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The North Korea-linked  Lazarus Group  has been linked to a cyber espionage attack targeting an unnamed aerospace company in Spain in which employees of the firm were approached by the threat actor posing as a recruiter for Meta. "Employees of the targeted company were contacted by a fake recruiter via LinkedIn and tricked into opening a malicious executable file presenting itself as a coding challenge or quiz," ESET security researcher Peter Kálnai  said  in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. The attack is part of a long-standing spear-phishing campaign called  Operation Dream Job  that's orchestrated by the hacking crew in an attempt to lure employees working at prospective targets that are of strategic interest, enticing them with lucrative job opportunities to activate the infection chain. Earlier this March, the Slovak cybersecurity company detailed an attack wave aimed at Linux users that involved the use of bogus HSBC job offers to launch a backdo

The North Korea-affiliated Lazarus Group has stolen nearly $240 million in cryptocurrency since June 2023, marking a significant escalation of its hacks. According to multiple reports from  Certik ,  Elliptic , and  ZachXBT , the infamous hacking group is said to be suspected behind the theft of $31 million in digital assets from the  CoinEx exchange  on September 12, 2023. The crypto heist aimed at CoinEx  adds  to a  string of recent attacks  targeting Atomic Wallet ($100 million), CoinsPaid ($37.3 million), Alphapo ($60 million), and Stake.com ($41 million). "Some of the funds stolen from CoinEx were sent to an address which was used by the Lazarus group to launder funds stolen from Stake.com, albeit on a different blockchain," Elliptic said. "Following this, the funds were bridged to Ethereum, using a bridge previously used by Lazarus, and then sent back to an address known to be controlled by the CoinEx hacker." The blockchain analytics firm said the late

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The North Korean threat actor known as  Andariel  has been observed employing an arsenal of malicious tools in its cyber assaults against corporations and organizations in the southern counterpart. "One characteristic of the attacks identified in 2023 is that there are numerous malware strains developed in the Go language," the AhnLab Security Emergency Response Center (ASEC)  said  in a deep dive released last week. Andariel, also known by the names Nickel Hyatt or Silent Chollima, is a sub-cluster of the  Lazarus Group  that's known to be active since at least 2008. Financial institutions, defense contractors, government agencies, universities, cybersecurity vendors, and energy companies are among the top targets for the state-sponsored group to fund espionage activities and illegally generate revenue for the country. Attack chains mounted by the adversary have leveraged a variety of initial infection vectors, such as spear-phishing, watering holes, and supply chain attacks, as

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as Lazarus Group has been observed exploiting a now-patched critical security flaw impacting Zoho ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus to distribute a remote access trojan called such as  QuiteRAT . Targets include internet backbone infrastructure and healthcare entities in Europe and the U.S., cybersecurity company Cisco Talos said in a  two-part   analysis  published today. What's more, a closer examination of the adversary's recycled attack infrastructure used in its cyber assaults on enterprises has led to the discovery of a new threat dubbed  CollectionRAT . The fact that the Lazarus Group continues to rely on the same tradecraft despite those components being well-documented over the years underscores the threat actor's confidence in their operations, Talos pointed out. QuiteRAT is said to be a successor to  MagicRAT , itself a follow-up to TigerRAT, while CollectionRAT appears to share overlaps with  EarlyRAT  (aka  Jupiter ),

The infamous Lazarus Group actor has been targeting vulnerable versions of Microsoft Internet Information Services ( IIS ) servers as an initial breach route to deploy malware on targeted systems. The findings come from the AhnLab Security Emergency response Center (ASEC), which detailed the advanced persistent threat's (APT) continued abuse of DLL side-loading techniques to run arbitrary payloads. "The threat actor places a malicious DLL (msvcr100.dll) in the same folder path as a normal application (Wordconv.exe) via the Windows IIS web server process, w3wp.exe," ASEC explained . "They then execute the normal application to initiate the execution of the malicious DLL." DLL side-loading , similar to DLL search-order hijacking, refers to the proxy execution of a rogue DLL via a benign binary planted in the same directory. Lazarus , a highly-capable and relentless nation-state group linked to North Korea, was most recently spotted leveraging the same t

The North Korean threat actor known as the Lazarus Group has been observed shifting its focus and rapidly evolving its tools and tactics as part of a long-running campaign called  DeathNote . While the nation-state adversary is known for persistently singling out the cryptocurrency sector, recent attacks have also targeted automotive, academic, and defense sectors in Eastern Europe and other parts of the world, in what's perceived as a "significant" pivot.  "At this point, the actor switched all the decoy documents to job descriptions related to defense contractors and diplomatic services," Kaspersky researcher Seongsu Park  said  in an analysis published Wednesday. The deviation in targeting, along with the use of updated infection vectors, is said to have occurred in April 2020. It's worth noting that the DeathNote cluster is also tracked under the monikers  Operation Dream Job  or  NukeSped . Google-owned Mandiant has also tied a subset of the activit

The North Korea-linked  Lazarus Group  has been observed weaponizing flaws in an undisclosed software to breach a financial business entity in South Korea twice within a span of a year. While the first attack in May 2022 entailed the use of a vulnerable version of a certificate software that's widely used by public institutions and universities, the re-infiltration in October 2022 involved the exploitation of a zero-day in the same program. Cybersecurity firm AhnLab Security Emergency Response Center (ASEC)  said  it's refraining from divulging more specifics owing to the fact that "the vulnerability has not been fully verified yet and a software patch has not been released." The adversarial collective, after obtaining an initial foothold by an unknown method, abused the zero-day bug to perform lateral movement, shortly after which the AhnLab V3 anti-malware engine was disabled via a  BYOVD attack . It's worth noting here that the Bring Your Own Vulnerable D

A new backdoor associated with a malware downloader named  Wslink  has been discovered, with the tool likely used by the notorious North Korea-aligned Lazarus Group, new findings reveal. The payload, dubbed  WinorDLL64  by ESET, is a fully-featured implant that can exfiltrate, overwrite, and delete files; execute PowerShell commands; and obtain comprehensive information about the underlying machine. Its other features comprise listing active sessions, creating and terminating processes, enumerating drives, and compressing directories. Wslink was  first documented  by the Slovak cybersecurity firm in October 2021, describing it as a "simple yet remarkable" malware loader that's capable of executing received modules in memory. "The Wslink payload can be leveraged later for lateral movement, due to its specific interest in network sessions," ESET researcher Vladislav Hrčka  said . "The Wslink loader listens on a port specified in the configuration and can

BlueNoroff , a subcluster of the notorious Lazarus Group, has been observed adopting new techniques into its playbook that enable it to bypass Windows Mark of the Web ( MotW ) protections. This includes the use of optical disk image (.ISO extension) and virtual hard disk (.VHD extension) file formats as part of a novel infection chain, Kaspersky disclosed in a report published today. "BlueNoroff created numerous fake domains impersonating venture capital companies and banks," security researcher Seongsu Park said , adding the new attack procedure was flagged in its telemetry in September 2022. Some of the bogus domains have been found to imitate ABF Capital, Angel Bridge, ANOBAKA, Bank of America, and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, most of which are located in Japan, signalling a "keen interest" in the region. It's worth pointing out that although MotW bypasses have been documented in the wild before, this is the first time they have been incorporated by

The Lazarus Group threat actor has been observed leveraging fake cryptocurrency apps as a lure to deliver a previously undocumented version of the AppleJeus malware, according to new findings from Volexity. "This activity notably involves a campaign likely targeting cryptocurrency users and organizations with a variant of the AppleJeus malware by way of malicious Microsoft Office documents," researchers Callum Roxan, Paul Rascagneres, and Robert Jan Mora  said . The North Korean government is known to adopt a three-pronged approach by employing malicious cyber activity that's orchestrated to collect intelligence, conduct attacks, and generate illicit revenue for the sanctions hit nation. The threats are collectively tracked under the name  Lazarus Group  (aka Hidden Cobra or  Zinc ). "North Korea has conducted cyber theft against financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges worldwide, potentially stealing hundreds of millions of dollars, probably to fund

The infamous Lazarus Group has continued its pattern of leveraging unsolicited job opportunities to deploy malware targeting Apple's macOS operating system. In the latest variant of the campaign observed by cybersecurity company SentinelOne last week, decoy documents advertising positions for the Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange firm Crypto[.]com have been used to mount the attacks. The latest disclosure builds on previous findings from Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET in August, which  delved  into a similar phony job posting for the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange platform. Both these fake job advertisements are just the latest in a series of attacks dubbed  Operation In(ter)ception , which, in turn, is a constituent of a broader campaign tracked under the name  Operation Dream Job . Although the exact distribution vector for the malware remains unknown, it's suspected that potential targets are singled out via direct messages on the business networking site Linke

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

The North Korea-backed Lazarus Group has been observed targeting job seekers with malware capable of executing on Apple Macs with Intel and M1 chipsets. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET linked it to a campaign dubbed " Operation In(ter)ception " that was first disclosed in June 2020 and involved using social engineering tactics to trick employees working in the aerospace and military sectors into opening decoy job offer documents. The latest attack is no different in that a job description for the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange platform was used as a launchpad to drop a signed Mach-O executable. ESET's analysis comes from a sample of the binary that was uploaded to VirusTotal from Brazil on August 11, 2022. "Malware is compiled for both Intel and Apple Silicon," the company  said  in a series of tweets. "It drops three files: a decoy PDF document ' Coinbase_online_careers_2022_07.pdf ', a bundle  'FinderFontsUpdater.app ,' and a downloa

The North Korean state-backed hacking crew, otherwise known as the  Lazarus Group , has been attributed to yet another financially motivated campaign that leverages a trojanized decentralized finance (DeFi) wallet app to distribute a fully-featured backdoor onto compromised Windows systems. The app, which is equipped with functionalities to save and manage a cryptocurrency wallet, is also designed to trigger the launch of the implant that can take control of the infected host. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky  said  it first encountered the rogue application in mid-December 2021. The infection scheme initiated by the app also results in the deployment of the installer for a legitimate application, which gets overwritten with a trojanized version in an effort to cover its tracks. That said, the initial access avenue is unclear, although it's suspected to be a case of social engineering. The spawned malware, which masquerades as Google's Chrome web browser, subsequently

Lazarus Group, the advanced persistent threat (APT) group attributed to the North Korean government, has been observed waging two separate supply chain attack campaigns as a means to gain a foothold into corporate networks and target a wide range of downstream entities. The latest intelligence-gathering operation involved the use of MATA malware framework as well as backdoors dubbed  BLINDINGCAN  and  COPPERHEDGE  to attack the defense industry, an IT asset monitoring solution vendor based in Latvia, and a think tank located in South Korea, according to a new  Q3 2021 APT Trends report  published by Kaspersky. In one instance, the supply-chain attack originated from an infection chain that stemmed from legitimate South Korean security software running a malicious payload, leading to the deployment of the BLINDINGCAN and COPPERHEDGE malware on the think tank's network in June 2021. The other attack on the Latvian company in May is an "atypical victim" for Lazarus, the

A prolific North Korean state-sponsored hacking group has been tied to a new ongoing espionage campaign aimed at exfiltrating sensitive information from organizations in the defense industry. Attributing the attacks with high confidence to the  Lazarus Group , the new findings from Kaspersky signal an expansion of the APT actor's tactics by going beyond the usual gamut of financially-motivated crimes to fund the cash-strapped regime.  This broadening of its strategic interests happened in early 2020 by leveraging a tool called ThreatNeedle , researchers Vyacheslav Kopeytsev and Seongsu Park said in a Thursday write-up. At a high level, the campaign takes advantage of a multi-step approach that begins with a carefully crafted spear-phishing attack leading eventually to the attackers gaining remote control over the devices. ThreatNeedle is delivered to targets via COVID-themed emails with malicious Microsoft Word attachments as initial infection vectors that, when opened, run a

Cybersecurity researchers took the wraps off a novel supply chain attack in South Korea that abuses legitimate security software and stolen digital certificates to distribute remote administration tools (RATs) on target systems. Attributing the operation to the Lazarus Group, also known as Hidden Cobra , Slovak internet security company ESET said the state-sponsored threat actor leveraged the mandatory requirement that internet users in the country must install additional security software in order to avail Internet banking and essential government services. The attack, while limited in scope, exploits WIZVERA VeraPort, which is billed as a "program designed to integrate and manage internet banking-related installation programs," such as digital certificates issued by the banks to individuals and businesses to secure all transactions and process payments. The development is the latest in a long history of espionage attacks against victims in South Korea, including Opera