments after gaining their trust under the guise of a romantic relationship or an investment advisor. Such manipulative and social engineering operations often end with the victims losing their funds, and in some cases, the extraction of even more money from them by requesting various fees and other payments. The Singapore-headquartered company said the campaign has a global reach, with victims reported across Asia-Pacific, European, Middle East, and Africa. The bogus apps, built using the UniApp Framework, have been classified under the moniker UniShadowTrade . The activity cluster i...

A new set of malicious packages has been unearthed in the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that masqueraded as cryptocurrency wallet recovery and management services, only to siphon sensitive data and facilitate the theft of valuable digital assets. "The attack targeted users of Atomic, Trust Wallet, Metamask, Ronin, TronLink, Exodus, and other prominent wallets in the crypto ecosystem," Checkmarx researcher Yehuda Gelb said in a Tuesday analysis. "Presenting themselves as utilities for extracting mnemonic phrases and decrypting wallet data, these packages appeared to offer valuable functionality for cryptocurrency users engaged in wallet recovery or management." However, they harbor functionality to steal private keys, mnemonic phrases, and other sensitive wallet data, such as transaction histories or wallet balances. Each of the packages attracted hundreds of downloads prior to them being taken down - atomicdecoderss (366 downloads) trondecoderss ...

The threat actors behind the Rhadamanthys information stealer have added new advanced features to the malware, including using artificial intelligence (AI) for optical character recognition (OCR) as part of what's called "Seed Phrase Image Recognition." "This allows Rhadamanthys to extract cryptocurrency wallet seed phrases from images, making it a highly potent threat for anyone dealing in cryptocurrencies," Recorded Future's Insikt Group said in an analysis of version 0.7.0 of the malware. "The malware can recognize seed phrase images on the client side and send them back to the command-and-control (C2) server for further exploitation." First discovered in the wild in September 2022, Rhadamanthys has emerged as one of the most potent information stealers that are advertised under the malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model, alongside Lumma and others. The malware continues to have an active presence despite suffering bans from underground forum...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malicious Android app on the Google Play Store that enabled the threat actors behind it to steal approximately $70,000 in cryptocurrency from victims over a period of nearly five months. The dodgy app, identified by Check Point, masqueraded as the legitimate WalletConnect open-source protocol to trick unsuspecting users into downloading it. "Fake reviews and consistent branding helped the app achieve over 10,000 downloads by ranking high in search results," the cybersecurity company said in an analysis, adding it's the first time a cryptocurrency drainer has exclusively targeted mobile device users. Over 150 users are estimated to have fallen victim to the scam, although it's believed that not all users who downloaded the app were impacted by the cryptocurrency drainer. The campaign involved distributing a deceptive app that went by several names such as "Mestox Calculator," "WalletConnect - DeFi &...