phishing attack | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Social engineering has long been an effective tactic because of how it focuses on human vulnerabilities. There's no brute-force 'spray and pray' password guessing. No scouring systems for unpatched software. Instead, it simply relies on manipulating emotions such as trust, fear, and respect for authority, usually with the goal of gaining access to sensitive information or protected systems. Traditionally that meant researching and manually engaging individual targets, which took up time and resources. However, the advent of AI has now made it possible to launch social engineering attacks in different ways, at scale, and often without psychological expertise. This article will cover five ways that AI is powering a new wave of social engineering attacks. The audio deepfake that may have influenced Slovakia elections Ahead of Slovakian parliamentary elections in 2023, a recording emerged that appeared to feature candidate Michal Simecka in conversation with a well-known journalist, M...

A financially motivated threat actor has been linked to an ongoing phishing email campaign that has been ongoing since at least July 2024 specifically targeting users in Poland and Germany. The attacks have led to the deployment of various payloads, such as Agent Tesla , Snake Keylogger , and a previously undocumented backdoor dubbed TorNet that's delivered by means of PureCrypter . TorNet is so named owing to the fact that it allows the threat actor to communicate with the victim machine over the TOR anonymity network. "The actor is running a Windows scheduled task on victim machines—including on endpoints with a low battery—to achieve persistence," Cisco Talos researcher Chetan Raghuprasad said in an analysis published today. "The actor also disconnects the victim machine from the network before dropping the payload and then connects it back to the network, allowing them to evade detection by cloud antimalware solutions." The starting point of the attac...

The job of a SOC analyst has never been easy. Faced with an overwhelming flood of daily alerts, analysts (and sometimes IT teams who are doubling as SecOps) must try and triage thousands of security alerts—often false positives—just to identify a handful of real threats. This relentless, 24/7 work leads to alert fatigue, desensitization, and increased risk of missing critical security incidents. Studies show that 70% of SOC analysts experience severe stress, and 65% consider leaving their jobs within a year . This makes retention a major challenge for security teams, especially in light of the existing shortage of skilled security analysts . On the operational side, analysts spend more time on repetitive, manual tasks like investigating alerts, and resolving and documenting incidents than they do on proactive security measures. Security teams struggle with configuring and maintaining SOAR playbooks as the cyber landscape rapidly changes. To top this all off, tool overload and siloed ...

News has been making headlines over the weekend of the extensive attack campaign targeting browser extensions and injecting them with malicious code to steal user credentials. Currently, over 25 extensions, with an install base of over two million users, have been found to be compromised, and customers are now working to figure out their exposure (LayerX, one of the companies involved in protecting against malicious extensions is offering a complimentary service to audit and remediate organizations' exposure - to sign-up click here ). While this is not the first attack to target browser extensions, the scope and sophistication of this campaign are a significant step up in terms of the threats posed by browser extensions and the risks they pose to organizations. Now that details of the attack have been publicized, users and organizations need to assess their risk exposure to this attack and to browser extensions in general. This article is aimed at helping organizations understand t...

A new attack campaign has targeted known Chrome browser extensions, leading to at least 35 extensions being compromised and exposing over 2.6 million users to data exposure and credential theft. The attack targeted publishers of browser extensions on the Chrome Web Store via a phishing campaign and used their access permissions to insert malicious code into legitimate extensions in order to steal cookies and user access tokens. The first company to shed light the campaign was cybersecurity firm Cyberhaven, one of whose employees was targeted by a phishing attack on December 24, allowing the threat actors to publish a malicious version of the extension. On December 27, Cyberhaven disclosed that a threat actor compromised its browser extension and injected malicious code to communicate with an external command-and-control (C&C) server located on the domain cyberhavenext[.]pro, download additional configuration files, and exfiltrate user data. The phishing email, which purported...

The threat actor known as Cloud Atlas has been observed using a previously undocumented malware called VBCloud as part of its cyber attack campaigns targeting "several dozen users" in 2024. "Victims get infected via phishing emails containing a malicious document that exploits a vulnerability in the formula editor (CVE-2018-0802) to download and execute malware code," Kaspersky researcher Oleg Kupreev said in an analysis published this week. More than 80% of the targets were located in Russia. A lesser number of victims have been reported from Belarus, Canada, Moldova, Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, and Vietnam. Also referred to as Clean Ursa, Inception, Oxygen, and Red October, Cloud Atlas is an unattributed threat activity cluster that has been active since 2014. In December 2022, the group was linked to cyber attacks aimed at Russia, Belarus, and Transnistria that deployed a PowerShell-based backdoor called PowerShower. Then exactly a year later, Russian cy...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new phishing campaign that has targeted European companies with an aim to harvest account credentials and take control of the victims' Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure. The campaign has been codenamed HubPhish by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 owing to the abuse of HubSpot tools in the attack chain. Targets include at least 20,000 automotive, chemical, and industrial compound manufacturing users in Europe. "The campaign's phishing attempts peaked in June 2024, with fake forms created using the HubSpot Free Form Builder service," security researchers Shachar Roitman, Ohad Benyamin Maimon, and William Gamazo said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The attacks involve sending phishing emails with Docusign-themed lures that urge recipients to view a document, which then redirects users to malicious HubSpot Free Form Builder links , from where they are led to a fake Office 365 Outlook Web App login page in order to ste...

A new phishing campaign has been observed employing tax-themed lures to deliver a stealthy backdoor payload as part of attacks targeting Pakistan. Cybersecurity company Securonix, which is tracking the activity under the name FLUX#CONSOLE , said it likely starts with a phishing email link or attachment, although it said it couldn't obtain the original email used to launch the attack. "One of the more notable aspects of the campaign is how the threat actors leverage MSC (Microsoft Common Console Document) files to deploy a dual-purpose loader and dropper to deliver further malicious payloads," security researchers Den Iuzvyk and Tim Peck said . It's worth noting that the abuse of specially crafted management saved console (MSC) files to execute malicious code has been codenamed GrimResource by Elastic Security Labs. The starting point is a file with double extensions (.pdf.msc) that masquerades as a PDF file (if the setting to display file extensions is disabled)...

Addressing cyber threats before they have a chance to strike or inflict serious damage is by far the best security approach any company can embrace. Achieving this takes a lot of research and proactive threat hunting. The problem here is that it is easy to get stuck in endless arrays of data and end up with no relevant intel.  To avoid this, use these five battle-tested techniques that are certain to improve your company's threat awareness and overall security. Finding threats targeting orgs in your region The most basic, yet high-impact way to learn about the current threat landscape for your company is to go and see what type of attacks other organizations in your region are experiencing.  In most cases, threat actors attempt to target dozens of businesses at the same time as part of a single campaign. This makes it possible to catch the threat early and make correct adjustments in your organization. How it contributes to your security: More targeted and effective de...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new kind of investment scam that leverages a combination of social media malvertising, company-branded posts, and artificial intelligence (AI) powered video testimonials featuring famous personalities, ultimately leading to financial and data loss. "The main goal of the fraudsters is to lead victims to phishing websites and forms that harvest their personal information," ESET noted in its H2 2024 Threat Report shared with The Hacker News. The Slovak cybersecurity company is tracking the threat under the name Nomani , a play on the phrase "no money." It said the scam grew by over 335% between H1 and H2 2024, with more than 100 new URLs detected daily on average between May and November 2024. The attacks play out through fraudulent ads on social media platforms, in several cases targeting people who have previously been scammed by making use of Europol- and INTERPOL-related lures about contacting them for help ...

A now-removed GitHub repository that advertised a WordPress tool to publish posts to the online content management system (CMS) is estimated to have enabled the exfiltration of over 390,000 credentials. The malicious activity is part of a broader attack campaign undertaken by a threat actor, dubbed MUT-1244 (where MUT refers to "mysterious unattributed threat") by Datadog Security Labs, that involves phishing and several trojanized GitHub repositories hosting proof-of-concept (PoC) code for exploiting known security flaws. "Victims are believed to be offensive actors – including pentesters and security researchers, as well as malicious threat actors – and had sensitive data such as SSH private keys and AWS access keys exfiltrated," researchers Christophe Tafani-Dereeper, Matt Muir, and Adrian Korn said in an analysis shared with The Hacker News. It's no surprise that security researchers have been an attractive target for threat actors, including nation-sta...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a sophisticated mobile phishing (aka mishing ) campaign that's designed to distribute an updated version of the Antidot banking trojan. "The attackers presented themselves as recruiters, luring unsuspecting victims with job offers," Zimperium zLabs Vishnu Pratapagiri researcher said in a new report. "As part of their fraudulent hiring process, the phishing campaign tricks victims into downloading a malicious application that acts as a dropper, eventually installing the updated variant of Antidot Banker in the victim's device." The new version of the Android malware has been codenamed AppLite Banker by the mobile security company, highlighting its abilities to siphon unlock PIN (or pattern or password) and remotely take control of infected devices, a feature recently also observed in TrickMo . The attacks employ a variety of social engineering strategies, often luring targets with the prospect of a job opp...