phishing attack | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A previously undocumented Chinese-speaking threat actor codenamed SneakyChef has been linked to an espionage campaign primarily targeting government entities across Asia and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) with SugarGh0st malware since at least August 2023. "SneakyChef uses lures that are scanned documents of government agencies, most of which are related to various countries' Ministries of Foreign Affairs or embassies," Cisco Talos researchers Chetan Raghuprasad and Ashley Shen said in an analysis published today. Activities related to the hacking crew were first highlighted by the cybersecurity company in late November 2023 in connection with an attack campaign that singled out South Korea and Uzbekistan with a custom variant of Gh0st RAT called SugarGh0st . A subsequent analysis from Proofpoint last month uncovered the use of SugarGh0st RAT against U.S. organizations involved in artificial intelligence efforts, including those in academia, private indust...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new phishing campaign that has been identified as targeting people in Pakistan using a custom backdoor. Dubbed PHANTOM#SPIKE by Securonix, the unknown threat actors behind the activity have leveraged military-related phishing documents to activate the infection sequence. "While there are many methods used today to deploy malware, the threat actors made use of ZIP files with a password-protected payload archive contained within," researchers Den Iuzvyk, Tim Peck, and Oleg Kolesnikov said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The campaign is notable for its lack of sophistication and the use of simple payloads to achieve remote access to target machines. The email messages come bearing a ZIP archive that purports to be meeting minutes related to the International Military-Technical Forum Army 2024, a legitimate event organized by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. It's set to be held in Moscow in mid...

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Created by John Tuckner and the team at automation and AI-powered workflow platform  Tines , the  SOC Automation Capability Matrix (SOC ACM)  is a set of techniques designed to help security operations teams understand their automation capabilities and respond more effectively to incidents.  A customizable, vendor-agnostic tool featuring lists of automation opportunities, it's been shared and recommended by members of the security community since its launch in January 2023, notably by Airbnb engineer Allyn Stott in his BSides and Black Hat talk,  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Build a Modern Detection & Response Program .   The SOC ACM has been compared to the MITRE ATT&CK and RE&CT frameworks, with one user saying, "it could be a standard for classification of SOAR automations, a bit like the RE&CT framework, but with more automation focus." It's been used by organizations in Fintech, Cloud Security, and beyond, as a basis for asses...

State-sponsored actors with ties to Russia have been linked to targeted cyber attacks aimed at French diplomatic entities, the country's information security agency ANSSI said in an advisory. The attacks have been attributed to a cluster tracked by Microsoft under the name Midnight Blizzard (formerly Nobelium), which overlaps with activity tracked as APT29 , BlueBravo, Cloaked Ursa, Cozy Bear, and The Dukes. While the monikers APT29 and Midnight Blizzard have been interchangeably used to refer to intrusion sets associated with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), ANSSI said it prefers to treat them as disparate threat clusters alongside a third one dubbed Dark Halo , which has been held responsible for the 2020 supply chain attack via SolarWinds software. "Nobelium is characterized by the use of specific codes, tactics, techniques, and procedures. Most of Nobelium campaigns against diplomatic entities use compromised legitimate email accounts belonging to dipl...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new evasive malware loader named SquidLoader that spreads via phishing campaigns targeting Chinese organizations. AT&T LevelBlue Labs, which first observed the malware in late April 2024, said it incorporates features that are designed to thwart static and dynamic analysis and ultimately evade detection. Attack chains leverage phishing emails that come with attachments that masquerade as Microsoft Word documents, but, in reality, are binaries that pave the way for the execution of the malware, which is then used to fetch second-stage shellcode payloads from a remote server, including Cobalt Strike. "These loaders feature heavy evasion and decoy mechanisms which help them remain undetected while also hindering analysis," security researcher Fernando Dominguez said . "The shellcode that is delivered is also loaded in the same loader process, likely to avoid writing the payload to disk and thus risk being detected." ...

A threat actor who goes by alias markopolo has been identified as behind a large-scale cross-platform scam that targets digital currency users on social media with information stealer malware and carries out cryptocurrency theft. The attack chains involve the use of a purported virtual meeting software named Vortax (and 23 other apps) that are used as a conduit to deliver Rhadamanthys , StealC , and Atomic macOS Stealer (AMOS), Recorded Future's Insikt Group said in an analysis published this week. "This campaign, primarily targeting cryptocurrency users, marks a significant rise in macOS security threats and reveals an expansive network of malicious applications," the cybersecurity company noted , describing markopolo as "agile, adaptable, and versatile." There is evidence connecting the Vortax campaign to prior activity that leveraged trap phishing techniques to target macOS and Windows users via Web3 gaming lures. A crucial aspect of the malicious o...

The Singapore Police Force (SPF) has announced the extradition of two men from Malaysia for their alleged involvement in a mobile malware campaign targeting citizens in the country since June 2023. The unnamed individuals, aged 26 and 47, engaged in scams that tricked unsuspecting users into downloading malicious apps onto their Android devices via phishing campaigns with the aim of stealing their personal data and banking credentials. The stolen information was subsequently used to initiate fraudulent transactions on the victims' banking accounts, resulting in financial losses. Following a seven-months-long investigation that was launched in November 2023 in partnership with the Hong Kong Police Force (HKPF) and the Royal Malaysia Police (RMP), the SPF said it found evidence linking the two men to a syndicate responsible for carrying out malware-enabled scams. "The two men [...] allegedly operated servers for the purposes of infecting victims' Android mobile phones w...

Pakistan has become the latest target of a threat actor called the Smishing Triad, marking the first expansion of its footprint beyond the E.U., Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., and the U.S. "The group's latest tactic involves sending malicious messages on behalf of Pakistan Post to customers of mobile carriers via iMessage and SMS," Resecurity said in a report published earlier this week. "The goal is to steal their personal and financial information." The threat actors, believed to be Chinese-speaking , are known to leverage stolen databases sold on the dark web to send bogus SMS messages, enticing recipients into clicking on links under the pretext of informing them of a failed package delivery and urging them to update their address. Users who end up clicking on the URLs are directed to fake websites that prompt them to enter their financial information as part of a supposed service fee charged for redelivery. "Besides Pakistan Post, the group was also ...

Threat actors linked to North Korea have accounted for one-third of all the phishing activity targeting Brazil since 2020, as the country's emergence as an influential power has drawn the attention of cyber espionage groups. "North Korean government-backed actors have targeted the Brazilian government and Brazil's aerospace, technology, and financial services sectors," Google's Mandiant and Threat Analysis Group (TAG) divisions said in a joint report published this week. "Similar to their targeting interests in other regions, cryptocurrency and financial technology firms have been a particular focus, and at least three North Korean groups have targeted Brazilian cryptocurrency and fintech companies." Prominent among those groups is a threat actor tracked as UNC4899 (aka Jade Sleet, PUKCHONG, and TraderTraitor), which has targeted cryptocurrency professionals with a malware-laced trojanized Python app. The attack chains involve reaching out to pote...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered an updated version of malware called ValleyRAT that's being distributed as part of a new campaign. "In the latest version, ValleyRAT introduced new commands, such as capturing screenshots, process filtering, forced shutdown, and clearing Windows event logs," Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers Muhammed Irfan V A and Manisha Ramcharan Prajapati said . ValleyRAT was previously documented by QiAnXin and Proofpoint in 2023 in connection with a phishing campaign targeting Chinese-speaking users and Japanese organizations that distributed various malware families such as Purple Fox and a variant of the Gh0st RAT trojan known as Sainbox RAT (aka FatalRAT). The malware has been assessed to be the work of a China-based threat actor, boasting of capabilities to harvest sensitive information and drop additional payloads onto compromised hosts. The starting point is a downloader that utilizes an HTTP File Server (HFS) to fetch a file named...

Cybersecurity researchers have spotted a phishing attack distributing the More_eggs malware by masquerading it as a resume, a technique originally detected more than two years ago. The attack, which was unsuccessful, targeted an unnamed company in the industrial services industry in May 2024, Canadian cybersecurity firm eSentire disclosed last week. "Specifically, the targeted individual was a recruiter that was deceived by the threat actor into thinking they were a job applicant and lured them to their website to download the loader," it said. More_eggs, believed to be the work of a threat actor known as the Golden Chickens (aka Venom Spider), is a modular backdoor that's capable of harvesting sensitive information. It's offered to other criminal actors under a Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) model. Last year, eSentire unmasked the real-world identities of two individuals – Chuck from Montreal and Jack – who are said to be running the operation. The latest atta...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a threat actor known as Sticky Werewolf that has been linked to cyber attacks targeting entities in Russia and Belarus. The phishing attacks were aimed at a pharmaceutical company, a Russian research institute dealing with microbiology and vaccine development, and the aviation sector, expanding beyond their initial focus of government organizations, Morphisec said in a report last week. "In previous campaigns, the infection chain began with phishing emails containing a link to download a malicious file from platforms like gofile.io," security researcher Arnold Osipov said. "This latest campaign used archive files containing LNK files pointing to a payload stored on WebDAV servers." Sticky Werewolf, one of the many threat actors targeting Russia and Belarus such as Cloud Werewolf (aka Inception and Cloud Atlas ), Quartz Wolf , Red Wolf (aka RedCurl ), and Scaly Wolf , was first documented by BI.ZONE in Octo...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of cyber attacks targeting defense forces in the country with a malware called SPECTR as part of an espionage campaign dubbed SickSync. The agency attributed the attacks to a threat actor it tracks under the moniker UAC-0020, which is also called Vermin and is assessed to be associated with security agencies of the Luhansk People's Republic (LPR). LPR was declared a sovereign state by Russia days prior to its military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Attack chains commence with spear-phishing emails containing a RAR self-extracting archive file containing a decoy PDF file, a trojanized version of the SyncThing application that incorporates the SPECTR payload, and a batch script that activates the infection by launching the executable. SPECTR serves as an information stealer by grabbing screenshots every 10 seconds, harvesting files, gathering data from removable USB drives, and stealing credentials and ...

Tom works for a reputable financial institution. He has a long, complex password that would be near-impossible to guess. He's memorized it by heart, so he started using it for his social media accounts and on his personal devices too. Unbeknownst to Tom, one of these sites has had its password database compromised by hackers and put it up for sale on the dark web. Now threat actors are working hard to link these leaked credentials back to real-life individuals and their places of work. Before long, a threat actor will use Tom's legitimate email account to send a spear-phishing link to his CEO. This is a common account takeover scenario where malicious attackers gain unauthorized access to the organization's systems, putting critical information and operations at risk. It usually starts with compromised credentials. We'll run through why account takeover is so hard to stop once it starts and why strong password security is the best prevention.  Why are account takeover attacks so...