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Microsoft has released security updates to address 51 flaws as part of its Patch Tuesday updates for June 2024. Of the 51 vulnerabilities, one is rated Critical and 50 are rated Important. This is in addition to 17 vulnerabilities resolved in the Chromium-based Edge browser over the past month. None of the security flaws have been actively exploited in the wild, with one of them listed as publicly known at the time of the release. This concerns a third-party advisory tracked as CVE-2023-50868 (CVSS score: 7.5), a denial-of-service issue impacting the DNSSEC validation process that could cause CPU exhaustion on a DNSSEC-validating resolver. It was reported by researchers from the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity (ATHENE) in Darmstadt back in February, alongside KeyTrap ( CVE-2023-50387 , CVSS score: 7.5). "NSEC3 is an improved version of NSEC (Next Secure) that provides authenticated denial of existence," Tyler Reguly, associate director of Security

The threat actors behind the Windows-based  Grandoreiro  banking trojan have returned in a global campaign since March 2024 following a law enforcement takedown in January. The large-scale phishing attacks, likely facilitated by other cybercriminals via a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model, target over 1,500 banks across the world, spanning more than 60 countries in Central and South America, Africa, Europe, and the Indo-Pacific, IBM X-Force said. While  Grandoreiro  is known primarily for its focus in Latin America, Spain, and Portugal, the expansion is likely a shift in strategy after attempts to  shut down its infrastructure  by Brazilian authorities. Going hand-in-hand with the broader targeting footprint are significant improvements to the malware itself, which indicates active development. "Analysis of the malware revealed major updates within the string decryption and domain generating algorithm (DGA), as well as the ability to use Microsoft Outlook clients on infected

It's been a decade since the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) introduced its Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 1.0. Created following a 2013 Executive Order, NIST was tasked with designing a voluntary cybersecurity framework that would help organizations manage cyber risk, providing guidance based on established standards and best practices. While this version was originally tailored for Critical infrastructure, 2018's version 1.1 was designed for any organization looking to address cybersecurity risk management.  CSF is a valuable tool for organizations looking to evaluate and enhance their security posture. The framework helps security stakeholders understand and assess their current security measures, organize and prioritize actions to manage risks, and improve communication within and outside organizations using a common language. It's a comprehensive collection of guidelines, best practices, and recommendations, divided into five core functions: Identify, Protec

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered an ongoing social engineering campaign that bombards enterprises with spam emails with the goal of obtaining initial access to their environments for follow-on exploitation. "The incident involves a threat actor overwhelming a user's email with junk and calling the user, offering assistance," Rapid7 researchers Tyler McGraw, Thomas Elkins, and Evan McCann  said . "The threat actor prompts impacted users to download remote monitoring and management software like AnyDesk or utilize Microsoft's built-in Quick Assist feature in order to establish a remote connection." The novel campaign is said to be underway since late April 2024, with the emails primarily consisting of newsletter sign-up confirmation messages from legitimate organizations and done so with an aim to overwhelm email protection solutions. The impacted users are then approached over phone calls by masquerading as the company's IT team, tricking the

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an intricate multi-stage attack that leverages invoice-themed phishing decoys to deliver a wide range of malware such as  Venom RAT , Remcos RAT, XWorm, NanoCore RAT, and a stealer that targets crypto wallets. The email messages come with Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file attachments that, when clicked, activate the infection sequence, Fortinet FortiGuard Labs  said  in a technical report. The modus operandi is notable for the use of the BatCloak malware obfuscation engine and ScrubCrypt to deliver the malware in the form of obfuscated batch scripts. BatCloak , offered for sale to other threat actors since late 2022, has its foundations in another tool called Jlaive. Its primary function is to load a next-stage payload in a manner that circumvents traditional detection mechanisms. ScrubCrypt, a crypter that was  first documented  by Fortinet in March 2023 in connection with a cryptojacking campaign orchestrated by the 8220 Gang, is asse

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

Cybersecurity researchers have detected a new wave of phishing attacks that aim to deliver an ever-evolving information stealer referred to as  StrelaStealer . The campaigns impact more than 100 organizations in the E.U. and the U.S., Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers said in a new report published today. "These campaigns come in the form of spam emails with attachments that eventually launch the StrelaStealer's DLL payload," researchers Benjamin Chang, Goutam Tripathy, Pranay Kumar Chhaparwal, Anmol Maurya, and Vishwa Thothathri said . "In an attempt to evade detection, attackers change the initial email attachment file format from one campaign to the next, to prevent detection from the previously generated signature or patterns." First disclosed in November 2022, StrelaStealer is  equipped  to siphon email login data from well-known email clients and exfiltrate them to an attacker-controlled server. Since then, two large-scale campaigns involving the ma

Threat actors are leveraging digital document publishing (DDP) sites hosted on platforms like FlipSnack, Issuu, Marq, Publuu, RelayTo, and Simplebooklet for carrying out phishing, credential harvesting, and session token theft, once again underscoring how threat actors are  repurposing legitimate services  for malicious ends. "Hosting phishing lures on DDP sites increases the likelihood of a successful phishing attack, since these sites often have a favorable reputation, are unlikely to appear on web filter blocklists, and may instill a false sense of security in users who recognize them as familiar or legitimate," Cisco Talos researcher Craig Jackson  said  last week. While adversaries have used popular cloud-based services such as Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, SharePoint, DocuSign, and Oneflow to host phishing documents in the past, the latest development marks an escalation designed to evade email security controls. DDP services allow users to upload and share PDF

A new phishing campaign is targeting U.S. organizations with the intent to deploy a remote access trojan called NetSupport RAT. Israeli cybersecurity company Perception Point is tracking the activity under the moniker  Operation PhantomBlu . "The PhantomBlu operation introduces a nuanced exploitation method, diverging from NetSupport RAT's typical delivery mechanism by leveraging OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) template manipulation, exploiting Microsoft Office document templates to execute malicious code while evading detection," security researcher Ariel Davidpur  said . NetSupport RAT is a  malicious offshoot  of a legitimate remote desktop tool known as NetSupport Manager, allowing threat actors to conduct a spectrum of data gathering actions on a compromised endpoint. The starting point is a salary-themed phishing email that purports to be from the accounting department and urges recipients to open the attached Microsoft Word document to view the "monthly

A new phishing campaign has been observed delivering remote access trojans (RAT) such as VCURMS and STRRAT by means of a malicious Java-based downloader. "The attackers stored malware on public services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and GitHub, employing a commercial protector to avoid detection of the malware," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Yurren Wan  said . An unusual aspect of the campaign is VCURMS' use of a Proton Mail email address ("sacriliage@proton[.]me") for communicating with a command-and-control (C2) server. The attack chain commences with a phishing email that urges recipients to click on a button to verify payment information, resulting in the download of a malicious JAR file ("Payment-Advice.jar") hosted on AWS. Executing the JAR file leads to the retrieval of two more JAR files, which are then run separately to launch the twin trojans. Besides sending an email with the message "Hey master, I am online" to the actor-controlled address, VCURMS RAT periodic

The threat actor known as  TA577  has been observed using ZIP archive attachments in phishing emails with an aim to steal NT LAN Manager ( NTLM ) hashes. The new attack chain "can be used for sensitive information gathering purposes and to enable follow-on activity," enterprise security firm Proofpoint  said  in a Monday report. At least two campaigns taking advantage of this approach were observed on February 26 and 27, 2024, the company added. The phishing waves disseminated thousands of messages and targeted hundreds of organizations across the world. The messages themselves appeared as responses to previous emails, a known technique called thread hijacking, in a bid to increase the likelihood of the attacks' success. The ZIP attachments – which are the most common delivery mechanism – come with an HTML file that's designed to contact an actor-controlled Server Message Block (SMB) server. "TA577's objective is to capture NTLMv2 Challenge/Response pairs from the SMB s

More than 8,000 domains and 13,000 subdomains belonging to legitimate brands and institutions have been hijacked as part of a sophisticated distribution architecture for spam proliferation and click monetization. Guardio Labs is tracking the coordinated malicious activity, which has been ongoing since at least September 2022, under the name SubdoMailing. The emails range from "counterfeit package delivery alerts to outright phishing for account credentials." The Israeli security company attributed the campaign to a threat actor it calls  ResurrecAds , which is known to resuscitate dead domains of or affiliated with big brands with the end goal of manipulating the digital advertising ecosystem for nefarious gains. "'ResurrecAds' manages an extensive infrastructure encompassing a wide array of hosts, SMTP servers, IP addresses, and even private residential ISP connections, alongside many additional owned domain names," security researchers Nati Tal and Ole

Cybersecurity researchers have unearthed a new influence operation targeting Ukraine that leverages spam emails to propagate war-related disinformation. The activity has been linked to Russia-aligned threat actors by Slovak cybersecurity company ESET, which also identified a spear-phishing campaign aimed at a Ukrainian defense company in October 2023 and a European Union agency in November 2023 with an aim to harvest Microsoft login credentials using fake landing pages. Operation Texonto, as the entire campaign has been codenamed, has not been attributed to a specific threat actor, although some elements of it, particularly the spear-phishing attacks, overlap with  COLDRIVER , which has a history of harvesting credentials via bogus sign-in pages. The disinformation operation took place over two waves in November and December 2023, with the email messages bearing PDF attachments and content related to heating interruptions, drug shortages, and food shortages. The November wave tar

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday  added  a medium-severity security flaw impacting Roundcube email software to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The issue, tracked as  CVE-2023-43770  (CVSS score: 6.1), relates to a cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw that stems from the handling of linkrefs in plain text messages. "Roundcube Webmail contains a persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that can lead to information disclosure via malicious link references in plain/text messages," CISA said. According to a description of the bug on NIST's National Vulnerability Database (NVD), the vulnerability impacts Roundcube versions before 1.4.14, 1.5.x before 1.5.4, and 1.6.x before 1.6.3. The flaw was  addressed  by Roundcube maintainers with  version 1.6.3 , which was released on September 15, 2023. Zscaler security researcher Niraj Shivtarkar has been credited with dis

A now-patched security flaw in Microsoft Outlook could be exploited by threat actors to access NT LAN Manager (NTLM) v2 hashed passwords when opening a specially crafted file. The issue, tracked as CVE-2023-35636 (CVSS score: 6.5), was addressed by the tech giant as part of its  Patch Tuesday updates  for December 2023. "In an email attack scenario, an attacker could exploit the vulnerability by sending the specially crafted file to the user and convincing the user to open the file," Microsoft  said  in an advisory released last month. "In a web-based attack scenario, an attacker could host a website (or leverage a compromised website that accepts or hosts user-provided content) containing a specially crafted file designed to exploit the vulnerability." Put differently, the adversary would have to convince users to click a link, either embedded in a phishing email or sent via an instant message, and then deceive them into opening the file in question. CVE-202

Microsoft on Friday revealed that it was the target of a nation-state attack on its corporate systems that resulted in the theft of emails and attachments from senior executives and other individuals in the company's cybersecurity and legal departments. The Windows maker attributed the attack to a Russian advanced persistent threat (APT) group it tracks as  Midnight Blizzard  (formerly Nobelium), which is also known as APT29, BlueBravo, Cloaked Ursa, Cozy Bear, and The Dukes. It further said that it immediately took steps to investigate, disrupt, and mitigate the malicious activity upon discovery on January 12, 2024. The campaign is estimated to have commenced in late November 2023. "The threat actor used a  password spray attack  to compromise a legacy non-production test tenant account and gain a foothold, and then used the account's permissions to access a very small percentage of Microsoft corporate email accounts, including members of our senior leadership team a

A threat actor called Water Curupira has been observed actively distributing the  PikaBot  loader malware as part of spam campaigns in 2023. "PikaBot's operators ran phishing campaigns, targeting victims via its two components — a loader and a core module — which enabled unauthorized remote access and allowed the execution of arbitrary commands through an established connection with their command-and-control (C&C) server," Trend Micro  said  in a report published today. The activity began in the first quarter of 2023 that lasted till the end of June, before ramping up again in September. It also overlaps with  prior campaigns  that have used similar tactics to deliver QakBot, specifically those  orchestrated  by  cybercrime groups  known as TA571 and TA577. It's believed that the increase in the number of phishing campaigns related to PikaBot is the result of QakBot's takedown in August, with DarkGate emerging as another replacement. PikaBot is primarily a loader, which means