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A suspected Chinese threat actor targeted a large U.S. organization earlier this year as part of a four-month-long intrusion. According to Broadcom-owned Symantec, the first evidence of the malicious activity was detected on April 11, 2024 and continued until August. However, the company doesn't rule out the possibility that the intrusion may have occurred earlier. "The attackers moved laterally across the organization's network, compromising multiple computers," the Symantec Threat Hunter Team said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Some of the machines targeted were Exchange Servers, suggesting the attackers were gathering intelligence by harvesting emails. Exfiltration tools were also deployed, suggesting that targeted data was taken from the organizations." The name of the organization that was impacted by the persistent attack campaign was not disclosed, but noted that the victim has a significant presence in China. The links to China as ...

A new Python-based hacking tool called  FBot  has been uncovered targeting web servers, cloud services, content management systems (CMS), and SaaS platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft 365, PayPal, Sendgrid, and Twilio. "Key features include credential harvesting for spamming attacks, AWS account hijacking tools, and functions to enable attacks against PayPal and various SaaS accounts," SentinelOne security researcher Alex Delamotte  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. FBot is the latest addition to the list of cloud hacking tools like  AlienFox, GreenBot  (aka Maintance),  Legion , and  Predator , the latter four of which share code-level overlaps with AndroxGh0st. SentinelOne described FBot as "related but distinct from these families," owing to the fact that it does not reference any source code from AndroxGh0st, although it exhibits similarities with Legion, which first came to light last year. The end goal of...

In today's rapidly evolving threat landscape, safeguarding your organization against cyberattacks is more critical than ever. Traditional penetration testing (pentesting), while effective, often falls short due to its high costs, resource requirements, and infrequent implementation. Automated internal and external network pentesting is a game-changing solution, empowering organizations to stay ahead of attackers with cost-effective, frequent, and thorough security assessments. Strengthen Your Defenses: The Role of Internal and External Pentests  Effective cybersecurity requires addressing threats from both inside and outside your organization. Automated solutions streamline this process, enabling IT teams to implement a holistic and proactive defense strategy. Internal Pentesting: Securing the Core Internal pentesting simulates an attacker operating within your network, exposing vulnerabilities such as insider threats, compromised credentials, or breaches through physical or ...

Israeli spyware vendor QuaDream is allegedly shutting down its operations in the coming days, less than a week after its hacking toolset was exposed by Citizen Lab and Microsoft. The development was reported by the Israeli business newspaper  Calcalist , citing unnamed sources, adding the company "hasn't been fully active for a while" and that it "has been in a difficult situation for several months." The company's board of directors are looking to sell off its intellectual property, the report further added. QuaDream, which specializes in hacking Apple devices that don't require any action on the part of the victim, is also said to have fired all its employees, with the firm undergoing significant downsizing, according to Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post . News of the purported shutdown comes as the firm's spyware framework – dubbed REIGN – was outed as  having been used  against journalists, political opposition figures, and NGO workers across...

An emerging Python-based credential harvester and a hacking tool named Legion is being marketed via Telegram as a way for threat actors to break into various online services for further exploitation. Legion, according to  Cado Labs , includes modules to enumerate vulnerable SMTP servers, conduct remote code execution (RCE) attacks, exploit unpatched versions of Apache, and brute-force cPanel and WebHost Manager (WHM) accounts. The malware is said to bear similarities to another malware family called AndroxGh0st that was first documented by cloud security services provider Lacework in December 2022. Cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, in an analysis published late last month, revealed that AndroxGh0st is part of a comprehensive toolset called AlienFox that's offered to threat actors to steal API keys and secrets from cloud services. "Legion appears to be part of an emerging generation of cloud-focused credential harvester/spam utilities," security researcher Matt Muir...

A nascent and legitimate penetration testing framework known as Nighthawk is likely to gain threat actors' attention for its Cobalt Strike-like capabilities. Enterprise security firm Proofpoint said it detected the use of the software in mid-September 2022 by a red team with a number of test emails sent using generic subject lines such as "Just checking in" and "Hope this works2." However, there are no indications that a leaked or cracked version of Nighthawk is being weaponized by threat actors in the wild, Proofpoint researcher Alexander Rausch  said  in a write-up. Nighthawk, launched in December 2021 by a company called MDSec, is analogous to its counterparts  Cobalt Strike ,  Sliver , and  Brute Ratel , offering a red team toolset for adversary threat simulation. It's licensed for £7,500 (or $10,000) per user for a year. "Nighthawk is the most advanced and evasive command-and-control framework available on the market," MDSec  notes . ...

U.S. cybersecurity and intelligence agencies on Tuesday disclosed that multiple nation-state hacking groups potentially targeted a "Defense Industrial Base (DIB) Sector organization's enterprise network" as part of a cyber espionage campaign. "[Advanced persistent threat] actors used an open-source toolkit called  Impacket  to gain their foothold within the environment and further compromise the network, and also used a custom data exfiltration tool, CovalentStealer, to steal the victim's sensitive data," the authorities  said . The  joint advisory , which was authored by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the National Security Agency (NSA), said the adversaries likely had long-term access to the compromised environment. The findings are the result of CISA's incident response efforts in collaboration with cybersecurity company Mandiant from November 2021 through January 2022. I...

A new phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) toolkit dubbed EvilProxy is being advertised on the criminal underground as a means for threat actors to bypass two-factor authentication (2FA) protections employed against online services. "EvilProxy actors are using reverse proxy and cookie injection methods to bypass 2FA authentication – proxifying victim's session," Resecurity researchers  said  in a Monday write-up. The platform generates phishing links that are nothing but cloned pages designed to compromise user accounts associated with Apple iCloud, Facebook, GoDaddy, GitHub, Google, Dropbox, Instagram, Microsoft, NPM, PyPI, RubyGems, Twitter, Yahoo, and Yandex, among others. EvilProxy is similar to adversary-in-the-middle ( AiTM ) attacks in that users interact with a malicious proxy server that acts as a go-between for the target website, covertly harvesting the credentials and 2FA passcodes entered in the login pages. It's offered on a subscription basis per service...

A nascent information stealer called Mars has been observed in campaigns that take advantage of cracked versions of the malware to steal information stored in web browsers and cryptocurrency wallets. "Mars Stealer is being distributed via social engineering techniques, malspam campaigns, malicious software cracks, and keygens," Morphisec malware researcher Arnold Osipov  said  in a report published Tuesday. Based on the  Oski Stealer  and first discovered in June 2021,  Mars Stealer  is said to be constantly under development and available for sale on over 47 underground forums, darknet sites, and Telegram channels, costing only $160 for a lifetime subscription. Information stealers allow adversaries to vacuum personal information from compromised systems, including stored credentials and browser cookies, which are then sold on criminal marketplaces or used as a springboard for launching further attacks. The release of Mars Stealer last year has also ...

Organizations' cybersecurity capabilities have improved over the past decade, mostly out of necessity. As their defenses get better, so do the methods, tactics, and techniques malicious actors devise to penetrate their environments. Instead of the standard virus or trojan, attackers today will deploy a variety of tools and methods to infiltrate an organization's environment and attack it from the inside. In an interesting twist of fate, one of the tools organizations have used to audit and improve their defenses has also become a popular tool attackers use to infiltrate. Cobalt Strike is an Adversary Simulation and Red Team Operations tool that allows organizations to simulate advanced attacks and test their security stacks in a close-to-real-world simulation. A new research webinar from XDR provider Cynet ( register here ) offers a better look at Cobalt Strike. The webinar, led by Cyber Operations Analyst for the Cynet MDR Team Yuval Fischer, will take a deep dive into the thr...

While the Coronavirus pandemic continues to strike chaos across the global economies, threat actors keep on launching cyberattacks on organizations from all sizes and verticals. IR providers face a unique challenge when approached by these organizations since, due to the Coronavirus mass quarantine, conducting incident response engagements by arriving physically to the customers' offices is impossible. Cynet 360, a tool of choice for a number of IR providers (offered to IR providers for free), enables responders to compensate on the lack of physical access with the ability to conduct a full IR operation remotely ( learn more here ) by seamless and rapid remote deployment, complete visibility into the attacked organization's environment, automated threat detection, and integrated MDR services. Attackers always seek easy opportunities, and it's no wonder many threat actors take advantage of the current mayhem of the Coronavirus pandemic to increase their attacks'...

As the world comes to grips with the coronavirus pandemic , the situation has proven to be a blessing in disguise for threat actors, who've taken advantage of the opportunity to target victims with scams or malware campaigns. Now, according to a new report published by Check Point Research today and shared with The Hacker News, hackers are exploiting the COVID-19 outbreak to spread their own infections, including registering malicious Coronavirus-related domains and selling discounted off-the-shelf malware in the dark web. "Special offers by different hackers promoting their 'goods' — usually malicious malware or exploit tools — are being sold over the darknet under special offers with 'COVID19' or 'coronavirus' as discount codes, targeting wannabe cyber-attackers," the cybersecurity firm said. COVID-19 Discounts: Exploit Tools for Sale The report comes following an uptick in the number of malicious coronavirus-related domains that hav...

It may sound creepy and unreal, but hackers can also exfiltrate sensitive data from your computer by simply changing the brightness of the screen, new cybersecurity research shared with The Hacker News revealed. In recent years, several cybersecurity researchers demonstrated innovative ways to covertly exfiltrate data from a physically isolated air-gapped computer that can't connect wirelessly or physically with other computers or network devices. These clever ideas rely on exploiting little-noticed emissions of a computer's components, such as light, sound , heat , radio frequencies , or ultrasonic waves , and even using the current fluctuations in the power lines. For instance, potential attackers could sabotage supply chains to infect an air-gapped computer, but they can't always count on an insider to unknowingly carry a USB with the data back out of a targeted facility. When it comes to high-value targets, these unusual techniques, which may sound theoretica...

Exams are pretty important in professional IT. You can have all the practical knowledge in the world, but technical recruiters want to see certificates. If you want to improve your resume, the Complete 2020 IT Certification Exam Prep Mega Bundle will help you ace nine of the most important exams. You can pick up the training now for only $39 via THN Deals. Over the next few years, the areas of greatest demand in IT will be networking, cloud computing, and cybersecurity. This bundle covers all three topics, with over 100 hours of training. The courses on cloud computing focus on AWS and Microsoft Azure, which are the two biggest platforms right now. You get full prep for four Azure exams and one AWS exam. The bundle also helps you pass three Cisco CCNA exams. If you plan to work with networks at any time, these certifications will serve you well. The final course works towards CompTIA Security+, which covers all the fundamentals of cybersecurity. Many companies now expect ...

In a coordinated International law enforcement operation, Europol today announced to shut down the global organized cybercrime network behind Imminent Monitor RAT , yet another hacking tool that allows cybercriminals to gain complete control over a victim's computer remotely. The operation targeted both buyers and sellers of the IM-RAT (Imminent Monitor Remote Access Trojan), which was sold to more than 14,500 buyers and used against tens of thousands of victims across 124 countries. The infrastructure and front-end sale website of the Imminent Monitor have also been seized as part of this operation, making the Trojan unusable for those who already bought it, as well as unavailable for the new users. Promoted as a legitimate remote administration framework, the hacking tool was widely used to unauthorisedly access targeted users' computers and steal their login credentials for online banking and other financial accounts. According to Europol's press release , aut...

Phishing is still one of the widely used strategies by cybercriminals and espionage groups to gain an initial foothold on the targeted systems. Though hacking someone with phishing attacks was easy a decade ago, the evolution of threat detection technologies and cyber awareness among people has slowed down the success of phishing and social engineering attacks over the years. Since phishing is more sort of a one-time opportunity for hackers before their victims suspect it and likely won't fall for the same trick again, sophisticated hacking groups have started putting a lot of effort, time and research to design well-crafted phishing campaigns. In one such latest campaign discovered by cybersecurity researchers at Check Point, a Chinese hacking group, known as Rancor , has been found conducting very targeted and extensive attacks against Southeast Asian government entities from December 2018 to June 2019. What's interesting about this ongoing 7-month long campaign is...

The greatest threat facing most nations is no longer a standing army. It's a hacker with a computer who can launch a crippling cyber attack from thousands of miles away—potentially taking down everything from server farms to entire power grids with a few lines of code. So it should come as no surprise that virtually every major company in both the public and private sector—as well as national security teams and government agencies—are looking for talented and trained professionals who can help them evade these cyber threats. Although it may seem a bit counterintuitive, the only person who can fight back against a hacker is another hacker. Known as ethical or "white hat" hackers, these intrepid cyber warriors are the first and most important line of defense against these nefarious hackers, and they're being paid handsomely for their services. The Complete White Hat Hacker Certification Bundle will teach you everything you need to know in order to join their r...

The German police yesterday raided the house of the developer of OmniRAT and seized his laptop, computer and mobile phones probably as part of an investigation into a recent cyber attack, a source told The Hacker News. OmniRAT made headlines in November 2015 when its developer launched it as a legitimate remote administration tool for IT experts and companies to manage their devices with explicit permissions. Available between $25 and $100, OmniRAT quickly became one of the most popular remote administration tools, allowing users to monitor Android, Windows, Linux, and Mac devices remotely and access every available information on them. However, just like any other remote administration tool like DroidJack, DarkComet, AndroRAT, and njRAT, some customers of OmniRAT also used the tool for illicit purposes, especially because it was available at a far cheaper price than other RATs in the market. In one such event earlier this year, a group of hackers attempted to target severa...

FireEye today released Commando VM , which according to the company, is a "first of its kind Windows-based security distribution for penetration testing and red teaming." When it comes to the best-operating systems for hackers, Kali Linux is always the first choice for penetration testers and ethical hackers. However, Kali is a Linux-based distribution, and using Linux without learning some basics is not everyone's cup of tea as like Windows or macOS operating systems. Moreover, if you are wondering why there is no popular Windows-based operating system for hackers? First, because Windows is not open-source and second, manually installing penetration testing tools on Windows is pretty problematic for most users. To help researchers and cyber security enthusiasts, cybersecurity firm FireEye today released  an automated installer called  Commando VM. But don't get confused with its name. Commando VM is not a pre-configured snapshot of a virtual machine ima...