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The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Monday unsealed indictments against seven Chinese nationals for their involvement in a hacking group that targeted U.S. and foreign critics, journalists, businesses, and political officials for about 14 years. The defendants include Ni Gaobin (倪高彬), Weng Ming (翁明), Cheng Feng (程锋), Peng Yaowen (彭耀文), Sun Xiaohui (孙小辉), Xiong Wang (熊旺), and Zhao Guangzong (赵光宗).  The suspected cyber spies have been charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusions and conspiracy to commit wire fraud in connection with a state-sponsored threat group tracked as  APT31 , which is also known as Altaire,  Bronze Vinewood , Judgement Panda, and Violet Typhoon (formerly Zirconium). The hacking collective has been  active since at least 2010 . Specifically, their responsibilities entail testing and exploiting the malware used to conduct the intrusions, managing the attack infrastructure, and conducting surveillance of specific U.S. entities, federal prosecutors no

The Iran-affiliated threat actor tracked as  MuddyWater  (aka Mango Sandstorm or TA450) has been linked to a new phishing campaign in March 2024 that aims to deliver a legitimate Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) solution called Atera. The activity, which took place from March 7 through the week of March 11, targeted Israeli entities spanning global manufacturing, technology, and information security sectors, Proofpoint said. "TA450 sent emails with PDF attachments that contained malicious links," the enterprise security firm  said . "While this method is not foreign to TA450, the threat actor has more recently relied on including malicious links directly in email message bodies instead of adding in this extra step." MuddyWater has been attributed to attacks directed against Israeli organizations since late October 2023, with prior findings from Deep Instinct  uncovering  the threat actor's use of another remote administration tool from N-able. This i

In today's digital world, where connectivity is rules all, endpoints serve as the gateway to a business's digital kingdom. And because of this, endpoints are one of hackers' favorite targets.  According to the IDC,  70% of successful breaches start at the endpoint . Unprotected endpoints provide vulnerable entry points to launch devastating cyberattacks. With IT teams needing to protect more endpoints—and more kinds of endpoints—than ever before, that perimeter has become more challenging to defend. You need to improve your endpoint security, but where do you start? That's where this guide comes in.  We've curated the top 10 must-know endpoint security tips that every IT and security professional should have in their arsenal. From identifying entry points to implementing EDR solutions, we'll dive into the insights you need to defend your endpoints with confidence.  1. Know Thy Endpoints: Identifying and Understanding Your Entry Points Understanding your network's

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as  Kimsuky  (aka Black Banshee, Emerald Sleet, or Springtail) has been observed shifting its tactics, leveraging Compiled HTML Help (CHM) files as vectors to deliver malware for harvesting sensitive data. Kimsuky, active since at least 2012, is known to target entities located in South Korea as well as North America, Asia, and Europe. According to Rapid7, attack chains have leveraged weaponized Microsoft Office documents, ISO files, and Windows shortcut (LNK) files, with the group also employing CHM files to  deploy malware  on  compromised hosts . The cybersecurity firm has attributed the activity to Kimsuky with moderate confidence, citing similar tradecraft observed in the past. "While originally designed for help documentation, CHM files have also been exploited for malicious purposes, such as distributing malware, because they can execute JavaScript when opened," the company  said . The CHM file is propagated within an IS

The WINELOADER backdoor used in recent cyber attacks targeting diplomatic entities with wine-tasting phishing lures has been attributed as the handiwork of a hacking group with links to Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), which was responsible for  breaching SolarWinds and Microsoft . The findings come from Mandiant, which said  Midnight Blizzard  (aka APT29, BlueBravo, or Cozy Bear) used the malware to target German political parties with phishing emails bearing a logo from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) around February 26, 2024. "This is the first time we have seen this APT29 cluster target political parties, indicating a possible area of emerging operational focus beyond the  typical   targeting  of  diplomatic missions ," researchers Luke Jenkins and Dan Black  said . WINELOADER was  first disclosed  by Zscaler ThreatLabz last month as part of a cyber espionage campaign that's believed to have been ongoing since at least July 2023. It attribute

The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Wednesday announced sanctions against two 46-year-old Russian nationals and the respective companies they own for engaging in cyber influence operations. Ilya Andreevich Gambashidze (Gambashidze), the founder of the Moscow-based company Social Design Agency (SDA), and Nikolai Aleksandrovich Tupikin (Tupikin), the CEO and current owner of Russia-based Company Group Structura LLC (Structura), have been accused of providing services to the Russian government in connection to a "foreign malign influence campaign." The disinformation campaign is tracked by the broader cybersecurity community under the name  Doppelganger , which is known to target audiences in Europe and the U.S. using inauthentic news sites and social media accounts. "SDA and Structura have been identified as key actors of the campaign, responsible for providing [the Government of the Russian Federation] with a variety of servic

Ivanti has disclosed details of a critical remote code execution flaw impacting Standalone Sentry, urging customers to apply the fixes immediately to stay protected against potential cyber threats. Tracked as  CVE-2023-41724 , the vulnerability carries a CVSS score of 9.6. "An unauthenticated threat actor can execute arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system of the appliance within the same physical or logical network," the company  said . The flaw impacts all supported versions 9.17.0, 9.18.0, and 9.19.0, as well as older versions. The company said it has made available a patch (versions 9.17.1, 9.18.1, and 9.19.1) that can be downloaded via the standard download portal. It credited Vincent Hutsebaut, Pierre Vivegnis, Jerome Nokin, Roberto Suggi Liverani and Antonin B. of NATO Cyber Security Centre for "their collaboration on this issue." Ivanti emphasized that it's not aware of any customers affected by CVE-2023-41724, and  added  that "

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it's forming a new "Water Sector Cybersecurity Task Force" to devise methods to counter the threats faced by the water sector in the country. "In addition to considering the prevalent vulnerabilities of water systems to cyberattacks and the challenges experienced by some systems in adopting best practices, this Task Force in its deliberations would seek to build upon existing collaborative products," the EPA  said . In a letter sent to all U.S. Governors, EPA Administrator Michael Regan and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan highlighted the need to secure water and wastewater systems (WWS) from cyber attacks that could disrupt access to clean and safe drinking water. At least two threat actors have been linked to intrusions targeting the nation's water systems, including those by an Iranian hacktivist group named  Cyber Av3ngers  as well as the China-linked  Volt Typhoon , which has targeted commu

A new variant of a data wiping malware called AcidRain has been detected in the wild that's specifically designed for targeting Linux x86 devices. The malware, dubbed AcidPour, is compiled for Linux x86 devices, SentinelOne's Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade said in a series of posts on X. "The new variant [...] is an ELF binary compiled for x86 (not MIPS) and while it refers to similar devices/strings, it's a largely different codebase," Guerrero-Saade  noted . AcidRain  first came to light  in the early days of the Russo-Ukrainian war, with the malware deployed against KA-SAT modems from U.S. satellite company Viasat. An ELF binary compiled for MIPS architectures, it is capable of wiping the filesystem and different known storage device files by recursively iterating over common directories for most Linux distributions. The cyber attack was  subsequently attributed  to Russia by the Five Eyes nations, along with Ukraine and the European Union. AcidPour, as the

Russia has detained a South Korean national for the first time on cyber espionage charges and transferred from Vladivostok to Moscow for further investigation. The development was  first reported  by Russian news agency TASS. "During the investigation of an espionage case, a South Korean citizen Baek Won-soon was identified and detained in Vladivostok, and put into custody under a court order," an unnamed source was quoted as saying. Won-soon has been accused of handing over classified "top secret" information to unnamed foreign intelligence agencies. According to the agency, Won-soon was detained in Vladivostok earlier this year and shifted to Moscow late last month. He is said to be currently at the Lefortovo pretrial detention center. His arrest has been extended for another three months, until June 15, 2024. The  detention center  is currently also the  place  where American journalist Evan Gershkovich is  being held , awaiting trial on suspicion of espionage. Gershkovich ha

Microsoft on Friday revealed that the Kremlin-backed threat actor known as  Midnight Blizzard  (aka APT29 or Cozy Bear) managed to gain access to some of its source code repositories and internal systems following a  hack that came to light  in January 2024. "In recent weeks, we have seen evidence that Midnight Blizzard is using information initially exfiltrated from our corporate email systems to gain, or attempt to gain, unauthorized access," the tech giant  said . "This has included access to some of the company's source code repositories and internal systems. To date we have found no evidence that Microsoft-hosted customer-facing systems have been compromised." Redmond, which is continuing to investigate the extent of the breach, said the Russian state-sponsored threat actor is attempting to leverage the different types of secrets it found, including those that were shared between customers and Microsoft in email. It, however, did not disclose what the

The China-linked threat actor known as  Evasive Panda  orchestrated both watering hole and supply chain attacks targeting Tibetan users at least since September 2023. The end goal of the attacks is to deliver malicious downloaders for Windows and macOS that deploy a known backdoor called MgBot and a previously undocumented Windows implant known as Nightdoor. The findings come from ESET, which said the attackers compromised at least three websites to carry out watering-hole attacks as well as a supply-chain compromise of a Tibetan software company. The operation was discovered in January 2024. Evasive Panda, active since 2012 and also known as Bronze Highland and Daggerfly, was  previously disclosed  by the Slovak cybersecurity firm in April 2023 as having targeted an international non-governmental organization (NGO) in Mainland China with MgBot. Another report from Broadcom-owned Symantec around the same time  implicated  the adversary to a cyber espionage campaign aimed at infil

The U.S. Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned two individuals and five entities associated with the Intellexa Alliance for their role in "developing, operating, and distributing" commercial spyware designed to target government officials, journalists, and policy experts in the country. "The proliferation of commercial spyware poses distinct and growing security risks to the United States and has been misused by foreign actors to enable human rights abuses and the targeting of dissidents around the world for repression and reprisal," the agency  said . "The Intellexa Consortium, which has a global customer base, has enabled the proliferation of commercial spyware and surveillance technologies around the world, including to authoritarian regimes." The Intellexa Alliance is a consortium of several companies, including Cytrox, linked to a mercenary spyware solution called Predator . In July 2023, the U.S. government  added  Cytrox and Intellexa, a

A previously undocumented threat actor dubbed  SPIKEDWINE  has been observed targeting officials in European countries with Indian diplomatic missions using a new backdoor called WINELOADER . The adversary, according to a  report  from Zscaler ThreatLabz, used a PDF file in emails that purported to come from the Ambassador of India, inviting diplomatic staff to a wine-tasting event on February 2, 2024. The  PDF document  was uploaded to VirusTotal from Latvia on January 30, 2024. That said, there is evidence to suggest that this campaign may have been active at least since July 6, 2023, going by the discovery of  another similar PDF file  uploaded from the same country. "The attack is characterized by its very low volume and the advanced tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) employed in the malware and command-and-control (C2) infrastructure," security researchers Sudeep Singh and Roy Tay said. Central to the novel attack is the PDF file that comes embedded with a malicious

At least two different suspected China-linked cyber espionage clusters, tracked as  UNC5325  and  UNC3886 , have been attributed to the exploitation of security flaws in Ivanti Connect Secure VPN appliances. UNC5325 abused  CVE-2024-21893  to deliver a wide range of new malware called LITTLELAMB.WOOLTEA, PITSTOP, PITDOG, PITJET, and PITHOOK, as well as attempted to maintain persistent access to compromised appliances, Mandiant said. The Google-owned threat intelligence firm has assessed with moderate confidence that UNC5325 is associated with UNC3886 owing to source code overlaps in LITTLELAMB.WOOLTEA and PITHOOK with malware used by the latter. It's worth pointing out that  UNC3886  has a track record of leveraging zero-day flaws in Fortinet and VMware solutions to deploy a variety of implants like VIRTUALPITA, VIRTUALPIE, THINCRUST, and CASTLETAP. "UNC3886 has primarily targeted the defense industrial base, technology, and telecommunication organizations located in the U.S. and

U.S. President Joe Biden has  issued  an Executive Order that prohibits the mass transfer of citizens' personal data to countries of concern. The Executive Order also "provides safeguards around other activities that can give those countries access to Americans' sensitive data," the White House said in a statement. This includes sensitive information such as genomic data, biometric data, personal health data, geolocation data, financial data, and certain kinds of personally identifiable information (PII). The U.S. government said threat actors could weaponize this information to track their citizens and pass that information to  data brokers  and foreign intelligence services, which can then be used for intrusive surveillance, scams, blackmail, and other violations of privacy. "Commercial data brokers and other companies can sell this data to countries of concern, or entities controlled by those countries, and it can land in the hands of foreign intelligenc

An Iran-nexus threat actor known as  UNC1549  has been attributed with medium confidence to a new set of attacks targeting aerospace, aviation, and defense industries in the Middle East, including Israel and the U.A.E. Other targets of the cyber espionage activity likely include Turkey, India, and Albania, Google-owned Mandiant said in a new analysis. UNC1549 is said to overlap with  Smoke Sandstorm  (previously Bohrium) and  Crimson Sandstorm  (previously Curium), the latter of which is an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) affiliated group also known as Imperial Kitten, TA456, Tortoiseshell, and Yellow Liderc. "This suspected UNC1549 activity has been active since at least June 2022 and is still ongoing as of February 2024," the company  said . "While regional in nature and focused mostly in the Middle East, the targeting includes entities operating worldwide." The attacks entail the use of Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure for command-and-control (C2) and social engin

In a new joint advisory, cybersecurity and intelligence agencies from the U.S. and other countries are urging users of Ubiquiti EdgeRouter to take protective measures, weeks after a botnet comprising infected routers was  felled by law enforcement  as part of an operation codenamed Dying Ember. The botnet, named MooBot, is said to have been used by a Russia-linked threat actor known as APT28 to facilitate covert cyber operations and drop custom malware for follow-on exploitation. APT28, affiliated with Russia's Main Directorate of the General Staff (GRU), is known to be active since at least 2007. APT28 actors have "used compromised EdgeRouters globally to harvest credentials, collect NTLMv2 digests, proxy network traffic, and host spear-phishing landing pages and custom tools," the authorities  said  [PDF]. The adversary's use of EdgeRouters dates back to 2022, with the attacks targeting aerospace and defense, education, energy and utilities, governments, hospita