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Email marketing service Mailchimp on Monday revealed a data breach that resulted in the compromise of an internal tool to gain unauthorized access to customer accounts and stage phishing attacks.  The development was first  reported  by Bleeping Computer. The company, which was acquired by financial software firm Intuit in September 2021, told the publication that it became aware of the incident on March 26 when it became aware of a malicious party accessing the customer support tool. "The incident was propagated by an external actor who conducted a successful social engineering attack on Mailchimp employees, resulting in employee credentials being compromised," Siobhan Smyth, Mailchimp's chief information security officer, was quoted as saying. Although Mailchimp stated it acted quickly to terminate access to the breached employee account, the siphoned credentials were used to access 319 MailChimp accounts and further export the mailing lists pertaining to 102 acc

A new email phishing campaign has been spotted leveraging the tactic of conversation hijacking to deliver the IcedID info-stealing malware onto infected machines by making use of unpatched and publicly-exposed Microsoft Exchange servers. "The emails use a social engineering technique of conversation hijacking (also known as thread hijacking)," Israeli company Intezer said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "A forged reply to a previous stolen email is being used as a way to convince the recipient to open the attachment. This is notable because it increases the credibility of the phishing email and may cause a high infection rate." The latest wave of attacks, detected in mid-March 2022, is said to have targeted organizations within energy, healthcare, law, and pharmaceutical sectors. IcedID, aka BokBot, like its counterparts TrickBot and  Emotet , is a  banking trojan  that has evolved to become an entry point for more sophisticated threats, including hu

A novel phishing technique called browser-in-the-browser (BitB) attack can be exploited to simulate a browser window within the browser in order to spoof a legitimate domain, thereby making it possible to stage convincing phishing attacks. According to penetration tester and security researcher, who goes by the handle mrd0x on Twitter, the method takes advantage of third-party single sign-on ( SSO ) options embedded on websites such as "Sign in with Google" (or Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft). While the default behavior when a user attempts to sign in via these methods is to be greeted by a pop-up window to complete the authentication process, the BitB attack aims to replicate this entire process using a mix of HTML and CSS code to create an entirely fabricated browser window. "Combine the window design with an iframe pointing to the malicious server hosting the phishing page, and it's basically indistinguishable," mrd0x  said  in a technical write-up publ

Permissions in SaaS platforms like Salesforce, Workday, and Microsoft 365 are remarkably precise. They spell out exactly which users have access to which data sets. The terminology differs between apps, but each user's base permission is determined by their role, while additional permissions may be granted based on tasks or projects they are involved with. Layered on top of that are custom permissions required by an individual user.  For example, look at a sales rep who is involved in a tiger team investigating churn while also training two new employees. The sales rep's role would grant her one set of permissions to access prospect data, while the tiger team project would grant access to existing customer data. Meanwhile, special permissions are set up, providing the sales rep with visibility into the accounts of the two new employees. While these permissions are precise, however, they are also very complex. Application admins don't have a single screen within these applications th

Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) warned of new phishing attacks aimed at its citizens by leveraging compromised email accounts belonging to three different Indian entities with the goal of compromising their inboxes and stealing sensitive information. The agency  cautioned  that the emails arrive with the subject line "Увага" (meaning "Attention") and claim to be from a domestic email service called Ukr.net, when in actuality, the email address of the sender is "muthuprakash.b@tvsrubber[.]com." The messages purportedly warn the recipients of an unauthorized attempt to log in to their accounts from an IP address based out of the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, further prompting them to click on a link to change their passwords with immediate effect. "After following the link and entering the password, it gets to the attackers," CERT-UA noted in a Facebook post over the weekend. "In this way, they gain access to

Details of a new nation-state sponsored phishing campaign have been uncovered setting its sights on European governmental entities in what's seen as an attempt to obtain intelligence on refugee and supply movement in the region. Enterprise security company Proofpoint, which detected the malicious emails for the first time on February 24, 2022, dubbed the social engineering attacks " Asylum Ambuscade ." "The email included a malicious macro attachment which utilized social engineering themes pertaining to the Emergency Meeting of the NATO Security Council held on February 23, 2022," researchers Michael Raggi and Zydeca Cass  said  in a report published Tuesday. "The email also contained a malicious attachment which attempted to download malicious Lua malware named SunSeed and targeted European government personnel tasked with managing transportation and population movement in Europe." The findings build on an  advisory  issued by the State Service

Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) has warned of Belarusian state-sponsored hackers targeting its military personnel and related individuals as part of a phishing campaign mounted amidst Russia's military invasion of the country. "Mass  phishing emails  have recently been observed targeting private 'i.ua' and 'meta.ua' accounts of Ukrainian military personnel and related individuals," the CERT-UA  said . "After the account is compromised, the attackers, by the IMAP protocol, get access to all the messages." Subsequently, the attacks leverage the contact information stored in the victim's address book to propagate the phishing messages to other targets. The Ukrainian government attributed the activities to a threat actor tracked as UNC1151, a Minsk-based group whose "members are officers of the Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Belarus." In a follow-up  update , the agency said the nation-state group a

Microsoft on Monday said it's taking steps to disable Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros by default across its products, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and Visio, for documents downloaded from the web in an attempt to eliminate an entire class of attack vector. "Bad actors send macros in Office files to end users who unknowingly enable them, malicious payloads are delivered, and the impact can be severe including malware, compromised identity, data loss, and remote access," Kellie Eickmeyer  said  in a post announcing the move. While the company does warn users about permitting macros in Office files, unsuspecting victims — e.g., recipients of phishing emails — can still be lured into enabling the feature, effectively granting the attackers the ability to gain an initial foothold into the system. As part of the new change, when a user opens an attachment or downloads from the internet an untrusted Office file containing macros, the app displays a

Cybersecurity researchers have turned the spotlight on a new wave of offensive cyberattacks targeting Palestinian activists and entities starting around October 2021 using politically-themed phishing emails and decoy documents. The intrusions are part of what Cisco Talos calls a longstanding espionage and information theft campaign undertaken by the  Arid Viper hacking group  using a Delphi-based implant called Micropsia dating all the way back to  June 2017 . The threat actor's  activities , also tracked under the monikers Desert Falcon and the APT-C-23, were first documented in  February 2015  by Kasperksy and subsequently in 2017, when Qihoo 360 disclosed details of  cross-platform   backdoors  developed by the group to strike Palestinian institutions. The Russian cybersecurity company-branded Arid Viper the "first exclusively Arabic APT group." Then in April 2021, Meta (formerly Facebook), which pointed out the group's affiliations to the cyber arm of  Hamas

Microsoft has disclosed details of a large-scale, multi-phase phishing campaign that uses stolen credentials to register devices on a victim's network to further propagate spam emails and widen the infection pool. The tech giant said the attacks manifested through accounts that were not secured using multi-factor authentication (MFA), thereby making it possible for the adversary to take advantage of the target's bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy and introduce their own rogue devices using the pilfered credentials. The attacks took place in two stages. "The first campaign phase involved stealing credentials in target organizations located predominantly in Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand," Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team  said  in a technical report published this week. "Stolen credentials were then leveraged in the second phase, in which attackers used compromised accounts to expand their foothold within the organization via la

Three different state-sponsored threat actors aligned with China, India, and Russia have been observed adopting a new method called  RTF  (aka Rich Text Format) template injection as part of their phishing campaigns to deliver malware to targeted systems. "RTF template injection is a novel technique that is ideal for malicious phishing attachments because it is simple and allows threat actors to retrieve malicious content from a remote URL using an RTF file," Proofpoint researchers said in a new report shared with The Hacker News. At the heart of the attack is an RTF file containing decoy content that can be  manipulated  to enable the retrieval of content, including malicious payloads, hosted at an external URL upon opening an RTF file. Specifically, it leverages the RTF  template functionality  to alter a document's formatting properties using a  hex editor  by specifying a URL resource instead of an accessible file resource destination from which a remote payload

No fewer than 1,220 Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) phishing websites have been discovered as targeting popular online services like Instagram, Google, PayPal, Apple, Twitter, and LinkedIn with the goal of hijacking users' credentials and carrying out further follow-on attacks. The findings come from a  new study  undertaken by a group of researchers from Stony Brook University and Palo Alto Networks, who have demonstrated a new fingerprinting technique that makes it possible to identify MitM phishing kits in the wild by leveraging their intrinsic network-level properties, effectively automating the discovery and analysis of phishing websites. Dubbed " PHOCA " — named after the Latin word for "seals" — the tool not only facilitates the discovery of previously unseen MitM phishing toolkits, but also can be used to detect and isolate malicious requests coming from such servers. Phishing toolkits aim to  automate and streamline  the work required by attackers to cond

Threat actors are increasingly banking on the technique of  HTML smuggling  in phishing campaigns as a means to gain initial access and deploy an array of threats, including banking malware, remote administration trojans (RATs), and ransomware payloads. Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team, in a new report published Thursday, disclosed that it identified infiltrations distributing the  Mekotio  banking Trojan, backdoors such as  AsyncRAT  and  NjRAT , and the infamous  TrickBot  malware. The multi-staged attacks — dubbed  ISOMorph  — were also publicly documented by Menlo Security in July 2021. HTML smuggling is an approach that allows an attacker to "smuggle" first-stage droppers, often encoded malicious scripts embedded within specially-crafted HTML attachments or web pages, on a victim machine by taking advantage of basic features in HTML5 and JavaScript rather than exploiting a vulnerability or a design flaw in modern web browsers. By doing so, it enables

Microsoft on Thursday disclosed an "extensive series of credential phishing campaigns" that takes advantage of a custom phishing kit that stitched together components from at least five different widely circulated ones with the goal of siphoning user login information. The tech giant's Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team, which detected the first instances of the tool in the wild in December 2020, dubbed the copy-and-paste attack infrastructure " TodayZoo ." "The abundance of phishing kits and other tools available for sale or rent makes it easy for a lone wolf attacker to pick and choose the best features from these kits," the researchers said. "They put these functionalities together in a customized kit and try to reap the benefits all to themselves. Such is the case of TodayZoo." Phishing kits, often sold as one time payments in underground forums, are packaged archive files containing images, scripts, and HTML pages that

DMARC  is a global standard for email authentication. It allows senders to verify that the email really comes from whom it claims to come from. This helps curb spam and phishing attacks, which are among the most prevalent cybercrimes of today. Gmail, Yahoo, and many other large email providers have implemented DMARC and praised its benefits in recent years. If your company's domain name is bankofamerica.com, you do not want a cyber attacker to be able to send emails under that domain. This puts your brand reputation at risk and could potentially spread financial malware. The DMARC standard prevents this by checking whether emails are sent from an expected IP address or domain. It specifies how domains can be contacted if there are authentication or migration issues and provides forensic information so senders can monitor email traffic and quarantine suspicious emails. What is a Phishing Attack? Phishing is an attempt by cybercriminals to trick victims into giving away sensitive

Microsoft has opened the lid on a large-scale phishing-as-a-service (PHaaS) operation that's involved in selling phishing kits and email templates as well as providing hosting and automated services at a low cost, thus enabling cyber actors to purchase phishing campaigns and deploy them with minimal efforts. "With over 100 available phishing templates that mimic known brands and services, the BulletProofLink operation is responsible for many of the phishing campaigns that impact enterprises today," Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team  said  in a Tuesday report. "BulletProofLink (also referred to as BulletProftLink or Anthrax by its operators in various websites, ads, and other promotional materials) is used by multiple attacker groups in either one-off or monthly subscription-based business models, creating a steady revenue stream for its operators." The tech giant said it uncovered the operation during its investigation of a credential phishing

Microsoft is warning of a widespread credential phishing campaign that leverages  open redirector links  in email communications as a vector to trick users into visiting malicious websites while effectively bypassing security software. "Attackers combine these links with social engineering baits that impersonate well-known productivity tools and services to lure users into clicking," Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team  said  in a report published this week. "Doing so leads to a series of redirections — including a CAPTCHA verification page that adds a sense of legitimacy and attempts to evade some automated analysis systems — before taking the user to a fake sign-in page. This ultimately leads to credential compromise, which opens the user and their organization to other attacks." Although redirect links in email messages serve a vital tool to take recipients to third-party websites or track click rates and measure the success of sales and marketin

Microsoft has disclosed details of an evasive year-long social engineering campaign wherein the operators kept changing their obfuscation and encryption mechanisms every 37 days on average, including relying on Morse code, in an attempt to cover their tracks and surreptitiously harvest user credentials. The phishing attacks take the form of invoice-themed lures mimicking financial-related business transactions, with the emails containing an HTML file ("XLS.HTML"). The ultimate objective is to harvest usernames and passwords, which are subsequently used as an initial entry point for later infiltration attempts. Microsoft likened the attachment to a "jigsaw puzzle," noting that individual parts of the HTML file are designed to appear innocuous and slip past endpoint security software, only to reveal its true colors when these segments are decoded and assembled together. The company did not identify the hackers behind the operation. "This phishing campaign ex

Click Studios, the Australian software firm which confirmed a  supply chain attack  affecting its Passwordstate password management application, has warned customers of an ongoing phishing attack by an unknown threat actor. "We have been advised a bad actor has commenced a phishing attack with a small number of customers having received emails requesting urgent action," the company  said  in an updated advisory released on Wednesday. "These emails are not sent by Click Studios." Last week, Click Studios said attackers had employed sophisticated techniques to compromise Passwordstate's update mechanism, using it to drop malware on user computers. Only customers who performed In-Place Upgrades between April 20, 8:33 PM UTC, and April 22, 0:30 AM UTC are said to be affected. While Passwordstate serves about 29,000 customers, the Adelaide-based firm maintained that the total number of impacted customers is very low. It's also urging users to refrain from po