The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: hacking news

Cisco Systems has rolled out fixes for a critical security flaw affecting Redundancy Configuration Manager (RCM) for Cisco StarOS Software that could be weaponized by an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code and take over vulnerable machines. Tracked as  CVE-2022-20649  (CVSS score: 9.0), the vulnerability stems from the fact that the debug mode has been incorrectly enabled for specific services. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by connecting to the device and navigating to the service with debug mode enabled," Cisco said in an advisory. "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary commands as the root user." The network equipment maker, however, noted that the adversary would need to perform detailed reconnaissance to allow for unauthenticated access to vulnerable devices. Stating that the vulnerability was discovered during internal security testing, Cisco added it found no evidence of active exploitat

An exploration of zero-click attack surface for the popular video conferencing solution Zoom has yielded two previously undisclosed security vulnerabilities that could have been exploited to crash the service, execute malicious code, and even leak arbitrary areas of its memory. Natalie Silvanovich of Google Project Zero, who  discovered  and reported the  two   flaws  last year, said the issues impacted both Zoom clients and Multimedia Router (MMR) servers, which transmit audio and video content between clients in  on-premise deployments . The weaknesses have since been addressed by Zoom as part of  updates  shipped on November 24, 2021. The goal of a zero-click attack is to stealthily gain control over the victim's device without requiring any kind of interaction from the user, such as clicking on a link. While the specifics of the exploit will vary depending on the nature of vulnerability being exploited, a key trait of zero-click hacks is their ability not to leave behind

A threat actor with potential links to an Indian cybersecurity company has been nothing if remarkably persistent in its attacks against military organizations based in South Asia, including Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, since at least September 2020 by deploying different variants of its bespoke malware framework. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET attributed the highly targeted attack to a hacking group known as  Donot Team . "Donot Team has been consistently targeting the same entities with waves of spear-phishing emails with malicious attachments every two to four months," researchers Facundo Muñoz and Matías Porolli  said . Operating since at least 2016, Donot Team (also known as APT-C-35 and SectorE02) has been linked to a string of intrusions primarily targeting embassies, governments, and military entities in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Nepal with Windows and Android malware. In October 2021, Amnesty International  unearthed evidence  tying the group'

The financially motivated  FIN8 actor , in all likelihood, has resurfaced with a never-before-seen ransomware strain called " White Rabbit " that was recently deployed against a local bank in the U.S. in December 2021. That's according to new findings published by Trend Micro, calling out the malware's overlaps with Egregor, which was taken down by Ukrainian law enforcement authorities in February 2021. "One of the most notable aspects of White Rabbit's attack is how its payload binary requires a specific command-line password to decrypt its internal configuration and proceed with its ransomware routine," the researchers  noted . "This method of hiding malicious activity is a trick that the ransomware family Egregor uses to hide malware techniques from analysis." Egregor, which commenced operations in September 2020 until its operations took a huge hit, is widely believed to be a  reincarnation of Maze , which shut down its criminal enterp

Providing public Wi-Fi is a great service to offer your customers as it becomes more and more standard in today's society. I like the fact that I do not have to worry about accessing the Internet while I am away, or spending a lot of money on an international connection, or just staying offline while I am away. With public Wi-Fi, modern life has become a constant connection to the Internet, whether we are on the bus, on the way to school or work, waiting for our flight in the airport or during the flight itself, or doing our homework or working on our projects in a café. We do business and communicate online in a variety of ways. We check our work emails, chat with our friends, and even take business calls online through the service. According to recent statistics, there are about 410,000 public Wi-Fi hotspots in the United States alone, in public places such as parks, libraries, public transportation, and train stations. Cons of using public Wi-Fi Despite the many benefits t

An elusive threat actor called Earth Lusca has been observed striking organizations across the world as part of what appears to be simultaneously an espionage campaign and an attempt to reap monetary profits. "The list of its victims includes high-value targets such as government and educational institutions, religious movements, pro-democracy and human rights organizations in Hong Kong, COVID-19 research organizations, and the media, amongst others," Trend Micro researchers  said  in a new report. "However, the threat actor also seems to be financially motivated, as it also took aim at gambling and cryptocurrency companies. The cybersecurity firm attributed the group as part of the larger China-based  Winnti cluster , which refers to a number of linked groups rather than a single discrete entity that are focused on intelligence gathering and intellectual property theft. Earth Lusca's intrusion routes are facilitated by spear-phishing and watering hole attacks

UniCC, the biggest dark web marketplace for stolen credit and debit cards, has announced that it's shuttering its operations after earning $358 million in purchases since 2013 using cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ether, and Dash. "Don't build any conspiracy theories about us leaving," the anonymous operators of UniCC said in a farewell posted on dark web carding forums, according to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic. "It is [a] weighted decision, we are not young and our health do[es] not allow [us] to work like this any longer." The UniCC team also gave its users 10 days to spend their balances, while also warning customers to "not follow any fakes tied to our comeback." Platforms such as UniCC function as an underground marketplace wherein credit card details stolen from online retailers, banks, and payments companies by injecting  malicious skimmers  are trafficked in exchange for cryptocurrency. The cards are then used by crim

Cybersecurity teams from Microsoft on Saturday disclosed they identified evidence of a new destructive malware operation dubbed " WhisperGate " targeting government, non-profit, and information technology entities in Ukraine amid brewing geopolitical tensions between the country and Russia. "The malware is disguised as ransomware but, if activated by the attacker, would render the infected computer system inoperable," Tom Burt, corporate vice president of customer security and trust at Microsoft, said , adding the intrusions were aimed at government agencies that provide critical executive branch or emergency response functions. Also among those affected by the malware is an IT firm that "manages websites for public and private sector clients, including government agencies whose websites were recently defaced ," Burt noted. The computing giant, which first detected the malware on January 13, attributed the attacks to an emerging threat cluster codenam

Ukrainian police authorities have nabbed five members of a gang that's believed to have helped orchestrate attacks against more than 50 companies across Europe and the U.S and caused losses to the tune of more than $1 million. The  special operation , which was carried out in assistance with law enforcement officials from the U.K. and U.S., saw the arrest of an unnamed 36-year-old individual from the capital city of Kyiv, along with his wife and three other accomplices. A total of nine searches across the suspects' homes were carried out, resulting in the seizure of computer equipment, mobile phones, bank cards, flash drives, three cars, and other items with evidence of illegal activity. The Cyber Police of the National Police of Ukraine said the group offered a "hacker service" that enabled financially motivated crime syndicates to send phishing emails containing file-encrypted malware to lock confidential data pertaining to its victims, demanding that the target

The U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) on Wednesday officially confirmed MuddyWater's ties to the Iranian intelligence apparatus, while simultaneously detailing the various tools and tactics adopted by the espionage actor to burrow into victim networks. "MuddyWater has been seen using a variety of techniques to maintain access to victim networks," USCYBERCOM's Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF)  said  in a statement. "These include side-loading  DLLs  in order to trick legitimate programs into running malware and obfuscating PowerShell scripts to hide command and control functions." The agency characterized the hacking efforts as a subordinate element within the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), corroborating earlier reports about the nation-state actor's provenance. Also tracked under the monikers Static Kitten, Seedworm, Mercury and TEMP.Zagros,  MuddyWater  is known for its  attacks  primarily directed against a wide gamut of en

Apple on Wednesday rolled out software updates for iOS and iPadOS to remediate a persistent  denial-of-service (DoS) issue  affecting the HomeKit smart home framework that could be potentially exploited to launch ransomware-like attacks targeting the devices. The iPhone maker, in its  release notes  for iOS and iPadOS 15.2.1, termed it as a "resource exhaustion issue" that could be triggered when processing a maliciously crafted HomeKit accessory name, adding it addressed the bug with improved validation. The so-called "doorLock" vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-22588, affects HomeKit, the software API for connecting smart home devices to iOS applications. Should it be successfully exploited, iPhones and iPads can be sent into a crash spiral simply by changing the name of a HomeKit device to a string larger than 500,000 characters and tricking the target into accepting a malicious Home invitation. Even worse, since HomeKit device names are backed up to iClou

A new  cross-platform backdoor  called " SysJoker " has been observed targeting machines running Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems as part of an ongoing espionage campaign that's believed to have been initiated during the second half of 2021. "SysJoker masquerades as a system update and generates its [command-and-control server] by decoding a string retrieved from a text file hosted on Google Drive," Intezer researchers Avigayil Mechtinger, Ryan Robinson, and Nicole Fishbein  noted  in a technical write-up publicizing their findings. "Based on victimology and malware's behavior, we assess that SysJoker is after specific targets." The Israeli cybersecurity company, attributing the work to an advanced threat actor, said it first discovered evidence of the implant in December 2021 during an active attack against a Linux-based web server belonging to an unnamed educational institution. A C++-based malware, SysJoker is delivered via a dr

Amid renewed tensions between the U.S. and Russia over  Ukraine  and  Kazakhstan , American cybersecurity and intelligence agencies on Tuesday released a joint advisory on how to detect, respond to, and mitigate cyberattacks orchestrated by Russian state-sponsored actors. To that end, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and National Security Agency (NSA) have laid bare the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) adopted by the adversaries, including spear-phishing, brute-force, and  exploiting known vulnerabilities  to gain initial access to target networks. The list of flaws exploited by Russian hacking groups to gain an initial foothold, which the agencies said are "common but effective," are below — CVE-2018-13379  (FortiGate VPNs) CVE-2019-1653  (Cisco router) CVE-2019-2725  (Oracle WebLogic Server) CVE-2019-7609  (Kibana) CVE-2019-9670  (Zimbra software) CVE-2019-10149  (Exim Simple Mail Transf

The digital security team at the U.K. National Health Service (NHS) has raised the alarm on active exploitation of Log4Shell vulnerabilities in unpatched  VMware Horizon  servers by an unknown threat actor to drop malicious web shells and establish persistence on affected networks for follow-on attacks. "The attack likely consists of a reconnaissance phase, where the attacker uses the Java Naming and Directory InterfaceTM (JNDI) via Log4Shell payloads to call back to malicious infrastructure," the non-departmental public body  said  in an alert. "Once a weakness has been identified, the attack then uses the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) to retrieve and execute a malicious Java class file that injects a web shell into the VM Blast Secure Gateway service." The web shell, once deployed, can serve as a conduit to carry out a multitude of post-exploitation activities such as deploying additional malicious software, data exfiltration, or deployment of r

Researchers have disclosed a security flaw affecting H2 database consoles that could result in remote code execution in a manner that echoes the Log4j "Log4Shell" vulnerability that came to light last month. The issue, tracked as  CVE-2021-42392 , is the "first critical issue published since Log4Shell, on a component other than Log4j, that exploits the same root cause of the Log4Shell vulnerability, namely JNDI remote class loading," JFrog researchers Andrey Polkovnychenko and Shachar Menashe  said . H2  is an open-source relational database management system written in Java that can be embedded within applications or run in a client-server mode. According to the  Maven Repository , the H2 database engine is used by 6,807 artifacts. JNDI, short for Java Naming and Directory Interface, refers to an API that provides naming and directory functionality for Java applications, which can use the API in conjunction with LDAP to locate a specific resource that it might

A North Korean cyberespionage group named Konni has been linked to a series of targeted attacks aimed at the Russian Federation's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) with New Year lures to compromise Windows systems with malware. "This activity cluster demonstrates the patient and persistent nature of advanced actors in waging multi-phased campaigns against perceived high-value networks," researchers from Lumen Technologies' Black Lotus Labs  said  in an analysis shared with The Hacker News. The Konni group's tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) are known to overlap with threat actors belonging to the broader  Kimsuky  umbrella, which is also tracked by the cybersecurity community under the monikers Velvet Chollima, ITG16, Black Banshee, and Thallium. The most recent attacks involved the actor gaining access to the target networks through stolen credentials, exploiting the foothold to load malware for intelligence gathering purposes, with early signs of t

Researchers have disclosed a novel technique by which malware on iOS can achieve persistence on an infected device by faking its shutdown process, making it impossible to physically determine if an iPhone is off or otherwise. The discovery — dubbed " NoReboot " — comes courtesy of mobile security firm ZecOps, which found that it's possible to block and then simulate an iOS rebooting operation, deceiving the user into believing that the phone has been powered off when, in reality, it's still running. The San Francisco-headquartered company  called  it the "ultimate persistence bug […] that cannot be patched because it's not exploiting any persistence bugs at all — only playing tricks with the human mind." NoReboot works by interfering with the routines used in iOS to shutdown and restart the device, effectively preventing them from ever happening in the first place and allowing a trojan to achieve persistence without persistence as the device is never

Cybersecurity researchers have taken the wraps of an organized financial-theft operation undertaken by a discreet actor to target transaction processing systems and siphon funds from entities primarily located in Latin America for at least four years. The malicious hacking group has been codenamed  Elephant Beetle  by Israeli incident response firm Sygnia, with the intrusions aimed at banks and retail companies by injecting fraudulent transactions among benign activity to slip under the radar after an extensive study of the targets' financial structures. "The attack is relentless in its ingenious simplicity serving as an ideal tactic to hide in plain sight, without any need to develop exploits," the researchers said in a report shared with The Hacker News, calling out the group's overlaps with another tracked by Mandiant as  FIN13 , an "industrious" threat actor linked to data theft and ransomware attacks in Mexico stretching back as early as 2016. Ele

An ongoing  ZLoader  malware campaign has been uncovered exploiting remote monitoring tools and a nine-year-old flaw concerning Microsoft's digital signature verification to siphon user credentials and sensitive information. Israeli cybersecurity company Check Point Research, which has been tracking the sophisticated infection chain since November 2021, attributed it to a cybercriminal group dubbed MalSmoke , citing similarities with previous attacks. "The techniques incorporated in the infection chain include the use of legitimate remote management software (RMM) to gain initial access to the target machine," Check Point's Golan Cohen said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The malware then exploits Microsoft's digital signature verification method to inject its payload into a signed system DLL to further evade the system's defenses." A banking trojan at its core, ZLoader has been employed by many an attacker to steal cookies, passwords