phishing attack | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Europol on Thursday announced the shutdown of a clearnet marketplace called Manson Market that facilitated online fraud on a large scale. The operation, led by German authorities, has resulted in the seizure of more than 50 servers associated with the service and the arrest of two suspects. More than 200 terabytes of digital evidence have been collected. In addition, over 80 data storage devices, cell phones, computers, as well as cash and crypto assets worth more than €63,000 ($66,500) have been confiscated. Manson Market ("manson-market[.]pw") is believed to have launched in 2022 as a way to peddle sensitive information that was illegally obtained from victims as part of phishing and vishing (voice phishing) schemes. One such criminal activity involved calling victims under the guise of bank employees to trick them into revealing their addresses and security answers. In another instance, a network of fake online shops was employed to deceive visitors into entering th...

Cybersecurity researchers have called attention to a novel phishing campaign that leverages corrupted Microsoft Office documents and ZIP archives as a way to bypass email defenses. "The ongoing attack evades #antivirus software, prevents uploads to sandboxes, and bypasses Outlook's spam filters, allowing the malicious emails to reach your inbox," ANY.RUN said in a series of posts on X. The malicious activity entails sending emails containing ZIP archives or Office attachments that are intentionally corrupted in such a way that they cannot be scanned by security tools. These messages aim to trick users into opening the attachments with false promises of employee benefits and bonuses. In other words, the corrupted state of the files means that they are not flagged as suspicious or malicious by email filters and antivirus software. However, the attack still works because it takes advantage of the built-in recovery mechanisms of programs like Word, Outlook, and WinRAR ...

Intro: Why hack in when you can log in? SaaS applications are the backbone of modern organizations, powering productivity and operational efficiency. But every new app introduces critical security risks through app integrations and multiple users, creating easy access points for threat actors. As a result, SaaS breaches have increased, and according to a May 2024 XM Cyber report, identity and credential misconfigurations caused 80% of security exposures. Subtle signs of a compromise get lost in the noise, and then multi-stage attacks unfold undetected due to siloed solutions. Think of an account takeover in Entra ID, then privilege escalation in GitHub, along with data exfiltration from Slack. Each seems unrelated when viewed in isolation, but in a connected timeline of events, it's a dangerous breach. Wing Security's SaaS platform is a multi-layered solution that combines posture management with real-time identity threat detection and response. This allows organizations to get a ...

A newly discovered malware campaign has been found to target private users, retailers, and service businesses mainly located in Russia to deliver NetSupport RAT and BurnsRAT. The campaign, dubbed Horns&Hooves by Kaspersky, has hit more than 1,000 victims since it began around March 2023. The end goal of these attacks is to leverage the access afforded by these trojans to install stealer malware such as Rhadamanthys and Meduza . "Recent months have seen a surge in mailings with lookalike email attachments in the form of a ZIP archive containing JScript scripts," security researcher Artem Ushkov said in a Monday analysis. "The script files [are] disguised as requests and bids from potential customers or partners." The threat actors behind the operations have demonstrated their active development of the JavaScript payload, making significant changes during the course of the campaign. In some instances, the ZIP archive has been found to contain other docum...

A global law enforcement operation has led to the arrest of more than 5,500 suspects involved in financial crimes and the seizure of more than $400 million in virtual assets and government-backed currencies. The coordinated exercise saw the participation of authorities from 40 countries, territories, and regions as part of the latest wave of Operation HAECHI-V , which took place between July and November 2024, INTERPOL said. "The effects of cyber-enabled crime can be devastating – people losing their life savings, businesses crippled, and trust in digital and financial systems undermined," INTERPOL Secretary General Valdecy Urquiza said in a statement. "The borderless nature of cybercrime means international police cooperation is essential, and the success of this operation supported by INTERPOL shows what results can be achieved when countries work together. It's only through united efforts that we can make the real and digital worlds safer." As part of H...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning about malicious email campaigns leveraging a phishing-as-a-service ( PhaaS ) toolkit called Rockstar 2FA with an aim to steal Microsoft 365 account credentials. "This campaign employs an AitM [adversary-in-the-middle] attack, allowing attackers to intercept user credentials and session cookies, which means that even users with multi-factor authentication (MFA) enabled can still be vulnerable," Trustwave researchers Diana Solomon and John Kevin Adriano said . Rockstar 2FA is assessed to be an updated version of the DadSec (aka Phoenix) phishing kit. Microsoft is tracking the developers and distributors of the Dadsec PhaaS platform under the moniker Storm-1575 . Like its predecessors, the phishing kit is advertised via services like ICQ, Telegram, and Mail.ru under a subscription model for $200 for two weeks (or $350 for a month), allowing cyber criminals with little-to-no technical expertise to mount campaigns at scale. Some of the...

Multi-stage cyber attacks, characterized by their complex execution chains, are designed to avoid detection and trick victims into a false sense of security. Knowing how they operate is the first step to building a solid defense strategy against them. Let's examine real-world examples of some of the most common multi-stage attack scenarios that are active right now. URLs and Other Embedded Content in Documents Attackers frequently hide malicious links within seemingly legitimate documents, such as PDFs or Word files. Upon opening the document and clicking the embedded link, users are directed to a malicious website. These sites often employ deceptive tactics to get the victim to download malware onto their computer or share their passwords. Another popular type of embedded content is QR codes. Attackers conceal malicious URLs within QR codes and insert them into documents. This strategy forces users to turn to their mobile devices to scan the code, which then directs them to ph...

The threat actor known as APT-C-60 has been linked to a cyber attack targeting an unnamed organization in Japan that used a job application-themed lure to deliver the SpyGlace backdoor. That's according to findings from JPCERT/CC, which said the intrusion leveraged legitimate services like Google Drive, Bitbucket, and StatCounter. The attack was carried out around August 2024. "In this attack, an email purporting to be from a prospective employee was sent to the organization's recruiting contact, infecting the contact with malware," the agency said . APT-C-60 is the moniker assigned to a South Korea-aligned cyber espionage group that's known to target East Asian countries. In August 2024, it was observed exploiting a remote code execution vulnerability in WPS Office for Windows (CVE-2024-7262) to drop a custom backdoor called SpyGlace. The attack chain discovered by JPCERT/CC involves the use of a phishing email that contains a link to a file hosted on Goo...

An INTERPOL-led operation has led to the arrest of 1,006 suspects across 19 African countries and the takedown of 134,089 malicious infrastructures and networks as part of a coordinated effort to disrupt cybercrime in the continent. Dubbed Serengeti , the law enforcement exercise took place between September 2 and October 31, 2024, and targeted criminals behind ransomware, business email compromise (BEC), digital extortion, and online scams. The participating nations in the operation were Algeria, Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. These activities, which ranged from online credit card fraud and Ponzi schemes to investment and multi-level marketing scams, victimized more than 35,000 people, leading to financial losses nearly amounting to $193 million across the world. In connection with the $6 million online Ponzi ...

The threat actor known as Mysterious Elephant has been observed using an advanced version of malware called Asyncshell. The attack campaign is said to have used Hajj -themed lures to trick victims into executing a malicious payload under the guise of a Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) file, the Knownsec 404 team said in an analysis published today. Mysterious Elephant, which is also known as APT-K-47, is a threat actor of South Asian origin that has been active since at least 2022, primarily targeting Pakistani entities. The group's tactics and tooling have been found to share similarities with those of other threat actors operating in the regions, such as SideWinder, Confucius, and Bitter. In October 2023, the group was linked to a spear-phishing campaign that delivered a backdoor called ORPCBackdoor as part of attacks directed against Pakistan and other countries. The exact initial access vector employed by Mysterious Elephant in the latest campaign is not known, but ...

Threat actors with ties to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) are impersonating U.S.-based software and technology consulting businesses in order to further their financial objectives as part of a broader information technology (IT) worker scheme. "Front companies, often based in China, Russia, Southeast Asia, and Africa, play a key role in masking the workers' true origins and managing payments," SentinelOne security researchers Tom Hegel and Dakota Cary said in a report shared with The Hacker News. North Korea's network of IT workers, both in an individual capacity and under the cover of front companies, is seen as a technique to evade international sanctions imposed on the country and generate illicit revenues. The global campaign, which is also tracked as Wagemole by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, entails using forged identities to obtain employment at various companies in the U.S. and elsewhere, and send back a huge portion of their wages bac...

A new phishing campaign is targeting e-commerce shoppers in Europe and the United States with bogus pages that mimic legitimate brands with the goal of stealing their personal information ahead of the Black Friday shopping season. "The campaign leveraged the heightened online shopping activity in November, the peak season for Black Friday discounts. The threat actor used fake discounted products as phishing lures to deceive victims into providing their Cardholder Data (CHD) and Sensitive Authentication Data (SAD) and Personally Identifiable Information (PII)," EclecticIQ said . The activity, first observed in early October 2024, has been attributed with high confidence to a Chinese financially motivated threat actor codenamed SilkSpecter. Some of the impersonated brands include IKEA, L.L.Bean, North Face, and Wayfare. The phishing domains have been found to use top-level domains (TLDs) such as .top, .shop, .store, and .vip, often typosquatting legitimate e-commerce organi...

Multiple threat actors have been found taking advantage of an attack technique called Sitting Ducks to hijack legitimate domains for using them in phishing attacks and investment fraud schemes for years. The findings come from Infoblox, which said it identified nearly 800,000 vulnerable registered domains over the past three months, of which approximately 9% (70,000) have been subsequently hijacked. "Cybercriminals have used this vector since 2018 to hijack tens of thousands of domain names," the cybersecurity company said in a deep-dive report shared with The Hacker News. "Victim domains include well-known brands, non-profits, and government entities." The little-known attack vector, although originally documented by security researcher Matthew Bryant way back in 2016, didn't attract a lot of attention until the scale of the hijacks was disclosed earlier this August. "I believe there is more awareness [since then]," Dr. Renee Burton, vice pre...

A newly patched security flaw impacting Windows NT LAN Manager (NTLM) was exploited as a zero-day by a suspected Russia-linked actor as part of cyber attacks targeting Ukraine. The vulnerability in question, CVE-2024-43451 (CVSS score: 6.5), refers to an NTLM hash disclosure spoofing vulnerability that could be exploited to steal a user's NTLMv2 hash. It was patched by Microsoft earlier this week. "Minimal interaction with a malicious file by a user such as selecting (single-click), inspecting (right-click), or performing an action other than opening or executing could trigger this vulnerability," Microsoft revealed in its advisory. Israeli cybersecurity company ClearSky, which discovered the zero-day exploitation of the flaw in June 2024, said it's been abused as part of an attack chain that delivers the open-source Spark RAT malware. "The vulnerability activates URL files, leading to malicious activity," the company said, adding the malicious file...

The rise of SaaS and cloud-based work environments has fundamentally altered the cyber risk landscape. With more than 90% of organizational network traffic flowing through browsers and web applications, companies are facing new and serious cybersecurity threats. These include phishing attacks, data leakage, and malicious extensions. As a result, the browser also becomes a vulnerability that needs to be protected. LayerX has released a comprehensive guide titled "Kickstarting Your Browser Security Program" This in-depth guide serves as a roadmap for CISOs and security teams looking to secure browser activities within their organization; including step-by-step instructions, frameworks, and use cases. Below, we bring its main highlights. Prioritizing Browser Security Browsers now serve as the primary interface for SaaS applications, creating new malicious opportunities for cyber adversaries. The risks include: Data leakage - Browsers can expose sensitive data by allowing empl...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new phishing campaign that spreads a new fileless variant of known commercial malware called Remcos RAT . Remcos RAT "provides purchases with a wide range of advanced features to remotely control computers belonging to the buyer," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Xiaopeng Zhang said in an analysis published last week. "However, threat actors have abused Remcos to collect sensitive information from victims and remotely control their computers to perform further malicious acts." The starting point of the attack is a phishing email that uses purchase order-themed lures to convince recipients to open a Microsoft Excel attachment. The malicious Excel document is designed to exploit a known remote code execution flaw in Office ( CVE-2017-0199 , CVSS score: 7.8) to download an HTML Application (HTA) file ("cookienetbookinetcahce.hta") from a remote server ("192.3.220[.]22") and launch it using mshta.e...