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Government and state-owned organizations in a number of Asian countries have been targeted by a distinct group of espionage hackers as part of an intelligence gathering mission that has been underway since early 2021. "A notable feature of these attacks is that the attackers leveraged a wide range of legitimate software packages in order to load their malware payloads using a technique known as  DLL side-loading ," the Symantec Threat Hunter team, part of Broadcom Software,  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The campaign is said to be exclusively geared towards government institutions related to finance, aerospace, and defense, as well as state-owned media, IT, and telecom firms.  Dynamic-link library (DLL) side-loading is a popular cyberattack method that leverages how Microsoft Windows applications handle DLL files. In these intrusions, a spoofed malicious DLL is planted in the Windows Side-by-Side ( WinSxS ) directory so that the operating system loads it

Hackers tied to the Iranian government have been targeting individuals specializing in Middle Eastern affairs, nuclear security, and genome research as part of a new social engineering campaign designed to hunt for sensitive information. Enterprise security firm Proofpoint attributed the targeted attacks to a threat actor named  TA453 , which broadly overlaps with cyber activities monitored under the monikers APT42, Charming Kitten, and Phosphorus. It all starts with a phishing email impersonating legitimate individuals at Western foreign policy research organizations that's ultimately designed to gather intelligence on behalf of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The sock puppet accounts include people from Pew Research Center, the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FRPI), the U.K.'s Chatham House, and the scientific journal Nature. The technique is said to have been deployed in mid-June 2022. However, what differentiates this from other phishing attacks

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

A number of firmware security flaws uncovered in HP's business-oriented high-end notebooks continue to be left unpatched in some devices even months after public disclosure. Binarly, which first  revealed details  of the issues at the  Black Hat USA conference  in mid-August 2022, said the vulnerabilities "can't be detected by firmware integrity monitoring systems due to limitations of the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) measurement." Firmware flaws can have serious implications as they can be abused by an adversary to achieve long-term persistence on a device in a manner that can survive reboots and evade traditional operating system-level security protections. The high-severity weaknesses identified by Binarly affect HP EliteBook devices and concern a case of memory corruption in the System Management Mode (SMM) of the firmware, thereby enabling the execution of arbitrary code with the highest privileges - CVE-2022-23930  (CVSS score: 8.2) - Stack-based buffer

The U.S. Treasury Department on Friday announced sanctions against Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) and its Minister of Intelligence, Esmaeil Khatib, for engaging in cyber-enabled activities against the nation and its allies. "Since at least 2007, the MOIS and its cyber actor proxies have conducted malicious cyber operations targeting a range of government and private-sector organizations around the world and across various critical infrastructure sectors," the Treasury  said . The agency also accused Iranian state-sponsored actors of  staging disruptive attacks  aimed at Albanian government computer systems in mid-July 2022, an incident that forced the latter to temporarily suspend its online services. The development comes months nearly nine months after the U.S. Cyber Command characterized the advanced persistent threat (APT) known as MuddyWater as a  subordinate element  within MOIS. It also comes almost two years following the Treasury's sa

More than $30 million worth of cryptocurrency plundered by the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group from online video game Axie Infinity has been recovered, marking the first time digital assets stolen by the threat actor have been seized. "The seizures represent approximately 10% of the total funds stolen from Axie Infinity (accounting for price differences between time stolen and seized), and demonstrate that it is becoming more difficult for bad actors to successfully cash out their ill-gotten crypto gains," Erin Plante, senior director of investigations at Chainalysis,  said . The development arrives more than five months after the  crypto hack  resulted in the theft of $620 million from the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Ronin Network, with the attackers laundering a majority of the proceeds – amounting to $455 million – through the Ethereum-based cryptocurrency tumbler Tornado Cash. The March 2022 cryptocurrency heist resulted in losses totaling 173,600 ETH wort

A malicious campaign mounted by the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group  targeted energy providers around the world, including those based in the United States, Canada, and Japan, between February and July 2022. "The campaign is meant to infiltrate organizations around the world for establishing long-term access and subsequently exfiltrating data of interest to the adversary's nation-state," Cisco Talos  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Some elements of the espionage attacks have already entered public domain, courtesy of prior reports from Broadcom-owned  Symantec  and  AhnLab  earlier this April and May. Symantec attributed the operation to a group referred to as Stonefly, a Lazarus subgroup which is better known as Andariel, Guardian of Peace, OperationTroy, and Silent Chollima. While these attacks previously led to the instrumentation of Preft (aka Dtrack) and NukeSped (aka Manuscrypt) implants, the latest attack wave is notable for employing two other pieces of mal

Major financial and insurance companies located in French-speaking nations in Africa have been targeted over the past two years as part of a persistent malicious campaign codenamed  DangerousSavanna . Countries targeted include Ivory Coast, Morocco, Cameroon, Senegal, and Togo, with the spear-phishing attacks heavily focusing on Ivory Coast in recent months, Israeli cybersecurity firm Check Point  said  in a Tuesday report. Infection chains entail targeting employees of financial institutions with social engineering messages containing malicious attachments as a means of initial access, ultimately leading to the deployment of off-the-shelf malware such as  Metasploit ,  PoshC2 ,  DWservice , and  AsyncRAT . "The threat actors' creativity is on display in the initial infection stage, as they persistently pursue the employees of the targeted companies, constantly changing infection chains that utilize a wide range of malicious file types, from self-written executable loader

Cisco on Wednesday rolled out patches to address  three security flaws  affecting its products, including a high-severity weakness disclosed in NVIDIA Data Plane Development Kit (MLNX_DPDK) late last month. Tracked as  CVE-2022-28199  (CVSS score: 8.6), the vulnerability stems from a lack of proper error handling in DPDK's network stack, enabling a remote adversary to trigger a denial-of-service (DoS) condition and cause an impact on data integrity and confidentiality. "If an error condition is observed on the device interface, the device may either reload or fail to receive traffic, resulting in a denial-of-service (DoS) condition," Cisco  said  in a notice published on September 7. DPDK  refers to a set of libraries and optimized network interface card (NIC) drivers for fast packet processing, offering a framework and common API for high-speed networking applications. Cisco said it investigated its product lineup and determined the following services to be affecte

A new piece of stealthy Linux malware called Shikitega has been uncovered adopting a multi-stage infection chain to compromise endpoints and IoT devices and deposit additional payloads. "An attacker can gain full control of the system, in addition to the cryptocurrency miner that will be executed and set to persist," AT&T Alien Labs  said  in a new report published Tuesday. The findings add to a growing list of Linux malware that has been found in the wild in recent months, including  BPFDoor ,  Symbiote ,  Syslogk ,  OrBit , and  Lightning Framework . Once deployed on a targeted host, the attack chain downloads and executes the Metasploit's " Mettle " meterpreter to maximize control, exploits vulnerabilities to elevate its privileges, adds persistence on the host via crontab, and ultimately launches a cryptocurrency miner on infected devices. The exact method by which the initial compromise is achieved remains unknown as yet, but what makes Shikitega

Cyberattacks on large organizations dominate news headlines. So, you may be surprised to learn that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are actually  more frequent  targets of cyberattacks. Many SMEs understand this risk firsthand.  In a recent  survey , 58% of CISOs of SMEs said that their risk of attack was higher compared to enterprises. Yet, they don't have the same resources as enterprises – making it nearly impossible to protect their organizations from widespread and increasingly more sophisticated attacks that don't discriminate based on company size. What's their solution? Extended detection and response (XDR).  During a recent webinar, Cynet's Director of Product Strategy, George Tubin ,  and guest speaker Senior Analyst at Forrester,Allie Mellen, discussed the most serious cybersecurity challenges for SMEs and how they can benefit from XDR platforms.  Here are the four key takeaways from the  conversation .  The Biggest Cybersecurity Challenges for SME

A variant of the Mirai botnet known as MooBot is co-opting vulnerable D-Link devices into an army of denial-of-service bots by taking advantage of multiple exploits. "If the devices are compromised, they will be fully controlled by attackers, who could utilize those devices to conduct further attacks such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42  said  in a Tuesday report. MooBot, first disclosed by Qihoo 360's Netlab team in September 2019, has previously targeted  LILIN digital video recorders  and  Hikvision video surveillance products  to expand its network. In the latest wave of attacks discovered by Unit 42 in early August 2022, as many as four different flaws in D-Link devices, both old and new, have paved the way for the deployment of MooBot samples. These include - CVE-2015-2051  (CVSS score: 10.0) - D-Link HNAP SOAPAction Header Command Execution Vulnerability CVE-2018-6530  (CVSS score: 9.8) - D-Link SOAP Interface Re

Networking equipment maker Zyxel has released patches for a critical security flaw impacting its network-attached storage (NAS) devices. Tracked as  CVE-2022-34747  (CVSS score: 9.8), the issue relates to a "format string vulnerability" affecting NAS326, NAS540, and NAS542 models. Zyxel credited researcher Shaposhnikov Ilya for reporting the flaw. "A format string vulnerability was found in a specific binary of Zyxel NAS products that could allow an attacker to achieve unauthorized remote code execution via a crafted UDP packet," the company  said  in an advisory released on September 6. The flaw affects the following versions - NAS326 (V5.21(AAZF.11)C0 and earlier) NAS540 (V5.21(AATB.8)C0 and earlier), and NAS542 (V5.21(ABAG.8)C0 and earlier) The disclosure comes as Zyxel previously addressed local privilege escalation and authenticated directory traversal vulnerabilities ( CVE-2022-30526 and CVE-2022-2030 ) affecting its firewall products in July. In J

High-profile companies and local governments located primarily in Asia are the subjects of targeted attacks by a previously undocumented espionage group dubbed  Worok  that has been active since late 2020. "Worok's toolset includes a C++ loader CLRLoad, a PowerShell backdoor PowHeartBeat, and a C# loader PNGLoad that uses steganography to extract hidden malicious payloads from PNG files," ESET researcher Thibaut Passilly  said  in a new report published today. Worok is said to share overlaps in tools and interests with another adversarial collective tracked as  TA428 , with the group linked to attacks against entities spanning energy, financial, maritime, and telecom sectors in Asia as well as a government agency in the Middle East and a private firm in southern Africa. Malicious activities undertaken by the group experienced a noticeable break from May 2021 to January 2022, before resuming the next month. The Slovak cybersecurity firm assessed the group's goals

A previously undocumented strain of Android spyware with extensive information gathering capabilities has been found disguised as a book likely designed to target the  Uyghur community  in China. The malware comes under the guise of a book titled " The China Freedom Trap ," a biography written by the exiled Uyghur leader Dolkun Isa. "In light of the ongoing conflict between the Government of the People's Republic of China and the Uyghur community, the malware disguised as the book is a lucrative bait employed by threat actors (TAs) to spread malicious infection in the targeted community," cybersecurity firm Cyble  said  in a report published Monday. The existence of the malware samples, which come with the package name " com.emc.pdf ," was first disclosed by researchers from the  MalwareHunterTeam  late last month. Distributed outside of the official Google Play Store, the app, once installed and opened, displays a few pages of the book, includi

The notorious Android banking trojan known as  SharkBot  has once again made an appearance on the Google Play Store by masquerading as antivirus and cleaner apps. "This new dropper doesn't rely on Accessibility permissions to automatically perform the installation of the dropper Sharkbot malware," NCC Group's Fox-IT  said  in a report. "Instead, this new version asks the victim to install the malware as a fake update for the antivirus to stay protected against threats." The apps in question, Mister Phone Cleaner and Kylhavy Mobile Security, have over 60,000 installations between them and are designed to target users in Spain, Australia, Poland, Germany, the U.S., and Austria - Mister Phone Cleaner (com.mbkristine8.cleanmaster, 50,000+ downloads) Kylhavy Mobile Security (com.kylhavy.antivirus, 10,000+ downloads) The  droppers  are designed to drop a new version of SharkBot,  dubbed V2  by Dutch security firm ThreatFabric, which features an updated co

How much time do developers spend actually writing code? According to recent studies , developers spend more time maintaining, testing and securing existing code than they do writing or improving code. Security vulnerabilities have a bad habit of popping up during the software development process, only to surface after an application has been deployed. The disappointing part is that many of these security flaws and bugs could have been resolved in an earlier stage and there are proper methods and tools to uncover them. How much time does a developer spend on learning to write a functioning code? And how much is spent on learning about code security? Or learning how not to code?" Wouldn't it be better to eradicate the problem from the system rather than having it there, and then trying to detect and stop an ongoing attack targeting it? You can test your secure coding skills with this short  self-assessment. The true cost of bugs Everyone makes mistakes, even developers.

A "major" security issue in the Google Chrome web browser, as well as Chromium-based alternatives, could allow malicious web pages to automatically overwrite clipboard content without requiring any user consent or interaction by simply visiting them. The clipboard poisoning attack is said to have been accidentally introduced in Chrome version 104, according to developer Jeff Johnson. While the problem exists in Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox as well, what makes the issue severe in Chrome is that the requirement for a user gesture to copy content to the clipboard is currently broken. User gestures include selecting a piece of text and pressing Control+C (or ⌘-C for macOS) or selecting "Copy" from the context menu. "Therefore, a gesture as innocent as clicking on a link or pressing the arrow key to scroll down the page gives the website permission to overwrite your system clipboard," Johnson  noted . The ability to substitute clipboard data poses se

Researchers have identified 1,859 apps across Android and iOS containing hard-coded Amazon Web Services (AWS) credentials, posing a major security risk. "Over three-quarters (77%) of the apps contained valid AWS access tokens allowing access to private AWS cloud services," Symantec's Threat Hunter team, a part of Broadcom Software, said in a  report  shared with The Hacker News. Interestingly, a little more than 50% of the apps were found using the same AWS tokens found in other apps maintained by other developers and companies, highlighting a supply chain issue with serious implications. "The AWS access tokens could be traced to a shared library, third-party SDK, or other shared component used in developing the apps," the researchers said. These credentials are typically used for downloading appropriate resources necessary for the app's functions as well as accessing configuration files and authenticating to other cloud services. To make matters wors