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Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a nascent artificial intelligence (AI) assisted ransomware family called FunkSec that sprang forth in late 2024, and has claimed more than 85 victims to date. "The group uses double extortion tactics, combining data theft with encryption to pressure victims into paying ransoms," Check Point Research said in a new report shared with The Hacker News. "Notably, FunkSec demanded unusually low ransoms, sometimes as little as $10,000, and sold stolen data to third parties at reduced prices." FunkSec launched its data leak site (DLS) in December 2024 to "centralize" their ransomware operations, highlighting breach announcements, a custom tool to conduct distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and a bespoke ransomware as part of a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) model. A majority of the victims are located in the U.S., India, Italy, Brazil, Israel, Spain, and Mongolia. Check Point's analysis of the group...

A Mirai botnet variant has been found exploiting a newly disclosed security flaw impacting Four-Faith industrial routers since early November 2024 with the goal of conducting distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The botnet maintains approximately 15,000 daily active IP addresses, with the infections primarily scattered across China, Iran, Russia, Turkey, and the United States. Exploiting an arsenal of over 20 known security vulnerabilities and weak Telnet credentials for initial access, the malware is known to have been active since February 2024. The botnet has been dubbed "gayfemboy" in reference to the offensive term present in the source code. QiAnXin XLab said it observed the malware leveraging a zero-day vulnerability in industrial routers manufactured by China-based Four-Faith to deliver the artifacts as early as November 9, 2024. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2024-12856 (CVSS score: 7.2), which refers to an operating system (OS) command injectio...

As SaaS providers race to integrate AI into their product offerings to stay competitive and relevant, a new challenge has emerged in the world of AI: shadow AI.  Shadow AI refers to the unauthorized use of AI tools and copilots at organizations. For example, a developer using ChatGPT to assist with writing code, a salesperson downloading an AI-powered meeting transcription tool, or a customer support person using Agentic AI to automate tasks – without going through the proper channels. When these tools are used without IT or the Security team's knowledge, they often lack sufficient security controls, putting company data at risk. Shadow AI Detection Challenges Because shadow AI tools often embed themselves in approved business applications via AI assistants, copilots, and agents they are even more tricky to discover than traditional shadow IT. While traditional shadow apps can be identified through network monitoring methodologies that scan for unauthorized connections based on...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning about a spike in malicious activity that involves roping vulnerable D-Link routers into two different botnets, a Mirai variant dubbed FICORA and a Kaiten (aka Tsunami) variant called CAPSAICIN. "These botnets are frequently spread through documented D-Link vulnerabilities that allow remote attackers to execute malicious commands via a GetDeviceSettings action on the HNAP (Home Network Administration Protocol) interface," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Vincent Li said in a Thursday analysis. "This HNAP weakness was first exposed almost a decade ago, with numerous devices affected by a variety of CVE numbers, including CVE-2015-2051 , CVE-2019-10891 , CVE-2022-37056 , and CVE-2024-33112 ." According to the cybersecurity company's telemetry data, attacks involving FICORA have targeted various countries globally, whereas those related to CAPSAICIN primarily singled out East Asian territories like Japan and Taiwan. T...

A global law enforcement operation has failed 27 stresser services that were used to conduct distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and took them offline as part of a multi-year international exercise called PowerOFF. The effort, coordinated by Europol and involving 15 countries, dismantled several booter and stresser websites, including zdstresser.net, orbitalstress.net, and starkstresser.net. These services typically employ botnet malware installed on compromised devices to launch attacks on behalf of paying customers against targets of their liking. In addition, three administrators associated with the illicit platforms have been arrested in France and Germany, with over 300 users identified for planned operational activities. "Known as 'booter' and 'stresser' websites, these platforms enabled cybercriminals and hacktivists to flood targets with illegal traffic, rendering websites and other web-based services inaccessible," Europol said in a stat...

A malicious botnet called Socks5Systemz is powering a proxy service called PROXY.AM, according to new findings from Bitsight. "Proxy malware and services enable other types of criminal activity adding uncontrolled layers of anonymity to the threat actors, so they can perform all kinds of malicious activity using chains of victim systems," the company's security research team said in an analysis published last week. The disclosure comes merely weeks after the Black Lotus Labs team at Lumen Technologies revealed that systems compromised by another malware known as Ngioweb are being abused as residential proxy servers for NSOCKS. Socks5Systemz, originally advertised in the cybercrime underground as far back as March 2013, was previously documented by BitSight as being deployed as part of cyber attacks targeting distributing PrivateLoader, SmokeLoader, and Amadey. The primary objective of the malware is to turn compromised systems into proxy exit nodes, which are t...

Europol on Tuesday announced the takedown of an invite-only encrypted messaging service called MATRIX that's created by criminals for criminal purposes. The joint operation, conducted by French and Dutch authorities under the moniker Passionflower , comes in the aftermath of an investigation that was launched in 2021 after the messaging service was discovered on the phone of a criminal convicted for the murder of a Dutch journalist Peter R. de Vries . This allowed authorities to intercept messages being sent via the service for a period of three months, amassing a total of more than 2.3 million messages in 33 languages. The messages, Europol said, are associated with serious crimes such as international drug trafficking, arms trafficking, and money laundering.  It's worth noting at this stage that MATRIX is different from the open-source, decentralized messaging app of the same name ("matrix[.]org"). Also known by other names such as Mactrix, Totalsec, X-quantum...

An INTERPOL-led operation has led to the arrest of 1,006 suspects across 19 African countries and the takedown of 134,089 malicious infrastructures and networks as part of a coordinated effort to disrupt cybercrime in the continent. Dubbed Serengeti , the law enforcement exercise took place between September 2 and October 31, 2024, and targeted criminals behind ransomware, business email compromise (BEC), digital extortion, and online scams. The participating nations in the operation were Algeria, Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. These activities, which ranged from online credit card fraud and Ponzi schemes to investment and multi-level marketing scams, victimized more than 35,000 people, leading to financial losses nearly amounting to $193 million across the world. In connection with the $6 million online Ponzi ...

A threat actor named Matrix has been linked to a widespread distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) campaign that leverages vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in Internet of Things (IoT) devices to co-opt them into a disruptive botnet. "This operation serves as a comprehensive one-stop shop for scanning, exploiting vulnerabilities, deploying malware, and setting up shop kits, showcasing a do-it-all-yourself approach to cyberattacks," Assaf Morag, director of threat intelligence at cloud security firm Aqua, said . There is evidence to suggest that the operation is the work of a lone wolf actor, a script kiddie of Russian origin. The attacks have primarily targeted IP addresses located in China, Japan, and to a lesser extent Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Egypt, India, and the U.S. The absence of Ukraine in the victimology footprint indicates that the attackers are purely driven by financial motivations, the cloud security firm said. The attack chains are characterized by ...

The malware known as Ngioweb has been used to fuel a notorious residential proxy service called NSOCKS, as well as by other services such as VN5Socks and Shopsocks5, new findings from Lumen Technologies reveal. "At least 80% of NSOCKS bots in our telemetry originate from the Ngioweb botnet, mainly utilizing small office/home office (SOHO) routers and IoT devices," the Black Lotus Labs team at Lumen Technologies said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Two-thirds of these proxies are based in the U.S." "The network maintains a daily average of roughly 35,000 working bots, with 40% remaining active for a month or longer." Ngioweb, first documented by Check Point way back in August 2018 in connection with a Ramnit trojan campaign that distributed the malware, has been the subject of extensive analyses in recent weeks by LevelBlue and Trend Micro , the latter of which is tracking the financially motivated threat actor behind the operation as Wate...

German law enforcement authorities have announced the disruption of a criminal service called dstat[.]cc that made it possible for other threat actors to easily mount distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. "The platform made such DDoS attacks accessible to a wide range of users, even those without any in-depth technical skills of their own," the Federal Criminal Police Office (aka Bundeskriminalamt or BKA) said . "The use of stresser services to carry out DDoS attacks has recently become increasingly known in the context of police investigations." The BKA described dstat[.]cc as a platform that offered recommendations and evaluations of stresser services in order to conduct DDoS attacks against websites of interest and render them unresponsive. According to an alert published by Radware in January 2023, dstat[.]cc offered botnet owners the ability to assess the capacity and capabilities of their DDoS attack services. "Bot herders use DStat sites ...

As the holiday season approaches, retail businesses are gearing up for their annual surge in online (and in-store) traffic. Unfortunately, this increase in activity also attracts cybercriminals looking to exploit vulnerabilities for their gain.  Imperva, a Thales company, recently published its annual holiday shopping cybersecurity guide . Data from the Imperva Threat Research team's six-month analysis (April 2024 – September 2024) revealed that AI-driven threats need to be top of mind for retailers this year. As generative AI tools and large language models (LLMs) become more widespread and advanced, cybercriminals are increasingly leveraging these technologies to scale and refine their attacks on eCommerce platforms. Imperva Threat Research also found that retail sites collectively experience an average of 569,884 AI-driven attacks each day. Understanding what types of threats are accounting for these attacks, and how to protect against them, is critical for retail businesses ...

Federal prosecutors in the U.S. have charged two Sudanese brothers with running a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet for hire that conducted a record 35,000 DDoS attacks in a single year, including those that targeted Microsoft's services in June 2023. The attacks, which were facilitated by Anonymous Sudan's "powerful DDoS tool," singled out critical infrastructure, corporate networks, and government agencies in the United States and around the world, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said. Ahmed Salah Yousif Omer, 22, and Alaa Salah Yusuuf Omer, 27, have been charged with one count of conspiracy to damage protected computers. Ahmed Salah has also been charged with three counts of damaging protected computers. If convicted on all charges, Ahmed Salah faces a statutory maximum sentence of life in federal prison, while Alaa Salah faces a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison. The DDoS tool is said to have been disabled in March 2024, the same...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new botnet malware family called Gorilla (aka GorillaBot) that draws its inspiration from the leaked Mirai botnet source code. Cybersecurity firm NSFOCUS, which identified the activity last month, said the botnet "issued over 300,000 attack commands, with a shocking attack density" between September 4 and September 27, 2024. No less than 20,000 commands designed to mount distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have been issued from the botnet every day on average. The botnet is said to have targeted more than 100 countries, attacking universities, government websites, telecoms, banks, gaming, and gambling sectors. China, the U.S., Canada, and Germany have emerged as the most attacked countries. The Beijing-headquartered company said Gorilla primarily uses UDP flood , ACK BYPASS flood, Valve Source Engine (VSE) flood , SYN flood , and ACK flood to conduct the DDoS attacks, adding the connectionless nature of the UDP prot...

Cloudflare has disclosed that it mitigated a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 3.8 terabits per second (Tbps) and lasted 65 seconds. The web infrastructure and security company said it fended off "over one hundred hyper-volumetric L3/4 DDoS attacks throughout last month, with many exceeding 2 billion packets per second (Bpps) and 3 terabits per second (Tbps)." The hyper-volumetric L3/4 DDoS attacks have been ongoing since early September 2024, it noted, adding they targeted multiple customers in the financial services, Internet, and telecommunication industries. The activity has not been attributed to any specific threat actor. The previous record for the largest volumetric DDoS attack hit a peak throughput of 3.47 Tbps in November 2021 , targeting an unnamed Microsoft Azure customer in Asia. The attacks leverage the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) protocol on a fixed port, with the flood of packets originating from Vietnam, Russi...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new malware campaign targeting Linux environments to conduct illicit cryptocurrency mining and deliver botnet malware. The activity, which specifically singles out the Oracle Weblogic server, is designed to deliver a malware strain dubbed Hadooken , according to cloud security firm Aqua. "When Hadooken is executed, it drops a Tsunami malware and deploys a crypto miner," security researcher Assaf Moran said . The attack chains exploit known security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, such as weak credentials, to obtain an initial foothold and execute arbitrary code on susceptible instances. This is accomplished by launching two nearly-identical payloads, one written in Python and the other, a shell script, both of which are responsible for retrieving the Hadooken malware from a remote server (" 89.185.85[.]102 " or " 185.174.136[.]204 "). "In addition, the shell script version attempts to iterate ov...