cyber espionage | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

It's not hard for a well-funded state-sponsored hacking group to break into corporate networks and compromise systems with malware, but what's challenging for them is to keep that backdoor and its communication undetectable from a firewall and other network monitoring applications. However, a cyber-espionage group known as " Platinum ," that is actively targeting governmental organisations, defense institutes, and telecommunication providers since at least 2009, has found a way to hide its malicious activities from host-based protection mechanisms. Microsoft has recently discovered that the cyber-espionage group is now leveraging Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT) Serial-over-LAN (SOL) channel as a file-transfer tool to steal data from the targeted computers without detection. Intel-based chip sets come with an embedded technology, called AMT, which is designed to allow IT administrators to remotely manage and repair PCs, workstations, and serve

Security researchers have confirmed that the alleged CIA hacking tools recently exposed by WikiLeaks have been used against at least 40 governments and private organizations across 16 countries. Since March, as part of its " Vault 7 " series, Wikileaks has published over 8,761 documents and other confidential information that the whistleblower group claims came from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Now, researchers at cybersecurity company Symantec reportedly managed to link those CIA hacking tools to numerous real cyber attacks in recent years that have been carried out against the government and private sectors across the world. Those 40 cyber attacks were conducted by Longhorn — a North American hacking group that has been active since at least 2011 and has used backdoor trojans and zero-day attacks to target government, financial, energy, telecommunications, education, aerospace, and natural resources sectors. Although the group's targets were a

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

Remember The Shadow Brokers ? They are back. A hackers group that previously claimed to have stolen a bunch of hacking tools (malware, zero-day exploits, and implants) created by the NSA and gained popularity last year for leaking a portion of those tools is back. Today, The Shadow Brokers group released more alleged hacking tools and exploits that, the group claims, belonged to " Equation Group " – an elite cyber attack unit linked to the NSA. Besides dumping some NSA's hacking tools back in August 2016, the Shadow Brokers also released an encrypted cache of files containing more NSA's hacking tools and exploits in an auction, asking for 1 Million Bitcoins (around $568 Million). However, after failed auction , the group put up those hacking tools and exploits for direct sale on an underground website, categorizing them into a type — like "exploits," "Trojans," and "implant" — each of which ranged from 1 to 100 Bitcoins (fr

As part of its Vault 7 series of leaked documents, whistleblowing website WikiLeaks today released a new cache of 27 documents allegedly belonged to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Named Grasshopper , the latest batch reveals a CLI-based framework developed by the CIA to build "customised malware" payloads for breaking into Microsoft's Windows operating systems and bypassing antivirus protection. All the leaked documents are basically a user manual that the agency flagged as "secret" and that are supposed to be only accessed by the members of the agency, WikiLeaks claims. Grasshopper: Customized Malware Builder Framework According to the leaked documents, Grasshopper framework allows the agency members to easily create custom malware, depending upon the technical details, such as what operating system and antivirus the targets are using. The Grasshopper framework then automatically puts together several components sufficient for attack

Open source developers who use the popular code-sharing site GitHub were put on alert after the discovery of a phishing email campaign that attempts to infect their computers with an advanced malware trojan. Dubbed Dimnie , the reconnaissance and espionage trojan has the ability to harvest credentials, download sensitive files, take screenshots, log keystrokes on 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, download additional malware on infected systems, and self-destruct when ordered to. The malware has largely flown under the radar for the past three years – Thanks to its stealthy command and control methods. The threat was discovered in the mid of January this year when it was targeting multiple owners of Github repositories via phishing emails, but cyber-security firm Palo Alto, who reported the campaign on Tuesday, says the attacks started a few weeks before. Here's How the Attack Works: The attack starts by spamming the email inboxes of active GitHub users with booby-trap

Security researchers have discovered a new Mac malware allegedly developed by APT28 Russian cyber espionage group who is believed to be responsible for 2016 presidential election hacking scandal. A new variant of the X-Agent spyware is now targeting Apple macOS system that has previously been used in cyber attacks against Windows, iOS, Android, and Linux devices. The malware is designed to steal web browser passwords, take screenshots of the display, detect system configurations, execute files and exfiltrate iPhone backups stored on the computer. The X-Agent malware is tied to Russian hacking group known as APT28 — also known as Fancy Bear, Sofacy, Sednit, and Pawn Storm — that has been operating since at least 2007 and is allegedly linked to the Russian government. "Our past analysis of samples known to be linked to APT28 group shows a number of similarities between the Sofacy/APT28/Sednit Xagent component for Windows/Linux and the Mac OS binary that currently forms

The hacker group calling itself the Shadow Brokers, who previously claimed to have leaked a portion of the NSA's hacking tools and exploits, is back with a Bang! The Shadow Brokers published more files today, and this time the group dumped a list of foreign servers allegedly compromised by the NSA-linked hacking unit, Equation Group, in various countries to expand its espionage operations. Top 3 Targeted Countries — China, Japan, and Korea The data dump  [ Download / File Password: payus ] that experts believe contains 306 domain names, and 352 IP addresses belong to at least 49 countries. As many as 32 domains of the total were run by educational institutes in China and Taiwan. A few target domains were based in Russia, and at least nine domains include .gov websites. The top 10 targeted countries include China, Japan, Korea, Spain, Germany, India, Taiwan, Mexico, Italy, and Russia. The latest dump has been signed by the same key as the first Shadow Brokers' dump of

The United States federal authorities have boosted charges against a former IBM Corp. software developer in China for allegedly stealing valuable source code from his former employer in the US. Chinese national Xu Jiaqiang, 30, was arrested by the FBI in December last year, when he was charged with just one count of theft of a trade secret. However, Jiaqiang has been charged with six counts: three counts of economic espionage and three counts of theft of a trade secret, as US prosecutors accused him of selling the stolen information to other companies, according to the Justice Department indictment [ PDF ]. The proprietary source code, which Jiaqiang was intended to sell for the benefit of the Chinese government, has been described as "a product of decades of work." Jiaqiang worked as a software developer for an unnamed American company that developed networking software from November 2010 to May 2014. In May 2014, Jiaqiang resigned the company only to sell the c

In Brief The Microsoft's Windows Defender Advanced Threat Hunting team detected that a cyber espionage group of hackers, known as PLATINUM, has found a way to turn the Windows's Hotpatching technique (a way of updating the operating system without requiring a restart) to hide its malware from Antivirus products. PLATINUM group has been active since 2009 and launching large-scale attacks against governmental organizations, intelligence agencies, defense institutes and telecommunication providers in South and Southeast Asia. Practically speaking, the most important thing for a sophisticated APT hacker and a cyber-espionage group is to remain undetected for the longest possible period. Well, that's exactly what an APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) group has achieved. The Microsoft's Windows Defender Advanced Threat Hunting team has discovered that an APT group, dubbed Platinum, has been spying on high-profile targets by abusing a " novel " technique called

In the most surprising manner, the Chinese government said it arrested criminal hackers behind the massive cyber attack on US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) earlier this year, dismissing its involvement. Three months back, we reported that China arrested a handful of hackers within its borders who were suspected of allegedly stealing commercial secrets from US companies. The arrests took place shortly before China President Xi Jinping visited the United States in September 2015 when both heads of states agreed that neither side will participate in commercial espionage against one another. China: Cyber Criminals Hacked OPM, Not Government Spies Now, those suspected hackers have turned out to be the ones in connection with the OPM hack that resulted in the theft of personal details of more than 21 Million United States federal employees, including 5.6 Million federal employees' fingerprints . Citing an " investigation ", the Chinese governme

The German authorities have initiated a further investigation into espionage by the United States secret service NSA and British intelligence agency GCHQ after...   ...the head of the German Federal Chancellery unit had his private laptop infected. According to a recent report published by Der Spiegel , the laptop of the Chancellery division leader was infected with Regin – a highly advanced espionage malware program that has been linked to the National Security Agency (NSA) and its UK counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). As The Hacker News reported almost a year ago, Regin is one of the most highly advanced, sophisticated malware programs that was used to spy on a wide range of international targets including: Internet service providers (ISPs) Telecommunications backbone operators Energy firms Airlines Government entities Research institutes Other high-profile individuals …around the world since at least 2008. Regin has d

The Potential threat, range from very narrow to very broad, posed by Cyber-Terrorism has provoked considerable alarm. Terrorists involved in Cyber Espionage and Operations aim at gaining access to Nation's critical infrastructure involving both Government as well as Private sectors. The Frequency and Intensity of such Cyber-attacks are increasing rapidly and extending into absolute cyber-war between states, allowing terrorist organizations to pilfer data from financial and military organizations. Similar Incident happened, few months back, when a group of Middle-east terrorists tried to infiltrate Indian Government officials operational in Cyber related divisions. In response, a team of Independent Indian security researchers planned a counter operation to track down the terrorist organization behind the cyber attack. Shesh Sarangdhar , a security researcher at Seclabs & Systems Pvt. told The Hacker News that his team successfully penetrated the sourc

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) type attacks continue to emerge on a global scale. What makes these attacks deviate from the norm is often the resources required to develop and implement them: time, money, and the knowledge required to create custom pieces of malware to carry out specific, targeted attacks. Operation Lotus Blossom is one of the more recent APT attacks that has been discovered and analyzed. It is an advanced adversary campaign against the mostly government and state-sponsored entities in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Indonesia. It is thought that this group carried out the attack to gain a geopolitical advantage by stealing specific information from government and military institutions in that area.  At this point, it is still too early to tell if the reach of the attack will extend to the private sector (a la Stuxnet and Duqu). How does the attack work? It was found that Operation Lotus Blossom involved a novel custom-built malware

Security firm Check Point has uncovered what seems to be a successful, and long-running, cyber-surveillance campaign called " Volatile Cedar ." Check Point found that targets of the attack included, but were not limited to, defense contractors, media companies, telecommunications, and educational institutions. The attack is said to have originated in Lebanon and possibly has political ties in the region. According to an article in Techworld , previous cyber-campaigns originating from Lebanon have been either extremely unsophisticated or targeted at other countries in the region. However, Volatile Cedar is different. According to the report, this campaign has been in operation since 2012 and has successfully penetrated a large number of targets across the globe. During this time it has allowed the attackers to steal data and monitor a large volume of victim's actions. The actors involved in this campaign do not appear to be using flashy mechanisms like zero day attacks

A State-sponsored Cyber Espionage Group -- most likely linked to the Chinese government becomes the first group to target the so-called " Air-Gapped Networks " that aren't directly connected to the Internet. What are Air-Gapped systems? Air-gapped systems are known to be the most safest and secure systems on the earth. These systems are isolated from the Internet or any other Internet-connected computers or external networks. Air-gapped systems are generally used in the critical situations that demand high security like in payment networks to process debit and credit card transactions, military networks, and in industrial control systems that operate critical infrastructure of the Nation. Why Air-Gapped? It is very difficult to siphon data from Air-Gapped systems because it requires a physical access to the target system or machine in order to do that and gaining physical access is possible only by using removable devices such as a firewire cab

Microsoft has come up with its most important Patch Tuesday for this year, addressing the recently disclosed critical the FREAK encryption-downgrade attack , and a separate five-year-old vulnerability leveraged by infamous Stuxnet malware to infect Windows operating system. Stuxnet malware , a sophisticated cyber-espionage malware allegedly developed by the US Intelligence and Israeli government together, was specially designed to sabotage the Iranian nuclear facilities a few years ago. First uncovered in 2010, Stuxnet targeted computers by exploiting vulnerabilities in Windows systems. Thankfully, Microsoft has issued a patch to protect its Windows machines that have been left vulnerable to Stuxnet and other similar attacks for the past five years. The fixes are included in MS15-020 which resolves Stuxnet issue. The company has also issued an update that patches the FREAK encryption vulnerability in its SSL/TSL implementation called Secure Channel (Schannel). The fix

Last month, cyber security researchers spotted a new strain of french surveillance malware, dubbed " Babar ," which revealed that even French Government and its spying agency the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE) is dedicatedly involved in conducting surveillance operation just like the United States — NSA and United Kingdom — GCHQ . A powerful piece of surveillance malware, known as " Casper ," has recently been discovered by the Canadian security researchers that once again point fingers at the French government. CASPER SURVEILLANCE MALWARE LINKED TO FRANCE The newly discovered sophisticated Casper surveillance malware is believed to be developed by France based hacking group suspected to have ties with the French government, according to the report published by Motherboard . Report suggests that French hacking group have developed ' Swiss Army knife of spying tools ' which has been used by French government to conduct multipl

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) may be hiding highly-sophisticated hacking payloads in the firmware of consumer hard drives over the last 15 to 20 years in a campaign, giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on thousands of targets' computers, according to an analysis by Kaspersky labs and subsequent reports. 'EQUATION GROUP' BEHIND THE MALWARE The team of malicious actors is dubbed the the " Equation Group " by researchers from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, and describes them as " probably one of the most sophisticated cyber attack groups in the world," and "the most advanced threat actor we have seen. " The security researchers have documented 500 infections by Equation Group and believes that the actual number of victims likely reaches into the tens of thousands because of a self-destruct mechanism built into the malware. TOP MANUFACTURERS' HARD DRIVES ARE INFECTED Russian security experts reportedly uncovered sta