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Threat actors are selling a new crypter and loader called  ASMCrypt , which has been described as an "evolved version" of another loader malware known as DoubleFinger. "The idea behind this type of malware is to load the final payload without the loading process or the payload itself being detected by AV/EDR, etc.," Kaspersky  said  in an analysis published this week. DoubleFinger was  first documented  by the Russian cybersecurity company, detailing infection chains leveraging the malware to propagate a cryptocurrency stealer dubbed GreetingGhoul to victims in Europe, the U.S., and Latin America. ASMCrypt, once purchased and launched by the customers, is designed to establish contact with a backend service over the TOR network using hard-coded credentials, thereby enabling the buyers to build payloads of their choice for use in their campaigns. "The application creates an encrypted blob hidden inside a .PNG file," Kaspersky said. "This image mus

Government and telecom entities have been subjected to a new wave of attacks by a China-linked threat actor tracked as  Budworm  using an updated malware toolset. The intrusions, targeting a Middle Eastern telecommunications organization and an Asian government, took place in August 2023, with the adversary deploying an improved version of its SysUpdate toolkit, the Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom,  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Budworm , also referred to by the names APT27, Bronze Union, Emissary Panda, Iron Tiger, Lucky Mouse, and Red Phoenix, is known to be active since at least 2013, targeting a wide range of industry verticals in pursuit of its intelligence gathering goals.  The nation-state group leverages various tools such as China Chopper web shell, Gh0st RAT, HyperBro, PlugX, SysUpdate, and ZXShell to exfiltrate high-value information and maintain access to sensitive systems over a long period of time. A previous report from SecureWorks in

A new malware strain called ZenRAT has emerged in the wild that's distributed via bogus installation packages of the Bitwarden password manager. "The malware is specifically targeting Windows users and will redirect people using other hosts to a benign web page," enterprise security firm Proofpoint  said  in a technical report. "The malware is a modular remote access trojan (RAT) with information stealing capabilities." ZenRAT is hosted on fake websites pretending to be associated with Bitwarden, although it's uncertain as to how traffic is being directed to the domains. Such malware has been propagated via phishing, malvertising, or SEO poisoning attacks in the past. The payload (Bitwarden-Installer-version-2023-7-1.exe), downloaded from crazygameis[.]com, is a trojanized version of the standard Bitwarden installation package that contains a malicious .NET executable (ApplicationRuntimeMonitor.exe). A noteworthy aspect of the campaign is that users wh

A "multi-year" Chinese state-sponsored cyber espionage campaign has been observed targeting South Korean academic, political, and government organizations. Recorded Future's Insikt Group, which is  tracking  the activity under the moniker TAG-74, said the adversary has been linked to "Chinese military intelligence and poses a significant threat to academic, aerospace and defense, government, military, and political entities in South Korea, Japan, and Russia." The cybersecurity firm characterized the targeting of South Korean academic institutions as in alignment with China's broader efforts to conduct intellectual property theft and expand its influence, not to mention motivated by the country's strategic relations with the U.S. Social engineering attacks mounted by the adversary make use of Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) file lures to drop a custom variant of an open-source Visual Basic Script backdoor called  ReVBShell , which subsequently ser

Tibetan, Uyghur, and Taiwanese individuals and organizations are the targets of a persistent campaign orchestrated by a threat actor codenamed  EvilBamboo  to gather sensitive information. "The attacker has created fake Tibetan websites, along with social media profiles, likely used to deploy browser-based exploits against targeted users," Volexity security researchers Callum Roxan, Paul Rascagneres, and Thomas Lancaster said in a report published last week. "Partly through impersonating existing popular communities, the attacker has built communities on online platforms, such as Telegram, to aid in distribution of their malware." EvilBamboo, formerly tracked by the cybersecurity firm under the name Evil Eye, has been linked to multiple attack waves  since at least 2019 , with the threat actor leveraging watering hole attacks to deliver spyware targeting Android and iOS devices. It's also known as Earth Empusa and POISON CARP. The intrusions directed agai

Chinese-language speakers have been increasingly targeted as part of multiple email phishing campaigns that aim to distribute various malware families such as Sainbox RAT, Purple Fox, and a new trojan called ValleyRAT. "Campaigns include Chinese-language lures and malware typically associated with Chinese cybercrime activity," enterprise security firm Proofpoint  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The activity, observed since early 2023, entails sending email messages containing URLs pointing to compressed executables that are responsible for installing the malware. Other infection chains have been found to leverage Microsoft Excel and PDF attachments that embed these URLs to trigger malicious activity. These campaigns demonstrate variation in the use of infrastructure, sender domains, email content, targeting, and payloads, indicating that different threat clusters are mounting the attacks. Over 30 such campaigns have been detected in 2023 that employ malwa

Telecommunication service providers in the Middle East are the target of a new intrusion set dubbed  ShroudedSnooper  that employs a stealthy backdoor called HTTPSnoop. "HTTPSnoop is a simple, yet effective, backdoor that consists of novel techniques to interface with Windows HTTP kernel drivers and devices to listen to incoming requests for specific HTTP(S) URLs and execute that content on the infected endpoint," Cisco Talos  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Also part of the threat actor's arsenal is a sister implant codenamed PipeSnoop that can accept arbitrary shellcode from a  named pipe  and execute it on the infected endpoint. It's suspected that ShroudedSnooper exploits internet-facing servers and deploys HTTPSnoop to gain initial access to target environments, with both the malware strains impersonating components of Palo Alto Networks' Cortex XDR application (" CyveraConsole.exe ") to fly under the radar. Three different HTTP

The China-linked threat actor known as  Earth Lusca  has been observed targeting government entities using a never-before-seen Linux backdoor called SprySOCKS. Earth Lusca was  first documented  by Trend Micro in January 2022, detailing the adversary's attacks against public and private sector entities across Asia, Australia, Europe, North America. Active since 2021, the group has relied on spear-phishing and watering hole attacks to pull off its cyber espionage schemes. Some activities of the group overlap with another threat cluster tracked by Recorded Future under the name  RedHotel . The latest findings from the cybersecurity firm show that Earth Lusca continues to be an active group, even expanding its operations to target organizations across the world during the first half of 2023. Primary targets include government departments that are involved in foreign affairs, technology, and telecommunications. The attacks are concentrated in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the

The threat actors behind RedLine and Vidar information stealers have been observed pivoting to ransomware through phishing campaigns that spread initial payloads signed with Extended Validation ( EV ) code signing certificates. "This suggests that the threat actors are streamlining operations by making their techniques multipurpose," Trend Micro researchers  said  in a new analysis published this week. In the incident investigated by the cybersecurity company, an unnamed victim is said to have first received a piece of info stealer malware with EV code signing certificates, followed by ransomware using the same delivery technique. In the past,  QakBot infections  have leveraged  samples signed with valid code signing certificates  to bypass security protections. The attacks start with phishing emails that employ well-worn lures to trick victims into running malicious attachments that masquerade as PDF or JPG images but are actually executables that jump-start the comprom

A new ransomware family called  3AM  has emerged in the wild after it was detected in a single incident in which an unidentified affiliate deployed the strain following an unsuccessful attempt to deliver LockBit (attributed to Bitwise Spider  or  Syrphid ) in the target network. "3AM is written in Rust and appears to be a completely new malware family," the Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom,  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The ransomware attempts to stop multiple services on the infected computer before it begins encrypting files. Once encryption is complete, it attempts to delete Volume Shadow (VSS) copies." 3AM gets its name from the fact that it's referenced in the ransom note. It also appends encrypted files with the extension .threeamtime. That said, it's currently not known if the malware authors have any connections with known e-crime groups. In the attack spotted by Symantec, the adversary is said to have managed to

A new phishing attack is leveraging Facebook Messenger to propagate messages with malicious attachments from a "swarm of fake and hijacked personal accounts" with the ultimate goal of taking over the targets' Business accounts. "Originating yet again from a Vietnamese-based group, this campaign uses a tiny compressed file attachment that packs a powerful Python-based stealer dropped in a multi-stage process full of simple yet effective obfuscation methods," Guardio Labs researcher Oleg Zaytsev  said  in an analysis published over the weekend. In these attacks, dubbed MrTonyScam, potential victims are sent messages that entice them into clicking on the RAR and ZIP archive attachments, leading to the deployment of a dropper that fetches the next-stage from a GitHub or GitLab repository. This payload is another archive file that contains a CMD file, which, in turn, harbors an obfuscated Python-based stealer to exfiltrate all cookies and login credentials from d

Threat actors associated with North Korea are  continuing  to  target  the cybersecurity community using a zero-day bug in an unspecified software over the past several weeks to infiltrate their machines. The findings come from Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG), which found the adversary setting up fake accounts on social media platforms like  X  (formerly Twitter) and  Mastodon  to forge relationships with potential targets and build trust. "In one case, they carried on a months-long conversation, attempting to collaborate with a security researcher on topics of mutual interest," security researchers Clement Lecigne and Maddie Stone  said . "After initial contact via X, they moved to an encrypted messaging app such as Signal, WhatsApp, or Wire." The social engineering exercise ultimately paved the way for a malicious file containing at least one zero-day in a popular software package. The vulnerability is currently in the process of being fixed. The payload, for its part, perf

A  Mirai botnet  variant called  Pandora  has been observed infiltrating inexpensive Android-based TV sets and TV boxes and using them as part of a botnet to perform distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Doctor Web said the compromises are likely to occur either during malicious firmware updates or when applications for viewing pirated video content are installed. "It is likely that this update has been made available for download from a number of websites, as it is signed with publicly available Android Open Source Project test keys," the Russian company  said  in an analysis published Wednesday. "The service that runs the backdoor is included in boot.img," enabling it to persist between system restarts. In the alternative distribution methods, it's suspected that users are tricked into installing applications for streaming pirated movies and TV shows through websites that mainly single out Spanish-speaking users. The list of apps is as follows -

The Iranian threat actor tracked as APT34 has been linked to a new phishing attack that leads to the deployment of a variant of a backdoor called  SideTwist . "APT34 has a high level of attack technology, can design different intrusion methods for different types of targets, and has supply chain attack capability," NSFOCUS Security Labs  said  in a report published last week. APT34, also known by the names Cobalt Gypsy, Hazel Sandstorm (formerly Europium), Helix Kitten, and OilRig, has a  track record  of targeting telecommunications, government, defense, oil and financial services verticals in the Middle East since at least 2014 via spear-phishing lures that culminate in the deployment of various backdoors. One of the key traits of the hacking outfit is its ability to create new and updated tools to minimize the odds of detection and gain a foothold on compromised hosts for extended periods of time. SideTwist was  first documented  as used by APT34 in April 2021, with Check Poin

Malicious actors associated with the Vietnamese cybercrime ecosystem are leveraging advertising-as-a-vector on social media platforms such as Meta-owned Facebook to distribute malware. "Threat actors have long used fraudulent ads as a vector to target victims with scams, malvertising, and more," WithSecure researcher Mohammad Kazem Hassan Nejad  said . "And with businesses now leveraging the reach of social media for advertising, attackers have a new, highly-lucrative type of attack to add to their arsenal – hijacking business accounts." Cyber attacks targeting Meta Business and Facebook accounts have gained popularity over the past year, courtesy of activity clusters such as  Ducktail  and  NodeStealer  that are known to raid businesses and individuals operating on Facebook. Among the methods employed by cybercriminals to gain unauthorized access to user accounts, social engineering plays a significant role. Victims are approached through various platforms ranging from Facebook a

Cybersecurity and intelligence agencies from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S. on Thursday disclosed details of a mobile malware strain targeting Android devices used by the Ukrainian military. The malicious software, dubbed  Infamous Chisel  and attributed to a Russian state-sponsored actor called Sandworm, has  capabilities  to "enable unauthorized access to compromised devices, scan files, monitor traffic, and periodically steal sensitive information." Some aspects of the malware were  uncovered  by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) earlier in August, highlighting unsuccessful attempts on part of the adversary to penetrate Ukrainian military networks and gather valuable intelligence. It's said that Russian forces captured tablets used by Ukraine on the battlefield, using them as a foothold to remotely disseminate the malware to other devices by using the Android Debug Bridge ( ADB ) command-line tool. Sandworm, also known by the names FROZENBARENTS, Ir

How often do cyberattacks happen? How frequently do threat actors target businesses and governments around the world? The BlackBerry® Threat Research and Intelligence Team recently analyzed 90 days of real-world data to answer these questions. Full results are in the latest BlackBerry  Global Threat Intelligence Report , but read on for a teaser of several interesting cyber attack statistics. Analyzing Real-World Cyberattacks In their most recent quarterly report, BlackBerry threat researchers analyzed the onslaught of malware-based attacks from December 2022 to February 2023. During that time, BlackBerry's AI-powered endpoint protection solution, detected and blocked a total of  1,578,733  malware-based cyberattacks targeting customers. 90 Days of Cyberattacks Based on analysis of cyberattacks detected and blocked during the 90-day window, the BlackBerry Threat Research and Intelligence Team recorded the following statistics: Total number of malware-based attacks:  1,578,73